Mondo Video
Why is it you always catch the weirdest shit at three o’clock in the morning on public access television? One program that has been making the graveyard-shift rounds is a fast-paced oddity called packrat. Blisteringly bizarre and intensely unpredictable, packrat is a seamless rapid-fire half hour of movie clips, music…
Fungus Alert
Lewis Carroll produced the perfect portrait of the prototypical copywriter in 1871, when in Through the Looking Glass, he had Humpty Dumpty explain to Alice, “When I use a word…it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” This Humpty Dumptyism infects many varieties of…
Pralines and Pushcarts
The gastronomic fossils of early Tex-Mex can still be found in Houston
Rotation
Phish Farmhouse Elektra Farmhouse is Phish’s 11th release. This is significant for two reasons. First, it disabuses the notion that this jam band is merely an entity forever lost on a tour that doesn’t end (you know, always fooling around, never doing anything). Second, those 11 albums have been put…
Raging Hormones
Speaking off the toque: Frédéric Perrier, chef and owner of Café Perrier, 4304 Westheimer, (713)355-4455 Q. Are the French really worried about hormones, or are they just jealous because America has better beef? A. They’re jealous. The French love American beef. But anything they can’t produce they must find something…
That ’70s Place
Like your parents’ den, Bellaire Broiler Burger [5216 Bellaire Blvd., (713)668-8171] is a comforting blast from the past, with wood paneling, orange upholstery, a vinyl portable bar and a television. It’s enough to make you feel like eating off a TV tray while the boob tube blares some meaningless ball…
Spreading Its Roots
Through the back door of Austin’s Continental Club, Steve Wertheimer hauls four stacked jumbo plastic garbage cans. The club owner loads his freight into the bed of his pickup truck and fastens everything down with a rope. Rolled-up blueprints and construction checklists are nestled on the dashboard as we pull…
Gelato Bravo
The bar is massive; the mirror is framed by dark wood columns with carved capitals. With his swooping gray mustache and barrel chest, bartender Richard Hazzard looks right at home. In the dining room, a few ladies with blue bouffants are lingering over lunch. As Hazzard makes my drink, I…
Pony Tricks
Devoted fans are even more important than we think. In the increasingly marketing-driven world of mass media, it seems that anybody with a face and a hook and the right connections can get to the top. Kids will buy anything. Once. The trick is getting their support throughout the span…
The American Scream
One of the few really cool things about summer in Houston is that the searing heat brings with it yet another installment of Infernal Bridegroom Productions’ Tamalalia series. This frothy cocktail of song, dance and silliness springs eternal from the obviously strange musings in writer/director/choreographer/actor Tamarie Cooper’s head. The copper-headed…
Room to Grow
Location, location, location. This cliché probably means everything to business owners in cities where people walk to and from places. Here, Houstonians expect to drive from apartment to supermarket to gym to apartment and from rock venue to rock venue. Traveling by auto is second nature, like turning without signaling…
Unmasked!
The mask is an object and a concept common to many cultures. It speaks to us because we identify ourselves by our faces, not hands, feet or, generally speaking, any other body part. Obscuring, altering or representing the face immediately intrigues people. The mask prompts us to investigate our temporally…
Personality Counts
It’s your right as a tax-paying American: When it’s hot as hell, and Sisqo’s “Thong Song” is playing on every radio from sea to shining sea, you’re entitled to see some ladies parade around half-nekkid. That’s what Houston thinks, at least. A bunch of clubs ’round town offer this attraction…
Look Who’s Losin’ It
Only in the movies could a kid who looks and acts like Jason Biggs be called a loser. Let’s see: charming conversationalist, big smile, washboard abs? Oh, yeah, those’ll make a guy unpopular for sure. About the only thing that’s surprising about Biggs’s character in Loser is that the filmmakers…
Rotation
Lucy Pearl Lucy Pearl Pookie/Beyond When a band breaks up, audiences expect the individual members to carry that sound with them to their new outfits. Fans of the vets who make up R&B triumvirate Lucy Pearl — En Vogue’s Dawn Robinson, Tony! Toni! Toné!’s Raphael Saadiq and A Tribe Called…
No Laughing Matter
It would be the easiest thing in the world to write off But I’m a Cheerleader, the story of a teenager discovering her sexual identity through a program designed to repress it, as a Saturday Night Live sketch awkwardly inflated to feature length. But when you start looking deeper into…
