Follow the Money
How could you not trust this man? We were a little shocked when we read an article in the Washington Times a couple of weeks ago about how members of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps were complaining about a lack of transparency when it came to the organization’s finances. The…
No, Seriously, It Really Is Falling
Rice University There’s hope underneath that tough facade. Homeless folks now have an option besides aluminum-can recycling and panhandling to earn a little extra cash. The good neighbors at Rice University are dropping Styrofoam boxes all over the city — not filled with beer, which would’ve been a good way…
The Grim Sweepers
USA Decon “This headband totally covers my bald spot.” The drive to Beaumont took more than an hour, and I thought about death the entire time. These weren’t your run-of-the-mill musings on mortality (although that would’ve been very alliterative of me). I was on the way to meet the guys…
Driving While White
“Wha? No drunken ethnic slurs? A rookie mistake, mate.” It’s all the buzz this morning: Mayor Bill White’s daughter Elena was arrested for allegedly driving while intoxicated. According to our pals at KHOU, 17-year-old Elena White was pulled over in the 9800 block of Memorial Drive (near the White family…
Ever Lastings Love?
MLB.com He’s here…for now. That damned ESPN the Magazine article. A little while back, the Mag published a story about Houston Astros ace Roy Oswalt. You know, the fire-armed, ice-in-his-veins Roy O. That guy. The story was called “Oswalt’s 10-Year Plan.” In the piece Roy O allows that he could…
Going for Gol
Jenifer Juelsgaard/Coady Photography Yearling Sale buyers are looking for the next Silver Gol or Snowy Alibi (above). The Texas Quarter Horse Yearling Sale is a minefield for anyone who likes to gesture with his hands or has Tourette’s syndrome. The movement of a finger on a thigh can signal a…
The Hunt Is On
The riding gear and hounds thing is optional, natch. If you find yourself with nothing to do this evening, and don’t mind the possibility of being arrested, you should check out Jacob Calle’s Scavenger Hunt. Calle says anyone interested should meet him at 7 p.m. at the Kroger (or, to…
Swedish Massage
Maybe Victoria just dropped her keys. Consider this your Friday afternoon skin fix. Thanks, Gawker! The site du gossip has links to some steamy pics of Swedish model/actress Victoria Silvstedt. The tall, tan blonde is seen on a hotel balcony, wearing nothing but a white bikini top and a weird…
Fiddy for 10
“I’m rich, biiiaaatch!” We have to give mad props to Madison High School’s Vince Young, who, as you may have heard, today agreed to a five-year deal, with $25.7 million guaranteed and an overall value that could reach $58 million — with the Tennessee Titans. It’s proof positive that Bud…
Losers Win
“Vote, er, don’t vote for me.” Any poll that has you in last place can’t be good for a politician. Unless, of course, that poll is taking place on Wonkette, and the subject is “Who is Running the Worst Campaign in America?” The voters at Wonkette clearly think Texas Democratic…
The Next Best Thing
Pele in the soccer doc While Allison and Ryan were getting the boot on So You Think You Can Dance (Allison, America? Allison? Did you misdial? While Heidi and her tortured grin go on and on?) another group of stalwart athletes and their fans in Houston were getting an upclose…
The Next Best Thing
Pele in the soccer doc While Allison and Ryan were getting the boot on So You Think You Can Dance (Allison, America? Allison? Did you misdial? While Heidi and her tortured grin go on and on?) another group of stalwart athletes and their fans in Houston were getting an upclose…
This Story Ain’t Tired
“Seriously, it’s gently worn…” Man, oh man, last Friday’s kooky car chase has turned out to be a gift that keeps on giving. First, we have the revelations of the driver, Kenneth Ray Pool, who told KHOU that he shot at police and fled in his truck because he’d upped…
Bring Back the Jams!
