Stage Notes
First, the bad news: Stages isn’t able to afford a summer season. Next, the good news: despite being financially strapped, the company is in no jeopardy of folding. It doesn’t owe anyone back pay. It’s square with its vendors. But many permanent staffers are on “hiatus,” as general manager Karen…
All in the Family
“It ain’t just dirt. It’s land. It’s a live thing,” proclaims one member of the Rowen clan, ready to do anything imaginable — and much that isn’t — for a piece of fertile eastern Kentucky soil. The time is 1819, but this particular Rowen’s forebears also lived by this portentous…
The Art of Community
Making my way up the crowded stairway toward Web of Life (1958) — one of two powerful murals that mark the entrance to the Museum of Fine Arts’ exhibit The Art of John Biggers: View from the Upper Room — I couldn’t help but notice a small group of African-American…
Classic Keaton, Classic Comedy
The oeuvre of silent-film comedian Buster Keaton, a body of work being celebrated this month at the Museum of Fine Arts, has snob appeal in spades — Samuel Beckett frequently cited Keaton as a prime influence, Federico Garcia Lorca wrote a short farce script (long-unpublished and never produced) for his…
Best of the Breast
Russ Meyer didn’t have it easy. Today, there are plastic mam jobs on almost every corner just bursting to be in exploitation movies. But when Meyer was casting Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, finding a 58-DD wasn’t so easy. The intrepid filmmaker probably toured half the go-go bars in America in…
The SAs a girl, she tried to break the color barrier in Houston schools. As an adult, she worked in the African liberation movement and against apartheid.
Marion Williams built the house on Farmer Street himself, board by board, nearly 50 years ago. That was long before the concrete river of the East Freeway inundated dozens of square blocks of nearby homes, starting the long, slow decline of the Fifth Ward. It was from the Farmer Street…
Clutch City Consumption
These are licensed goods,” volunteered the officious, crew-cut young man tailing me around the Westpark flea market with a walkie-talkie. He sounded defensive. As well he might have: it was Saturday noon, scarcely 38 hours after the Rockets sent the Spurs packing, and the market stalls were awash in bootleg…
The Rule of Men, Not Law
One of the more instructive defenses of Mayor Bob Lanier’s siphoning of Metro funds to fill potholes and pave streets was delivered last week by Louis Macey, the former city councilman and onetime Harris County appointee to the transit agency’s board. “When a public body takes an issue to the…
The Insider
Operation DeGuerin Strike The sole defendant facing trial in the FBI’s Operation Lightning Strike sting of NASA contractors and employees is aiming to zap his accusers with some legal electricity of his own. Dale Brown has landed a DeGuerin to wage his courtroom battle next week, although it wasn’t the…
Letters
Harris County In Bondage Suck-Up from Our Favorite DJ Perplexed Another APV Solution The Tim Fleck coverage of the current Allen Parkway Village situation constituted good journalism for providing a history of the site from the ’40s to the present [News, “Lanier Village,” May 11]. But where Fleck may hope…
Unlikely Lunches
Lunch at Houston’s cities-within-the-city just got a lot more interesting. At the Galleria, Neiman Marcus has plunked its sleek, amusing sidewalk cafe of the future — Il Posto — right out on the mall’s main street, with a painted Tiepolo sky above and sacred temples of consumerism on every side…
What Becomes a Legend Most?
Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown was holding court, with a hometown advantage, in his bus outside Billy Blues last fall when guitarist Ron Harris entered with a quizzical look on his face. “Hey, Gate,” he asked, “did you ever pull a baby out of a burning car?” Brown puffed at his pipe…
Rotation
Ron Sexsmith Ron Sexsmith Interscope Life is amazing in its endless capacity for renewal. Just when you’ve written off a tired old tradition — in this case, the sensitive singer/songwriter guy — as having finally been shamed into postmodern exile, it reappears in a form as pure as if you…
Press Picks
thursday june 8 Peer Gynt The Houston Ballet is ending its 25th anniversary season with a revival production of Peer Gynt. When Ben Stevenson and the Ballet first presented this work, the New York Times noted that its power came “from a certain theatrical astuteness and also from the excellent…
Critic’s Choice
During March’s South by Southwest music conference, as Bedhead headlined a bill at the Terrace that featured such labelmates as Ed Hall and Sixteen Deluxe, a few hundred people crowded at the foot of the stage and just listened. They did not move, they did not jump up and down…