Mr. Saturday Night
With all due respect to the late Phil Hartman, Darrell Hammond is probably Saturday Night Live’s most brilliant impressionist ever. For ten seasons, his dead-on takes on figures from politics (Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney), news (Ted Koppel, Tim Russert, Chris Matthews) and Hollywood (Jay Leno, Sean…
Soul Rebels Brass Band
Here’s the 1,094th thing I love about New Orleans: You’ll be driving through the ghetto and a car will pull up alongside you blaring music out of its open windows. In just about every other city in America, you would hear 50 Cent or Lil Jon or some other crunkmeister…
Kinky Politics
FRI 6/24 The way Kinky Friedman sees it, the fermenting battle between Rick Perry and Kay Bailey Hutchison for the Texas governorship is “a choice between an empty suit and an empty dress…though she’s twice the man that he is.” That’s why the iconoclastic musician/mystery author has thrown his ever-present…
MewithoutYou and Make Believe, with Veda
Ex-Korn guitarist Brian “Head” Welch’s epiphany that hanging with Jesus was more important than chilling with groupies amused many familiar with that band’s rather heathen endeavors. But a rocker’s admission to being down with G-O-D isn’t the albatross it once might have been. Just witness the burgeoning success of the…
No Duncan Allowed
SAT 6/25 With the impending end of the NBA season, true basketball fans are slipping into their annual depression. Can we really live without San Antonio Spurs star Tim Duncan’s vanilla, fundamentally sound jump hook? But don’t start popping the Prozac just yet — the And 1 Mixtape Tour is…
Jimmy Lafave
Repeatedly acknowledged as the finest living interpreter of Bob Dylan’s work, Jimmy Lafave leads live shows that are never complete without a dozen Dylan covers, just as no star-studded Woody Guthrie tribute show is complete without Lafave’s version of “Oklahoma Hills.” His band can turn on a dime, moving with…
Swallow Your Pride
It’s possibly the best opportunity in town to people-watch, shake your ass or hook up with someone hot. And the parade is just the icing on the cake of the 27th annual Pride Houston weekend. “I’m excited that we’re actually doing an expanded festival,” says Pride Houston executive director Jack…
Dance, Dance, Revolution
Forget Mad Hot Ballroom. The real dance documentary hit of the summer is more likely to be Rize. After all, which do you think the kids are going to find more appealing: formal steps that require suits, partners, and schoolteachers, or shaking the booty and slamming into fellow dancers while…
Murder, He Wrote
A master of murder and mayhem, Ira Levin has written some of the scariest page-turners ever to fly off a grocery-store rack, including Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives. Levin, whom Stephen King reportedly called “the Swiss watchmaker of suspense,” is no slouch in the theater department, either. In 1978,…
Pan-Louisiana Fusion
There are two television sets blaring at Soul on the Bayeaux, a homey little restaurant in the Third Ward. One set is tuned to a soap opera, the other to a game show. A radio station’s also playing. We ask the waitress what’s underneath the white sheet on a nearby…
A Wunderkind Looks at 40
“I thought that I’d be dead by now — but I’m not.” So ends the first song on East Nashville Skyline, Todd Snider’s newest and best album. The song is called “Age Like Wine,” and it improbably casts Snider as an “old timer — too late to die young now.”…
Oasis
The return of Los Bros. Gallagher after their Heathen Chemistry produced not a banging wallop but a fizzling so-what. Perhaps it was their master plan all along to lower the bar and then leap over it when no one was expecting it, unless they were making bad records on purpose,…
Girls Interrupted
Not many people saw Lost and Delirious, the 2001 boarding-school drama about two girls in obsessive love, and that was probably for the best. Yes, Piper Perabo (Coyote Ugly) made a stunning androgynous rebel, but she couldn’t rescue the film from its unctuous self-importance. My Summer of Love, a bewitching…
Warped Minds
This is a diary of a trip to this year’s Vans Warped Tour. The city doesn’t matter, because Vans Warped is its own city. The tour stops in Houston this weekend. 7:41 a.m. Get a wake-up call from my 14-year-old nephew, Jeremy, who I’m taking to his very first Warped…
Tunnel of Love
For the past month and a half people have been slamming on their brakes and craning their necks on Montrose Boulevard — but not for any of the usual reasons. There’s no car wreck to gawk at, no homeless person wheeling his cart down the middle of the road, no…
Car Trouble
Anyone who would insist that movie reviewing is not a real job (“‘Sup, Mom?”) hasn’t been forced to sit through screenings of Bewitched and Herbie: Fully Loaded in the span of five days — and by forced, I mean either you see both movies, write 800 words about each, or…
Dubble Trubble
The trouble with most indie rock is that it tries too hard to be indie, bending over backward to be stylish. Too often, things like melody, hooks and instrumental polish are jettisoned in favor of needless inscrutability, overweening cuteness and amateruish playing. Not so with Troubled Hubble, a superintelligent quartet…
Capsule Reviews
A Class Act A Class Act, now running at Theater LaB, is a wonderfully tender homage to the late Edward Kleban, award-winning lyricist for A Chorus Line. Put together by Linda Kline and Lonnie Price, the musical is built around several of Kleban’s previously unproduced songs, telling the songwriter’s own…
Mining Silver
Nicky Silver blew onto the theatrical scene in the mid-’90s with his hysterically strange plays about the heart-crushing loneliness of our modern times. His oeuvre — at once darkly philosophical and laugh-out-loud funny — examines everything from dysfunctional families to death to gay love. And his quirky stories have often…
How Low Can You Go?
