City Hall’s Dime Debts
With a $2.2 billion budget, the city of Houston doesn’t stop on a dime. But the Houston Press halted for a quick double take when that municipal bill arrived in the mail recently. Due and payable in U.S. currency to the city of Houston was ten cents. There was no…
Sympathy for the Angel
The streets are still littered with trash — every single inch, it seems, covered in a thin gray slime that oozes on forever. The light drizzle only makes things worse, more slippery-sticky. Hard to keep your footing in a mess like this. One wrong step, and it’s ass-first into the…
More Payne for the IRS
Score it Jerry Payne 2, the Internal Revenue Service 0. Last Friday, United States District Judge Vanessa D. Gilmore ordered the IRS to pay Payne more than $1.5 million in damages. She agreed with the Houston attorney that IRS agents damaged his law practice by illegally releasing information about his…
Rotation
Jessica Andrews Heart Shaped World Dreamworks Look out, world, heart-shaped or not. Here comes 15-year-old Jessica Andrews, playing the Nashville Tiffany part to Britney Spears’s turn as Debbie Gibson. Blessed with physical attributes sure to ignite fantasies in high school football players and potential pedophiles everywhere, Andrews is a shoe-in…
The Woman George W. Bush Didn’t Marry
They look so carefree and young, trapped in time, sitting on a carpet in front of a fireplace. He’s in a suit and tie; she’s in a sleeveless dress, smiling, her hair cropped short. Their hands, presumably intertwined, are hidden beneath a cushion propped between the two. The date is…
Bolshoi Beauty
To maniacal ballet lovers, true ballerinas have a rare essence that sets them apart. Maybe it’s their aura of feminine purity or the quintessence of classical technique. Perhaps it’s the way their feet whisper on pointe. Or how they float through all manner of arabesque and pirouette. The novice spectator…
News of the Weird
Lead Stories *Prominent Christian conservative psychologist Paul Cameron told Rolling Stone magazine in a March interview that he feared gay sex would supplant heterosexual sex unless a vigilant society repressed it. “Marital sex tends toward the boring,” he said. “Generally, it doesn’t deliver the kind of sheer sexual pleasure that…
Love Thy Neighbor
Wednesday, November 27, 1996, 4:50 p.m. — still a beautiful day in the neighborhood. From a second-floor window in the home of Mr. Charles Van Wormer, a security camera records the moment, as it records all moments, around the clock. One takes nothing for granted in a beautiful neighborhood. The…
Hungry: Will Judge for Food!
Former criminal district judge Woody Densen has been defeated both as a Democratic incumbent and a Republican challenger, but he still occasionally sits as a visiting judge in Harris County. Recently Densen’s assignments dwindled alarmingly while visiting judges from outside the county continued to rake in long hours and big…
Hot Plate
Hello, Dilly: In the midst of the otherwise regulation Chinese menu at Hunan’s Restaurant [3835 Bellaire, (713)666-2000] is a gem of a dish called Chinese Pickle Noodle Soup. Unlikely as it may sound, it’s a tummy-warming bargain big enough for two at $4.50, available for dining in or delivery. A…
Letters
Willie Sutton for Senator A famous outlaw was once asked, “Why do you rob banks?” He responded, “Because that is where the money is!” He should have been a politician, because that’s where the real money is. Alas, he was too honest, as he at least was willing to admit…
Presidential Kids’ Charity
Governor George W. Bush may be the offspring of a former president, but that doesn’t qualify him to raise money for his own presidential bid out of the office of a nonprofit kids’ charity in Houston. A Bush solicitation letter sent out last week by controversial fund-raiser Laura S. Rowe…
Night & Day
Thursday March 25 Big surprise: “The Artwork of John Lennon” seems to be more about Yoko Ono than her late husband. Yoko chose to release only the best drawings, and though there are a few self-portraits and political statements in the mix, the vast majority happens to have Yoko in…
It Is a Different World
Marisa Tomei made it into the movies, but what happened to the rest of the cast of the successful six-year Cosby Show spin-off, A Different World? Whitley, Freddie, Dwayne Wayne, Denise Huxtable — where are you now? “We’re still in the business,” says Charnele Brown, who played the earnest and…
