Wilco
When a band tries to follow up an album that has been smothered to death by wonky music critics and the wordy pillows they carry, it’s never pretty. No wonder, after the mass hysteria of 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, that members of Wilco had to dry out at rehab clinics…
Peace — For Now
The 15th version of the “Friendshipment Caravan” — a somewhat motley collection of school buses and trucks, packed with aid supplies, church folk and community activists — passed through Houston July 3, on its way to the Mexican border. Once in Mexico, the vehicles and their passengers head to a…
Playbill
Rebirth Brass Band The words “crunk” and “tuba” don’t usually belong in the same sentence, but there’s no better adjective for the Rebirth Brass Band’s tuba man, Philip Frazier. The man can blast on that fat brass, and when you ladle two each of trumpets, ‘bones and saxes over the…
Pier Pressure
Tilman Fertitta runs with an elite crowd. The CEO of Landry’s Seafood Restaurants Inc. regularly rotates between the business and society pages, makes helicopter trips to oversee his extensive Galveston Island holdings and jets to New York to cozy up to Wall Street analysts. But the man whose company reported…
Sa-Weet!
It’s charming. It’s hilarious. It is perhaps the most beautifully crafted, lovingly rendered portrait of extreme geekitude ever to grace the screen. It’s Napoleon Dynamite — the first feature film from 24-year-old Brigham Young University student Jared Hess — and, if there is any justice, it’s going to be huge…
Letters
Flap on the Gap at HISD Bright whites: Robert Kimball danced around the obvious [“HISD’s Ethnic Gap,” July 1]. On the whole, white students are not treated differently from their minority peers; they simply perform better. More gaps Kimball should have included are in the areas of discipline, behavior, expectations…
Just One of Those Biopics
“Is this one of those avant-garde things?” a dying Cole Porter (Kevin Kline) warily asks Gabe (Jonathan Pryce), a sort of Ghost of Musicals Past who appears out of the ether to shepherd the composer through the this-was-your-life montage that makes up Irvin Winkler’s biopic De-Lovely. “It’s a musical –…
Bring the Noise
Priest in Shit appears with Realicide, Rotten Piece and Kairos at 8 p.m. Monday, July 19. Super Happy Fun Land, 2610 Ashland, 713-880-2100, www.sup erhappyfunland.com. $6.
Because We Could
In the beginning, there was nudity. Along a bank of the Colorado River, cradled by jutting cliffs, a community of sun-kissed river guides bathed happily in the nude. They were young and lithe; they were wild and free; they were hirsute, and they had nothing but time. It was 1978,…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, July 15 With an exhibition title like “Is Where the Heart Is,” artist Justin Berry is running the risk of turning people away who fancy themselves lactose-intolerant, i.e. allergic to cheesiness. But Berry’s sculptures and drawings might teach you a thing or two. His work deals with the construction…
A Gift to Grief
The opening moments of The Door in the Floor are not promising. A little girl stands on a chair in a hallway of photos, pointing at the images and speaking about them. Soon, she’s joined by a middle-aged man, probably her father, who takes her on a tour through the…
Beyond Borders
“How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age” opens at 6:30 p.m. Friday, July 16, and runs through October 3. 5216 Montrose, 713-284-8250. Free.