Greg Levitt Michael Haaga, your 2005 Local Musician of the Year The Music Awards are coming! The Music Awards are coming! To whet your appetite, we put together a list of all the winners of selected categories going back to the inception of the awards in 1990. Who will join…
The Submarines
Fleetwood Mac’s incestuous entanglements have nothing on the romantic spark of the Submarines, a Boston-bred duo whose relationship with each other was seemingly as cursed as it was creative. With a recent reconciliation, the group’s debut disc is brimming with lovelorn sagas about betrothal and betrayal, amply illuminated by a…
Over Your Head
Publisher: Ubisoft
Platform: Xbox 360
Price: $59.99
ESRB Rating: T (for Teen)
Score: 7 (out of 10)
The Bard Gets Bloody
The University of Houston’s School of Theatre has challenged itself with this year’s Houston Shakespeare Festival by bringing one of the Bard’s most intense plays to the Miller Outdoor Theatre. Titus Andronicus is the bloodiest of all Shakespearean tragedies. Rape, murder, mutilation, cannibalism and everything else modern audiences associate with…
Sumo
Not to be confused with the Argentine reggae undergrounders, this Swedish house duo played four venues during the 2006 Winter Music Conference in Miami, twice at Amika. The Danceband is the group’s official debut full-length after the release of its past seven years’ worth of singles on last year’s Rebounces,…
Eating for Two
Feed (TLA) Remember the old jokes about “What’s grosser than gross”? The makers of Feed do, as they prove in the first 10 minutes — one-upping their opening scene featuring a voluntary victim of cannibalism by bringing in a guy who gets nekkid and shoves cheeseburgers down the throat of…
Stranger than Fiction
Pablo Picasso once said that art is the lie that tells the truth. Michael Putegnat would probably agree. The Brownsville public policy and computing consultant chose to write a novel to explain how oil politics affect Wall Street, Washington and Small Town, USA. “All I could show was the numbers…
Hamster Theatre
The latest from the Hamsters is everything a fan might expect from one of Colorado’s most gloriously twisted exports: a two-disc package divided between unconventional studio offerings and a live set that underscores the band’s ambition and eccentricities. The initial pair of cuts on Execution set the stage for the…
Our top DVD picks for the week of July 25
2005 Academy Award Nominated Short Films (Magnolia) Animaniacs: Volume 1 (Warner Bros.) Ask the Dust (Paramount) Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That! (ThinkFilm) The Benchwarmers (Sony) Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story (Shout! Factory) Bogie & Bacall: The Signature Collection (Warner Bros.) Chappelle’s Show: The Lost Episodes (Paramount) Electric Shadows (First Run)…
Whitener Night
It’s rare for a performer to be booked two consecutive weekends at a comedy club; most comedians simply cannot put that many asses in that many seats. But comedic hypnotist Ken Whitener typically does two weekends in a row at the Laff Spot. He sells so well, the Spot’s Web…
Trudy Lynn with the Calvin Owens Blues Orchestra
Homegrown Houston blues mama Trudy Lynn has belted out her 13th CD, I’m Still Here, and it’s all still good. Actually, a few moments of Still Here border on the great. The title song, a slow blues ballad that Lynn wrote, shows Lynn the singer at her best, moaning and…
2006 Houston Press Music Awards Supplement
This year’s Houston Press Music Awards take a less-is-more approach. Yes, we are down a dozen or so bands from our peak year last year, but we have a stronger band-for-band lineup. And better still, this will be our most physically compact showcase since the days when the event was…
Ume in Bloom
The droning, thrashing guitar rock of local up-and-comers Ume immediately evokes comparisons to Sonic Youth. But there’s no comparison for Ume’s lead singer-guitarist, Lauren Larson. The petite Larson whizzes across the stage like a Tasmanian devil on PCP, creating a tornado of blond hair as she belts out fierce vocals…
