The Strokes
The great rock and roll swindle continues! Music journalist sheep still hold to their claim that we’re in the middle of a rock and roll revival. Nonsense. Rock and roll would first have to go away in order to be revived, and anyone can tell you that, since 1955, rock…
Duck, Duck, Goose
When was the last time you channeled your inner pigeon? Yeah, it’s been a while for us, too. You can make up for lost time by checking out Jennifer Monson’s Bird Brain, a multi-year dance and educational project that investigates the migratory patterns of birds and other animals. “The world…
Broken Social Scene
Canadians think they’re such hot shit — what with their universal health care, lack of gun violence and Labatt Blue. Add to that a budding underground music scene that’s slowly creeping its way to the surface, and you’ll begin to understand what all the hubbub is aboot. What a difference…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, March 18 You gotta love the folks over at Lawndale Art Center. Not only do they, time and time again, showcase excellent local and national talent in the visual arts, they also know how to throw one helluva party. Today they’re cleaning off their paintbrushes and basting some barbecue…
GoGoGo Airheart
Though one of GoGoGo Airheart’s members once described their style as “pop music for people who don’t like pop music,” there’s little that’s recognizable as pop of any kind in the musings of this San Diego-based band. Instead, the mainly instrumental, looping dub on their most recent self-titled CD, known…
Capturing Friedman
I’m not going to kiss babies; I’m going to kiss their mothers. — Kinky Friedman Kinky Friedman is serious. Well, just about as serious as anyone named Kinky can be. “The governor’s race appears to be picking up some steam,” he says. For those of you who don’t dabble in…
The Bamboo Kids, with Pearlene and the Bloody Hollies
Since they were recently touted by the New York Press as “the best unsigned band in New York,” it’s easy to imagine that somewhere the ghost of Joey Ramone is smiling down on Brooklyn’s Bamboo Kids. As opposed to the flashier Strokes-like stuff that comes wafting out of Manhattan on…
Houston’s Due
Who needs the hassle of traveling to Austin, buying a wristband and then waiting in line with hundreds of other saps outside shows you can’t get into? Houston will have its own version of a certain well-known conference at the second annual South By Due East Music Festival, which will…
Hamer Time
The appeal of a quirky little Norwegian film called Kitchen Stories arises from the unlikeliest of sources: a series of domestic studies conducted back in the early 1950s by a group of Swedish efficiency experts. The mission of the Home Research Institute, as far as anyone could tell, was to…
Jekyll & Hydesky
The bartender at the new Smith & Wollensky steak house on Westheimer pours a generous dose of Beefeater gin into an ice-filled stainless-steel shaker and then swishes some dry vermouth around in the chilled martini glass. I wait for him to pick up the shaker. The harder you agitate a…
Sit, Stay, Run!
SUN 3/21 If you want to make sure your mutt stays your best friend, you’d better take him to the Houston Humane Society’s Greek in the Streets K-9 Fun Run and Walk. Not only will Rover love the workout, he’ll also appreciate the plethora of sniffing opportunities. The event includes…
Forget Me Not
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which a man has recollections of a soured relationship erased from his brain, may be the most romantic movie in recent memory, if you will pardon the unforgivable pun. Written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry, it’s about many things: how…
Chic Grits
The homemade breads and muffins, which accompany each meal, are reasons enough to eat at Ouisie’s Table (3939 San Felipe, 713-528-2264), but the dish that commands the most admiration is the restaurant’s shrimp and grits ($16). The creamy grits are bright yellow, thanks to the addition of tons of cheese…
Trophy Children
SAT 3/20 If you’ve never taken your kids to visit the Orange Show, then shame on you! Jeff McKissack’s shrine to his favorite fruit is one of the coolest things in our sweltering city. This weekend, you’ll have the perfect opportunity to make it up to your mistreated darlings at…
Lone Star, Anyone?
