That’s Some Self-help
Every Wednesday and Sunday night between the hours of 2 and 6 a.m., Sean Young works it at Club Some. He doesn’t work it in the RuPaul way of the go-go dancers and the pacifier-sucking club kids who frequent the dank, dark basement next to Emo’s; he works it on…
Phallic Four
Anyone with a ten-year-old girl at home will immediately recognize Hysteric Studs by Charlotte Mann. The British import, on stage at Theater LaB, is a silly, rowdy, testosterone-laden version of the equally silly Spice Girls movie Spice World. Tessa Walker, who directed the play’s London premiere, put together a handsome…
Hot Plate
A gauntlet of goodies: Try to ignore the creamy profusion of profiteroles and pistachio cream cakes long enough to reach the splendid peach-plum amaretto tart, all the way at the end of the imposing glass case at the Epicure French Bakery and Tea Room [2005 West Gray, (713)520-6174]. Austrian-trained pastry…
A Hedda His Time
Henrik Ibsen, who died in 1906, is generally considered the father of modern drama. He’s the first playwright to create tragedies about ordinary people, and he wrote plays in prose rather than poetry. But anyone who considers the title character in Hedda Gabler ordinary ought to have her head examined…
Sorry, Charlie
With their claws in everything from hard Chicago blues to rockabilly to bebop to even C&W swing, Little Charlie and the Nightcats are nothing if not one of the most versatile bands performing and recording under the all-encompassing genre “the blues.” So it’s surprising to find it’s only with this…
Couch Capo
When hitmen wore hats and Cadillacs had running boards, the average Mafia don could knock off the Tattaglia brothers in mid afternoon and sit down to a nice plate of chicken cacciatore that evening, content that he’d seen to the family business and blazed a path for his first-born son’s…
Punk Drunks
GBH is by no means a complicated band. Both musically and personally, its members seem to subsist entirely on a diet of punk and drink, as both items have been not only the thrust of 80 percent of their subject matter, but also one of the main reasons they continue…
Media Mother
The independent production/distribution company The Shooting Gallery probably got a lot more attention when Monica Lewinsky showed up in Washington wearing a cap with its logo than is likely from the release of The 24 Hour Woman, a modest, deserving film from writer/director Nancy Savoca. Savoca has made three earlier…
Pop Goes the Quartet
Take a couple of classical fiddlers, mix in some fiery oboe licks, throw in a little freebase accordion, serve it up with megadoses of a Puccini-loving Irish tenor, and what’s the end result? The inimitable, irreverent flavor of Quartetto Gelato. Dubbed “debut artist of the year” in 1996 by National…
Cinematic Feet
Tango provides a happy intersection of the never-waning craze for the intense, erotic Argentinean dance-and-music art form and venerable Spanish writer-director Carlos Saura’s penchant for performance films featuring song and dance (Blood Wedding, Carmen). His most recent entry in this genre was Flamenco, beautifully shot by Vittorio Storaro (most famed…
It Takes One
Lonestar is made up of five guys from Texas who each separately took their dreams of stardom to Nashville. It’s the kind of story that usually ends with crushed hopes and poverty, or worse. Very few end the way Lonestar’s does: with gold records and No. 1 hits. But when…
Regular Joe
In the three decades that director Ken Loach has been a steadfast champion of the British working class, his films have lost none of their sting. Whether examining a brutal Belfast police incident in Hidden Agenda (1990) or the plight of an unemployed man struggling to buy his daughter a…
Phat Cat
When Lee Rocker wants to, say, hit a local California juke joint, he hops in his 1959 Ford Skyliner, a 19-foot-long, red street machine with white trim he picked up five years ago in Garland, Texas. When Lee Rocker wants to get dressed for a gig or even for a…
Adding It All Up
Even with the generally buoyant, election-stoked mood about public education in Texas, you don’t have to look far to find the bad news. No farther than the comfortable north Houston living room of Larry and Stephanie Johnson on a Wednesday night. Ever since Stephanie’s teenage son, Stecil, died in a…
Easy on Friday Night
In the 1970s, as lead singer of The Commodores, Lionel Richie helped usher in the disco era. In the 1980s, he gained success as a one-man hit factory. The man was, next to Michael Jackson, the biggest pop star of the decade. He matched Irving Berlin for No. 1 tunes,…
Kindred Spirits
Driving down the road, Pete Haviland sees ghosts of dead dogs. Once he drove his car into a field, swerving to miss a brown chow that wasn’t there when he got out to check. When he shivers, his girlfriend knows he’s seen something. What bothers him is when he sees…
Battlin’ Beignets
Joachim Jantzen didn’t much like his job as night manager of Crescent City Beignets [3260 Westheimer, (713)520-8291], admits his wife, Teda, because he wasn’t overly fond of the owner, 32-year-old Tucker Bunch. But Jantzen was working on his master’s degree by day and needed to work by night, so he…
Megascreen Cinemas March In
Even on an early mid-week evening, the expansive parking lot of the Tinseltown USA Westchase is half full. Cinemark’s 24-screen complex beckons viewers with splashy neon and Mardi Gras colors. Wildly successful by any standard, Westchase has outgrossed the rest of Cinemark’s 280 theaters nationally since its marquee lights first…
The Cajun Rages
Report #00001 New Orleans Food Police To: Treebeard’s Market Square location 315 Travis (713)752-2601 As a transplanted Cajun, I feel it’s my duty to inspect the various Houston restaurants that claim to serve Louisiana-style food. I had high hopes for your restaurant, given its lunch crowds and a glowing review…
News Hostage
Witnesses Say Sun Rose in East We always like to give credit where it’s due, so let’s hand out a hearty round of congratulations to the Houston Chronicle for its worldwide scoop, bannered across the front page of its Sunday, February 21, edition, that Muhammad Ali is … well …..
Bang-up Bento Boxes
I was interested to read recently that American food pundits have pronounced rutabagas and bento boxes as the coming culinary fads. Rutabagas? Yawn. If 1999 is going to be the year of the rutabaga, I want out of the food biz now. But bento boxes — the sexy, sleek lunch…
Has Robert Eckels Lost His Mind?
In sentencing Ben Reyes and Betti Maldonado last week for their roles in bribing city officials during an FBI sting operation, a stern-faced Judge David Hittner ratcheted up by two levels the time the pair would serve in jail. The federal judge declared that the duo “tarnished the public view…
News of the Weird
Lead Stories *In September a Tennessee appeals court rejected a woman’s challenge to a child custody ruling that she said endangers her twelve-year-old son. According to the court: “Record does not support finding that unsupervised visitation with husband puts child in danger. [T]here is not one whisper of anything improper…
Letters
Sense of Balance Maybe I don’t read enough print journalism, or maybe I just read the bad stuff. Regardless, I found Brad Tyer’s piece on Parr’s cats [“Biggest Game in Town,” February 11] to be what every piece of journalism is supposed to be: objective and honest. Needless to say,…
Night & Day
Thursday March 4 Appraising the significance of Bournonville’s 19th-century romantic ballet, La Sylphide, George Balanchine once said, “Ballet history was changed completely by the work …[it’s] a revolution in the art of dancing that we still witness whenever we go to the ballet….” High praise, coming from one of the…
Mind Over Midway
The carnival midway is the last great American bastion of, oh, we’ll call it, “chivalry.” Sure, women are allowed to drop $2 a ball at any booth they choose, but it’s men — from middle school to middle age — who are goaded to “win something for the little lady.”…