Soundboard to Heaven
The one-story building on Alabama that houses Justice Records isn’t much to look at — a dull brick structure that shares parking space with its equally nondescript next-door twin. Inside the modish lobby, framed examples of the 31 disks, mostly jazz, that the independent label has released in its five-year…
Letters
Trish and Darin Aren’t Beautiful People… By writing about Trish and Darin [Music, “No Respect,” March 3], Brad Tyer has the courage to discuss a band to which he clearly does not hold musical allegiance, a quality not seen in any Houston music critic since the departure of the Public…
Hot plate
My Night Downtown Life is full of rude surprises, as a recent night on the town reminded me. At Jones Hall, the mighty Pinchas Zukerman seemed so bored during his violin recital that my cohort and I slipped out at intermission to essay that thankless downtown task, The Search for…
Harmonic Convergence
First, a confession. It was the naughty spirit of comic adventure that propelled me toward Heaven on Earth. I found a certain puckish joy in the idea of a “gourmet” Thai-Indian vegetarian restaurant parked downtown at the Heaven on Earth Plaza Hotel — that shabby Days Inn taken over by…
We All Scream for Thora-Zine
Bear with me here. It’s Thursday afternoon, long past deadline, and outside these windows is one of those rare days that starts around 2 p.m. with open windows, slacks through a couple of lazy hours listening to records and smoking butts, starts to get pleasantly bent around 5, and only…
Rotation
Odd Squad Fadanuf Fa Erybody Rap-a-Lot Houston-style hip-hop — the “H-Town” or “Fifth Ward” sound — is frequently perceived as the Texas branch of West Coast and Miami gangster flavor. Geto Boys, Scarface, Street Military and the Underground Kings have all emerged from Houston to gain national visibility with variations…
Dumbass Deluxe
It’s not every day that you go to a show with the exclusive and single-minded intent to do nothing at all but kick out the jams, muthafucka, but when you do — when the moon is riding high and frothy curls of adrenaline are crashing through your veins and dammit,…
The Man With the Blue Guitar
I don’t know just what it is about New England in general, and Boston in particular, that breeds and draws so many white men with blues-soaked bones, but they keep drifting into my viewfinder. First it was the Raymond Carver/Son House hybrid songwriting of Bill Morrissey, then the gritty slide…
Crimes of the Hearty Har Hars
It’s a crapshoot when a domestic comedy begins with an old Southern woman’s reading her husband a letter from her sister about so-and-so’s scandalous defection to the Nazarenes; about a neighbor’s not being so uppity once a nephew got the electric chair; about her son’s falling into a real bad…
A Glutton for Farce
If it does nothing else, La Nona should have a direct effect on snack sales at Main Street Theater. Roberto Cossa’s play is so preoccupied with food and starvation that by intermission, the audience should be lining up for second-act provisions. Then again, by the play’s close, no one in…
What Moves Us Deeply?
To be a painter is to assume an immense load of cultural baggage. After more than a century of questioning and refining, what in painting still has potential? A painted picture has taken on a kind of eternal identity unimaginable in other kinds of artwork. The problem is not whether…
Adding Insult to Injury
As if the breakup of the Southwest Conference, and being cut out of the prestige and possible big bucks of the Big Eight, weren’t bad enough for the University of Houston’s athletic department, the school’s professors recently decided to add a little insult to injury. Gathering at a faculty senate…
Press Picks
thursday march 17 Thanks for the Memories A tribute to the late great Shamrock Hotel and the late great Glen McCarthy. “The Shamrock was not just a hotel, built of steel, mortar and rivets,” the press release tells us. “She was a symbol of all Houston was and is: ‘The…
Extended Labor
It’s hard not to root for Angie, the new film by director Martha Coolidge. Its story has a handful of familiar elements: we’re back among the Bensonhurst Italians, and our heroine, Angie Scacciapensieri (is that ethnic enough for you?) wants something more than the life her longtime boyfriend, Vinnie the…
24 Lies Per Second
East German newsreels and educational films can be funny, if a bit pathetically so. A miner supposedly digs four times his coal quota: “From this time on,” the soundtrack heralds, “the men felt a new relationship towards their work”; a paternal teacher spins a globe, asks a cherub to “show…
Open Season on Open Seats
If last week’s primary elections proved one thing, it’s that having a reputation for being tough on crime and criminals is a plus, especially if you’re running for a criminal court judgeship. Last Tuesday, seven working prosecutors on the staff of Harris County District Attorney John B. Holmes Jr. competed…