Viva la Causa
SUN 3/14 Most fun-run participants don’t give much of a damn about the causes for which they’ve taken to the streets. They’re just looking for a good excuse to burn some calories. Not so with the AIDS Walk Houston, an annual event designed to increase awareness of HIV/AIDS issues in…
The Unicorns, with Rosa and I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness
What the world needs now is a whimsical pop band with songs about death and ghosts. With the release of 2003’s Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone, the Unicorns amply fit the bill. Playful and dark, achingly simple and ambitious — often at the same time — this…
Dammit, Mamet!
The problem with Spartan isn’t so much that it’s mediocre, but that it could be a whole lot better. Unlike writer-director David Mamet’s last movie, Heist, a film with such a generic plot and predictable Gene Hackman performance that it never had a chance, Spartan has a reasonably compelling story…
The Decemberists
For those who find the undergraduate fictional sketches of Belle & Sebastian too precious or Neutral Milk Hotel’s stream-of-consciousness descriptions too rambling, there exist the Decemberists. The Northwestern group serves up hearty literary pop by the bale. Augmented by liberal doses of strings, organs and accordions, the songs are brightly…
Hanky Panky
Houston Grand Opera’s 29th world premiere, The End of the Affair, has a lot in common with both The Passion of the Christ and Lethal Weapon: It’s all about God, and you get to see a naked butt. And as it turns out, New Zealand-born baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes, the…
Westside Connection
Westside Connection Out to resuscitate the West Coast rap scene and keep it gangsta, Westside Connection — the hefty rap trio of Ice Cube, Mack 10 and WC — re-emerges with Terrorist Threats, arriving seven years after its bold and brutal debut, Bow Down. Shit done change since 1996, when…
Gray Zombies
Suchu Dance artistic director Jennifer Wood is known for her great sense of humor, which is why the opening of her latest production, Astoria, was so unsettling. As soon as the lights went up, dancers fell to the ground, writhed on the floor and then walked like zombies — repeatedly…
The Walkmen
The Walkmen deserve praise for painting their influences with something that is both a few shades weirder and more charged and electrifying. On the hell-raising “The Rat,” from its second full-length, Bows + Arrows, the group sounds like it’s updating a lost U2 track circa ’83 (when Bono, the Edge,…
Odd Couplings
Don’t invite a centaur to your wedding. They’re worse guests than your cousin’s alcoholic biker of a third husband. When the ancient Greek half-man, half-horse creatures were invited to the wedding of Perithoos and Hippodameia, they got bombed and attacked all the women in the wedding party. An all-out brawl…
Starlight Mints, with Dressy Bessy, Four Men Walking and Deathray Davies
Perhaps it’s because the Starlight Mints hail from Norman, Oklahoma, that the funtastic pop quintet is frequently compared to Norman homeboys the Flaming Lips. In any case, the Mints’ members are more like second or third cousins than siblings to the Lips’ psychedelic sound. We’d do better to compare them…
Capsule Reviews
“Ayanah Moor: Word!” It seems like anything can be deemed a work of art once it’s been placed on a gallery wall, and Ayanah Moor’s work on view at Lawndale is a classic example of this phenomenon. For the “A to Z Like Me” series, Moor silk-screened definitions of African-American…
The Fire Theft, with Dios, Grandaddy and Saves the Day
Sunny Day Real Estate was one of the most influential American bands of the last decade. One of the first to be tagged emo (though it transcended the label), the band spawned a loyal following and many imitators, and may be partly responsible for the emo-pop of Dashboard Confessional or…
Capsule Reviews
The Illustrated Woman Nancy Kiefer’s depression-era drama seeks, but never finds, adequate focus. It has enough backstories for a half-dozen plays — incest, rape, amnesia, adultery, hard times — but the major plot devices hinge around daughter Jane Ellen’s secrets resulting from a childhood trauma, which are telegraphed through the…
From Bad to Worse
If you were expecting the first film to emerge from Afghanistan since the defeat of the Taliban to be even remotely celebratory, you’ll have to adjust your expectations. Radically. In Osama, filmed in 2002 and 2003 in a “suburb” of Kabul, writer-director Siddiq Barmak is not interested in showing us…
Creature Comforts
Your budding scientists can experience the wilds of nature — without loading up on stinky mosquito spray — at six cool (read: air-conditioned), eco-friendly, interactive camps inside the Moody Gardens pyramids this week. Groups of kids will investigate topics such as creatures that live on the ocean floor, the wacky…
Monica Hits Midtown
A slice of dark purple duck prosciutto, a little sweet blood orange, some crunchy fennel and a sip of a “yellow fever” cocktail — that’s all it takes. I surrender. Monica Pope is a genius. And her new restaurant, T’afia on Travis Street, is flat-out brilliant. The duck prosciutto is…
