Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
Okay, maybe spending an evening with people wearing vinyl, chains, latex paint, nipple clamps and other assorted trinkets, doing God-knows-what to each other, isn’t your idea of a swingin’ Saturday night, but don’t say you aren’t just a wee bit curious. This is the kind of thing you’ve probably seen…
Fun with Rednecks
If you’ve got your paternity narrowed down to Bubba, Jed and Uncle Jethers, you might be a redneck. If you think the slogan “Guns, God and guts” is listed by order of importance, then you’re a redneck, no doubt about it. But if your name is Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall,…
All Joking Aside
That compact commercial strip of Mid Lane between Westheimer and San Felipe makes me gnash my teeth in frustration. Could it get any shorter, narrower or more packed with traffic? Between the looming stone-faced town houses, cheek-by-jowl office blocks and chichi storefronts, this pocket-size gauntlet feels as densely overpopulated as…
Key Ingredient
Caught up in the end-of-the-millennium hoopla last year, Jazz Times asked 300 musicians to vote for Jazz Artist of the Century. The ballot included five obvious names: Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker, and space for write-in votes and comments. Many comments were published in…
Think Small
Dirty Rotten Imbeciles. D.R.I. Either way you put it, if you’ve been following heavy rock or punk for long, you’ve probably known the name forever, or at least the past 18 years. It was in May 1982 that D.R.I. first formed, right here in a Spring Branch basement. Aside from…
Bedroom (Black) Eyes
It all starts in the middle of a hot, sticky New York City night: A man and a woman grunt their way through some very steamy love, pounding the bed, groaning and moaning until they reach that very special moment. She screams, “Yes! Yes!” and “Do me! Do me!” reaching…
South by Southwest by Houston Press
Alternative newsweeklies from across the country lie in stacks on two cloth-covered, cafeteria-size tables inside the Austin Convention Center’s exhibition hall, SXSW trade-show headquarters. Bloated with booths boasting dot-com thises or dot-com thats, this hall, bigger than a football field, is from end zone to end zone prime real estate…
Light Touch
As you drive down Main Street, the solid, nearly windowless limestone mass of the new Audrey Jones Beck Building appears to be a fortress, filling the city block from curb to curb. It’s hard to imagine that the main idea behind this opaque counterpart to the steel-and-glass Museum of Fine…
Listen In
SXSW Wednesday, March 15 Road Kings at Stubb’s Japanic at Soho Lounge Sing a verse, quickly fingerpick a little riff, sing another verse, pick same riff. Repeat over and over until crowd is satisfied. Elvis popularized this recipe for rock and roll success more than 40 years ago. Fortunately for…
A Room of Its Own
The opening of the Audrey Jones Beck Building works into Museum of Fine Arts director Peter Marzio’s grand plan to make the institution a Mini-Met, a smaller-scale version of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and to enhance what is already an encyclopedic collection that spans 5,000 years…
You Go Gaelic, Girl
While Peter Garrett, the hyperkinetic, cranelike front man for Midnight Oil, used his law degree to delve into sociopolitical issues and tilt his lyrics toward a better future, Mary Jane Lamond went to school to preserve the past and possibly improve on it. Lamond attended college in a small rural…
Dead Man Walking
O sweet vulture of love! Picking through the bones and sinew of doe-eyed fools the world around! How exquisite is thy rending, how blissful the release! Spirits in crimson rivulets swirled, souls as carrion shredded! Two vibrant hearts made still as one, to sate thy gnashing beak! Blessed bloody bird,…
High-Tech Hell
Richard Duckett King recently started job hunting, determined to put to use his freshly awarded Ph.D. in psychology. But when potential employers in his home state of Pennsylvania ran a standard criminal background check, King’s Houston nightmare came back to haunt him after 25 years. King, now 43, was fresh…
Prepare for Landing
Is America ready for the Hong Kong action style? Certainly there are many fans of the balletic, guns-and-martial-arts, fly-through-the-air movies that have inspired the likes of Quentin Tarantino and the Wachowski brothers. And yet Hollywood still seems to have trouble marketing the concept. Yes, John Woo gets high-profile projects, but…
Scouting a Smear
Attorney Cory Birenbaum shifted uneasily in the witness box as an unusual weekend court hearing unfolded in Houston last Saturday morning. The former press aide to ex-congressman Steve Stockman verbally ducked and weaved under grilling by attorney Richard Ellison, representing District 7 congressional runoff leader John Culberson. Culberson is asking…
Saving Baby Angela
On the freeway, Susan Sciacca left the driver’s-side window open an inch while she smoked, a cartoon air freshener dangling from her rearview mirror: Taz, the Tasmanian devil, a combination of energy and chaos. Susan, herself all energy, gravitates toward chaos: She’d been a caseworker for Children’s Protective Services for…
Butthead, Be Gone
You probably didn’t take much notice, but the longtime morning-drive radio duo of Stevens and Pruett is no more. The pair, whose repertoire for the past 27 years seemed to consist solely of tediously juvenile fart and titty jokes, was broken up when Mark Stevens left KLOL-FM February 23. We…
Poison Pen
Workers watched as the man went through the parking lot of the Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan, methodically writing down the license plate numbers of the vehicles. Within a few weeks the intruder was joined by others, all believed to belong to an antiabortion group in that area. And then,…
Letters
The Pen Is Mightier Than…The Masters of Defense wasn’t a European phenomenon [“Swordplay? No Way!” by Lisa Gray, March 2]. It was a group of mostly middle-class citizens of London. There were academies throughout Europe that taught hundreds of styles and methods, but they had many different names and many…
Gulag Gardens
Covered parking lots hardly pretend to be objects of beauty, but the one at Hobby Airport manages to accent the bland concrete with well-maintained touches of greenery. In a relative rarity for Houston, the airport’s multilevel parking garage has permanent displays of lush foliage surrounding its series of stairwells. Pansies,…
Bloody Good
Sometimes, when grazing from an all-you-can-eat buffet, it’s best not to know exactly what you’re stuffing into your mouth. More on that in a minute, but first some background: Gold Ribbon Bake Shop, contrary to its name, is not just a bakeshop. It’s a gorge-yourself-till-you’re-fat-and-stupid buffet of Philippine dishes combined…
Not Your Grandma’s Girl Scouts
In 1909 the Boy Scouts held their first mass rally in London, England. As Collier’s Encyclopedia recounts, “A number of girls arrived, uninvited, and expressed interest in joining the scouting movement. [Lord Robert S.S.] Baden-Powell decided it would be better to establish a similar movement for girls than to allow…
Hot Plate
Afternoon Delight: There’s something seductive about the Grilled Portobello Mushroom Sandwich ($6.95) at Baba Yega [2607 Grant Street, (713)522-0042]. Perhaps it’s biting through the crusty whole wheat bun. Or maybe it’s the sensual pleasure of the creamy basil-mayo sauce against your tongue. Then again, it could be the feeling you…
Gray
Around 1 a.m. Corvettes jam James Coney Island’s front parking lot, displaying their low-slung, curvaceous selves to be admired by all the world — or at least by all the world cruising Westheimer late on a Saturday night, all the speed aficionados and car fiends and street racers waiting for…
The Day the Democrats Died
At least in the Heights, the new process of voting Republican was relatively painless. For the first time in 35 years as an eligible voter and in a decade at the same residence, this Houston native deserted the traditional Democratic primary stop. That meant bypassing Jones Chapel African Methodist Episcopal…