Caribbean Vacation
SAT 7/26 Parents know all about the summer challenge: Prying kids’ butts off couches and their hands from joysticks. To accomplish such a monumental task, though, you’ve got to find alternative entertainment — and if stealthy educational value is built in, so much the better. Storyteller Edwin Negrón uses handmade…
Making Book
Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald asserted that “There are no second acts in American lives.” But a horse named Seabiscuit and the three disparate men who shared its success would surely disagree. Based on the best-selling nonfiction book by Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit recounts the story of an unprepossessing, knobby-kneed horse that…
Here Come the Drums
FRI 7/25 Here’s a not-so-little-known fact: Houston has a thriving bhangra and Asian-massive music scene. Desis have been throwing bhangra parties in this city for years, and the way things are going now, it’s set to really blow up. With the success of Punjabi MC and Jay-Z’s recent collaboration, and…
Enough’s Enough
Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over continues a fine tradition of turning third installments of film series into three-dimensional efforts; Amityville 3-D and Jaws 3-D exploited the gimmick long before Robert Rodriguez made clever use of the numeral signifying the milking to death of a franchise. But what Rodriguez lacks –…
Funny Guy
WED 7/30 Although Neil Hamburger calls himself “America’s Funnyman,” a lot of people don’t find him funny. But to some, that makes him funny. His live albums are full of awkward silences and heckling from the audience. Is he the butt of the joke, or is the joke on us?…
Eight Is Great
What a happy time it is when Tamarie Cooper, the wacky redheaded diva reigning supreme at Infernal Bridegroom Productions, flies off to Hollywood. Of course it’s not her leaving that makes us so giddy; it’s the wild, laugh-till-your-face-hurts gift she’s brought back from her fairy-tale trip to Tinsel Town. Tamalalia…
Sheely Splits
The receptionist at the Sam Houston Hotel listens to the question about who’s in charge of its Riviera Grill these days. “I’m not sure,” she laughs. The question is referred to general manager Stephan Andre. He doesn’t call back. Neither does the boutique hotel’s owner, Barbara Stovall Smith. Late the…
Body Art
People have been drawing people for at least the past 17,000 years. That is approximately when the first known image of a human, a crude stick figure with a bird head/mask, was chalked onto a wall deep in Lascaux cave in southwestern France. Older drawings, like those found to the…
Crustacean Sensation
Long accustomed to the chicken-fried philosophy of Southern cooks, some locals first savored the delectably delicate, deep-fried tempura crust on veggies years ago. It was easy to be instantly hooked on the crunchy, lacelike coating that seemed to have magical flavor-enhancing powers on anything it encapsulated — even broccoli. The…
Holy Father
The pope isn’t Catholic. John Paul II, the man most people believe to be pope, is really an imposter. He’s deliberately plotting to destroy the Catholic Church from within. Catholics have been lied to, and they have been robbed. These are the messages Hutton Gibson preaches in his crusade to…
Rock You like a Hurricane
Hurricane Claudette may have just grazed us, but this tempest is gonna smack us full-force in the face. The Houston Press Music Awards showcase is upon us again — and this year it’s bigger than ever. Fourteen stages, 75 bands and seven bucks a ducat. You can’t beat that with…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thusday, July 24 Today, why not surround yourself with models and fine-ass cars? Fashion Group International is hosting an event called Fashionably Loud in the grand showroom of Mercedes-Benz Star Motor Cars. Award-winning local designers Alex Chapman, Jenny MacNeil and Uyen Thanh will be showing their fall lines. You can…
’80s Babies
Some musicians take you to a place. Think of Calexico and that Arizona desert vibe, of Dr. John’s New Orleans aura, of Snoop Dogg’s ability to transform the burbs into a cartoonish version of South Central L.A. Other bands make you travel in time. Longwave is one such band. Longwave’s…
Sausage Delivery Systems
The pizza crust was crispy with big yeast bubbles. The tomato sauce was spicy. And the loose Italian sausage spread over the top was kicking up some serious garlic and fennel fumes. It was some of the best Italian sausage I’ve ever had on a pizza. The only thing wrong…
Wango Chango
Ever since his band Chango Jackson switched from singing in English to Spanish and later changed its name from Moscas, guitarist-singer Chango Van Jackson has felt a new freedom, but also discovered an ardent desire to do something that has never been done before. “I’d been real disappointed with English…