Native Australian and new Houston Ballet artistic director Stanton Welch has made good on his promise to choreograph a dance that pays tribute to his new home, the Lone Star State. His first full-length outing for the company, Tales of Texas, is a three-act two-step through the history of our…
Canadian Invasion
SAT 3/20 Face it: We’re not the live music capital of the world. But every March, we get sloppy seconds when cool bands book shows down here after they’ve lined up their South By Southwest gigs 150 miles up the road. And this year, several stellar Canuck bands will migrate…
Getting Wilder
Thornton Wilder, one of America’s most idiosyncratic playwrights, never gave the public a full account of his life. But his final novel, Theophilus North, written in 1973, two years before his death, is semiautobiographical. In it, Wilder gave his life a Hollywood gloss, polishing the rougher edges and deleting issues…
The Kings of Queens
Close your eyes and visualize a group of drag queens on a stage. Chances are you imagined a bunch of dudes in dresses lip-syncing played-out songs by Cher, Bette Midler and Barbra Streisand. Fair enough, but don’t clump the Kinsey Sicks into that category. These gals belt out original tunes…
Capsule Reviews
The End of the Affair Houston Grand Opera’s 29th world premiere 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…
Wisdom of Solomon
Few recent albums have caused my soul more distress than the Sleepy Jackson’s Lovers. Not that it’s a bad album — on the contrary, it’s pretty good. Rather, it’s the questions it raises and the soul-searching it’s caused me. To wit, with all the genre-flipping — from Gram Parsons alt-country…
Village Person
Many artists have had difficult childhoods, but by any measure, Arshile Gorky’s was particularly traumatic. He was born Vosdanik Adoian in the village of Khorkom in Turkish Armenia in 1904. Two years later, his father emigrated to America. Whether he left to find work or to avoid arrest for being…
NYC Re-Nu-al
“Are you ready for more?” “Are you talking to me?” Just when the exported goods of New York’s renewed dalliance with the Trouser Press history of rock seemed to have expired, stellastarr* and its metallic brand of arty new wave kicks off round two. Pretend it’s for the better, because…
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…
A Nashville Star Is Born
Well, as a city we sure blew it when American Idol came to town. When our local citizens weren’t regaling Randy, Paula and Simon with the worst singing this side of a Tokyo karaoke bar on Bottomless Sake Night, they were dousing Simon with ice water and bringing about lightning…
All Aboard
Ted McCormick, able-bodied seaman, has traveled the world on tankers. Used to be, when he’d dock in the Port of Houston, he’d walk off the ship, stroll past a chain-link fence and hoof it straight to the local post office, newsstand and burger joint. But a few months ago, while…
Statistics
“The songs are all done, and as they go down on tape / The critics click their pens / Comparisons made and names dropped in all boldface / To sound like his best friends.” So begins “Sing a Song,” the first track on Leave Your Name, the debut solo effort…
Watching You
A Diet Coke shared among friends was enough to undo 12-year-old Alyssa Nemec’s life. The seventh-grader at Garland T. McMeans Junior High went to the gym before first bell on September 24. She joined some friends, including an eighth-grader holding the soda. Offered a sip, Alyssa took one and said…
The Get Up Kids
How the Get Up Kids ruined underground music for my generation in 220 words or less: Late in 1996, when this Kansas band released its first seven-inches, ear-to-the-ground indie kids went ballistic. The band’s full-length debut, Four Minute Mile, fused postpunk staples (Braid, Jawbox), navel-gazing confessions and crunchy pop choruses…
Island Survivor
They all laughed at Greg Roof when he ran for mayor of Galveston two years ago. Which was probably a reasonable reaction, seeing as Roof may or may not have been living in the city at the time. They laughed again this year when he tried to force a referendum…
Robbers on High Street
If it’s true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the Strokes should feel pretty stoked upon hearing this New York quartet’s debut EP. Robbers Ben Trokan (vocals/guitar/keyboard), guitarist Steve Mercado, bassist Jeremy Phillips and drummer Tomer Danan seem to ape their more famous (and overrated) NYC brethren…
Ruffled Feathers
Chris Comeaux has lived all of his 50 years in Port Bolivar, a sleepy shrimping community on the west end of the Bolivar Peninsula. He lives about a mile from the lighthouse, and has more relatives than he can count among Bolivar’s thousand or so residents. As a 17-year-old in…
Zeke
Led by singer Marky Feltchtone’s insane, bug-eyed staccato count-offs at the start of every other song, Zeke became one of the best speed-punk bands of the ’90s. With a sound fueled by model glue, heroin and plenty of Slayer and Ramones concerts, Zeke was too messy for metal, too leather-vested…
Letters
Skin and Bones Rockin’ Rocket: Absolutely loved the article “Rocket Man” by Craig Malisow [March 4]. It’s not often that the Houston Press spices it up. As for Scott Styles, from physicist to porn star, you rock! Javier Martinez Houston Under the cover: I just returned from my neighborhood Kroger…