Mixed Thrill
On my first visit to Kactus Cafe, I was at a loss to figure out exactly what the restaurant was trying to be. After a few more visits, I still wasn’t sure. Were the owners after something Southwestern? (The decor seemed to suggest this.) Or maybe South American? (Certain menu…
A Bug to Be Different
Rodney Crowell is one of those guys who was probably never meant to be a Nashville high roller in the first place. Sure, he’s penned huge hits for dozens of top-echelon country stars, was ushered into patriarch Johnny Cash’s kingdom through his former marriage to the Man in Black’s daughter…
Quick Study
At first, the small talk seemed to be leading nowhere. Soon enough, though, Mark May could sense that there was a reason for the phone call: This was business. Why else would Dickey Betts, a founding member of one of the most important bands of the ’70s, waste his time…
Sample Melody
Quick. How many world-renowned jazz pianists from Houston can you name? Well let’s see, there’s Joe Sample and, um … well, there’s Joe Sample. Houston’s pianistic claim to fame and co-founder of one of the world’s first jazz-funk bands, the Crusaders, is at age 58 still realizing new creative visions…
Rotation
John Fogerty Blue Moon Swamp Warner Bros. John Fogerty hasn’t been heard from much in more than a decade, since 1986’s Eye of the Zombie — which, in rare form, came merely a year after he released his double-platinum “comeback” album Centerfield. In 11 years, he has surfaced with the…
Static
Identity problem… You may have heard a rumor buzzing around that the Urban Art Bar — still the best reason for live music fans to venture downtown — is on the verge of closing. Not so, says part owner Skip Rudsenske, though there have been a few significant changes made…
Never Too Old to Rock and Roll
In his prime, Herschel Berry entertained hordes of feverish followers at nightclubs all over Houston. But these days, he makes do as a Randalls Peapod man. Five times a week, the city’s former ambassador of feel-good rock and roll punches in at Peapod headquarters, prints out the day’s grocery lists…
War Story
A film about no less than an entire century, Theo Angelopoulos’s broodingly majestic Ulysses’ Gaze, the Grand Jury Prize winner at Cannes two years ago, is an Odyssey for the 20th-century Balkans conflict. Harvey Keitel plays “A,” a Greek-American filmmaker researching a documentary on the Manakia brothers, Greek cinema pioneers…
Air Disaster
It wouldn’t be fair to say that the string of hits produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer from 1983 through 1996 are stylistically interchangeable. But it wouldn’t be awfully unfair either: A homogeneous, auteurial touch runs from Flashdance (1983) through Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) and…
Between Friends
In November 1993, shortly after he was first re-elected with 91 percent of the vote, Mayor Bob Lanier embarked on a series of unprecedented real estate deals. The significance of the transactions was summed up by Lanier’s chief of staff, Dave Walden, in a memo to Margie Bingham, the director…
The Insider
Caution: He’s Got a Volcano in His Belly In the 18 months since then-federal drug czar Lee Patrick Brown huddled with a coterie of advisers in downtown Houston to plot out his race for mayor, things have gone pretty much as planned. The former Houston police chief dutifully followed the…
Big Story
Uh oh. It’s Channel 2 news. Time to shoo the kids out of the room. What’ll it be tonight? “Gas: How to make it disappear quietly”? No, that was a few weeks ago. Maybe, “Do your children dress too sexy?” No, KPRC-TV already tilled that loamy ground, probably well in…
Letters
Pasadena Story It seems eerie, growing up in the Pasadena area for 20-plus years and hearing all of those stories that you know couldn’t possibly be true, then reading them from the source [“Sherwood’s Rules,” by Randall Patterson, May 15]. Good job. A. Fuller via Internet Everybody Digs That Dinosaur…
Press Picks
thursday june 5 Falsettoland In the final installment of William Finn’s three-part musical “Marvin Trilogy,” Marvin is reunited with Whizzer, the man for whom he left his wife; Marvin also plans for his son’s bar mitzvah — and finds that those plans don’t always jibe with the ideas of his…