Music Man
In a posh hotel room in Hamburg, dashing classical pianist Glenn Gould (Colm Feore), with rumpled clothes and abstracted gait, is feeling too ill to perform. Feverish, he phones in a telegram canceling upcoming concerts; meanwhile, a maid cleans up around him. When she’s ready to leave, Gould motions her…
Lady of Spain
Plot summary is normally the lazy way out of a movie review; not so with Kika. The latest by Spanish director Pedro Almodovar has a story arc that’s so detailed, and that’s carried by so many characters, that to chart it would be hard, tedious work. I had to see…
The Sound of Silents
Middle-aged Americans such as myself likely got their first taste of silent films by watching the ’60s television program Fractured Flickers. For you Generation Xers, this is one way we amused ourselves in those days: the television would show scenes from The Hunchback of Notre Dame or The Phantom of…
Open Mouths, Closed Hearts
It sounded like a healthy menu. Milk, wheat toast, bananas and warm oatmeal; milk, carrot sticks, green beans, rice and baked chicken; and milk and peanut butter sandwiches for an afternoon snack. “Children must get nutritious, healthful meals if they are to grow into healthy, productive adults.” So goes the…
Restricted Access
For four years, Emerson Chu has helped produce a one-hour nightly news show about events in Houston’s Chinese community. Though fiercely appreciated by some, the TV show, broadcast in Chinese, has an audience small by most television standards. Commercial stations would be hard-pressed to find a spot for it. That’s…
Letters
Mr. Congeniality Regarding the question of whether traditional groups such as the Men of Houston Morris Dancers should have a separate category in your annual music poll [Pop Moment, “Mucking It Up,” by Brad Tyer, May 19]: I don’t suppose we really give a rat’s arse if you include us…
Press Picks
thursday june 9 The Smithereens Goateed Smithereens frontman Pat DiNizio writes and plays songs (e.g. “Baby, Be Good”) that sound a whole heck of a lot like the Beatles. Take that either as evidence that the Smithereens are pasty pop apes with a ripped-off jangly Rickenbacker sound, or as proof…
Pub Flubs Grub
Add the debut of the Village Brewery, with its five house-made beers on tap, to your list of summer’s urban events: all month long, Houston’s pent-up brewpub thirst has kept this cavernous old postal garage packed, even on weeknights. In animated attendance are jocks and computerheads and fledgling middle managers;…
Conversion Experience
I’m not a Cafe Express person — haven’t been for years. The more celebrity chef Robert del Grande dumbed down the menu at his upscale fast-food spots, the less I found to interest me. “People want quiche,” he once told me regretfully when I asked what had become of the…
Jazz Reconsidered
So maybe you’re a little punk rawker, and you think jazz is that Chuck Mangione record your parents ran out and bought after the ’80 Olympics — the one with Chuckie and his trumpet flying off a trampoline in some NYC loft. That jazz stuff is either stuffy or cheesy…
Musical Labels
It’s almost a truism that Texas music is hybrid music. Whether we’re talking about the jazz-slash-country Texas Swing stylings of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys or the blues-rock mind meld of ZZ Top, Texas artists have not often settled for party-line purity. But even given the state’s long history…
Deep-Sixed at 101
Afternoon drive-time radio listeners might have noticed the absence of one Donna McKenzie from the KLOL/101 FM airwaves starting a week ago Wednesday, but they probably didn’t receive the press release KLOL faxed to my desk that very same June 1. Here it is, FYI: “Pat Fant, general manager of…
War Within a War
A murder mystery lives on the misdirected expectations and presumptions of its audience. In the best of the genre, the onlookers should be surprised not only by the identity of the murderer, but by what they learn about their own preconceptions. Charles Fuller’s 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winner, A Soldier’s Play, currently…
Comedy with Character
“Dying is easy, comedy is hard,” goes the old actors’ saw. Two hard-working actresses are doing their level best to prove the laughs are worth the effort in Theatre LaB Houston’s sharp-edged production of Mo Gaffney and Kathy Najimy’s The Kathy and Mo Show: Parallel Lives. Deborah Hope and Dee…
More Than Just A Pretty Face
Edgar Degas always regarded the human figure as the most important subject for art. He built himself a reputation as the principal figure painter of the Impressionist circle with his images of athletic ballerinas, nude bathers, tired laundresses and brazen cafe-concert artistes. And his views about landscape were firm: “If…