Where’s the Beef?
Curt Kirkwood likes to play with words. The Meat Puppets vocalist/guitarist is on the phone from his Tempe, Arizona home, enduring another round of interviews before embarking June 30 on a national tour as opening act for Stone Temple Pilots. I’m his third of the day, and there are two…
Live Shots
Beck Toad’s on the Deck Saturday, June 18 Whoever decided that Beck was an exhausted commodity once “Loser” started to slide off the charts apparently neglected to tell the 750 or so barely clothed pubescents who lined the terrace-style bunker of Toad’s Saturday night. The kids were out in all…
Musical Chairs
Yes, I’m getting tired of ringing this bell, but what’s a reporter to do when his beat’s infrastructure is self-destructing in a nasty, crumbling cycle of closure and doom…. The city’s inner-Loop clubs are dropping like flies. First Goat’s Head Soup blew up (although that loss was hardly the first…
Yiddish Yahoos
“Klezmer,” I’m told by Bill Averbach, leader of The Austin Klezmorim, is Yiddish for “musician,” which goes some way toward explaining the wide-open eclecticism of the musical genre of the same name. Eastern European in ancestry, klezmer music is more or less Jewish jazz, a hodgepodge of improvisation-friendly musics originally…
Woe is Me
Nothing’s what it used to be, or so the fogies tell us. I feel myself turning into one lately. The news that Roznovsky’s had shuttered its clapboard burger joint on a somnolent West End corner put me into a certified fogey funk; I haven’t felt so out of sorts since…
Daddy Dearest
It’s Lynnie’s turn now. The baby of an Olympian acting family — most especially Shakespearean actor and heartthrob Sir Michael Redgrave — Lynn Redgrave tells the story of her clan in the lively and engaging Shakespeare for My Father, a touring one-woman show now playing at the Alley. Dressed in…
It’s Play Time!
Since nobody got up to go to the bathroom during any of the summer theatrical productions for children I saw across Houston over the past few weeks, I think it’s fair to say that we have an extraordinary number of smash hits on our hands. The enthusiastic audiences, whose ages…
Uurrpp!
When seated in front of a three-hours-and-then-some movie, impatient filmgoers sometimes begin a mental editing process, wishing that the story were moving faster. Do we need this many detailed dancehall scenes? we asked during Malcolm X. Couldn’t Kevin Costner’s life as a solitary frontier soldier take up less time? we…
Hat Trick
While there’s no deep meaning in a rap song entitled “Come Pet the P.U.S.S.Y.,” the fictional rap group that performs it in Fear of a Black Hat — Rusty Cundieff’s merry mockumentary about rap music that owes much to Rob Reiner’s spoof of heavy metal, This Is Spinal Tap –…
The Wild, Wild East
White has been billed (if that’s not too strong a term for a film that’s arriving this quietly) as the sequel to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue and the middle episode in his trilogy based on the colors of the French flag (part three, Red, apparently caused a stir at Cannes). In…
Food Fight
It’s 50 minutes and counting on Galveston’s Seawall Boulevard. Frantic hammering rings from a freshly minted stucco-and-red-tile building; sumptuous tropical plantings that have sprouted overnight strain against their moorings in a stiff breeze. Across the street, May sunshine glints off the Gulf of Mexico. At precisely 3 p.m., Tilman J…
Robot Man
The apartment belonging to Jim Dabbs is just one among the thousands on the city’s southwest side, and as you drive through his complex’s access gate and wave to Dabbs, a stocky man with closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair and beard, as he awaits you at his door, you feel like…
Restaurant War, Part 2
The messy separation of the partners who once ran The Quilted Toque (now renamed Cafe Toque) got even more curious last Wednesday when ex-chef and ex-partner Monica Pope carried off the establishment’s booze inventory after she had asked authorities to terminate the cafe’s liquor license. Pope’s departure from the Toque…
Letters
No Use Is Wise Use It is interesting to see the Memorial Park mountain bike controversy shape up as a local “wise use” issue [News, “Panic in Memorial Park,” by Steve McVicker, May 19]. And like all “wise use” campaigns, the advocates promote the philosophy that nature should be used…
Press Picks
thursday june 30 Episode three of The Real World, season three Now we can really settle in with the new cast: episodes one and two have aired, we know the names and faces of the new kids and we’ve accepted the fact that the young and the flaky from The…
World Peace and Barbecue
It’s a plot with a deliciously Houstonian twist: after years of combing my beloved East End for great barbecue, I finally hit the jackpot — in an unsung little Korean joint. Faintly sweet, richly scallion-flavored, the crusty grilled pork ribs at Woo Mi Gwan qualify as seriously Texas-friendly grub. But…