Jurassic 5
It can’t really be called a comeback, especially since they were a retro-minded, old-school hip-hop act to begin with. But that’s exactly what Jurassic 5’s new tour could be considered. These L.A. rappers came out swinging in the late ’90s, releasing the back-to-basics LP Quality Control, which featured incredible verbal…
Dance Lessons
“Okay, when we’re at the club, call me April,” says Conchita, smearing on yet more purple lipstick. “I am not going to call you no April!” I laugh. “Ay, you’re so mean. I just don’t want none of the guys to know my real name, in case I have to…
Don’t Mess with “Texas”
Pete Mayes has spent more than 50 years perfecting his infectious blend of blues and R&B with a touch of country and Texas shuffle. “Texas” Pete Mayes, as he’s known in blues circles (which stipulate that all performers older than 60 must have a nickname), is just as likely to…
Shadows Fall
The metal band Shadows Fall is steadily moving up the music-game food chain. They started off in 1995 and released their first album, Somber Eyes to the Sky, two years later. That led to a recording contract with the indie-metal-rock label Century Media, a second CD, Of One Blood, and…
Escalator Buffet
Crumbling pappadums over your Indian food is something I picked up from a British guy who joined me for lunch at Bombay Brasserie on University. He says they do it all the time in England — same idea as crushing up saltines in your soup. If you aim the cracker…
That’s Intensive
They come from as far away as Australia, France, Brazil and Japan to pursue their dreams of one day spinning across the great stages of the world. Some of them as young as ten, they sacrifice their summer vacations to spend six grueling weeks performing some the dance world’s most…
Mark Farina
For more than a decade, San Francisco DJ Mark Farina has been a prominent figure on the house scene. Of course, this shouldn’t be surprising, considering he got his start in the late ’80s playing in his native Chicago, which has long been one of the premiere house music cities,…
Metal Warriors
Springfield, Massachusetts’s Shadows Fall is a rarity among metal bands, one that executes hard, fast and dangerous music and gets its albums well distributed. Sure, there’s a clichéd war theme on the band’s past two albums – 2004’s A War Within and this year’s Fallout from the War – as…
The Orange Death
A postal worker’s cacophony of found objects and makeshift sculptures, the Orange Show proves that you don’t need to be a professional artist to create art. So it’s appropriate that for its first drive-in movie, the museum chose a flick from low-budget legend Roger Corman, whose resourcefulness proves you don’t…
Band of Heathens
Austin’s Band of Heathens call themselves a “loosely knit collective,” but there isn’t anything loose about their music. This is well-crafted Americana, built on strong melodies and superior musicianship. It don’t hurt that four of the six band members are talented singer-songwriter-guitarists (Brian Keane, Colin Brooks, Ed Jurdi and Gordy…
Home Front
Carl Strandlund should have gotten a big piece of the post-World War II-technology-boom pie. His Lustrons — porcelain-enameled, steel houses made on an assembly line and supposedly fire-proof and maintenance-free — were supposed to be the easy answer to a housing shortage that had left families without a place to…
Hogwarts Holiday
Don’t even act like you don’t like Harry Potter. Harry-hatin’ was so five years ago. J.K. Rowling’s series about the boy wizard has made “Hogwarts” and “Quidditch” household names from Baytown to Bangkok, and hordes of people across the globe are eagerly anticipating the release of the next Potter tome…
London Fog
For 35 years, Woody Allen was a long shot to stray into the Bronx or Staten Island — much less the alien reaches of London, England. The creator of Manhattan has always been joined to his chosen borough like pastrami on rye, so when he ventured abroad last year to…
On Your Top Eight?
