Letters
Titanic Problem Richard Connelly’s analysis of the Piotrowski debacle [“How to Beat City Hall,” February 26] was very entertaining but unfortunately only exposed the tip of the iceberg. As a lawyer who works on behalf of folks like Ms. Piotrowski, I and my clients have endured the misery of the…
Press Picks
thursday march 12 “Local Heroes” and “Four Wheels, One Eye: Art Cars in the Eyes of the Image Makers” These exhibitions, unrelated except that they both carry the official imprimatur of FotoFest 98, deal with the same general subject: Houston’s amorphous cultural fringe, which burrows in the ground beneath the…
Hot Plate
The bread pudding ($4.25) at Gugenheim’s (1708 Post Oak Blvd., 622-2773) is something to behold. Served in a plain white bowl, it soars above a mantle of cream like Everest breaking through a ring of cloud. Pure joy. Its effect on me is Everest-like as well: I find myself gasping…
ThEATer
I love the Angelika Cafe and Bar. Love it truly, madly, deeply. Why? For lots of reasons, really. But mainly because the hostess there — a delightful person — helps men into their jackets. A lot of women would consider that demeaning, I told her. Not me, she said, all…
Static
More than a one-trick pony… Any band that aims for greatness needs a steadying element — an authority figure, if you will. For Houston’s Horseshoe, that used to be drummer Eddie Hawkins, who, during his four year-stint with the somewhat hapless acid-rock and country quintet, gladly took on all the…
Blond Leading the Blind
One of the half-dozen main characters in Tom DiCillo’s ensemble comedy The Real Blonde is obsessed with finding a literal specimen of the title rara avis: a bona fide, not-out-of-the-bottle goldilocks. Exactly what gives rise to this fetish — what would make such a woman more appealing than a rinse-job…
Rotation
Robbie Robertson Contact from the Underworld of Redboy Capitol There must be a few folks out there still pining for the simpler days when Robbie Robertson wasn’t such an insufferably pretentious do-gooder. For those disenfranchised followers of his no-frills roots-mining with the Band, it must feel like forever since Robertson…
Payback Time
In an antiseptic meeting room deep in the maze of the George R. Brown Convention Center, no voices were raised, no impassioned speeches burst forth and nobody made any overt threats, but the message from the minority community to the people building Houston’s baseball stadium was clear: It’s payback time…
Child of Fate
The performance is almost flawless — a real stadium crowd pleaser. But in a small venue like Cody’s, signs of tension are evident at first, despite the show’s tight choreography, pulsing R&B grooves and seamless harmonies. It seems the time is now for Destiny’s Child. Though its members are amazingly…
The Insider
City Council Fire Sale With two Houston City Council members among the Hotel Six defendants currently in federal court facing bribery charges, what better time could there be for special interests to curry favor with them? After all, in politics, perhaps even more than in real life, a friend in…
No Monkey Business
The Space Monkeys hail from Manchester, a working-class enclave far from the of-the-moment trendiness of London. That bleak spot is also the hometown of the long-defunct Joy Division, and of the more recent English phenomena Stone Roses and Oasis. Like their post-punk countrymen, the Space Monkeys are, in essence, performing…
Stolen and Forged
Residents of tony West University Place aren’t used to being victims of crime sprees. That’s something that happens in Houston. West U cops ordinarily clock speedsters driving over the 30-mile-per-hour speed limit on the inaptly named Buffalo Speedway, work household thefts or handle the occasional stickup of an unsuspecting resident…
Dish
Second Coming on Shepherd Those who have longed for this day can finally rejoice. After a decade’s absence, Tila’s is back. Or it will be very soon. The Houston businesswoman whose Mexican restaurant on lower Westheimer was something of a shrine for much of the 1980s has decided to gird…
Starved for Respect
The drive from downtown Houston to the Hunger’s office-park rehearsal facility is only about 15 minutes. But as far as the Inner Loop’s hipster set is concerned, the place might as well be on the other side of the earth. And in a way, it is. Hunger headquarters is located…
Bad to Brecht, Vile to Weill
On the surface, Threepenny Opera seems a perfect choice for Infernal Bridegroom Productions, which recently opened the show at Atomic Cafe, a new performance space in the warehouse district downtown. Bertolt Brecht’s wonderfully sardonic and somewhat didactic musical, scored by Kurt Weill, deals with questions of class and money, and…
Far from Over
In March of 1971, Edward Albee, the writer of such astonishing plays as Zoo Story and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, had just turned 43. But critics who’d recently seen his latest theatrical endeavor, All Over, had begun to wonder if the playwright’s career was all over. Though the production’s…
Murder to Watch
At first glance, Jonathan Darby’s Hush appears to have a couple of things going for it. There’s some high-wattage star power in the persons of Jessica Lange and Emma’s Gwyneth Paltrow. There’s a possibly lethal power struggle between a possessive mother and the pretty daughter-in-law who’s snatched her sonny boy…
Looking for Laura
At first, the news spread by word of mouth: 12-year-old Laura Smither had failed to return home from her early morning jog. Hours after her parents realized that something had gone terribly wrong, the over-the-phone, across-the-fence early notification system was working full-tilt. Friendswood, population 29,000, was behaving like the small…
Waste Not, Want Not
In his years as a petrochemical plant manager, Joe Monk has grown accustomed to pejoratives hurled in his direction. Until recently, though, “radical environmentalist” wasn’t one of them. But when you oppose a landfill on which hundreds of millions of dollars are riding, as Monk does, your opponents are likely…