Return of the Art Bar
The theater is dead; long live the theater! That’s the theme running through the non-stop conversation of Nicholas (“Nick”) Vastakis, one-time managing director of the West-Mon Repertory Theater, now manager, head bar-keep and presiding spirit of the Westheimer Art Bar & Theatre. This new performance space is rising from the…
Kitsch of Death
The Houston Grand Opera obviously likes composer Robert Moran. Two years ago the company launched his one-act Beauty-and-the-Beast opera Desert of Roses, and now they’ve premiered his new effort, The Dracula Diary. Considering as well such other recent HGO novelties as Where’s Dick? and Frida, I wonder whether the company’s…
The Raising Arizona Proxy
I could tell you that The Hudsucker Proxy is a Capra-esque film “about” a little guy’s skyrocket ride to the top of American industry, and that it pushes the Horatio Alger storyline as far as it will go. But because Joel and Ethan Coen are in charge, that would be…
The Delirium of Society
In Suburban Queen, video artist Mindy Faber fantasizes that her mentally ill mother, Patricia, using “everyday grease and grime” as war paint, casts off the oppressive role of housewife and mother. “I am a woman. I can bleed for days and not die,” Patricia Faber proclaims in the role her…
Crime & Punishment
Sitting inside a five-by-five cage in the visiting area of Texas’ death row, convicted killer Anthony Ray Westley looks calm, even pleasant. But as he talks to some visitors through a glass-and-wire partition, that image of calm is shattered by the reminder of a literally scarred past. Pulling up his…
Hermann Park or Parking?
It seems like such an easy notion. Ben Taub Hospital needs more parking. The city would like a little more leverage to get something going at the stalled Allen Parkway Village site. The hospital district has some land near Allen Parkway Village, the city has some land near Ben Taub…
A Clash of Cultures
A year and a half of not-so-pacific times at KPFT-Pacifica Radio came to a head recently when Barry Forbes, for 21 fractious months general manager of Houston’s original hippie radio station — 90.1 on the FM dial, where polkas and jigs and John Hiatt can be heard interspersed with poetry…
Letters
Don’t Give Up the Chase I have just read Brian Wallstin’s “Deadly Pursuit” article in the Houston Press [March 10]. As a former Texas peace officer I have been personally involved in four high-speed/high-stress vehicle pursuits, three of which were conducted in excess of 110 mph. I caught all but…
Press Picks
thursday march 24 Virginia Slims of Houston tennis tournament Conchita Martinez, Martina Navratilova and Zina Garrison headline this year’s Slims tourney. Here’s pulling for the Third Ward-born and -bred Garrison, whose lifetime record against Navratilova is something like 1-40. But Zina has karma working this year — she started a…
Live Shots
The Eddy Hobizal Band Escondido Saturday, March 19 Eddy Hobizal’s band of four HSPVA alumni plays respectable covers, mostly of ’70s fusion. Two of Saturday’s sets featured standards by Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Return to Forever, Miles Davis and Santana — jazz/rock pieces with a pronouncedly funky beat, a simple…
Rotation
Sad Pygmy “tomato halo” Lazy Squid Records Every time I think garage rock has once and for all become its own self-referential bad joke about its own bad self, some local band puts out a disk like “tomato halo,” and for a precious few two-and-a-half-minute chunks of time, it all…
Down and Dull in Austin
Austin’s annual South by Southwest Music Conference is a perpetual disappointment and probably couldn’t be otherwise. Hundreds of unsigned bands, many of whom are unsigned because they suck, gather in a tiny city to mingle with vacationing journalists, screw up parking, piss in the bushes and try to make 20-minute…
All Rise
Still laying down solid walking bass lines, conducting master classes across the country and adding to the more than 40,000 photos he’s taken of fellow performers, 83-year-old Milt Hinton embodies jazz history. Thanks to the joint sponsorship of SUM Arts, the jazz program at the High School for the Performing…
Wink Wink
“Did you hear what the Art Guys did?” That line has been a sporadic refrain for almost a decade in the Houston art world, prefacing yet another lavish account of some witty perversion that served as a sort of civic-minded jump-start for stalled sensibilities. The rumors are nearly always accurate…
On the road to Lafayette with Planet Shock!
It’s one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, there’s a big, black Ford truck pulling a U-Haul parked at the curb, and the doors are open as people walk in and out of a rented house in the Montrose. Planet Shock! is packing up to drive to a show in Lafayette,…
The Paper Delivers
Two minor characters, veteran reporters on a big-city newspaper, are battling over turf on a late-breaking crime story. “You got the cops,” one asserts while looking for agreement from the metro editor, “I got the poignant shit.” This throwaway moment of dedication and cynicism is only one of many that…
Hot Plate
Life After Mrs. Brenner It is instructive to note which restaurants Houston expatriates rush to when they come home again. It’s not the fancy or ambitious or high-concept places my visitors seem to pine for; it’s eateries that satisfy some primitive need in our Texas souls. A cherished Tex-Mex joint…
Fish Tacos of the Gods
“What’s your favorite restaurant?” people are always asking me. Whereupon my brain freezes. I hem. I haw. I qualify. It’s the kind of cosmic question to which I have never had a ready answer. Until the last three months: now I just tell them it’s Berryhill Hot Tamales. Berryhill’s, a…