Rotation
eels Daisies of the Galaxy Dreamworks If ever a person could sing, “Goddamn right it’s a beautiful day” and make it sound great, it’s E, the singer-songwriter behind Los Angeles’s eels. Despite bouts of sarcasm, the eels take happiness, propelled by throbbing bass beats, and ride it for all they…
Low and Outside
So there you are, driving down from Kingwood on the Eastex or heading in from Sugar Land on the Southwest Freeway, going to an Astros game. Visions of sugarplums dance in your head. You think back on all the lofty rhetoric that was tossed around during the 1996 campaign to…
Local Rotation
Oddiscee Oddiscee Fires of August Entertainment Even though Oddiscee presents himself as some mythical figure, he certainly sounds like he wants Houston audiences to embrace him as a mere mortal. Produced by Mike B. (Master P, E-40), Greg Philippi and Oddiscee himself, this self-titled debut is permeated with that homemade…
Dream Taker
On one corner stands the new monument to the mania of professional sports: Enron Field. Long before it was finished, politicians were already pointing to the retractable-roof stadium as the prime example of what can be accomplished when local governments get together with private enterprise and tens of millions in…
Rock for Art Majors
Kingsbury Manx’s self-titled debut is one of those quiet little discs that sneaks up on you with how good it is. Built around a trio of singers, mellow chord progressions and understated drumming, the album radiates simple beauty, which is what makes this North Carolina band so solid. The group…
Traditional and Trite
Screw the traditional peanuts and Cracker Jacks. Popcorn’s the scent pumped into the streets surrounding Enron Field. (We think this pollution is kinda mean to the hungry homeless people.) The old Union Station, the grand entryway to the stadium, is the preliminary stop on the tour of the Astros “tribute”…
Road to El Bathhouse
From its opening moments, The Road to El Dorado looks and sounds oddly out of time, as though it were removed only yesterday from a time capsule sealed and buried in 1972. With its Peter Max visuals and Elton John vocals, it’s a decidedly unhip piece of work — Starlight…
Nickel-and-Diming
It was 1996. Downtown was as yet pre-vitalized, Bayou Place still unopened, and the baseball stadium not even in the planning stages. The soon-to-boom downtown’s powers-that-be approached a wary populace on bended knee, virtually begging Houston’s good burghers to return home to downtown. In November of that year, City Council…
Boneheaded
Not so long ago The Skulls would have starred Tom Cruise — but in which role? He could have been either lead; the one he didn’t choose could have landed in the lap of James Spader or Rob Lowe. One can easily imagine Cruise as Luke McNamara, the beefy, rough-and-tumble…
No EF-ing Way
For Guy Yount, the highlight of the year comes on opening day of the baseball season. This year the Houston publisher is stretching out the celebration: Yount has tickets to not one but three opening days, in Houston, Chicago and San Francisco. “I love my Astros,” he says, the image…
My Three Contenders
In the opening scenes of Price of Glory, set in the late ’70s, a young prizefighter named Arturo Ortega (Jimmy Smits) loses a career-making bout. He earns a few grand, but he’s plainly washed up in the ring, and we’re meant to see that it’s his greedy manager’s fault –…
Trying to Make Amens
The trustees of Fort Bend Independent School District have got their panties in a wad over school prayer, an issue — like abortion — of extreme emotion and little compromise. (Could we all just have a moment of silence here, please?) The matter of invoking the Lord before Terry plays…
Retro Virus
Terrence McNally’s Tony-winning play Love! Valour! Compassion!, now running at Bienvenue Theatre, opened off-Broadway less than a decade ago, but it already feels dated. The script focuses on eight gay men who spend their summer weekends at a beach house hideaway two hours north of New York City. Inside this…
Let’s Play Ball!
