Letters
Look for the Union Label Your cover story “Hard Labor” [May 26, by Michael King] represents the sort of poorly reported, poorly written and poorly edited garbage I recently have come to expect from you folks. It reads like a feature in a college weekly, rather than the former pacesetter…
Press Picks
thursday june 23 Treasures of Our Earth The 41st annual event held by the Houston Gem and Mineral Society opens today, filling the AstroArena with treasures. Special Exhibits Chairman Ron Talhelm says, “Not only will we have the popular Burning Tree Mastodon that had people lined around the block in…
A Roma Therapy
In the eight-table microcosm of Collina’s Italian Cafe, the simple act of breathing is therapeutic: from its homely open kitchen tumble warm, yeasty drafts, tomato-edged and ripe with garlic, that beget an almost giddy sense of well-being. The simple act of eating a pizza here can be therapeutic, too. In…
Rotation
Beastie Boys Ill Communication Grand Royal/Capitol Ever since the Beastie Boys’ 1984 License to Ill shot to the top of the charts with its snot-nosed appropriation of black rap and its “Fight for Your Right to Party” frat-dork anthem, critics have been waiting for these self-exiled New Yorkers to slip…
Woman Childs
Toni Childs doesn’t much like my suggestion that her new album — recorded in part at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios, produced by Gabriel knobman David Botrill and featuring a guest appearance by the shocked monkey himself — resembles, well, the sort of music Mr. Gabriel might make if he…
Pure-D Purty
There’s a bunch of ways to describe a man’s singing voice, but Don Walser’s crying, yodeling, crooning pipes suggest an adjective that’s hard to argue with. Don Walser’s voice is purty. Everyone who’s heard it knows it, too. The Butthole Surfers, of all the stylistically divergent people, are fans. They…
Dj Vaughan
In last year’s biography Stevie Ray Vaughan, authors Joe Nick Patoski and Bill Crawford relate the story of a young Stevie Ray being heckled by older brother Jimmie. The elder Vaughan was drunk one night, listening to Stevie rehearse and yelling, “You can’t play shit.” When the generic insult failed…
Burning Down the House
Much remains to be said about the explosion that leveled Goat’s Head Soup in the early morning of June 12, as evidenced by the claims of everybody who’s ever been in the club, and a good number who haven’t, to have the inside scoop on who blew the Soup and…
Court Food
When I have business downtown and desire to feel truly urban, I repair to one of the naugahyde-and-chrome stools outside La Palapa, the muddy-pink taco stand opposite the civil courthouse. From this unglamorous perch, I can observe the downtown dance and reassure myself that Tex-Mex food is, after all, the…
Follow the Bouncing Body
“One must shake the audience out of its expectations,” bad-boy British playwright Joe Orton wrote. “They need not so much shocking, as surprising out of their seats.” By setting Orton’s Loot in a living room with walls of blues, greens and yellows so bold and primary that they make the…
The Apple of His Eye
While in graduate school in the ’60s, writer and Rice professor Max Apple lived with his immigrant grandfather, an irascible former baker in his nineties who kept busy while his beloved grandson hit the books. Fully able despite his venerable age, Herman “Rocky” Goodstein, a Lithuanian Jew who had emigrated…
Dictatorial Love
Cheery samba music certainly isn’t the soundtrack you’d expect to accompany newsreel footage of Marshal Tito, the former Yugoslavian dictator, receiving the reverence of his people. But that’s exactly what we get in Tito and Me, a whimsical coming-of-age story set in 1954, when Tito was at the height (such…
On the Fast Track
If you want to be sure that the Reagan-Bush era has finally ended, look to Speed. Instead of having a killing machine at the heart of what may well be this summer’s defining action movie, we have the suddenly beatific Keanu Reeves, bulked up, to be sure, but still bearing…
Jack’s Back
Wolf was preceded by enough bad vibes to set me on my guard. Early press releases stated — yikes! — that Jack Nicholson’s character becomes “drawn deeper into the mystical feral spirit of the wolf,” and screenwriter Jim Harrison explained that he got the idea for the film from a…
The Case Against Kay
One day late in the spring of 1992, then-Texas State Treasurer Kay Bailey Hutchison cornered one of her subordinates, R.T. Burkett, in a hallway. An exacting boss, Hutchison wanted to know how much progress Burkett, director of information resources at the Treasury, had made on the “special project” she had…
Rockets Mania
Rockets Mania” is a phrase everyone in Houston has been bantering around for the past few weeks, but some Houstonians have apparently taken the word “mania” literally. The following are just a few examples of what an NBA championship drive can bring out in a person — from the best…