Playbill
Ozomatli is a party. Not just party music, an actual party. With ten members, the band has more people onstage than the number of guests at my last birthday celebration. Mixing salsa and hip-hop, samba and tablas, ska and jazz, this Los Angeles-based band gives multiculturalism a soundtrack, calling it…
Rotation
Tracy Byrd Keepers/Greatest Hits MCA They don’t usually make “albums” these days on Nashville’s Music Row, but rather collections of either potential singles or songs that the record makers wish could be singles. And as any music fan with a modicum of taste will tell you, even some of those…
Well-Lubed
Little girls love Grease. Apparently, so do a lot of grown-up girls and boys. The crowds for Theatre Under the Stars’ production of the musical have been enormous. Even the hill at Miller Outdoor Theatre has been overflowing. Hot as it is, the production is worth the crowds, sweat and…
Crude but Clever
Drop Dead Gorgeous, a satirical look at a Minnesota beauty pageant, is frequently funny; occasionally eerie, creepy and disturbingly accurate; though too often crude. This crudeness is a flaw, not comedy: Despite jokes about burn victims and beauty queens blowing beets, this “mockumentary” is not crude as in South Park,…
Learning Curves
No bell rang to mark the beginning of class. It was just one of many things missing from this high school. For two months, as winter segued into spring, about 40 students who had either dropped out or been kicked out of the Dallas area’s Arlington public high schools attended…
Rebmaster
The barbarians have breached the city walls. In the office, the blacks are coming after a man’s job. In the schools, they’re chasing his daughter. The welfare blacks are fornicating and having more welfare blacks, and the Border Patrol is saying “Olé!” as the Mexicans come in. And a pervert…
Insider
Education board meetings in Houston haven’t had this much fizz since the tag team of HISD trustees Gina Wray Wright and the late Liz Spates literally drove superintendent Joan Raymond batty in the late eighties. For aficionados of administrative anarchy, the best show in town these days is the racially…
Civil(ity) War
Leo Tucker doesn’t really belong anywhere, but he’s still found a nice little spot to read his paperbacks and sometimes drink a beer. The 57-year-old disabled veteran sits on a curb across the street from the downtown Star of Hope Men’s Shelter, where he usually sleeps at night. A gutted,…
She’s So…Normal
Normally, an unknown author with a debut collection of short stories would be little more than a blip on the radar of New York’s publishing scene. But when Melissa Bank’s The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing went up for sale, tongues wagged and eight publishing houses competed for rights…
News of the Weird
Lead StoriesOn the same day in June that the Colombian government was announcing that it would henceforth count cocaine farming (estimated at $1 billion a year) in its official economic figures, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange went to the remote village of La Machaca to meet with…
Sitcom Survivor
Margaret Cho suffers from the opposite of stage fright. In real life, she’s a mess. “I have incredible difficulties doing the smallest things,” the 30-year-old comedian says from New York. “I can’t shop for groceries. I can’t run errands. I just shut down.” But when Cho has a mike in…
Amplified
Fitz-ka-bob The letters have been pouring in, and to say I can respond to all personally and/or in-depth would be to lieŠ Which, by the content of some letters, is precisely what I was doing when I said in this space two weeks ago that the young punks associated with…
Flo Knows
Florence “Flo” Bosley is the queen of the steam table. Most cuisines aren’t tough enough to endure the rigors of the lunch buffet (although that never stops Chinese restaurants from trying). But the down-home soul cooking of Bo & Flo’s only benefits with a spell on the buffet table’s steam…
News Hostage
The Hunt for the Railcar Killer (Ratings) took to the skies July 13, and the results weren’t pretty. Again. Rafael Resendez-Ramirez (Not His Real Name, as they say in journalism) surrendered in El Paso that morning and was brought to Houston, as you might have heard. The local TV stations…
Hot Plate
Key (lime) information: If you’re still looking for a blockbuster finale after reveling in the butter-slathered filet mignon, cheese-enthralled au gratin potatoes and heady berry-blooming Cabernet at Pappas Brothers Steakhouse [5839 Westheimer,(713)780-7352], think tropical. Pucker up for the palatial key lime pie ($6.95), a larger-than-life creation encircled with fresh raspberry…
Sayonara, Sidewalk
In a deal first reported by the Houston Press [“Where the Sidewalk Ends,” by Tim Fleck, July 8], Microsoft has sold the city guide portion of its Sidewalk operation to Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch (TMCS) of Pasadena, California. The transaction ends Microsoft CEO Bill Gates’s attempt to build a nationwide chain of…
Celebrate Good Times, C’mon!
There are few equivalents in the business world to the independent record company. Most are labors of love rather than profit. Music lovers first, business people second, indie label owners perform a valuable service in releasing music by artists that the big, corporate imprints can’t, won’t or don’t know about…
Downing
Stare as long as you want. Lance’s face yields no secrets. Nothing in the eyes or smile of this handsome, dark-haired boy says stop, wait a minute, tread carefully. At least not as his face lies captured in a photograph, restful and calm. He could be any boy from Middle…
North and South
One might imagine that Doug Sahm came up with the idea of forming the Texas Tornados — his Tex-Mex supergroup with Chicano country crooner Freddy Fender, conjunto music legend Flaco Jimenez and Sahm’s Sir Douglas Quintet compadre Augie Meyers — while sipping Corona con lima in a rustic cantina south…
French Bliss
After one week in France (and watching one too many French films), I’ve searched continuously for a Houston version of my ideal French bistro. It should be a small, cozy restaurant, with black-and-white tile floors, perhaps, a wood-beamed ceiling, exposed brick walls, and maybe a fireplace for cold evenings. The…
Composing Youth
When student choreographer Cleopatra Williams heard the dance score that teenage composer Jude Vaclavik had composed for her, she thought the screams and groans he had injected into the melody were difficult to handle. Otherwise, the dissonant, multi-keyed work remotely inspired by John Adams’s later works communicated the earthy, tribal…