No Bang, No Bing, No Boom
I wish I could’ve seen the looks on the suits’ faces at MGM, the studio behind Blown Away, when they first saw Speed. We were robbed, they must have said. They got our mad bomber, they got our bomb disposal team, they got our vehicle wired to explode if the…
Good Combination
As its title indicates, Combination Platter fits nicely into the Chinese-American food-film genre, joining Dim Sum, Eat a Bowl of Tea and The Wedding Banquet. Like that last film, Combination Platter follows a young Chinese man, Robert (Jeff Lau), in search of a green-card marriage. But Combination Platter is not…
A Lame, and Troubling, Lion
“Sometimes bad things happen and there’s nothing you can do about it.” This sobering message — only one of several downbeat pronouncements in what’s supposed to be an exuberant flick for kids — is given to the young lion cub Simba in The Lion King. Such advice, along with the…
Anatomy of an Intervention
For years, Mamie Sue Bastian Elementary was perceived in Houston education circles as a hellhole — a grim, neglected school in a low-income neighborhood, populated with teachers who didn’t teach and children who couldn’t learn. But the low-slung building at 7350 Calhoun, in the shadow of the Loop in southeast…
Battle of the Bonds
On a Sunday afternoon this past May, 34-year-old Elizabeth Peavy drove to a convenience store on Bissonnet in southwest Houston. After purchasing some gasoline and a snack, Peavy got back into her rented red Thunderbird. But before she could start the car and drive away, a young man with a…
New Editor Named at Press
Following a five-month search, a new editor-in-chief has been hired for the Houston Press. Jim Simmon, most recently political editor at the Houston Chronicle, will take over management of the Press beginning July 13. Simmon, who grew up in Louisiana, has lived in Houston since 1981 and has worked at…
Letters
Kay Hutchison is a Dead Horse Miriam Rozen is beating a dead horse [“The Case Against Kay,” June 23]. The general public sensed the hypocrisy regarding the charges that Kay Bailey Hutchison used taxpayer dollars for political campaigning. Hutchison is the quintessential example that asserts perception is often more important…
Press Picks
thursday july 7 Wine Train to Galveston Take the wine train to Galveston — this is a fine idea. Trains are wonderful. Really. Maybe you think this sounds like a hokey pick, but even for those benighted babes to whom the words “Orient Express” or “Midnight Flyer” or The Great…
Taste of Russia
July is the cruelest month in Houston, when the heat congeals into a crushing, invisible mass and September seems impossibly far away. Redemption in July is where you find it: even within an unglamorous styrofoam bowl at an eccentric little storefront Russian deli called Yakov’s. Chef Yakov Shteyman’s chilled beet-and-cabbage…
Squashed Toad’s
Bonehead play of the month: Goat’s Head Soup co-owner Antonios Stavropolous was arrested last Tuesday on felony arson charges related to the recent, um, explosion of Goat’s Head Soup. According to published reports, witnesses claim to have seen Stavropolous removing items, including an estimated $4,000 worth of lighting equipment, from…
What a Long, Strange Trip…
We were snowed in in Flagstaff, walking on the ice. The Missiles and their manager, who was me. It wasn’t the first time I’d considered killing them. Bill and Dave were several steps behind, and Ken was camped out in the shower of the Starlight Motor Lodge with a telephone…
Rotation
Various Artists Kiss My Ass Mercury There was a time in my early youth, when split screens were not yet something we couldn’t afford but just something that didn’t exist, when a friend and I nearly came to blows over the choice of TV channels. He wanted to watch Kiss…
Retro Grade A
When North Carolina’s Southern Culture on the Skids are hungry, they scarf pork and fried chicken. When they’re at home, they’re pickin’ and grinnin’ in a trailer park. And when they’re feeling romantic, they write an ode to hillbilly love called “Put Your Teeth Up on the Window Sill.” The…
New Theater on the Block
“You’re not the first person who’s asked that question,” William Hardy replies with a grin. After nearly three years of working to create — and raise money for — the new Houston Repertory Theatre, he is accustomed to myriad variations on the bemused inquiry, “Why would anybody try to start…
The Raw and the Cooked
The trouble with rushing off to brand-new restaurants is that occasionally you blunder into one that is not quite ready for prime time. My recent evening at the Blue Nile, a Spartan Ethiopian place that just opened on far western Richmond, was a textbook illustration of this particular peril. The…
Dead Men’s Tales
Long since set on the British Empire, the sun shines eternal on Sherlock Holmes. Arthur Conan Doyle’s detecting doppelganger has survived happily through dozens of literary and film versions, parodies and sequels over the course of one century, and looks robust enough to flourish through at least another. At the…
Art of Darkness
The modern world at war is not a place to live. The “smallness” of human beings in a time of war bespeaks the meaninglessness of human life. This collapse, this nothingness, this sense of the utter irrelevance of humanity is powerfully conveyed in Susan Crile’s series “The Fires of War”…