Spunk Rock
Kim Shattuck is looking at you, and from the stage she can see everything. She can see your dandruff, your clothes, your zits, the way your mouth hangs open. She can see you scratching. She can tell when you’re bored, and it makes her sad. And when you hop and…
Static
Corporate flexing… Last week, Pace Concerts announced its plans to invade Bayou Place in a fashion befitting its entertainment-empire status. Downtown at the Palace Cafe, tables and chairs were cleared and the cappuccino machines primed for the June 5 press conference. A crowd of about 80 or so media folks,…
Heavy on the Lite
“Easycore” is what he calls it — see him there, present day, still staggering around in last night’s rumpled sharkskin suit. Another lukewarm martini, one more spin of Burt Bacharach’s Wives and Lovers. Known as MOR — Middle of the Road — this sort of music enables this swinger’s lifestyle…
Rotation
Paul McCartney Flaming Pie Capitol It’s possible that undue stress has been heaped upon Paul McCartney’s post-Abbey Road reputation by the assertion that he was the less substantial — and less driven — half of rock and roll’s most celebrated songwriting partnership. Then again, maybe not. There are plenty of…
No Frills Allowed
It’s fitting that Tom Russell’s new retrospective CD says nothing about greatest hits, instead going with the oblique title The Long Way Around. It’s fitting not because the songs weren’t hits (though only a couple dented the charts, and then only when recorded by someone else), but because, rather than…
The Write Stuff
Director Peter Greenaway’s films are an acquired taste — quasi-surrealist fare at its most annoying or resplendent, depending on who you’re talking to. His tendency to cram art history references, bewildering factoids and visual flourishes into practically every shot makes for an experience that qualifies as both a rush and…
Magical
In a season of lumbering big-screen circuses, Rough Magic provides a rowdy creative sideshow. It’s the kind of haywire high-wire act that suspends the laws of science and grows more involving and comical with every artful near-fall. It’s about magic as illusion and magic as genuine miracle, and it shuffles…
That Sinking Feeling
First, the good news: Unlike most action film sequels, Speed 2: Cruise Control is not a mere retread of the original. Now the bad news: Better it had been. Director Jan De Bont made a dazzling debut with the 1994 Speed. His riveting direction of action triumphed over a hackneyed,…
Cuban Comfort
The first name is clearly Italian. The last name is clearly French. And the look, as anyone who’s spent any time in diners can attest, is clearly that of a Greek short-order cook: bearish frame, arms that would do a wrestler proud, slicked-back hair, even, on occasion, the toothpick caught…
The Art of Darkness
When Don Bacigalupi became director of the University of Houston’s Blaffer Gallery a year and a half ago, one of the first exhibits he put on the gallery’s schedule was a survey of the work of African-American artist Michael Ray Charles. In one sense, it was an obvious choice: Charles…
The Insider
Start the Music Several weeks ago, City Councilman Orlando Sanchez helped bully a local arts organization out of sponsoring a jazz concert by the band Crisol, which includes four Cuban musicians [The Insider, “Stop the Music,” May 22]. As it turns out, the main effect of the councilman’s intervention has…
Dead on the Street
Weirdly enough, Ronnie Tucker thought he was a judge. That, at least, was a delusion he voiced during a September 19, 1993 interview at Vernon State Hospital, one of the many psychiatric evaluations of Ronnie Tucker that were performed in his relatively short and hapless life. “You can’t be questioning…
Letters
The Popcorn’s Never Worth It I found Peter Rainer’s Lost World review very disconcerting [Film, “Spielberg’s Lost,” May 22]. If I wanted to read a dissertation on the life and times of Steven Spielberg, I would have picked up the Time magazine mentioned in the review. The information and examination…
Press Picks
thursday june 12 Don Quixote The Houston Ballet caps its 199697 season with a revival of Ben Stevenson’s lavish, romantic Don Quixote … yes, the same Don Quixote that premiered here two years ago. In October, the Ballet will truck this production to the Kennedy Center, so they’re giving the…
Dish
Cook’s Choice The first time I wandered into the Maru Grocery, I did so out of simple curiosity. I had just sated myself at the nearby Cafe Piquet, and when I walked out I noticed to my left a small storefront with a sign in the window advertising enjera. I’d…
Mr. Popular
From the very beginning, life wasn’t much of a strain for Evan Dando. Thanks to his globetrotting parents, he grew up well-off, well-cultured and well-liked; he’d been just about anywhere he’d ever dreamed of going by the time he finished high school. He’s handsome — not just as musicians go,…