Good Cop, Bad Cop
One can only imagine the pitch meeting at which comedian-turned-film actor Denis Leary told ABC programming execs he wanted to write and star in a show about a pill-popping, Scotch-swilling, chain-smoking, adulterous New York City cop who utters obscenities as casually as he exhales. It’ll be a 30-minute show, Leary…
Beefing Up the Coach
Dom Capers can’t believe how long the line is at Goode Co. Barbeque. And I can’t believe that this is the first time the head coach of our new NFL expansion team has been to a Texas barbecue joint. “Pay attention,” I tell the coach. “Bum Phillips and Earl Campbell…
Letters
No Muckraker Debra’s nice but lite: Just want to compliment you on a great story [“Heir Time,” by Wendy Grossman, February 15]! Most of my reads of the Press come up with 50 percent truth, 50 percent posturing by the paper — still a very interesting alternative to the Chronicle…
Lost in the Capsicum Sea
If you can’t decide between the red pepper soup ($4.95 a bowl) and the poblano soup ($4.50 a bowl) at Cafe Red Onion [3910 Kirby Drive, (713)807-1122; 12041 Northwest Freeway, (713)957-0957], then go ahead and order a cup ($2.50 each) of each. That way, you can discover how chef Rafael…
Around the Parks in 38 Days
Summer 1998. Baseball. McGwire and Sosa. The home run chase. Impressive, right? Try these numbers: Thirty ballparks, 38 days, 15,000 miles. All by car. Dave Kaval and Brad Null did it, starting on June 20, 1998, in San Francisco and ending on July 27 in Kansas City. They’ve documented the…
Playmaker
It was the first exhibition game of the 1986 NFL season, and few football games are more insignificant than the first exhibition of the year. Team starters may play for a drive or two before letting the scrubs come on to scramble for jobs, but the veterans typically take it…
Star Bucks
In May 1977, it had all the makings of a box office disaster. The script had been turned down by numerous studios. It had no major stars and a troubled production. And though its obsessive creator had a major hit with a teen comedy, George Lucas had every reason to…
Stirred and Shaken
The score is tied with a few minutes remaining, and all eyes are on the TV at Ernie’s on Banks [1010 Banks, (713)526-4566]. It’s a great neighborhood sports bar with picture windows on a little park and a couple of pool tables — as good a place as any to…
Crap Shoot
Austin’s mega-music conference South by Southwest is many things to many people. For some struggling bands, it offers the faint glimmer of discovery. For jaded veteran acts, it’s an annoying label obligation that comes with the bonus of playing to the backs of industry suits with cell phones glued to…
Heart Attack
Former Houstonian Billy Harper is an aggressive tenor saxophonist, with a tone that’s both gripping and penetrating. He’s not interested in seducing his audiences; he prefers to challenge them, and his bandmates, with a strong and relentless attack whose origins can be traced not to the practice room but to…
Tattoo Jew
Davenen is the Yiddish term for Jewish prayer. There’s a different Yiddish word for “Christian prayer,” since davening implies more of an animated conversation with God. When you daven, your body gesticulates. Shoulders rock. Necks sway. Your head bobs back and forth. The waist bows until all the vertebrae in…
Heymakers
It’s not that the Heymakers are unworthy. Actually, the Austin-centric quartet of Carl Cooley (a Houston native), Dennis Ku, John Dorn and Rick Broussard has decent chops for an alternative country/ No Depression/traditional country/ whateverthehellyouwannacallit band. And Making Hey certainly has the requisite numbers involving loose wimmin, harsh tequila, open…
Playbill
Don’t tell Pittsburgh natives Anti-Flag that the days of politically driven punk music are over. In a genre dominated by copycats bemoaning romantic hardships or bragging about how punk they are, Anti-Flag still cranks out tunes with the rebellious convictions of years past. Growing up in a home where activism…
Eightball & MJG/South Park Mexican
Houston fans sometimes get a little worried when a local rapper blows up and prepares to take on the world. As any Houstonian, we’ll admit we’re a fickle lot. If the rapper in question makes us look bad by not coming correct, we’ll forget about their asses faster than we…
Stay the Coarse
Georges Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear is anything but politically correct. The famous French farce from 1907 makes fun of anybody and everybody who happens into this utterly silly world, which has been painted in shades of gleaming white and scaldingly hot pink in the Alley’s new production. Artistic…
Playbill
If it’s mid-March in Houston, you can count on two things: Bars across the city will pour some green dye in their beer and “go Irish,” and the Bob Marley Festival will praise Jah locally before launching a national tour. Easily the city’s most underrated event, the festival is two…
About Face
People with snub noses are vain, untruthful, unstable, unfaithful and seducers.” So wrote Barthélemy Coclès in his 1533 treatise Physiognomonia. The now discredited pseudoscience of physiognomy was at its peak during the 18th and 19th centuries, when proponents believed that a host of personality traits — criminal tendencies, in particular…
Empty Visions
Hollywood appears to be developing a healthy sense of humor about Valentine’s Day, which, from this cynic’s perspective, is a good thing. In the new millennium, rather than the usual romantic trifles like Return to Me, we’ve seen Valentine (bitter ex-nerd cuts beautiful people to bits), Hannibal (sadistic brain-eater as…
The Badge Means You Owe
She never saw the dunning notice, but that was her name up at the top, beneath the letterhead and badge-shaped logo of the Texas State Fraternal Order of Police. “Dear Daisy Bostick,” the letter read, “On 12/06/00, you made commitment over the phone for $35. Please make your Check or…
Sex, Lies and Countertenors
Those who prefer Shakespeare and Greek tragedy to the melodrama of the opera house might find reason to tiptoe into Houston Grand Opera’s new period production of Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea. The first opera based on a historical incident, Poppea re-creates Roman emperor Nero’s devilish spurning of his wife,…
Mystery Code
As a sophomore, Chas Davis became so disenchanted with his school that he began wearing a bright orange shirt paired with orange insulated wind pants to class. On the front of the shirt he painted “Property of Alvin High School.” On the back he stenciled his student ID number and…
Adjust the Contrast
Director John Herzfeld’s last feature, 1996’s droll and underrated 2 Days in the Valley, was a more than adequate counterbalance to the catastrophe of his first feature, Two of a Kind, a 1983 John Travolta vehicle that, together with Moment by Moment, put its star on the fast track from…
The Comeback Kid
Beatrice Gonzales wrecked her life on New Year’s Eve 1995, not that she can remember much about it. She knows that she and her husband had been fighting. She knows that she’d been drinking and using drugs. She knows that she almost killed her one-year-old baby that night when she…
Knowing Right from Wrong
Dressed in standard prison whites and sporting a burr haircut and black horn-rimmed glasses with Coke bottle-thick lenses that both magnify and blur his eyes, Johnny Paul Penry picks up the telephone in the visiting area of Texas’s death row where he has spent the last 22 years. “What’s this…
Politics of the Dance
If Houston Grand Opera failed to have a note taker at a dramatic and sometimes teary ad hoc meeting of dancers and staff of the Houston Ballet last week, it missed out on a great plot for one of HGO chief David Gockley’s hypermodern productions. Here’s the outline for the…
Win a Few, Lose One
When a federal jury in Miami decided on February 20 that Exxon had defrauded its service station dealers out of $500 million, the company had its usual responses at the ready. We didn’t do anything wrong, Exxon spokespeople told the media. We always behave ethically, they said. We’ll win on…