State of Affairs
When they got together to create Oklahoma!, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein made an unlikely pair of Broadway collaborators. Skeptics and pundits scoffed at the union of the chic, jazzy Rodgers and the operatic, elegant Hammerstein, but the pair reinvented the musical with their landmark Oklahoma!, which opened in March…
Good Fellows
FRI 7/16 When you’re trying to make a point (or thousands of them), sometimes you have to devote your body to the cause. “I wear three different arm braces. I’ve got to wear an eye patch now, ’cause I gave myself such bad eye strain,” says artist Laura Lark, commenting…
Capsule Reviews
Black Coffee Agatha Christie’s classic murder mystery Black Coffee gets off and running when a crotchety rich old man is murdered with a poisoned cup of coffee. Suspects abound. There’s the beautiful, platinum-haired Lucia Amory (Robin Terry). There’s sweet old spinster Miss Caroline Amory (a wonderfully loopy Bettye Fitzpatrick), who’s…
Ball Bangers
Leathery old men chain-smoke and squint into the Mediterranean sun. One of them lifts the bocce, a softball-sized wooden sphere, and tosses it toward the pallino, a smaller target ball. The bocce lights in the Italian sand, rolling close to the pallino. The opponent’s task: to place his own ball…
People Are Strange
Diane Arbus’s photograph A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, NY, 1970 shows an enormous, ungainly young man with two tiny, doll-like parents looking up at him. The son is stooped forward, and you wonder if the ceiling is even high enough for him to stand…
Don’t Just Watch
FRI 7/16 Calling all artists, would-be artists, art patrons and general misfits. You’re invited to contribute to the unpredictable energy cultivated at “Participate,” a monthly gathering at the gallery Mind Puddles. At its debut last month, a wall-to-wall crowd of guests immersed themselves in bass-thumping tunes, art exhibits, dancing and…
Capsule Reviews
“Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America” If you go to this exhibition expecting to see works by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, you’ll be disappointed. By emphasizing important but perhaps less familiar artists — indeed, many of the works on display have rarely, if ever, been shown in the…
She’s Baaack
THU 7/15 Have you ever seen an actor completely lose her shit on stage? Well, be prepared to watch a major-league freak-out when those charming renegades at Infernal Bridegroom Productions present the latest installment of the Tamalalia series. Starring award- winning actor (and director, designer and choreographer) Tamarie Cooper, Tamalalia…
The 19th Oasis
Tuna carpaccio $12
Duck confit spring roll $6.50
Beef tenderloin $26.50
Wasabi-crusted grouper $19
Chicken-fried pork chops $17.25
They Are Too the Boss of You
They Might Be Giants are in an enviable position. Eighteen years into a recording career that has seen their evolution from indie label fledglings to corporate rock stars and finally into a self-sufficient cottage industry unto themselves, these two unassuming guys named John have stuck around a lot longer than…
Hot Plate
Sundae best: Reportedly, the sundae was created in the late 19th century as a way of getting around the era’s blue laws, which outlawed all sorts of Sunday activities, including the sale of ice cream sodas. Hence the “soda-less soda” — or sundae: ice cream topped with the syrup that…
On Da Lingo
“Come on everybody get on up,” sang Mary J. Blige over a driving beat in the 2001 hit “Family Affair.” “‘Cause you know we gots to get it crunk.” This was a turning point in hip-hop history. Blige dropping a C-bomb may not seem like such a big deal today…
Children of Enron
When a limousine pulled up to take the family to the airport, Chris Boutcher couldn’t quite believe it. It was the summer of 2000, Enron was trading at $90 a share, and Chris had a one-way ticket to Houston. It sucked, sure, that he had to pick up and move…
Theo Parrish
Theo Parrish has so much street cred as a house DJ/producer, there should be turntable mats sold at specialty music stores with his face on them. A native of Chicago, America’s house capital, and now a resident of Detroit, America’s techno capital, the man has probably heard just about everything…
Minor League Rockers
Over by the bar there are still some empty seats on this warm Thursday night, but in front of the stage the floor is packed with teens and kids in their early twenties. Behind them parents — that’s right, parents — sit waiting for the show to continue. The metal…
Goodie Mob
On Goodie Mob’s first release since 1999, One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show, T-Mo, Khujo and Big Gipp are out to prove that the absence of Cee-Lo won’t stop them from making dope music. The trio is at its best on the somber but potent “God I Wanna Live,” where…
Patterson Hood
Yes, Virginia, there were Drive-By Truckers albums before a bandwagon of critics hailed the Alabama natives’ Southern Rock Opera and Decoration Day as the rebirth of the Confederate Guitar Army. The Truckers have, in fact, been around for eons, and the first officially released solo record by front man Patterson…