Flattened Fellini
Nine, by Arthur Kopit and Maury Yeston, won best musical and four other Tonys in 1982. Perhaps the adulation had as much to do with Tommy Tune’s direction as it did with the musical itself, because the Main Street Theater production is a flat-footed blunder from beginning to end. The…
Free Radical
With his Buddy Holly specs, shoelaceless Jeff Spicoli sneakers, Bermuda shorts and a goofy T-shirt that asks, “Where the Heck Is Kosciusko, MS?” Rad Richard is the visual definition of a hipster doofus, a cat that steadily balances between coolness and nerdiness. The guy’s also a bit of a nut…
Snow Outing
Jane Chambers broke new ground when she wrote A Late Snow 25 years ago. Her very old-fashioned love story put a new spin on the woes and worries of amour. For though lesbians have always been here, few authors were brave enough in 1974 to give them a voice (despite…
On a Roll
Keith Coit’s shiny silver diner on the corner of Washington Avenue and Waugh Drive reminds me more of a backwoods general store than a big-city deli. Inside, I expect to cross a creaky wooden floor under lazily twirling ceiling fans, past farmers gossiping at a domino table. I dunno, it’s…
Drawing: A Blank
Everyone complains about exhibits predicated on regionalism, and they are indeed silly: “Four Old Texas Sculptors Whose Rich Collectors Agreed to Underwrite a Show,” “Twenty Young Texas Painters Who Flirted with the Curator When He Came By Their Studios,” etc. Such shows are marginally better when they have even the…
Mom-and-pop, Thai-style
There’s a soft spot in my heart for small family-owned restaurants, the kind with Mom and Dad in the kitchen and the kids working out front. What those places lack in polish they make up for with the love and care put into the food. Downtown Houston’s first Thai restaurant,…
Reel Time
“I hope it’s better than The Truman Show,” said the woman in line behind me at the publicized “sneak preview” of EDtv. Afterward a man in my row declared, “That was a lot better than The Truman Show.” Pretentious high-concept films like The Truman Show often garner accolades and let…
Greenspoint Ho!
Until recently, one of Houston’s secret dining bargains was largely reserved for tourists: the monthly “Dine Around Houston” program sponsored by the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau. For a reasonable $35, visitors from Newark or Natchez are loaded onto two merry Metro trolleys that normally serve The Park’s downtown…
Myles of Ego
Self-serving confessions are a mainstay of bestseller lists; now we’re doomed to see their ilk on screen. The film 20 Dates is the not-so-verite story of Myles Berkowitz, a tyro filmmaker in his mid-thirties who tries to advance his career and up his happiness quotient by filming himself on a…
God Awful
Let’s see, the band’s name is taken from an Alice in Chains song about heroin, the singer is a Wiccan witch, and a song called “Bad Religion,” though not about the infamous punk band of the same name, appears on one of its CDs. Yeah, it’s a safe bet to…
Odd Squad
Ginger and Fred. Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds. To the list of unforgettable movie dance partnerships, we may now add Omar Epps, the trim, handsome young man who stars as one-third of The Mod Squad, and Michael Lerner, the heavy-set middle-aged actor who played…
Fishin’ Folk
The phrase “resists easy categorization” is an overused cliche for describing an artist with an eclectic sound. Yet the term makes sense when talking about Trout Fishing in America. After all, even this duo of Keith Grimwood and Ezra Idlet struggles sometimes to define the music they create. In various…
Queen of the Good Ol’ Boys
Katherine Scardino usually looks good — at 54, she can pass for a decade younger — but today in court the overall effect was particularly striking: Her blond hair streamed obediently to the shoulders of her brown Anne Klein suit, her makeup was subtle but not too subtle, her tortoiseshell…
Jazz la King
Your first time seeing Sonny Rollins perform is almost like going to watch a chained magician try to escape from a submerged chest. One question will pop up over and over again in your mind: Can he do it? Reputation has it that Rollins is jazz’s greatest living improviser and…
