Where Ya Been, Ms. Lynn?
Get ready to file another early June weekend under “Only in Houston” when the Juneteenth Blues Festival celebrates its 20th anniversary. On Saturday, a vintage triple bill of Pete Mayes and the Texas House Rockers, Trudy Lynn and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown caps off the three-day lineup, which also includes Willie…
Love’s Labors
What is it about new plays and poets who live in the East Village? What is it about plays that love video? The answer may be Aristotelian in nature — young playwrights have grown up so completely under the influence of TV that they can’t write anything that doesn’t include…
Her Wayor No Way
Ani DiFranco has nothing to be sore about these days. Though she’s often labeled a folkie malcontent because of her caustic lyrics and offbeat, aggressive performances, at this moment, the 25-year-old singer/songwriter is in a mood highly uncharacteristic of someone who’s been fielding phone interviews for hours. While she admits…
Walking Man
In one of Rice professor (and Art Forum critic) Thomas McEvilley’s oft-given lectures, he speculates that the earliest known art-making consisted of piling rounded stones in a heap. Because we can’t determine the material purpose of these piles of stones, McEvilley’s argument goes, it’s plausible to conclude that they represent…
Happy Trails
“Hobart — great name. There’s not many of those in the world, I bet.” Roy Rogers seems genuinely tickled to be speaking with someone who’s probably taken as much flack as he has for a name he had nothing to do with choosing — even if that someone is a…
Deft and Daft
For more than 60 years, readers have delighted in the sly satire of Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm, a mischievous send-up of D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and assorted other high-toned practitioners of grimly serious rural romances. Now director John Schlesinger has made a movie of Gibbons’ novel, and the good…
Rotation
Magnapop Rubbing Doesn’t Help Priority If Rubbing Doesn’t Help sounds looser and more scatterbrained than its much-hailed 1994 predecessor, Hot Boxing — much like a demo — it could be because Magnapop’s second full-lengther is a demo, more or less. After subjecting themselves to the meticulous wiles of underground demigod…
The Happy Hero
After wading through the angst of three doom-and-gloom Batman movies, wouldn’t you like to see a masked superhero who enjoys his work? Who actually thinks battling bad guys is a grand and glorious adventure? Then take a peek at The Phantom, a rousingly old-fashioned and refreshingly uncomplicated comic-book movie. Mind…
The Passionate Pilgrim
When NFL president Neil Austrian sat down with John Jay Moores and County Judge Robert Eckels to discuss pro football’s future in Houston, it would have been easy for Austrian to judge Moores as an easy mark. After all, Moores is a most unprepossessing rich man. Soft-spoken and self-deprecating, he…
The Gospel According to John
On Hispanics: “The sense I have is that Hispanics are the last great immigrant group. And however they get in this country, they come over really believing in the American dream. I think that the people who scoot in here from Mexico and Central America are the best people from…
Cash from CACHH
For the last decade, Houston’s arts organizations, big and small, have engaged in a polite — if sometimes strained — agreement over how they would split the money available to them from the city. Revenue received from the arts’ cut of the hotel occupancy tax would go to the Cultural…
Stadia Watch
Now that the voters have spoken, Stadia Watch humbly offers this prediction: rejection of the proposed HISD bond offering will make it difficult, if not impossible, for the stadia boys to win public approval of any funding scheme involving taxpayers’ dollars. Not only will they have to contend with the…
Woman Trouble
Around 50 well-dressed black women fidget in their seats on a Sunday night, waiting for the show to begin. They’ve paid $25 apiece to hear Robert Myers, a Houston author who fearlessly tackles all the problems besetting African-Americans. In a mere 93 pages, he proposes to stop crime, teen pregnancy,…
The Insider
Flunking the B-School The late Jesse H. Jones is arguably the premier business genius in Houston’s history, but the Rice University business school that bears his name doesn’t enjoy nearly so lofty a reputation. A confidential internal report to top Rice administrators, compiled by a blue-ribbon committee of corporate leaders…
Letters
Ida Tarbell Never Met Steve Stockman I can forgive Tim Fleck for including me among “the great Republican unwashed” in the so-called VIP section at the Stockman/ Gingrich rally on May 18 [The Insider, May 23]. And as an agnostic, I won’t take personal offense at the snippets of sneering…
Press Picks
thursday june 6 Mr. Holland’s Opus There’s a lot of talk lately about what’s new at movie theaters, but Cinemark has something really different: tonight, Cinemark Hollywood 16 will show the heartwarming story of a music teacher father and his deaf child with closed captions for the deaf and hard…
Tea Time
The Sunset Tea Room is metamorphosing. Sure, when I ducked in on a recent weekday noon, things didn’t look all that different from how they’ve always looked at this 20-year-old stronghold of the Inner Loop “ladies who lunch” crowd. More than 50 percent of the patrons had blood that obviously…
Marrakech Success
My friends and I agree: we’ve had few dining experiences as purely pleasant as the recent evening when we watched dusk filter through the tree branches while lounging on banquettes in the second floor dining room of Marrakech Restaurant. Several things contributed to this conviviality. Good conversation, for one. A…
Static
Not just another cranky pop band… In attempting to bundle Super Deluxe’s moody nature and strange work habits into a single, excusable cliche, it would be easy to type “temperamental artists.” That’s how they’re often described. But it isn’t the whole story. Super Deluxe lead singer Brandon Blake, for one,…