Night & Day
Thursday July 23 The works in “Judye Williams: Flying Pies and Cowgirls” call to mind Leslie Caron’s famous retort to the offended censors regarding her hip-gyrating fox trot with furniture in An American in Paris: “I was dancing with a chair!” Similarly, Fort Worth artist Williams sculpts scantily clad –…
A Swift Shift in the Pants
In the 1997 book The Conquest of Cool, author Thomas Frank mischievously labels the consumer sway from the 1950s through the present as a swift shift from square to hip. Frank says the change was marked, in part, by the death of the “gray flannel suit,” a classic ’50s icon…
Eats of Eden
The first thing you should know about handyman Lucky Striche (that’s “Strike”) is that he isn’t — very lucky, that is, at least when it comes to money and love. Then there’s the Shady Shade Trailer Park, where Lucky lives and works; it seems devoid of verdant growth of any…
Dish
Stranger Than Sushi The president of the Benihana Japanese steak-house chain was recently in Houston not only to check out the newest Benihana in Sugar Land (2579 Town Center Boulevard), but to scout potential locations for his new restaurant concept called Sushi Doraku, translated as “joy of sushi.” Joel Schwartz…
Hot Plate
It’s not true, as some have suggested, that I grew up eating steak and kidney pie. What I did grow up eating was another pub-grub mainstay, the so-called ploughman’s lunch. I can’t say which I enjoyed more: the lunch or the attendant danger. But I’ll tell you this: Eating Stilton…
Static
Rave and wave-offs, summer edition… Let me preface this selective rundown of the latest crop of local releases by clearing the air a bit: No, we will not be doubling our coverage of the Houston music scene now that the Public News is history, its assets in our possession. But…
In with the Old
While it’s true that the B-52’s did return to the studio for a while, plans for a full-length CD of fresh material never panned out. Instead, the band has joined fellow college-rock mainstays the Pretenders on the concert circuit this summer — not in support of an all-new release, but…
Clubland
Billy Blues shares top billing (so to speak) in a new cable access show covering the genre’s primo talent as they rip it up live at the Richmond Strip nightclub. Self-described “blues-rocker-turned-TV-producer” Gene Kelton is the man behind the unimaginatively titled Gene Kelton’s Texas Blues Showcase. An unquestioned jack of…
Born to Sing
On this cold, rainy day in Germany, Canadian chanteuse Holly Cole couldn’t be farther from Texas, which may explain why she’s particularly interested in the local weather when she calls from Berlin. Talk quickly turns from the withering heat to last year’s Lilith Fair and a Houston stop that came…
Latina Nueva
Yes, I admit it, I’m gullible, but when a restaurant calls itself Amazon 2050 A.D., I expect rain forest, chattering monkeys, tree frogs, brilliantly colored butterflies and, at the very least, a macaw or two. Am I being overly literal here? Probably. But a name like that, you will admit,…
Rotation
Dave Alvin Blackjack David Hightone Some things get better with time and age — like fine wine and Dave Alvin. As the chief guitarist and songwriter for the Blasters, the neo-rockabilly band he led with his singing brother Phil, Alvin helped stretch that hillbilly rock-cat genre far beyond what any…
How to Site a Nuclear Waste Dump — for Just $50 Million
1) Ignore scientific consultants. In 1983, The Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Authority hired Los Angeles-based engineering consultants Dames & Moore to conduct a siting study for the proposed facility based on state siting guidelines. After looking at all of Texas, the consultants excluded much of Hudspeth County — the…
Reconstructing Brian
Everyone is trying to get a smile out of Brian Wilson. He’s nearing the end of a photo session, sitting on a stool in the spacious, cluttered garage of his Los Angeles home, and his face is like iron. The photographer is running him through a series of poses –…
Trench Warfare
In the stark, wild west landscape of the Trans-Pecos region, a rancher and a baker kick up dust in the bottom of a trench 32 feet deep, 210 feet wide and 400 feet long. The rancher, shielded from the blazing sun by a cowboy hat, scoops a small pebble of…
Combat Reality
The first shot in Steven Spielberg’s remarkable World War II epic Saving Private Ryan is an American flag with the sun behind it. It’s a delicate, almost diaphanous image — the fabric has the transparent delicacy of a chrysalis. This is the perfect introduction to a movie about the fragility…
Traveling Waste
Transportation considerations were not paramount in the search for a dump site. The major generators of nuclear waste in Texas are concentrated in the eastern half of the state, and waste coming from Maine and Vermont will travel from Texarkana, on the state’s eastern border, through Dallas to reach Sierra…
Sweeney’s a Sweet Success
Phillip Duggins, Masquerade Theatre’s founder and producer, has lots of chutzpah — you have to give him that. How else can you explain the audacity this tiny, aspiring theater group had to choose Sweeney Todd as its second season-opener? Fortunately, Duggins also has talent, and apparently lots of it. He…
Alley Fighting
Vanessa and Dr. William Blackstone were eating breakfast in late April when they saw something rather odd out their window. As Vanessa Blackstone recalls: “We saw two people having a conversation in our back yard. The next thing we know, we saw a bulldozer coming through our fence.” They knew…
The Insider
Ad Litem Alibi? Harris County juvenile court judge and Texas Protective and Regulatory Services (TPRS) officials are on a collision course with regard to the judge’s tactics in trying to speed up the adoption of children in the custody of the state agency. Judge Pat Shelton is critical of the…
Letters
Parents’ Thanks Thank you for your story [“Two Bullets in the Back, by Randall Patterson, July 9]. You captured the tragedy and absurdity of the events of July 15, 1995. You weave a narrative that is accurate, insightful and vivid. It is also devastating. A lot of hard work went…