The Basement Tapes
Some things are just common sense for those of us who’ve spent a lifetime on this spongy coastal plain overlaid with spiderwebs of concrete and steel, and prone to periodic drenching. We don’t have subways like East Coast cities, and most homes here don’t have basements. The few who do…
E.T. the Extra-Tutorial
For almost two decades, Stanley Kubrick wanted to make a film based on Brian Aldiss’s 1969 short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” about a robot child named David who wants only to be “real” so Mummy and Daddy will love him. The late director of 2001: A Space Odyssey…
Judicial Show and Tell
If you aspire to be a federal judge or U.S. attorney in Texas, be prepared for an informational strip search — one that goes far beyond past scrapes with the law, marital peccadilloes, delinquent taxes or professional qualifications. The application questionnaire from the screening committee for Senators Phil Gramm and…
Good Hood
Like countless European American filmmakers before him, African-American filmmaker John Singleton tends to operate under the faulty logic that vengeance equals heroism. Anyone who doubts this assertion is welcome to compare his grooveless, mean-spirited remake of Shaft to the deceptively simple and human original. This isn’t to say that he’s…
All That Glitters
The Chronicle reported June 20 that former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Golden Richards was a Metro bus driver, and he had just been arrested for various old parole violations. The Chronicle reported June 21 that former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Golden Richards was alive and unarrested in Utah, and that…
New Jewish Questions
Who would have imagined that at this late date — more than half a century after the end of World War II, after The Diary of Anne Frank, Schindler’s List, Au Revoir, Les Enfants, Pierre Sauvage’s documentary Weapons of the Spirit and Jan Kadar’s amazing The Shop on Main Street…
Chin Up
By his own definition, Bruce Campbell is a “midgrade, kind of hammy actor”–a B-movie star, in other words, a man whose career unfolds, like a Swedish porn loop, on Cinemax in the wee small hours of the morning. When I mentioned to a handful of people I was writing about…
Applying a Heavy Wash
After nonstop flood coverage featuring drenched reporters in waders (God help us if we ever see Wayne Dolcefino in anything that clingy again), local stations got around to the Theater District’s woes –water-damaged costumes, lost scores, canceled performances, a 17th-century double bass turned into a flotation device. Meanwhile, the visual…
Letters
Green Diet Market bias: The article carries such a message of distrust that seems to be based more on who the principals are with Green Mountain Energy instead of focusing on what they are trying to do [“Red Light, Green Light,” by Melissa Hung, June 7]. This is a market…
Flickerstick
Viewers of VH1’s Bands on the Run know the story. While the boring Josh Dodes Band, the talentless Harlow and the insufferable Soulcracker are out hustling, our boys from DFW are still in bed, usually with some groupie. While the competition is hell-bent on making rock as dreary as a…
The Devil & Mr. Riordan
“I went back to Ohio, but my city was gone,” Chrissie Hynde once sang, and Rick Riordan now knows exactly what she meant. Though he lived in Austin a decade ago, the mystery novelist was still taken aback by the changes that Michael Dell hath wrought in this mini-Silicon Valley…
Toque Off
Alberto Baffoni is an Italian chef who worked for eight years in Washington, D.C., before coming to Houston to open his own restaurant. At Simposio (5591 Richmond Avenue, 713-532-0550), he serves Northern Italian food, which is sometimes a challenge in a city whose Italian-American community comes from Southern Italy. We…
Spontaneous Wayne
Wayne Brady just can’t stop making stuff up. Ever since the 29-year-old man o’ many talents became one of the quick-witted mainstays on ABC’s weekly improv comedyfest Whose Line Is It Anyway?, the Orlando-born Brady has built a rep as a performer who can whip up a song out of…
Goin’ Yard