Like many local bands – and many people on the planet – the Bluebirds have a MySpace account. However, you can’t learn much from their page, except that the duo is looking for a bassist and a second guitarist, has 191 friends, and needs to do something about the transparent…
She’s Got Problems
The “problem with no name” was Betty Friedan’s phrase for the lack of social and spiritual meaning in the lives of women. She addressed this nameless predicament in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, which is often credited with launching the modern women’s movement. But 40 years after the start…
Changes in Attitude
On Lobbying Day in February, when state legislators traditionally meet with interest groups, Planned Parenthood of Houston chartered a bus, rented a room and arranged with State Representative Martha Wong to cart 100 voters and local schoolchildren from her district into Austin. There was only one problem: When they got…
Undercover of the Night
Michael Mann’s Miami Vice is like a car that’s been stripped of everything but its two bucket seats and rebuilt from the ground up. The protagonists are a pair of detectives named Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) and a cover of Phil Collins’s “In the Air…
Honky-tonk Hendrix
Don’t let the cowboy hat and the “Ah, shucks” attitude fool you – Junior Brown isn’t just any country guitarist. This is what Jimi Hendrix would sound like if he were stranded in a honky-tonk. Of course, Brown sings in a rich baritone and plays a guit-steel – a dual-handled…
Take a Triptych
The character at the center of Mildred’s Umbrella Theater Company’s latest production, Triptych, never appears on stage. Without a curtain call, the philandering Henry wrecks the lives of three women. While the regular Don Juan hides from the problems he’s caused, his wife, Pauline, stalks his mistress Clarissa with plans…
Bishop Is Back
Even if you don’t remember George M. Bishop, the Houston legal community does. Married to a judge, Bishop was a behind-the-scenes power in deciding who would get on the bench and stay there; in return he was often appointed to lucrative cases by gratefully employed jurists. His South Dakota pheasant…
Free Kicks
When the clueless U.S. men’s soccer team got dumped in the first round of the World Cup last month, American sports fans generally shrugged and went about their business. Aside from its popularity among millions of suburban schoolchildren, what most other earthlings call “the beautiful game” still arouses about the…
No Phishing
The Gourds’ best-known song is probably a supposed Phish cover of a Snoop Dogg tune. Known for their anything-goes concerts, the Austin country rockers fired up a twangy version of Snoop’s “Gin and Juice” at a 2000 show, but Napster users mistakenly attributed it to jam band giants Phish. “I…
Ballet Aid
Rolando Sarabia is about to rise to the top of the Houston Ballet world, and today dance aficionados can get their first peek at the man The New York Times called “the Cuban Nijinsky.” Sarabia, who is slated to become Houston Ballet’s principal dancer next spring, was granted asylum status…
Letters to the Editor
Crab Bag AA success: Great job on the Sartin’s story [“Crab Man,” by Robb Walsh, July 13]. After reading it, I had to drag the wife over to their new location in Clear Lake to eat crabs and watch the hippies laugh at the bikers, who were making fun of…
The Metamorphosis
The Ant Bully is based upon a short children’s book by John Nickle, who wrote and illustrated the 1999 work all by his lonesome after years of providing illustrations for The Wall Street Journal and Sports Illustrated, not to mention other works of kiddie lit. The book, as most parents…
Sew Artsy
There’s a quilt show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. But as you may have guessed from the venue, it’s not a showcase of Grandma’s heirlooms — that is, unless your grandma (and her grandma and possibly even her grandma) is one of the acclaimed crafters from Gee’s Bend,…
Two Cool Cats
Who doesn’t like a martini and a steak followed by a show? You can have your steak and eat it too today at Sullivan’s, which is bringing in some top Broadway talent for Jerby & Omari Tau Live!, a one-night engagement. Omari Tau, working on his day off from The…
Image of the Week
The classic live album Mothership Connection, recorded at the Summit, is not George Clinton’s only tie to the P-Funkiness of Houston. He was in town recently to thank the kids at Waltrip High for the art car they created in tribute to him. The car, named “Atomic Dog…One Nation Under…
Trailer Camp
With the Houston heat index rising well above a hundred degrees, now is no time for serious, head-scratching theater. That sort of artistic experience takes too much darned work in this kind of weather. Thankfully, the folks at Stages Repertory Theatre seem to know this. They’ve come up with a…
Geek or Chic?