Last fall, we started asking musicians, music critics and other folks in the biz about their favorite guilty pleasures, and this is the third article (and last for a while) in that series. Well, what have we learned? Guilty pleasures are in the eye of the beholder. For a country…
Refined Taste
The uptown potpie ($9.99) at Blue Plate Bistro (1708 Post Oak Boulevard, 713-439-1537) is a chic rendition of an old favorite. As your fork gently pierces its light, airy puff-pastry crust, a stream of steam escapes, and the inside is revealed to be chock-full of sophisticated ingredients. Plain chicken gets…
Capsule Reviews
“Angel Rodriguez-Diaz/Carter Ernst” Angel Rodriguez-Diaz’s hyperreal, kitsch-infused paintings depict luchadores, the masked stars of Mexican wrestling. But Rodriguez-Diaz isn’t presenting his subjects in the ring. Instead, he paints intimate portraits with elaborate, lacy backgrounds. In these lushly colored paintings, Rodriguez-Diaz imparts incongruous psychological undertones to his subjects. One image, for…
Various Artists
The latest volume of British label BBE’s The Kings of… series may be the most unusually packaged of the bunch. Revered hip-hop producer/spinner DJ Premier and U.K. DJ-battle champ Mr. Thing pair up to assemble a collection of tunes with the aim of musically chronicling hip-hop’s history. But this two-disc…
High Times
Thirty-five years ago, on June 12, 1970, Pittsburgh Pirate and future Texas Rangers pitcher Dock Ellis found himself in the Los Angeles home of a childhood friend named Al Rambo. Two days earlier, he’d flown with the Pirates to San Diego for a four-game series with the Padres. He immediately…
Teenage Fanclub
How far from current rock trends can a band be without sounding outdated? The answer is the space between, say, gaseous Coldplay or icy Franz Ferdinand and the warm earth that Teenage Fanclub has been tending since 1991’s much-hyped breakthrough, Bandwagonesque. This year’s model, Man-Made, is moodier and more sophisticated…
Got Your Health
You’re a city bureaucrat who’s managed to lop off $1 million from your department’s budget. You would think you’re gonna get praised to the skies when you make your presentation at a city council budget hearing. Instead, you get your head cut off. Is there no justice? Of course, it’s…
Lise Liddell
Houstonian Lise Liddell went all the way down under — to Brisbane, to be exact — to record this album, and it sounds like some of the songs were written “under” something else…a table, perhaps, or certainly a dark cloud. At any rate, Liddell’s pop-rockin’ Americana is best when her…
Can’t Get Arrested
Houston police have announced a major crackdown on jaywalking. Not a major crackdown on gang activity, but jaywalking. Although, to be fair to HPD, if any gang members don’t use the crosswalks properly, they are so busted. We tested it. We dressed conspicuously and crossed in the middle of the…
Ronny Elliott, with Ken Gaines
Ronny Elliott is like a Brillo pad; if he rubs against you, there’s gonna be some scrapes. About as far from the alt-country mainstream as you can get, Elliott’s records are like surly little history lessons, full of pop culture trivia about wayward geniuses like Tampa Red, Lord Buckley, Gorgeous…
Letters
Jail Business City at risk: Thank you for exposing the widespread incompetence and neglect festering within the UTMB prison and jail health care programs [“The Fix Is In,” by Greg Harman, June 9]. This is not just an issue for the bleeding-heart liberals. Mismanagement of inmate medical services creates a…
Luciano, with Dean Fraser, Irie Time, Bigga Boss and Manjaro
The artist formerly known as Jepther McClymont has always camped out at the intersection of Jamaica’s two major musical subgenres: the conscious warmth of roots reggae and the digital grind of modern dancehall. And few singers in any style have been as successful at negotiating the boundary between sacred and…
Skinless, with Deicide, Immolation, Despised Icon and With Passion
Deicide’s Glenn Benton had an inverted cross branded into his forehead, the better to prove that the unholy source of songs such as “Fuck Your God” doesn’t confine his sacrilege to the studio. In terms of ostentatious, omnipresent blasphemy, that’s tough to top. Skinless gives it a try, and while…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, June 23 It ain’t easy — or cheap — to heat up the local sociopolitical climate through spoken word, visual arts, film, dance, music and multimedia presentations. But for the past six years, Voices Breaking Boundaries has somehow managed to do it. Now, the venerable arts organization is holding…
Two Hoots and a Holler, with Jesse Dayton and Guy Forsyth
Back in the late ’80s, Rick Broussard’s Two Hoots, along with folks like the Leroi Brothers and Joe Ely, set the standard for Lone Star roots rock. Two Hoots perhaps had more cachet in Austin than any band at that time; fans regularly lined up early to see Two Hoots…