Brand Name, House Special
Hating British trance DJ Paul Oakenfold is like hating Wal-Mart — it’s not that fun. Like the ubiquitous superstore, Oakenfold is officially the biggest and most successful at what he does, namely, playing clubs all over the world, selling mix CDs and producing remixes for top-shelf pop artists. In fact,…
Curry for the Laddies
London Sizzler Tandoori Bar & Grill London Sizzler Tandoori Bar & Grill Tandoori mixed grill$13.50
Onion bhaji$2.95
Butter chicken$10.50
Chicken tikka masala$9.50
Vindaloo$9.50
Chicken pili pili$12.50
Cruel Summer
A couple of weeks ago, the entire Lollapalooza Tour was canceled. Earlier this summer, Christina Aguilera likewise pulled the plug on a whole tour, citing a throat condition, and her rival pop tart Britney Spears also canceled a bunch of dates, pegging the blame on a bum knee. Though there…
French Accent
Crepes aren’t easy to make. Getting the thickness just right is essential; too thin and they won’t hold up, too thick and they won’t cook right. At Cava Bistro (301 Main, 713-223-4068), they’ve mastered the elusive skill of preparing this French street food. Cava’s crepes ($7.95) might look like large…
Donny Hathaway
It must’ve been fun to go to concerts in the 1970s, back when artists didn’t dick around with pyrotechnics and special effects and worthless-ass video montages. Back then, they knew that to impress an audience, they actually had to perform. The L.A. fans Donny Hathaway sings for on several tracks…
Armand Van Helden
In the mid- to late ’90s, Armand Van Helden was the name in American progressive trance and house, penning hits like “U Don’t Know Me” and “Witch Doktor” while remixing tracks by everyone from Puff Daddy to the Rolling Stones. His two postmillennial LPs met with tepid press and little…
Various Artists
This record reminds me of one of those mix tapes you discover you made one drunken night. You know what I’m talking about: It starts out as a fairly cohesive batch of tunes — there’s Richard Berry’s original R&B version of “Louie Louie,” a slow-burning P-Funk instrumental, the underappreciated classic…
The Last Word
They were an unlikely success story. An immigrant from communist Yugoslavia, he had no money, little English and a lowly job as a deckhand on an oyster boat. She was native of East Texas, waiting tables at Sambo’s in Nassau Bay. They met at the restaurant in the late ’80s…
O’Doyle Rules
It’s not apparent until about halfway through this record — and even then only if you’ve been following the printed lyrics — that No Place Else to Go is a concept record that actually tells a story. Sure, the concept — a relationship gone bad — isn’t a new one,…
Love the Big Bang
There’s bad news if you live in the Gulf Coast town of Quintana: The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has finished its report on a proposed liquefied natural gas terminal, and basically much of your town could be immolated in a matter of seconds if something goes wrong. The good news:…
Playbill
Bayside, with Armor for Sleep, Fall Out Boy and Name Taken The group of young, slightly geeky, self-hating emo kids from Long Island that make up Bayside pour their little hearts out on their debut, Sirens and Condolences, turning high school prom tragedies into magnificent rock songs. These kids worship…
Center of Gravity?
