Still Waiting
Of all the modern masters of theater, Samuel Beckett probably offers a stage director the widest opportunity to invent meaning and, right along with it, the greatest potential for disaster. It’s rare, even with the clearly coded map Beckett provided in his characters’ dialogue, to find an utterly honest production…
God Help Them
In The Devil’s Own, Brad Pitt plays Frankie McGuire, an Irish Republican Army gunman with 24 kills to his credit — 13 British soldiers and 11 police officers. After a bloody firefight in Belfast he escapes to New York, where, helped by a pro-IRA judge (George Hearn), he is placed…
Children on a Train
“Remember?” Lore Segal asks as she holds up a shoelace attached to a cardboard label numbered “152.” A gasp escapes from an unseen room of kindertransport survivors. In Melissa Hacker’s directorial debut, My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports, she documents a nearly forgotten episode of the Holocaust: the transport…
King of Richmond Strip
Dennis Lange lives at the office — literally. His workplace is his residence, though his version of home doesn’t quite jibe with the popular definition of a livable habitat. The first indication that things are more than a little unconventional at the Lange residence are the vans loaded down with…
Covert Aid for Lee Brown?
So far, former police chief Lee P. Brown’s mayoral bid has yet to make itself official, and probably won’t until May, when the Rice professor’s academic responsibilities are fulfilled. But at least one reliable source indicates that Mayor Bob Lanier may not wait to begin giving Brown covert aid, including…
Shell Games
Even if Shell’s Deer Park refinery had a job for Ron Bennett, it’s easy to see why the company might not be keen to offer it to him. Bennett, who worked at the refinery from 1988 until he injured his back in March 1991, has been a boil on the…
Letters
Screw That I found the article on Houston’s “Screw” culture [“Swangin’ and Bangin’,” by Megan Halverson, February 27] very irresponsible. This culture, which glorifies converting cars to obnoxious boom boxes, disturbing the peace, doing drugs and drinking like a fish received not one word of condemnation in your expose. Not…
Press Picks
thursday march 27 Threadgill’s — The Cookbook Threadgill’s is a great place for lunch, except that it’s so darned packed all the time, and it’s a couple of hundred miles away. Better to whip up the Austin institution’s Southern dishes at home. Proprietor and recipeman Eddie Wilson — the so-called…
Pure Peru
Tito Arianzen’s route to restaurant ownership may have taken him in a strange direction — one that ran straight through the Medical Center — but it landed him in a good place: Super Rico on Hillcroft. If you develop a yen for Peruvian food, Super Rico is the place to…
Educated Sounds
If you ever wanted proof of the benefits of education, Horace-Alexander Young is it. Over the last decade, the Houston native and admired jazz flute virtuoso has found himself recording, touring the world and serving as musical director for the likes of B.B. King, Freddy Fender, the Chi-Lites, Regina Belle,…
Looking for Billy Zoom
No one will ever make a movie about D.J. Bonebrake. Not while punk culture is overcrowded with easily glorified martyrs such as the Germs’ Darby Crash, that badass party boy and even worse Iggy imitator whose life and fabulous suicide will soon be entertaining suburbanites at a theater near you…
Sound Check
Over the past year, a new generation of soul crooners — D’Angelo, Maxwell and Tony Rich — has revivified R&B vocals by dumping the new-jack croak that Boyz II Men still use to line their pockets with gold. These fellows are slipping into the darker, creamy stylings of the 1970s,…
Static
Minor cause for an update… There’s a simple reason why the furor over efforts by state Senator Judith Zaffirini (D-Laredo) to prevent underage music fans from gaining access to nightclubs that serve alcohol fizzled so quickly: People finally got the right information. In January, the Austin-American Statesman reported that Zaffirini…