Letters
Over the Rainbow After reading Alison Cook’s scathing review of the Rainbow Lodge [Cafe, “Rainbow Rebirth?,” February 17], I thought, “There is justice in the world!” I used to enjoy the food and the surroundings there. Then, a few years ago, I took my then-boyfriend to the Lodge for dinner…
Wings o’ Desire
If you’re like me, you’ve courted automotive disaster by gaping at that big wordy sign on top of Wings ‘N’ More, a baby three-unit chain with an outpost on Westheimer near Bering. The sign makes claims about the eatery’s Buffalo wings, and its cole slaw, and — this was the…
No Respect
Trish and Darin don’t get much respect. They have their fans, certainly, and a good number of them. They play in town four or five times a month, drawing crowds in the low hundreds, and out of town more than once a week, to sporadic but promising response. Their debut…
Hot Koko
Koko Taylor owns two Grammys and the baddest lungs in the business. Last year, Chicago’s mayor proclaimed March 3 “Koko Taylor Day.” But starting off a 9:30 a.m. phone interview from her Windy City home last week, the undisputed Queen of the Blues was out of breath from shoveling snow…
Rotation
Ornette Coleman Beauty is a Rare Thing Rhino Ornette Coleman played with sidemen as diverse as Pat Metheny and Jerry Garcia. His songs have been covered by the likes of David Sanborn and newcomer saxophonist Joshua Redman — the jazz world’s latest young lion, and the son of Coleman’s ’70s…
Press Picks
thursday march 3 La Nona (“The Granny”) Steve Garfinkel continues to behave strangely. First, he directed Julius Caesar in a style that, although it succeeded, would be called strange by any normal person. Now he appears onstage as an old woman. To be fair, this is not “Old Mother Riley…
Celting Point
When your band’s life spans the course of 31 years and 30 albums, you make some friends in the business. Maybe that’s why these interviews I do with Chieftains leader Paddy Maloney each time the Irish-music band comes through town turn out sounding like Maloney is reciting a Who’s Who…
O Brave New Pizza
It was white and sleek and square, and it slept in my hand like a time bomb. “Welcome to the brave new world of restaurant beepers,” I thought glumly, perched in the bar of FM l960’s brave new California Pizza Kitchen. It was Saturday. The place was packed. We were…
Positive Nihilism
If you don’t own any of their albums — and if you don’t listen to KTRU — chances are good you’ve never heard NoMeansNo. It’s nothing to be embarrassed of; they’ve never heard you, either. Both situations may be remedied this Saturday, when the band makes its first Texas stop…
Naked Laughter
Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey is a charming and witty little comedy about AIDS. That unlikely combination is made more remarkable by the play’s theatrical exuberance, which is amply evident in the current production at Stages, the southwest premiere of this 1993 off-Broadway hit. Rudnick’s characters carry on as if camp never…
Love Is Murder
Alan Bowne’s 1987 Beirut, a futuristic AIDS morality play receiving its frank Houston premiere at Theater LaB, certainly hits the ground running. A man awakens in the dead of night, rises nude out of bed, walks across his stark room to a table to wash himself from a cooking pot,…
Art as Ecstasy
To understand oneself and the place and time in which one lives and dreams, to make oneself not just more responsive to the visual world but more responsible in the real one — these are among the humanist goals of “Projects,” a show of site-determined works at DiverseWorks by three…
The Chips Are Down
Instead of calling his latest sports screenplay Blue Chips, Ron Shelton (writer/director of Bull Durham and White Men Can’t Jump) should’ve titled it Recruiting Violations: College Basketball 101. Not even gritty director William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist) can make this offering more than a survey course. The ever-busy…
The Little Mexican Tramp
The 1993 death of the great Mexican comic actor Mario Moreno, better known as “Cantinflas,” was an event noted in some detail in the U.S. press, even though his work was virtually unknown outside the Spanish-speaking world. His image somehow crossed the Rio Grande, but it did so without his…
The Whoo-oo Highway
The Chase harkens back to The A-Team, Batman (the TV version) and old-fashioned movie serials, with a little mushy stuff on the side. It’s set inside a cherry-red BMW and on television, as live spy-eye news crews follow the chase. This “Terror at 100 mph” — as one TV station…
Fight to the Finish
The lumpy soup that is the Houston professional boxing scene bubbled once again last week, as yet another set of promoters presented a fight card. During the last two years a number of people have labored mightily to make the city a viable fight town. Locals have taken their shots,…
Giving the Big No to Nuchia
February did not end on a happy note for Houston Police Chief Sam Nuchia. Nuchia has been struggling to come up with a promotions policy that would satisfy both African-American officers — who had filed suit claiming that the existing policy was racially biased — and their non-black colleagues. But…
Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women
Lamentably, the women of the Wild West show aren’t fireproof this year. The Flying Cossacks, the trick riders in the pre-rodeo Wild West show, don’t use pyrotechnics (although anyone who cares to may still stroll the showgrounds singing “Learned pigs and fireproof women,” to the tune of “Silver Threads and…