The Color of Money
On Friday, March 18, when Harris County released its draft budget, a number of county justices of the peace saw evidence of something they’d suspected for weeks: a recent and unusual audit of justice courts had less to do with tracking county money than it did with finding out how…
Once More, The Vision Thing
Traversing the no-man’s-land that surrounds the George R. Brown Convention Center by night, it was hard to know whether to snicker or sigh at the “Imagine Houston” sign on the electronic marquee. Other Beatles titles seem more appropriate than the John Lennon song to our image-deprived, plan-less city. “Why Don’t…
Press Picks
thursday march 31 Senior Citizens’ Prom Stouffer Presidente Hotel will be decked out as if for the glamorous proms of the ’30s and ’40s, and this senior prom is for genuine senior citizens –65 and older. This swing-time celebration will feature dancing to the Cary Richards Orchestra’s renditions of tunes…
Rotation
Atomic Opera For Madmen Only Giant Houston’s prog-rock trinity of King’s X, Galactic Cowboys and Atomic Opera keeps tempting reviewers (at least this reviewer) to use words like “interchangeability.” All share a similar guitar sound, vocal harmonies and stop-sign time changes. All have shared, at one point or another, the…
Critic’s Choice
It’s easy to get sidetracked by the number of times the word “legendary” appears in proximity to white blues-harp, er, legend Charlie Musselwhite, and it’s easy to forget that the man just turned 50 this year. As blues legends go, he’s a babe in the woods. You won’t hear inexperience…
Live Shots
Silkworm with aMiniature Sunday, March 20 Epstein’s One of the surest symptoms that your alternative rock is bloating is the emergence of the rock-star ego. That, as much as anything, is what punk rock set out to destroy 20 years ago, and the bands on this double bill have learned…
Pink Pigs and Scarred Psyches
It started, as do so many of life’s guilty pleasures, in junior high school. My more prescient friends were busy mail-ordering indie punk singles by the crate, documenting the New Wave blow by blow on their parents’ crappy turntables. Although I finally, almost by accident, brought home the Sex Pistols’…
Hickman’s Science Project
Former HSPVA golden girl Sara Hickman lives in Dallas these days, but if the audience that turned out for her Rockefeller’s showcase some months back is any indication, she can always count on a crowd in her hometown. What she’s had a more difficult time counting on is record-label support…
Hot Plate
My Trip to West U I prefer West U in small doses. I get to say that because I used to live there, in a charming frame bungalow that got torn down and replaced by a monster house that bulges out to the lot line. That’s the kind of thing…
Letters
Term Limitations All Around The fawning tone of Susie Kalil’s latest review [Art, “What Moves Us Deeply,” March 17] is hard to take seriously. Does she think she does Mr. McGee any favors with her overworked thesaurus and lack of balance? Indeed, it is more of a hindrance to the…
Chopsticks at the Ready
Four or five bites into our dinner at the Chinese Cafe, the pace accelerated exponentially: chopsticks flew, serving spoons clanked furiously, the tabletop lazy Susan spun and spun and spun. A gimme-some-more-of-that-kung-pao-chicken look glinted in my friends’ eyes; they had seemed politely dubious at the news that I’d found a…
Socialist Surrealism
While Cuban photography of the 1960s and ’70s was characterized by epic imagery and heroic representation and sentiment, “The New Generation: Two Decades of Contemporary Cuban Photog-raphy from the Island” clearly shows that today, 35 years after the Cuban Revolution, a different artistic sensibility is expressing itself. A new generation…
Trey’s Touch
Touched, 24-year-old Houston choreographer Trey McIntyre’s newest work for the Houston Ballet, is a frenzied celebration of things that go bump in the dark, then see the light. Two of the piece’s four movements are lit only by flashlights held in the hands of the barefoot dancers, who must know…
New Wave AIDS
Savage Nights dominated last year’s Cesars, the French equivalent of the Oscars. But it could scarcely be more different from Hollywood’s recently honored Philadelphia, despite having the theme of AIDS in common. Philadelphia, for all its technical and sociological virtues, was an aesthetically safe movie. Savage Nights is much more…
Cultivating a Career
Houston filmmaker Alex Georges wasn’t hard to pick out of the crowd of cinephiles entering Austin’s venerable Dobie Theater last Monday. The Dobie, one of the venues for the new South by Southwest film festival, could barely contain the big, dark-haired, square-jawed Georges. Built more along the lines of a…
A Comedy of Marryment
If real-life nuptials are even a quarter as funny as those portrayed in Four Weddings and a Funeral, get me to the church on time. Mike Newell’s very English romantic comedy features reception dancing so spastic that it reflects badly even on cute children, and a folk duo so frightful…
Hard Times at the Ballet
To open the Houston Ballet’s production of the fourth act of the 19th-century classic La Bayadere, 24 women dressed in pink tights and white tutus descend a darkened ramp to a black and empty stage. With each delicious, slow phrase of the spun-sugar music, a dancer enters from the top…