Lutefisk Sushi
The Japanese have been turning out blistering punk bands as regularly as they once churned out Godzilla flicks. But for every relatively well known J-punk band such as Guitar Wolf, Thee Michelle Gun Elephant and Teengenerate, there are hundreds more bubbling under the crust, groups like the Havenots, Invisible Man’s…
Game On
“What the fucking shit fuck ass!” It is the cry of a warrior, of a soldier who is losing his cool. But the battlefield is not some desert in Iraq, it’s a darkened back room of a CompUSA store in an Austin strip mall. And the situation is not looking…
Reelin’ In the Years
Well, the Music Awards are in their 14th year, and Racket thought this as good a time as any to take a look back through the archives. And what a story they tell. Back in 1990, a Bush was in the White House and the economy — especially the local…
Paige Boy Returns
A deftly executed coup ended this month with the return to the Houston school district of Terry Abbott, the public relations man who paved the way for Rod Paige to become U.S. secretary of education. Abbott spent four years at HISD touting the so-called “Houston Miracle” and went to Washington…
Spacek
Right from the jump, even before you drop the disc in the player, Steve Spacek makes sure you know that he is the coolest, yet most woebegone sumbitch that you’ll ever come across. On the cover of the new album, Vintage Hi-Tech, Steve Spacek, producer Morgan Zarate and instrumentalist Edmund…
Letters
Down Under Thunder Don’t enable: I read your article about a woman and her son feeding feral cats [“Catfight,” by Wendy Grossman, June 19]. Then I read about the glories of feeding an animal that is not indigenous to southeast Texas. In Australia, feral cats are shot on sight. They…
King Geedorah
It’s safe to say that MF Doom — also known as King Geedorah, on this album at least — possesses the most delightfully demented mind in all of music. Each one of his releases is a complex maze where listeners have to sift their way through his intricate wordplay and…
Downie Fresh
On her latest release, thinking-woman’s rocker Liz Phair may have stumbled trying to repackage herself for the mainstream — drawing snarky comparisons to Avril Lavigne — but it’s safe to say that Gord Downie won’t be mistaken for nü-metal Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger anytime soon. After all, Downie writes songs about…
Circuits of Steel Tour
Pittsburgh is much more than merely a town full of black-and-gold-clad unemployed steelworkers jamming to Christina Aguilera and the Cynics, and this year’s Circuits of Steel Tour represents more than just a local musical movement trying to make good on the national scene. This collective of experimental electronic artists from…
Weird Wide Web
Five years ago, former Austinite Pamela Ribon started posting diary entries on a Web site called “Squishy.” By 2001, the site was receiving close to a million hits per month. Now, Ribon’s published a book, Why Girls Are Weird, about an Austin woman who posts her journal online and the…
Modest Mouse
In the two years since Modest Mouse’s last proper tour, the indie rock stalwarts have morphed from being the band of choice for all the young hipsters to being the band whose name was dropped by all the scenesters. Led by the insane, lisping poet in baggy corduroys, Isaac Brock,…
A Bad Moon Rising
Of the more than 2,000 paintings, drawings and sketches Vincent Van Gogh created in his lifetime, Moonrise has always been one of the most mysterious. The majority of the postimpressionist painter’s works can be dated through letters he wrote to his brother Theo. But Van Gogh didn’t leave many clues…
Two Cow Garage
Two Cow Garage has generated considerable buzz, impressive online sales and a ton of press with its debut release, Please Turn the Gas Back On. Fronted by 21-year-old Micah Schnabel from Bucyrus, Ohio, this young threesome plays with a loud, bull-necked, fuzzy alt-country-meets-indie-rock heartland jangle that sounds like its admitted-biggest-influence…
The Healthy Choice
SAT 7/26 Remember Perfect, starring John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis? In the film, Curtis’s character wants to know, “What’s wrong with wanting to be the best you can be? What’s wrong with wanting to be perfect?” The competitors in the Mr. and Ms. Legacy Fitness Championships, sponsored by the…
Bob Margolin
When Muddy Waters tears the roof off the Winterland with “Mannish Boy” during The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s film of the Band’s 1976 farewell concert, Bob Margolin is standing right next to him. Consequently, you see almost as much of him as the Crawlin’ Kingsnake during the number. It’s a…