Light Lesson
Of the talents August Wilson brings to playwrighting, brevity surely isn’t one of them. Steeped in folk language and vernacular wisdom, Wilson dwells in words. From Joe Turner’s Come and Gone to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences, Wilson’s characters go round and round personal, societal and historical issues dear to them,…
Uncharted Waters
I’m worried about the fate of Pocahontas. Of all the big-budget, feature-length cartoons released by Disney in the past six years, this one — about a romance between a Native American woman and a white man who arrived in the New World seeking to conquer the land and its people…
Batman, At Last
I was disappointed in the first two Batman movies. Despite moments of dark wit and visual brilliance, they didn’t move me emotionally, and I didn’t think much of them as entertainment, either. The problem was their director, Tim Burton. He’s an artist, not a showman; a visionary, not a storyteller…
God, Guns & Kombucha
It wasn’t the deer-in-the-headlights look on Steve Stockman’s face the day in April when he called a press conference to explain that he had gotten no advance notice of the bombing in Oklahoma City or had any direct affiliation with the citizen militias whose profile had risen considerably in the…
Letters
Boobs Galore And the winner of the booby prize for the best boo-boo ’bout a boob-flick goes to … Edith Sorenson! Okay, actually, Sorenson didn’t do a bad job of reviewing a cult film she didn’t like as much as I [Film, “Best of the Breast,” June 8]. But as…
Press Picks
thursday june 22 The Life of a Check The YMCA and the Houston Public Library, two organizations not normally known as money machines, host a series of summer workshops designed to teach kids about the long green. “The Life of a Check,” obviously, explains why mommy can too be out…
Diner’s Notebook
I’ve had slippage on the brain lately. I keep going into old-favorite restaurants only to find that all is not well; it would be nice to suppose they’re all just having an off-day, but can my luck really be so consistently bad? I doubt it. I think slippage is occurring…
A Vocal Concern
For close to 15 years, Robert Simpson has been nurturing an ambition. A longtime director of church choirs who studied his craft in New York and Germany, Simpson felt a desire to move from the sacred to the secular. It’s not that he wanted to give up his churchly duties;…
Rotation
Lozenge Plenum farrago Some bands practice for years, writing and arranging and mastering their instruments, affecting images, subjecting themselves to the harness of management and the rigors of the sign-a-deal dance, only to discover that their product is still, somehow, considered inappropriate for commercial consumption. Then there are other bands…
Critic’s Choice
The ”Houston jazz scene” may be an oxymoron. The improvisation specialists who call Bayou City home are few, and only a handful of those players dare to deal with the hassles of club gigs. That’s one reason why the small band of really dedicated jazzers in town pop up on-stage…
It’s Still Timbuk Time
“The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades,” the sardonic send-up of the skewed values of the 1980s by Austin’s Timbuk 3, was quite possibly the most commercially successful record to ever come out of a home studio in Texas’ capital. For several months in 1986, it was impossible to…
A Question of Power
The first thing most parents ask when they visit Kent Academy, a private preschool on the banks of Sugar Creek, is if their child can fall into the water. Not a chance, promises administrator Veronica Eaton, a gentle-voiced woman in her mid-20s. Immaculate, sky blue and airy, Kent Academy doesn’t…
The Importance of Being Elouise
In most instances a restaurant opening is just a restaurant opening. But sometimes it’s a cultural event: one of those occasions that represents some essential truth about a segment of the community. Take the planned reopening of Tony’s this fall, a prospect much longed for among Houston’s display-conscious society set…