Too Much Italian?
News of another upscale Italian restaurant opening in town fills me with the same enthusiasm I feel for tax hikes and Mattress Mac commercials. How many, I always wonder, can the human brain absorb? Can I face another faux fresco? So I was surprised to find my eyes de-glazing at…
Diner’s Notebook
Hot Stuff Every Houstonian knows at least one gastronomic braggart who insists nothing is ever hot enough for them. Bring this person in your life to Savoy Grocery’s adjoining Tikka & Kebab restaurant, a resoundingly bare-bones Pakistani operation that’s guaranteed to make even the macho chilehead emit involuntary exhalations and…
Rotation
D-Knowledge All That and a Bag of Words Quest/Warner Bros. MTV told us poetry is making a comeback, but where then are all the poets? So far the spoken-word revolution has offered only a bunch of strictly average monologists and some mildly entertaining performance artists. Has our grasp on literacy…
Thriving — or Simply Surviving?
Longevity is the easy part of rock and roll; it is no great task to survive the music business, even if an artist is driven solely by the illusions of fame — money, women, the glamorous excesses. One need only look at Steve Tyler or, for that matter, Steve Perry,…
Pop Moment
The lumbering frame of Henry Rollins was as ubiquitous in Austin during South by Southwest as barbecue and Shiner Bock, showing up on panels, haunting the Austin Convention Center, assisting rock legend and noted schizophrenic Roky Erickson at two ill-fated book signings that lasted only a few minutes before Erickson…
Press Picks
thursday march 23 Angels in America Tony Kushner’s epic of gay life in America — which has won a Tony, a Pulitzer and a London Evening Standard best play award — opens in our neck of the woods with a special preview performance for Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS (DIFFA)/Houston…
Play that Monkey Beat
Jim Suhler may still play the blues, or at least a rock-oriented version thereof, but the east Dallas native has to admit that he probably has less real reason to feel the blues than at almost any time in recent memory. Well, yeah, there is the little problem of the…
Poetic Power
In a day of faxes, printouts, Internet bulletins, e-mail and other electronic wonders, Kenneth Goldsmith’s laboriously pencil-drawn words that emphasize the virtue of manual writing seem obsessively, if gleefully, old-fashioned. In his installation 73 Poems at Lawndale Art & Performance Center, the New York artist celebrates language as a product…
Coal-Colored Glasses
Atom Egoyan’s vision of a world full of misfits, nomads and wounded souls is so peculiar — and, frankly, so generally off-putting — that it’s hard to imagine him applying his talents to anything but his own work. If the Canadian filmmaker directed a Lethal Weapon movie, supercops Martin Riggs…
Shotgun Marriage
The new Australian feature Muriel’s Wedding evokes a couple of other independently funded hits from recent years, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Strictly Ballroom. It takes its obsession with matrimony from the former and its over-the-top tone and visual style from the latter. But it’s undisciplined and klutzy, veering…
Battle Scars
Being a warrior, a true warrior, is a noble life. Pretending to be a warrior, but being a coward, is hopeless and brings disaster. The difference between having convictions and courage, and being plain stubborn or violent, isn’t always obvious. And in the new film from New Zealand director Lee…
Houston On Screen
The Museum of Fine Arts’ First Look: New Films Made in Houston is essentially a well-intentioned attempt to support local filmmaking. On view are four independent features, all made in and around Houston, primarily by first-time directors, who mostly used local casts and crews. Participants earned experience more than anything…
Winners and Losers
The “war room” that had been set up in an upper floor suite of Austin’s Doubletree Hotel was abuzz when Tom Logans arrived there in the spring of 1992. A pencil-thin black man who had moved to Houston from San Diego in the boom years of the early ’80s, Logans…
Got Mad, Got Even
Info:Correction Date: 04/13/95 Info: Got Mad, Got Even Two former HL&P workers took revenge against the Light Company, but say the city settled for “chump change” By Michael Berryhill On a Friday morning in mid-January, Charles Pace had backed Houston Lighting & Power into a corner that disgruntled ex-employees of…
Funny Business II
Lavonia Gill went to the Municipal Courts Administration Building almost a dozen times to pay a traffic ticket she received in 1990. But on each occasion, after standing in a long line with others who have been issued citations for everything from speeding to feeding zoo animals, Gill was unable…
Letters
Roping Fry Michael Fry’s cartoon in the February 16 issue of the Press [“Are Rodeo Events Really Cruel to Animals?”] was obviously the product of an uninformed pen. It is a shame that some readers might actually believe that he knows anything about the sport of rodeo. Having been a…