Diner’s Notebook
It’s all too easy to get into a rut where breakfast is concerned; mornings tend to bring out the creature of habit in all of us. In the interests of a.m. diversity, then, some suggested field trips to broaden your breakfast horizons. * At the Texas Lee Bakery, 9126 Bellaire…
Sounds for the Long Haul
Surviving in the music industry isn’t easy. You can be on top one minute, on the bottom the next. It can be a world that lasts for as little as a day; as evidence, all you need to do is look at all the one-hit wonders that have littered the…
Rotation
Elvis Costello Kojak Variety Warner Bros. Elvis Costello is a man of many tastes and many ideas. In the last few years, he’s played stripped-down rock and roll with the reformed Attractions and chamber-pop music with the Brodsky Quartet. You could be rude and call him scatterbrained and unfocused, a…
Critic’s Choice
The trouble with bar bands is that they all sound like bar bands — they hear a song, they play the song, always in an instantly recognizable manner. That’s their job, of course, but ultimately “bar band” becomes a stylistic straitjacket. The other constraint on the careers of those seeking…
Feats of Courage
It’s been seven years since Little Feat reconstituted itself, but even after all that time a question still follows the band around like a lonesome puppy: will this second set of Feat ever be judged on its own terms? The problem with answering that question is the band itself. It’s…
Sweet Magic
Matthew Sweet was probably poking some sort of fun at his own bad self when, in 1993, he led listeners into Altered Beast — his first release after the breakthrough college radio success of Girlfriend — with a song titled “Dinosaur Act.” Echoplexed guitars roared and crunched and squealed through…
Highland Fling
Except for a most unwelcome pre-curtain speech, Denton Yockey, executive director of Lone Star Performing Arts Association, puts on a bonny show in Brigadoon, Lerner and Loewe’s enduring 1947 Scottish fantasy, which opens Galveston Island Outdoor Musicals’ 19th season. In casting the leads, Yockey has signed crowd favorites from last…
Stage Notes
Tweaking Tennessee: Cross Big Mama from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Amanda from The Glass Menagerie and what do you get? Big Amanda, that’s what. She’s one of a most peculiar lot in The Glass Mendacity, a send-up of three Tennessee Williams plays (A Streetcar Named Desire being…
Songs and Dance
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the Houston Ballet has a hit on its hands. At last Thursday’s opening night performance of “Rooster,” one of a trio of dance premieres being presented as the next-to-last production of the Ballet’s 25th anniversary season, the crowd started shouting its appreciation…
Term limits and a domineering mayor have combined to make the City Council little more than a rubber stamp. And Houston may pay dearly for that down the line.
It was a Wednesday afternoon in December, and the City Council chamber in the lower level of the City Hall Annex echoed with the sound of one man beating his head against the wall. To a frustrated Ben Reyes, the eight-term councilman from the east side, simple arithmetic suggested that…
Bedtime for Boo Boy
The new Casper — the 28 trillion bytes of Industrial Light and Magic created Casper — does not inhabit the gently hokey realm of the original Harvey Comics Casper. The comic-book Casper had friends such as Hotstuff, the little red devil, and Wendy, the good little witch, and would never,…
Deano’s Disclosure
If you were in a charitable mood, you might give newspaper-killer Dean Singleton credit for nerve, if nothing else. In this age when grudging employees go postal on their bosses for little or no reason, the 44-year-old baby face who launched a thousand pink slips at the Houston Post came…
Flings, First and Final
If you need proof that what we enjoy in art has nothing to do with what we’ll accept in life, then consider love stories. When you look back at most of the really powerful movie romances both past (City Lights, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca) and present (Love Story, Annie…
The Insider
Caution: Falling Academics It could be a long wait for Houstonians expecting — or dreading — a swift return by former mayor Kathy Whitmire from her Rocky Mountain high at Junior Achievement headquarters in Colorado Springs. Some associates suggest that Whitmire, a recent appointee to the New York Stock Exchange…
Big Fun at Fung’s
“There’s someone back in that kitchen whose only job is to mince and toast garlic,” surmised my tablemate as we demolished a mess of soft-shell crabs in the cushy pink confines of Fung’s Kitchen. She sounded very pleased at this notion. I understood her line of thought: every square inch…
American Woman
First there was the Yugoslavian writer. Then came the Pakistani on a bicycle. Finally, there was the handsome Turk who proposed marriage and a move to Ankara. “I got engaged. It was my first proposal… as a woman. Other times I made them,” Kathryn McGuire explains. Ah, the romantic adventures…
Perk of Office
artha Wong and Helen Huey weren’t taking any chances when the city’s Ethics Committee convened last week to consider complaints against the two councilmembers. Both contend the complaints are groundless, but, just in case, Wong and Huey have availed themselves of the kind of high-priced legal talent that their adversaries…
Letters
Run, Run, Run I read your informative and “almost” amusing article regarding the Houston Police Department and their so-called “sting” at Lamar High School [News, “The Great Smokeout,” by Brian Wallstin, May 11]. The reason I say “almost” amusing is my daughter was one of the juveniles included in the…
Press Picks
thursday june 1 The Romance Continues The National Turkey Federation informs us that “June is Turkey Lovers’ Month,” and who are we to argue? The National Turkey Foundation, following the lead of the cranberry people who managed to get their food out of its holidays-only rut, says that turkey is…