Is Napoleon Dynamite cool anymore? We can’t tell. First our hipster friends were all telling us we had to see the quirky, independent comedy from Idaho (of all places). Then we started seeing high school kids in “Vote for Pedro” T-shirts. Then bobbleheads of the title character were on sale…
Don’t Shoot The Messenger
Because recent news from the Middle East has been mostly of the shit-your-pants variety, it’s comforting to see the conflicts of the area condensed into genre fiction, where the hero gets the girl, the villain gets his just deserts and no one gets killed — at least no one the…
The Bards of Baytown
I’m a sucker for bands that dance around the fringes of twang — bands that are country-steeped but not country, pop-friendly but not pop, exactly. Anglophile touches don’t hurt either, nor do mild tinges of psychedelia. Usually these bands have an exquisite sense of melancholy as well. When it sets…
Capsule Reviews
Black Comedy The Alley Theatre’s Summer Chills season is supposed to provide Houstonians breezy, easy shows that will distract us from the dreadful Gulf Coast heat. Happily, that’s exactly what Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy does. An English farce written in the ’60s, the amusing popsicle of a one-act features a…
Art on the Move
Don’t call them cartoonists. The creative minds whose work will be presented today at Independent Exposure’s Animation Program prefer the term “moving image artists,” according to associate curator Stephanie Martz. “These people are visual artists, and animation is just a second focus to many of them,” says Martz. Still, some…
Freakin’ Sweet
The online magazine Dance Hunter called Houston’s Michele Brangwen a choreographer of “heart, soul, and depth.” Her past work ranges from Black Rain, which compared the emotional and physical fallouts of Hiroshima and 9/11, to Desperados, a sensual display of tango. Brangwen considers original music such an integral part of…
Mr. Renfrow Risin’
Thursday night in H-town…The evening begins while the sun still sizzles overhead. I walk from the Press office down to Leon’s Lounge, where I am to meet Swingin’ 650 DJs Ronnie Renfrow and Ken Double, who, well, doubles as the radio voice of the Houston Aeros. But first, Leon’s intrudes…
Capsule Reviews
“Fellowship Series XI: Expositions” CACHH’s fellowship series exhibitions continue to offer up interesting, bite-size selections of work from its grant recipients. This time the featured artists are Beth Secor, Angela Fraleigh and Darryl Lauster. Secor paints family portraits from old photographs; in an accompanying artist’s statement, she relays snippets of…
Pit Bullying the Audience
Bobby Slayton, the “Pit Bull of Comedy,” has earned his nickname and he intends to keep it. Draw attention to yourself for any reason – wear a colorful shirt, sit too close to the stage or grimace even slightly at one of the brazen comedian’s off-color jokes – and the…
Hot and Steamy
The cookies ‘n cream “pizzookie” ($4.95) at BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse (2231 Highway 6 South, 281-242-0400) is eight inches of heaven. A cross between a pizza and a cookie, it’s a deep-dish molten chocolate dessert that tastes a whole lot like Oreos served hot out of the oven. Three scoops…
Get Your Flirt On
When I heard that Nelly Furtado flew to the top of the Billboard album charts with her third album, Loose, I knew it was official — people like their pop stars to look like hoochies in clear heels. The CD sold 220,000 copies in its first week. The first single,…
Why Don’t More Mexicans Care About Mexican Politics?
Dear Mexican, The Mexican presidential elections have been a freaking mess. I voted for the conservative candidate, Felipe Caldern, who almost everyone agrees won the election. But the leftist Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador is making a mess out of this by claiming electoral fraud. Does the Mexican have an opinion…
VAST Experience
When a band’s name is an acronym for Visual Audio Sensory Theater, its live show better entail more than just some guys and their instruments. Fortunately, VAST lives up to its name by complementing its industrial soundscapes with a light show and video presentation. The brainchild of guitar prodigy-turned-sonic warlock…
Special Martini
One could easily drive by Buddha Lounge (2670 Sage, 713-621-2833) and miss it, because the sign on the awning simply says “Lounge.” But simplicity is the way of the Buddha, and Buddha Lounge is the type of place that needs no sign at all. It’s so good, it could rely…