Hot Plate
It’s easy to make an onion quiche. What isn’t so easy is making a good one. Actually, it’s damn hard. The great stumbling block is the pastry, known to the French as pate brisee. Tricky and temperamental, it can drive even good cooks to despair. Which hasn’t deterred Cafe Europa…
Phony Folksy
Probably every film director itches to make a western, so let’s be thankful that, with The Newton Boys, Austin’s Richard Linklater has scratched his itch. Now he can go back to making movies about subjects he has some genuine feeling for. Linklater should not be begrudged his chance to “stretch.”…
Real-Life Product
This is the story of O — Lil’ O, to be exact. On a Friday morning, Lil’ O, the street and studio persona of 20-year-old Houstonian Ore Magnus-Lawson, tears into the parking lot of a West Houston pool hall in a black Honda Accord. Sauntering into the vacant establishment, he…
Sol Food
My favorite D.H. Lawrence heroine is Juliet, a New York woman who flees her dullard husband — he wears a gray suit and a gray felt hat — and moves to Italy, where she and her young son roll oranges to one another across a tiled, sun-filled patio. For Juliet,…
Static
SXSW ’98: Taking it as it comes… Griping has always been part of the South by Southwest Music Conference, where for five dizzying days in Austin, the pissing and moaning is as copious as the tepid beer and leathery barbecue. Going into this year’s event, tops on the diss list…
Tangled Web
The phone call finally arrives around 6 p.m., four hours late. The connection crackles and hisses as if it resents the human intrusion; Tito Larriva’s voice on the other end sounds hollow, distant. The imagination reels. This is, after all, the primary orchestrator behind what is possibly the meanest rock…
Rotation
Cheri Knight The Northeast Kingdom E-Squared As a member of the great Boston band Blood Oranges, Cheri Knight was alternative country before alternative country was cool. But among those in the know, Knight’s singing and songs had long been special. Her plain but moving alto and tales about the cycle…
Brown and White
Lovers of American movies used to joke that foreign films wouldn’t look so good if you saw them without subtitles. John Sayles’s latest movie, Men with Guns, plays better than his other films because it does have subtitles. Bald dialogue always sounds better in Spanish and Indian dialects. Set in…
Radio Shy
Kicking off their spring tour here in Houston, Radiohead have broken the record for the fastest sellout in Aerial Theater’s brief history, packing the place faster than even the reunited Jane’s Addiction could. This from a band with only one hit single in the last five years (“Creep”) and extremely…
No Going Forward
The flimsiest hustle in movie promotion today — one perpetrated by film festivals and their camp followers — is that independent movies are starved for mainstream attention. The truth is, they often have an open field in big-city media. Major studios are usually unable to deliver a finished print of…
Two Out of Three
One-act plays are hard to produce. Often running no more than 45 minutes, a lone one doesn’t fill up an evening of theater, and it’s difficult to find two or more that somehow fit together. So when Main Street Theater set out to produce its current “Festival of One-Act Plays,”…
Peer Pressure
Well before seven in the morning, when the winter sun is still far from rising, the first trickle of students heads to Anderson Elementary. They wait outside closed doors for a half-hour or more, an ever-growing gaggle of kids. By the time the school opens at 7 a.m. or so,…
Conference Kudos and Crud
Best Hollywood Cameo: Director/sometime guitarist Robert Rodriguez jamming like a man possessed with Tito and Tarantula at Waterloo Brewing Co. Best Reason to Annex Canada: Vancouver-based PURE’s potent showcase at Liberty Lunch. Best Proof That Great Rock Can Thrive in Cold Climates: Libido’s bracing Norwegian blast at the Atomic Cafe…
Situational Ethics
The night before the December 1995 runoff election for the District D position on Houston City Council, Jew Don Boney was on the verge of finally winning elected office. The race against opponent Saundra Chase Gray was close, however, and only hours before ballots were cast, Boney –who had lost…
Cuidado Cuidado
Like lots of working people of limited means, Juan Lopez could only dream of owning a home. Then, in the summer of 1996, he heard about Homes for Houston, an ambitious program initiated by former mayor Bob Lanier that aims to provide 25,000 new affordable-housing units by the year 2000…
Scenes from a Sting
Tony Reyes lingered at the Galleria-area Hunan’s Restaurant after a business lunch he had with his brother, Councilman Ben Reyes, Ben’s son Albert, and Rosalie Brockman, the councilman’s girlfriend. It was the afternoon of November 3, 1995, less than two months before term limits would force Ben Reyes to give…
To Die For
The city of Houston wants to build a monument to victims of violent crime — and mass murderer Elmer Wayne Henley wants to help pay for it with part of the proceeds from his second art show. Although the idea repulses the father of one of Henley’s victims, city officials…
Letters
Beach City Fan I am a resident of Beach City and a member of Informed Citizens United. Thank you for your very candid article [“Waste Not, Want Not,” by Bob Burtman, March 12] regarding the issues we are faced with. The descriptions of the persons you wrote about are right…
Good Golly, Miz Molly!
She’s as beloved by liberals as she is despised by Dittoheads, but both sides would agree that Molly Ivins is rarely uninteresting. The Austin-based writer, whose blunt, shrewdly funny column is syndicated by about 200 U.S. newspapers, has just released her third collection of musings, You Got to Dance with…
The Postmod Squad
Ego and art have always been bedfellows, whatever the medium of expression. And Trisha Brown is the acknowledged (and self-acknowledged) master of her own expressionistic realm: postmodern dance with a formalist bent. She makes no bones about it. “It’s lonely here at the top,” Brown says bluntly by phone from…
Night & Day
Thursday March 26 Though Galveston’s IMAX Film Festival is billed as a spring-break special, it strikes us that most of the bikinis and briefs will not be found indoors watching flicks like The Last Buffalo, Mountain Gorilla and Tropical Rain Forest — which makes the fest a fairly safe bet…
Dish
Copycat Cookery? Last December, a Houston Press reviewer stopped by a new Chinese restaurant called Hunan Paradise (2649 Richmond, 526-1688). Kathy Biehl was taken with the fusion-style food, but noticed an uncanny resemblance to the cuisine served at the Empress of China (5419-A FM 1960West, [281] 583-8021). Her review has…