Museum with 1,000 Faces
You might not think that a baseball catcher’s face protector, an approximately 7,000-year-old facial shroud from the Middle East and Darth Vader’s helmet would have a lot in common. But they’re all examples of masks that have been used for wildly varying purposes since the dawn of civilization (I’ve always…
Diana Ross and the Supremes
So Diana Ross has come out of hiding to assert herself as the Diva to Bitch-Slap All Other Divas. Did she do it to bring some class back to divadom? Possibly. Mariah now walks around half-butt-nekkid like she just dropped off the pages of Barely Legal. Whitney has apparently resorted…
Handmade Films
You know you’re in for a different cinematic experience from the moment you walk up to the Aurora Picture Show and come face to face with the video kaleidoscope outside — the closest thing the theater has to a marquee. The converted church doubles as the home of Aurora’s founder,…
Pleasure Domes
I really love coconut. I love the way it tastes, whether encrusted on shrimp or chicken, in a cake or cream pie, or in the form of milk or rum. I also love the way it smells. Forget the “new car” fragrance at the car wash, gimme Piña Colada every…
Take Me Out to the Ball Game Cafe
On the TV monitor at Ruggles at Enron Field, we were watching Chris Holt put on an amazing performance against the Philadelphia Phillies. Not only did he pitch the entire game, he also singled to left to drive in two runs. It was only the second big-league ball game my…
Falling For It
The Humpty Dumpling Café had its work cut out to overcome some major biases on my part. First, there’s the restaurant’s name. I hate it. I mean, I really, really hate it. It was, I think, Thoreau who said, “Beware all restaurants bearing overly cute names.” Then there’s the poem…
Mudbugs: The Dirty Truth
They were my first crawfish of the season, and they brought back fond memories of Louisiana love affairs and eating Cajun food in the car. (If you throw crawfish shells out of a moving vehicle while crossing the Atchafalaya Swamp, are you littering or recycling?) Itz All Good [6734 Cullen…
Free-Range Chicken
About nine years ago, in a humble Redondo Beach nightclub, urbane British folk singer Billy Bragg reappraised 20th-century politics by means of an intriguing correlation. Might it be, he postulated, that contemporaries Leon Trotsky and Harlan Sanders were not merely striking doppelgängers, but, in fact, the same person? Consider, he…
Born in the USO
No one really hung back by the bar. Everybody was up at the front of the stage, where four scary-looking characters in leather and jeans and a banner bearing the name “L.A. Guns” — printed inside a skeleton’s head inside a police badge — occupied the available spotlight. Back at…
Dr. Jekyll and Jim Carrey
In the new Jim Carrey farce, Me, Myself & Irene, the rubber-faced comedian plays a meek Rhode Island state trooper named Charlie, whose aggressions are so pent up that they finally have to break out in the form of a second personality called Hank. Where Charlie silently endures potty-mouthed curses…
Two-Step Switcheroo
Kim Richey is calling from the road, somewhere inside the D.C. Beltway, trying her best to escape the confines of her hotel room, even while on the phone. “I can’t open my window. I’m going to try to get my Swiss Army knife. I think if I can take these…
Deliverance from China
The pill felt like a pebble clenched between Lijun’s forefinger and thumb. It was an intractable little nugget, both liberator and agent of death. The abortion tablet contained within its indifferent core the power to define the course of the young woman’s life. Nobody but her boyfriend knew she was…
Holy Diver
In City of God, E.L. Doctorow’s latest novel, a Catholic priest by the name of Pemberton questions every infallible notion in the Bible and in Christianity itself. His Sunday sermons sound like angry editorials. As a result, Pemberton is stripped of his collar by the local diocese. He becomes a…
Riding to Win
A sudden rainstorm washed away the trail. The ribbons marking the path were pounded into the ground as Darolyn Butler-Dial rode out of the woods on the northern New Mexico mountain. It was 9 p.m., and Darolyn was 90 miles into a 100-mile championship endurance horseback ride; she circled the…
Rotation