Upon entering Caribbean Cuisine (7433 Bissonnet, 713-772-8225), your first thought is a question: How can so many delicious smells emanate from one small storefront restaurant — or rather, a half-restaurant and half-Jamaican grocery? The menu boasts the typical Jamaican fare — jerk chicken, curried chicken and goat, oxtail dinner, brown…
Free Fire Zone
The ambience seems more MTV game show than Upper Kirby restaurant: The chandeliers drip Lucite icicles. Limp Bizkit throbs from the sound system, and the hip-looking cocktail servers move to the beat. The bar sports a line of huge jars full of decorator fruits — square-cut blood oranges and parallelogram…
Stirred and Shaken
The fireworks stands along the interstate put me in a Fourth of July frame of mind. I’m a sentimental slob. But what’s an Independence Day cocktail? I decide to mosey on over to the Cadillac Bar (1802 Shepherd Drive, 713-862-2020). There’s a drink there called a Mexican Flag that has…
Crystal Frontier
Poor Mexico, poor United States, so far from God, so near to one another.” — Carlos Fuentes, The Crystal Frontier Deserts laugh at borders. In the Arabian peninsula, where the natives know a thing or two about the desert, this is abundantly clear. No cartographer nor diplomat has ever bothered…
Strangers in a Strange Land
This article is two and a half years in the making. That’s how long it took to track down the Houston hip-hop trio known as K-Otix. It has been an on-and-off journey getting the elusive triumvirate — MCs Michael “Mic” Nickerson, 26; Damien (he says his parents didn’t give him…
Being Gary P.
At 55, Gary P. Nunn has likely got only a few more years in the saddle before he puts himself out to pasture. He’s at an age when the more settled life at the Grand Ole Opry or some rustic Branson palazzo begins to beckon, but one can scarcely imagine…
Racket
Edgar “The Big E” Salazar is a DJ, but not of the sort one would expect to find as a graduate of Madison High School on Houston’s southwest side. Back in the late ’80s at the predominantly African-American school, when his classmates were into Eric B. and Rakim, Too $hort…
The Beach Boys
Almost 40 years after Brian Wilson and Mike Love penned “Surfin’,” the Beach Boys’ stock is still on the rise. Wilson in particular has been enjoying a media lovefest for most of the past decade while the rest of the band only occasionally gets its due. All the recent accolades,…
Naked Shame
Lupe Cantu lay in the back of her brother’s Ford Mustang wanting to throw up. It was Good Friday, so instead of a beef taco, the 41-year-old Catholic woman ordered El Patio’s spicy shrimp flameados. After a few bites, she had started vomiting in the restaurant. Cantu asked her brother…
Prison Love Scene
To differentiate oneself in the increasingly saturated field of modern metal is difficult at best. One could easily imagine that every funky beat, every 808 bass blast, electronic blip, guitar scratch and staccato vocal that could possibly be put on tape already has been. As the Preacher of Ecclesiastes spake:…
The Transgender Menace Next Door
Phyllis Randolph Frye pronounces the phrase “voy dyer,” just like every other trial lawyer in Texas. Voir dire means jury selection, and lawyers say it’s 90 percent of winning a case. For Phyllis, it was even more important. She advertised in Houston’s gay papers, and her clients didn’t expect much…
Playbill
In the increasingly crass realm of country music, Jim Lauderdale is indeed a class act. And that praise doesn’t apply to just his music. In this game of critical appreciation (or approbation, for that matter), taking the measure of a man’s music by taking the measure of the man himself…
Born-Again Beauty
Attorneys Catherine Coulter and Deborah Keyser were having their regular Thursday lunch date with friends from court. As they got ready to order, Deborah’s engaged sister, Sheila Wells, shared her complaint. Sheila couldn’t believe how hard it was to find a reception hall for her upcoming wedding. Everything was either…
Playbill
They were Townes Van Zandt’s only true backing band, and Lucinda Williams tabbed them for her second album, Happy Woman Blues. Mike Edwards, Mickey White and Wrecks Bell are the Hemmer Ridge Mountain Boys, and though they are not as widely storied as more famous bands, the hell-raising tales that…