Press Picks
thursday march 2 The Sacred Journey into Women’s Sexuality This workshop is “a safe space, for women only, to get in touch with and explore further a part of themselves that is often ignored or buried in ‘everyday’ life.” Canadian tantra teacher Maryse Cote comes to help women who want…
Take This Band and Love It
Iowa beatnik folkie Greg Brown was my long-scheduled reservation for this week’s Critic’s Choice slot, but according to the folks at the Mucky Duck, where Brown was scheduled to appear on Saturday, he postponed so he wouldn’t have to compete with Nanci Griffith in Houston and Austin. When you drive…
Rotation
Fun-Da-Mental Seize the Time Beggars Banquet In case you haven’t yet figured out why Public Enemy’s last release stiffed so hard, take another lesson from Fun-Da-Mental. An English rap group comprising two Asians and two Afro-Caribbeans, Fun-Da-Mental applies P.E.’s aggressively political ranting to Britain’s homegrown race problems and essentially rehashes…
Pop Moment
Austinite and former Houston homeboy Jessie Dayton is still being coy about the label deal he’s reportedly on the verge (at press time) of signing, and since we’ve waited this long, I guess I’ll be coy, too, and let the ink dry before spilling the beans, but we know this…
Don’t Laugh At a Legend Roky Erickson emerges from the cacophony with his first new album in a decade
AUSTIN — The man standing at the counter, waiting to order his food, is slumped and disheveled and looking slightly deranged. His beard chopped and trimmed in odd proportions, his matted and tangled and unwashed hair sticking up in various spots, his voice an uncomfortably loud squawk, Roky Erickson looks…
The Other Mandola’s
Poor me. I drove by Mandola’s Deli for eight years without stopping. And no wonder: the blank brick facade of this windowless East End lunch spot seems hooded. Inscrutable. Grimly closed off. Inside, however, waits a knotty-pine universe bustling with shirtsleeved regulars and bursting with old-school surprise. Food snobs and…
Live Shots
“Texas” Johnny Brown Billy Blues Tuesday, February 21 After seeing “Texas” Johnny Brown invite Katie Webster on-stage to close out the night, I know Houston is a blues lover’s Promised Land. Can I have an “amen” and another cold beer? Brown’s 67th birthday celebration was equal parts showcase and family…
Possible Dream
If there were any doubts that the Houston Ballet is grooming Lauren Anderson to take over as the symbol of the troupe once prima ballerina Janie Parker steps down, last week’s world premiere of Ben Stevenson’s restaging of Don Quixote should have lain them to rest. It’s not just that…
Poor Portrait
Leonard Nimoy is not a playwright. This cuts to the quick of the problems with Vincent, currently at Main Street Theater. In 1984, Nimoy, best known as Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, devised a one-man vehicle for himself about another character partly known for his ears: Vincent van Gogh. But Nimoy…
The Evil and the Stupid
It’s pointless to respectfully review a film as ineptly written, indifferently directed and slothfully performed as Just Cause, the new legal thriller about a Harvard law professor and anti-death penalty advocate (Sean Connery) who heads down south to the Florida Everglades to win freedom for a condemned black murderer (Blair…
Buried Deep
Outside a stylish Glasgow flat rests a doormat with the message, “Not today, thank you.” It’s been put there by the flat’s residents, a trio of twentysomethings obsessed with their own cynical chic. The pronouncement is in big block black letters, and as the yuppies give into greed and become…
Lone Star
The Hunted has packs of lithe ninjas and, like so many Asian-flavored films, has an instructive subtext. Between the bouts of swordplay, we learn that Christopher Lambert is moving comfortably into middle age and headed for Harrison Ford territory, that John Lone is in danger of becoming Rutger Hauer and…
All About Elyse
Thick gray fog gobbles the tops of downtown’s skyscrapers; a damp chill sidles through the sparse lunchtime crowd huddled on folding chairs in front of City Hall. It’s not the weather that Elyse Lanier would have chosen for her Valentine’s Day sing-along here at City Hall park — but that…
Angry White Male
It was the late fall of 1984, and then-U.S. representative Phil Gramm was flying about Texas on the final leg of his near-manic pursuit of the U.S. Senate seat he now holds. The stump speech Gramm was giving varied little from town to town, except that at most stops he’d…
Shhhhhh!
How can it be revealed: “It is imperative that an applicant’s weight be in proportion to his/her height.” That’s the first sentence in the Houston Police Department’s Recruit Selection Criteria manual — a document full of similarly scintillating information that city officials for some reason would prefer that the public…
Street Fight
Loud music. Noisy drunks. Beer bottles, pools of urine, an occasional undergarment left behind after a night of carousing. Joanna Pasternak figures that such spillover from The Pig “Live,” a bar that’s catty-corner to the backyard of her home in the 2100 block of Colquitt, is just part of the…
Letters
Indefensible Behavior I was glad to learn that I was not the only person completely offended by the cartoon which you printed in “Female Troubles.” [News, by Steve McVicker, February 2.] I had the unfortunate task of handing that very cartoon to my employer (an attorney) when one of his…