The players may change; the possibility continues to torture some Astros fans, a diamond oddity as curious as it is superfluous. Deep fly ball to center. Beltran’s got a good jump. At full speed, his cleats scrape the surface of the warning track. But there’s a little bell going off…
King Artless
Behold what is, in theory, the thinking person’s ideal summer blockbuster. King Arthur features some of the planet’s most beautiful people, dressed way sexily, gallantly galloping and bashing each other with all manner of implements amid lush vistas and robustly appointed sets. Add an intriguing historical pedigree and apparently unprecedented…
Letters
Color Coded No black gays: I eagerly read excerpts from your article [“Gay Play,” by Catherine Matusow, June 24], hoping to see that it reflected a “cross-section” of Houston’s gay community. What I found was more of the same, slanted, one-sided view that completely ignores African-Americans. One would think that…
Until the Night
Memory is a wonderful thing, if you don’t have to deal with the past,” declares French Celine (Julie Delpy) to her erstwhile American one-night-stand Jesse (Ethan Hawke) in Before Sunset, the meandering but reasonably charming follow-up to the duo’s 1995 Euromance, Before Sunrise. In the movies as in life, nearly…
La-La Land
“I spend way too much time figuring out who to fuck to get ahead. I can’t help it. I’m obsessed with becoming a successful actress,” says Michaela in The Assistants, Robin Lynn Williams’s new novel about life in Hollywood as an underling to the stars. Michaela is way past her…
Serenade in the Sand
Fair warning: If the behavior of camels in the Gobi Desert during the spring birthing season is not high on your things-to-learn-about list, and you don’t hunger to know everything about southern Mongolian herdsmen, then The Story of the Weeping Camel probably isn’t your kind of movie. Saying they were…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, July 8 Self-help books with unlikely messiahs are popping up all over the place: How Proust Can Change Your Life, The D’Oh! of Homer, Donald Rummy for Dummies — okay, so that last one doesn’t exist, but can’t you see it? And now we’ve got How to Be Lovely:…
Black Death
In Black Coffee, nobody loves Sir Claud Amory (James Belcher). The eccentric old man is too stingy to engender warm feelings. He runs around in a ridiculous red-silk smoking jacket and spends all his time and money inventing weapons of mass destruction, the sort that can kill “hundreds of thousands…
Play Ball
In the past few years, baseball’s health has suffered under the weight of some notable maladies. Steroids. Corked bats. Violent fans. Player-owner face-offs. Owner-Congress face-offs. And the mystery of lower revenues leading to higher salaries. Who’s zoomin’ who? But perhaps the last decade’s biggest single boner happened at the 2002…
Capsule Reviews
Boy Groove “You make my hips buck,” sings the gyrating boy band, voguing in front of the audience. Aaron Macri and Chris Craddock’s musical spoof Boy Groove is having its U.S. premiere at Theatre LaB Houston, and in it, fictional teeny-bopper sensation Boy Groove gets screwed just like it ought…
A Bright Prophecy
TUE 7/13 If you thought you would’ve done more with your life by this year’s birthday, here’s a story to make you feel even worse. At 15, Flavia Bujor is a best- selling author and has been anointed the newest “international literary sensation,” drawing comparisons to J.R.R. Tolkien and Lewis…
Exploding the Canon
If you go to “Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America” expecting to see works by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, you’ll be disappointed. By emphasizing important but perhaps less familiar artists — indeed, many of the works on display have rarely, if ever, been shown in the United States…
Mini Cooperstown
The NFL Yawnfest — er, Experience — held during Super Bowl week at the George R. Brown Convention Center was a dud. The most popular exhibit was the half-size football field where parents let their kids run around until they dropped from exhaustion. But we have higher hopes for the…
Capsule Reviews
“Olafur Eliasson: Photographs” Olafur Eliasson presents a world with a quietly powerful, contemplative and fascinating beauty. For his exhibition at the Menil Collection, he’s taken photos of Iceland and grouped them in grids, creating series of images and recording his movements though landscape — over a trail, down a river…
A Real Mix
FRI 7/9 For a group of performers who are all about mixing, the DJ community seems to split into two camps: hip-hop and dance. Building bridges, one beat at a time, promoter Qousey Ben-Musa has set aside plenty of time for both types of spinning at the Sexxxtravaganza Tour. “We’ve…
Golden Boy
Morgan Faulkner is shredding the wave. The 18-year-old is in Isla Blanca Park, South Padre Island, shooting for air on a broken-nosed shortboard. The fiberglass snapped like a potato chip in the previous heat, cutting an inch off the front end. But Faulkner has gone a whole foot shorter in…
Love and Marriage
WED 7/14 This summer, the folks at Stages Repertory Theatre are bringing back the 1996 off-Broadway relationship romp, I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change! They’re lauding the play as a musical about “everything you’ve thought about dating, mating and romance but were afraid to admit.” And apparently lots of…
Emvisible
I have to let the world know that if it weren’t for D12, there wouldn’t be a Slim Shady,” says Swift of his infamous D12 cohort, Eminem. “The name ‘Slim Shady’ stems from the creation of D12, and that’s what he introduced to the world in ‘Hi, My Name Is…’…