The Insider
Summer Interlude Make like The Insider, and don’t postpone your summer vacation waiting for indictments from the federal grand jury weighing the evidence in the City Hall sting. Our intelligence indicates none will be forthcoming before late next month, at the earliest. The feds reportedly are convinced that time is…
Browniad
Lee Brown invited the press to the Rice campus last week to hear him mulch over his nascent mayoral campaign. Of course, that wasn’t the pretext for the gathering. Ostensibly, Brown had positioned himself before that soothing Georgia O’Keefe print in Sewall Hall to discuss his impending trip to Atlanta…
Letters
Yes, That’s It — WASP Hatred! I too am the owner of a David Weekley home, but judging by the extreme bias reflected in Bob Burtman’s article about Weekley homes [“Slab O’ Trouble,” June 27], I doubt you will print this letter. I mean after all, when you have published…
Press Picks
thursday july 25 The Way Cool Group Show See way cool art and meet musical artists from Da Camera at this celebration of the arts. The relatively new Koelsch-Frietsch Gallery promises “a cornucopia of contemporary art in a variety of mediums.” Works — standard art along with jewelry and darling…
Deli Dream
Zinnante’s Delicatessen is one of those unassuming neighborhood holes in the wall — so unassuming that, though it’s in my own neighborhood, I’ve driven, even walked, right past it for years. I only became aware of it when my husband happened to casually mention that there was this great Italian…
Jazz Friendly
Big, bald, bearded guitarist Tod Vullo has been playing jazz around Houston for 16 years, and when he gets excited about something (which seems to happen frequently), his gruff voice grows louder, faster and jollier as the emotion increases. Loud, fast and jolly is how he sounds when he gets…
Static
Raves and wave-offs… For some people, summer means less of a workload. I, alas, am not one of them. As if tracking down the nominees for the Press Music Awards weren’t enough to contend with (anybody know where to find Ken Valentino?), from June to September, local releases multiply atop…
Rap of Ages Inc.
Who would have thought it? A middle-aged white guy responsible for this summer’s premier live rap show? Unlikely, but true: House of Blues, the juke joint-themed chain restaurant and venue founded in 1992 by Isaac Tigrett (who had earlier co-founded, then sold his interest in, the Hard Rock Cafe chain),…
Nasty Conquers All
It’s only been a year, but it might as well have been a lifetime ago. Flash back to 1995. Austin’s Ugly Americans were living the rock star lifestyle they’d always felt they deserved, touring the country with Big Head Todd and the Monsters and the Dave Matthews Band, staying in…
Simple Pleasures
Amid the many Galleria-area lunch spots where power deals are negotiated resides a cafe suitable for eating lunch in your shirt sleeves. In fact, if you wear a suit jacket in this joint, you’re likely to feel out of place. The Fountainview Cafe is an enclave of comforting reliability in…
Houston Press 1996 Music Awards
Thirty-six categories. More than 100 nominated bands and performers. You want proof that there’s a lot of music to be found in Houston? Well, there you have it: the musicians who make up the ballot entries for the Press Music Awards. Keeping up with that explosion of sound can be…
A Juicy Steak
If the Marlboro Man is your cowboy thing, then Joey Berner’s production of Steak! at the Actors Workshop might not be. Christi Stewart-Brown and Elizabeth Pringle’s tongue-in-cheek musical — which premiered last year in Washington, D.C., to great response — subverts nearly a century of genre images that celebrate the…
Sound Check
For most pop historians, the 1950s are notable for one thing, and one thing only: the emergence of Elvis Presley and the rise of rock and roll. But while rock was infecting the minds of the kids, their older siblings were paying attention to something else, a cooler-than-cool sound that…
Black, White and a Few Shades of Gray
John Grisham wrote A Time to Kill long before he became a fixture on the bestseller lists, and he continues to claim it as his personal favorite among all the novels he has written. A romantic notion? Probably. But perhaps also an accurate appraisal. A Time to Kill is the…
Highs and Lows
Trainspotting may well be the most exuberantly vital and scabrously funny movie ever made about heroin addiction. Which is just part of the reason why, in a little more than 90 minutes, it manages to be more devastatingly effective than a solid week of “Just Say No” TV spots. And…
Spirited
When’s the last time you saw John Astin, America’s beloved Gomez Addams, in a film? He’s here, in Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners — and so is Re-Animator’s Jeffery Combs. Astin plays a supporting role as the Judge, a long-dead lawman, and Combs is FBI special agent Dammers, a living creep…
Variety Club Follies
Elizabeth “Lele” Brown’s daughter was born prematurely, and the young mother soon found herself shuttling in and out of hospitals and doctors’ offices, immersed in a world of sick and suffering children. Her daughter was a “near-miss SIDS baby,” as Brown puts it, who nearly died in her crib twice…
Mom’s the Word
Chiropractor Don Huey Jr. was having trouble with the property he owns at 7725 Westview. Huey wanted to convert the nondescript ranch house from a residence to his new office, and he needed city approval of his plan before he could proceed. But the plan had flaws: at less than…