Local Rotation
Guy Schwartz and the New Jack Hippies The Return of the New Jack Hippies Self-released Those plugged into the local scene know this title is something of a joke. Guitarist Guy Schwartz and bassist Roger Tausz are old hippies, ones who’ve been together and in and out of regional bands…
Music Awards Winners
Though The Hub looks like a diner, with its booths and linoleum floor, it’s actually a swell place for live music. For her Houston Press Music Awards 2000 showcase last week, R&B singer Song had set her band up in the corner. While she and her musicians were difficult to…
He Likes Beer
Sam Houston Race Park’s between-the-ponies country entertainment has been divided neatly into two categories: those with their glory days in the rearview mirror, and those with their futures spread out before ’em. Lubbockite Pat Green falls squarely in the latter, and is thus also deserving of pity. Not because he’s…
Jimmy’s Justice
The headlights a block behind Bud “Jimmy” Sawyer Jr. flashed from dim to bright to dim to bright again. At 12:40 in the morning, November 17, 1992, Jimmy was looking to buy crack cocaine, a plentiful commodity in his northeast Houston neighborhood where gunshots could be heard even before sunset…
Mandy Moore
Mandy Moore — What a chore it is, keeping tabs on all these warbling, blue-eyed, blond-haired waifs. There are the usual suspects: Britney Spears, who leads to Christina Aguilera, who leads to Mandy Moore, who leads to Jessica Simpson, who leads to Hoku, who — where the hell is this…
Your Cheatin’ Heart?
Pam Delker was preparing to leave her Manvel pizza restaurant last month, when she caught sight of an intruder on her roof. He shouted down that he was sent to dismantle her sign. Delker cautioned him against carting all of it away. “I’ve been paid to take this fucking sign…
Sisters Morales
Sisters Morales — Talk about a bumpy ride. First, Roberta Morales was set back with a bout of cancer (from which she has since recovered), then some Nashville record executives never followed through on signing Roberta and Lisa — the company, according to the sisters, couldn’t compartmentalize their sound neatly…
How Green Is My Building?
Four years ago, officials at the University of Texas Health Science Center trumpeted their determination to construct a unique nursing and biomedical sciences building in the Texas Medical Center. They vowed it would be a showcase for “stewarding resources, doing no harm, benefiting others in the present and future, and…
Truck-Stop Italian
Know the Italian word for “Bubba”? If so, use it at Big Humphrey’s Pizza and Italian Restaurant in Pearland. This unlikely outlet of serious Italian cuisine, nestled between an auto parts store and a Chevy truck dealership in Brazoria County, is surrounded almost exclusively by customers’ pickups. The walls inside…
Weary of the Wows
The sad part — the really sad part — is that the same tired line no doubt occurred to dozens of the lap-of-luxury traveling Hollywood press Saturday night. “Houston, we have a problem,” they all likely said in similar moments of semi-inspiration as the room-service machinery at the Hilton hotel…
Stellar Cellar
Overview: For years, Astros fans chanted, “No more mediocrity!” The Houston heathens pleaded to Drayton McLane. He made his vow: Give him a stadium, and big thrills would be on the way. No more unmemorable seasons. And the Astros’ owner has lived up to his pledge. But nobody could predict…
Porn to Sell
It’s tempting to think there’s something twisted about her tale. After all, she was a mere 18 the first time she had sex in front of a camera-for money, small change that would soon enough blossom into a pile of cash-and did so only at the insistence of her boyfriend,…
Be Positive and Nice
The headline on the front of the Houston Chronicle’s Metro section July 19 could have been lifted right off a Houston school district press release: “HISD Test Scores Are ‘Marvelous,’ Researcher Says.” The headline accurately reflected the story — Gary Dworkin, a sociology professor from the University of Houston, was…
Not By The Book
When Sidney Berger, director of the Children’s Theatre Festival at the University of Houston, heard that the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer of Fiddler on the Roof had a collection of kids tunes feeding the moths in his trunk, he asked if he could build a show around them, sight unseen. The…
Letters 07-27-2000
Beach and Learn As a lawyer, I represented a number of property owners, including John Arrington, in lawsuits, both as defendants and as plaintiffs, against the state’s efforts to enforce the Open Beaches Act [“This Sand Is Your Sand,” by Brad Tyer, July 13]. The events of that litigation might…