Acoustic Alchemy The Beautiful Game Higher Octave Music Acoustic Alchemy’s 1987 debut, Red Dust & Spanish Lace, and the debut of the new adult contemporary radio format in the same year sent the unknown English group to the top of the contemporary jazz charts. Fronted by acoustic guitarists Greg Carmichael…
Going to the Dogs
If your commute takes you past an office-park lawn or schoolyard, you may have noticed after-work socials where dogs roam free and romp in packs while owners stand to the side, plastic bags, you hope, at the ready. These informal dog playgrounds, like the places where teenagers gather to drink…
Local Rotation
Sugar Shack Get Out of My World Estrus Records No, this quintet does not cover the 1963 Jimmy Gilmer & the Fireballs hit with which it shares its name. Consisting of 14 original tracks and clocking in at just a smidgen longer than 30 minutes, the sound of Get Out…
Putting Up
A few hundred miles and a generation in time separated Lynda Nichols from Harry Burger, but they both had an acquired appreciation for the traditional small town squares of Texas. Nichols grew up in Granbury, the small city south of Fort Worth that forgot to follow the trend of razing…
Retro Active
If there were still a place where cowboys scraped their mud-caked work boots on the brass rungs of an old barstool, toweled themselves off with a faded bandanna and bellied up to the bar to sip an ice-cold Lone Star and contemplate their loneliness in this harsh world, Two Tons…
Tea and Strumpets
I was feeling guilty. Last time, I’d made Wendy meet me at the Pig Stand No. 2, a diner with terrible food but a gajillion goofy little pig figurines and the kind of waitresses who call everyone honey. The place makes me laugh, and Wendy makes me laugh. I’d thought…
Making Things Perfectly Queer
Gay rights activist Ray Hill has been scandalizing Houstonians for decades. To hear him tell it, his sordid reputation started way back in the ’50s when he came out to his friends at Galena Park High School. Who ever heard of such a thing back in those innocent soda-shop days?…
From PACman to Port Chairman
With approval by Harris County Commissioners Court last week, the ascension of James Tilden Edmonds from Port of Houston commissioner to powerful chairman is seemingly a done deal. Only a vote by City Council remains, and Edmonds says he has pledges of support from Mayor Lee Brown and a majority…
Inhuman Theater
Joel Orr’s Bobbindoctrin Puppet Theatre is wonderfully strange indeed. Billed as “the only group of its kind in Houston” — and lots other places, too — Orr’s trunk of creepy puppets is nothing less than a suitcase filled with nightmares. Open it and be prepared to shiver. Everything from talking…
Toy Story
Nick Park speaks so softly that the tape recorder barely registers him at all. His is a whisper of a voice, the sound of a man who has spent years in isolation talking to no one but himself. Transcribing an interview with him is like trying to decipher a man’s…
Letters 06-22-2000
Nice CatchI wanted you to know how much I enjoyed your article on the Palacios shrimpers [“The Long Haul,” by Melissa Hung, June 8]. My parents grew up in that town, and my grandparents still live there. We live in Houston now, but visit often. I have watched over the…
Home Court Advantage
It would not be much of a stretch to assume that voters turned down the basketball arena plan last November because they didn’t like the deal. Logically, the Rockets and the Sports Authority would have accepted defeat, sat down at the negotiating table and reworked the terms to be more…
Tropical Breeze
Behind the planters of dark green mother-in-law’s tongues and the hand-crafted equipale chairs stretches the long, gleaming wooden bar of The River Cafe [3615 Montrose, (713)529-0088], where three gorgeous women in little black dresses are laughing and drinking. The steamship posters and movie-star portraits hanging on the walls, as well…
Rocket Men
Try as they might — and they’ve been trying damn hard — the folks at the Houston Chronicle just haven’t been able to do as much as they’d like to help the Houston Rockets get a taxpayer-funded palace built. They have hyped such supposedly earthshaking announcements as the fact that…
Rotation
Kathy Mattea The Innocent Years Mercury Records It may soil one’s alternative-country credentials to claim that some truly decent stuff sneaks out of Nashville’s Music Row. Like Kathy Mattea, for instance, who records middle-of-the-road country-pop, yet pulls it off so well that one cannot deny her artistic significance. As a…