Back in ’96 Drayton McLane and the Astros were recruiting community heavy hitters to support a referendum to build the downtown baseball stadium now known as Enron Field. The team’s owner promised that minorities and women would receive 30 percent of the stadium revenues, including the food and drink concessions…
Weird Science
Back in the 1930s, sociologist William Sheldon became famous for taking pictures of nude college students. Sanctioned by the universities, the photos, made in the name of “science,” were used to classify and create “somatotypes” of the human race. Sheldon snapped three pictures of each naked student (side, front and…
Gold Medals for the Golden Years
America, land of the 24-hour gym and the quick-fix face-lift, is not a country given to growing old gracefully. The only benefit most of us see in seniority is discount movie tickets. But the athletes of the 2000 Houston Senior Olympics have a different concept of aging: They compete in…
Whose Stadium Is It, Anyway?
Unable to score admission to the biggest athletic events of the season? You weren’t alone. Tickets for the Astros’ first game at Enron Field March 30 and the April 7 season opener were sold out by mid-morning of their release date in January. The Astros and everyone else connected with…
Kill the Wabbit!
When Shelley Duvall was growing up in Houston, her second-grade class went downtown to see the symphony. To hear Duvall tell it, the experience changed her life. “Classical music, for me, inspired interest in the sciences and mathematics Š [it] really opens your eyes to the world, even though it’s…
By the Authority Vested in…
They said it, we didn’t. In the short life as the godparents of an evolving Enron Field, Harris County-Houston Sports Authority directors met, made minutes and moved on. The official record, as seen on the Authority’s Web site, is fully sanitized of the backroom action. But some of the snippets…
Waiting for Turbot
Setting: The Remington Grill. A weekday night. David, Ruth, Robert and Dennis arrive on time, having previously confirmed their reservations. They are shown to a fine table in the center of the room. They are presented with a lovely dish of crudités on ice. No menus. Waiter: Would you like…
Letters
Bean Yanker “Run to Ground” [by Wendy Grossman, March 9] is the first material of yours that I have read. I was spellbound. I couldn’t put the damn thing down. By the time I was done, I could smell the stale cigarettes, taste the cheap beer and hear the cold…
Everyband
It is 1975. The place, a San Francisco nightclub. On a dimly lit dais, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley of KISS are standing center stage guitar-to-guitar, facing each other. As guitarist Ace Frehley closes his eyes and rips through bluesy arpeggios stage right, and as drummer Peter Criss pounds out…
Blue Highways
Just past the San Luis Pass toll bridge that joins the western tip of Galveston Island to the mainland was a billboard for the Red Snapper Inn. The good news the sign signaled was that our long road trip along the grievously potholed Blue Water Highway was almost over; the…
[S]hit
In 1998 Saul Williams generated some buzz by co-writing and starring in the hit of the Cannes and Sundance film festivals, Slam, a breezy tale about spoken-word poetry in New York. Just a few months later MTV Books, capitalizing on his name, released a “book” of Williams’s doggerel, She. A…
Hot Plate
Two-Minute Drill: Banh mi. That’s Vietnamese for a sandwich — ubiquitous in Little Saigon, on the south side of Midtown — and no one does the humble sandwich better than Givral’s [2704 Milam (713)529-0462; and 9308 Bellaire Boulevard, (713)988-7275]. At lunchtime the line can run out the door of the…
Makeup Something
Coal Chamber’s second album, Chamber Music, which was released in September 1999, sold like crazy for a few weeks, basically coasting on favorable prerelease buzz. Five weeks later it fell off the charts, apparently when pissed-off fans discovered the disc did not sound at all like the group’s gold-selling self-titled…
Blackieballed
When Blackie Lawless of W.A.S.P. was writing “I Wanna Be Somebody,” his shock-metal band’s breakthrough song of 1984, he probably was imagining being a superstar rock god. He probably never imagined being what he has become, a lightning rod for free speech. Last week a Montgomery Count y nightclub canceled…
Listen In
30footFALL Fitzgerald’s Friday, March 24 From its opening sleight-of-hand sample — a classic-rock groove that lasted all of 15 seconds before it gave way to straight-ahead punk — to its thrashy crescendo, 30footFALL made sure of two things: that the audience never got its bearings fully established and that forward…