Green Party
Back East they dye the rivers green on St. Patrick’s Day in honor of the snake-driving, dead-raising, proselytizing patron saint of Ireland. Down here we don’t bother with the food coloring — after all, Buffalo Bayou is always a little green — but we do party like we’re all a…
The Icebox Revisited
Wednesday, July 22, 1959: As near as he can remember it, Robert LeRoy Miller was just sitting on the porch of his parents’ home. He was 13, about to enter the seventh grade, and he’d been idling away his summer in a languid blur of marbles, neighborhood boxing matches and…
What He Said
Incoming Houston police chief Harold Hurtt brings with him a slew of good reviews from Phoenix, where he was chief for four years. Observers there say he’s smart, effective and willing to trust his lieutenants. One thing he isn’t, however, is eloquent. Or even glib. Or pretty much able to…
Two-Steppin’ in Tutus
In July, one of Australia’s most talented dancers, Stanton Welch, became Houston Ballet’s new artistic director. When he left the land down under for the Lone Star State, part of his charge was to create a ballet to honor his new home. That much-anticipated tribute opens this week. Welch, known…
Young Loves
Like a lot of divorced parents, Susan Zaratti prepared for one of the bleaker moments of the yule season last December: relinquishing her seven-year-old son for the required Christmas visitation days with his father, her ex. She was 24 when she fell in love in 1995 with C. Tom Zaratti,…
Brie For Me
A fork is all you’ll need to enjoy the baked Brie ($7.50) at Pâtisserie Descours and Café (1330 Wirt, 713-681-8894). You use it to gently break through the exquisite, handmade puff pastry, which is baked to a golden-brown finish. As you slice through the cheese, it oozes out of its…
Letters
Text Bitter Book burning: Great story [“Package Deal,” by Ray Hafner, February 26]! Although I’m long past my college years, the textbook sham was a scourge then, as it is now. One of my family members is in the upper caste of a university teaching staff, and he encourages the…
Quiet Riot Grrl
Now don’t you think something’s gonna happen soon / It’s been so long since they changed that tune — “Juliet (Keep That in Mind)” Barely 24, Thea Gilmore has released five albums since being “discovered” at the studios of the legendary British folk ensemble Fairport Convention. Believing the industry “has…
Hail to the Turd Blossom
The rest of the country has learned what Texans have known for a long time: Karl Rove, the president’s most trusted political strategist, is a scary, scary man. Rove’s hidden hand in George W.’s unlikely ascendancy to the international stage will be the topic of Bush’s Brain, a documentary making…
Strings Attached
Rufus Wainwright is a bit different from most of his pop star peers. While their ambitions seem to be more and greater fame, multimillion sales, lots of bling, commercial endorsements and maybe their own line of clothing, he has more serious goals. Rufus Wainwright wants to write an opera someday…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, March 11 In much the same way Howard Dean was swept up on a tide of true-believing Netizens, guitarist Fred Eaglesmith has been continually championed by a grassroots organization of hard-core bluegrass fans. A couple of die-hard Fredheads have gone so far as to organize the Fred Eaglesmith Texas…
Who Cares!
If you think that the Janet Jackson-Justin Timberlake nipple-shield flash and Michael Jackson’s child molestation trials are the biggest scandals in entertainment right now, then you obviously haven’t tuned in to Spanish-language television recently. While the Jackson family exercises the Anglo media with its travails, Univision and its competitors have…
Photos, Photos Everywhere
Do you let the water run while you’re brushing your teeth? It may seem like a small thing, but water is becoming an increasingly precious commodity. Swirling around it are all kinds of social, scientific and political issues. And the folks at FotoFest are setting out to educate us about…
Grammy Shammy
This little tale of falsely claimed Grammy nominations begins a few months back, when I received a package from a local band called Sugar Bayou. It looked promising — the producer was Robbie Parrish, one of the better drummers in town and one of the best drum technicians in the…
Teenage Wasteland
SAT 3/13 With mainstream masculine role models seemingly limited to hypermacho athletes, wisecracking/ass-kicking action heroes and proudly sociopathic hip-hop stars, it’s clear that in 2004, boys still don’t cry. But what do boys do? In PG-13: Male Adolescent Identity in the Age of Video Culture, a new multimedia exhibit opening…
Tom Heinl
Possessed of a deep, smooth, country-fried croon, Tom Heinl favors much the same musical turf staked out by Ray Price, but Heinl’s subject matter is just a tad bit more, well, let’s just say postmodern. For example, where Price may have had “Heartaches by the Number,” Heinl’s heartaches number only…