Last Call
The master of the martini is dead. Near the end, 62-year-old Jose Serna was an elder of sorts to thousands of new arrivals into a revitalized downtown. With his trademark bow tie and black-rimmed Buddy Holly eyeglasses, he was the supreme mixologist behind the bar at Warren’s Inn. He treated…
Go Whisper It on the Mountain
At Mary Jane’s a couple of weeks ago Sevenfold played to a nearly packed house. Bulging middle-agers looking uncomfortable in jeans, big-haired college gals and excessively pierced freakazoids all seemed to be enjoying themselves, grooving along to the melodic rock. As with any club performance, most ears were adjusted to…
NASA Gets Weird
Granted, mock spaceships, latex aliens and UFO floats are unusual subjects for an exhibit, but stranger still is the fact that all this can be found at Space Center Houston, a place usually devoted to serious human exploration of the stars, in its new exhibit, “Roswell and the Alien Invasion.”…
Playbill
For some, the Mekons have attained cult status. For the rest of us, England’s most eclectic post-punk unit is confounding and has been since its formation in Leeds in the late 1970s. Gutter punk, honky-tonk, acid-folk or power pop, the band, whose constantly changing lineup revolves around its two steadfast…
The Axman Cometh
When Emanuel Ax asked John Adams to write a concerto for him, the composer quickly agreed. After all, since winning the first Arthur Rubenstein International Piano Competition in 1974 at the age of 24, Ax has been one of the most sought-after soloists on the circuit. Known for his empathetic…
Listen In
The Hollisters Fabulous Satellite Lounge Friday, March 3 While the Fabulous Satellite Lounge isn’t a traditional roadhouse, it is a great venue to hear the Hollisters. The Satellite is about drinking and dancing, and that’s what the Hollisters made everyone packed into the place want to do last week. The…
Hot Plate
For Whom the Bell Tolls: When one local adman treats his employees to lunch at Maxim’s [3755 Richmond, (713)877-8899], he insists they order the Charlie Bell Salad, perhaps because he doesn’t want to be the only person accused of garlic breath. The classic salad ($9.75, $16.25 and $23.25) is topped…
Something Old, Something New
Produced as a 100th birthday salute to one of the 20th century’s most significant British playwrights, Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, as directed by Stephen Rayne, is an absolutely fetching show, dripping gorgeous opulence across the Alley’s main stage. The now famous Bliss family consists of four arty eccentrics who break…
Shut Your Mouth
Over the sounds of crashing water and a bellowing steamship, softly echoing guitar tones coalesce a familiar melody. A pause — one, two, three — then the tempo doubles and the song begins. It is Los Straitjackets’ take on “My Heart Will Go On,” the Grammy-winning hit from 1997’s Titanic…
Walking The Dead
The warehouse district can be an intimidating maze of shadows, dark alleys and twisting streets. But Walking the Dead, Keith Curran’s nifty little play about performance art, gender identity and sexual stereotypes, makes winding through the downtown labyrinth worth every wrong turn. Funny, politically savvy and terribly saucy, this newest…
Double Time
When Bob Henschen played a one-night stand with Dizzy Gillespie in 1991, he didn’t have to worry about the crazy piano charts the legendary trumpeter was known for. By that point in his career, Gillespie was mostly playing standards and talking a lot on stage, letting his affable personality carry…
Lana Verner, Lana Verner
Theater LaB continues its ultra-silly Camp Alamo series with the world premiere of Blair Fell’s Lana Verner, Lana Verner, an outlandish, floozy bit of laugh-out-loud, totally tasteless fluff that leaps back into 1950s Hollywood, where blond bombshells ruled the world. The story starts when Lana (Therese Kotara) meets Sasheemi (Tracy…
What the Doctor Ordered
The folk at Channel 2 probably thought they had picked a winner when they decided to begin airing a syndicated hour-long talk show by Dr. Laura Schlessinger, who is looking to parlay her radio fame into television riches. Instead of a winner, though, KPRC has found itself stuck in a…
Things Change
In creating a portrait of Jo March in Little Women, Louisa May Alcott gave us a gutsy, colorful tomboy who is unrivaled in 19th-century fiction. But no matter how intently critics argue that the story should be considered serious literature, it’s still a girls’ book. It’s one of those precious,…
News of the Weird
Lead StoriesCynthia Lane told reporters in February that she would file a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission because Windsor Regional Hospital had labeled her Down syndrome child on charts as “FLK,” which several health care staffers told her was a commonly used term meaning “funny-looking kid.” Said the…
Old Age Question
The Menil Collection’s Willem de Kooning exhibition, curated by Klaus Kertess, seeks to explore the painter’s creative process, but winds up raising even more provocative questions about art, aging and the mental process. The intriguing “Willem de Kooning: In Process” is the second consecutive abstract expressionist show from the Menil,…
Letters
Old Friends Add Up I want to thank you for writing about Mickey Dunlap [“Turnstyled and Junkpiled,” by Brad Tyer, February 17]. I went to school in Graham with Mickey from sixth grade through eighth. I have since moved away, but I often think about him and where he is…
Aimin’ High
Shooting Gallery, the independent film company best known for the Oscar-winner Sling Blade, has introduced a new wrinkle to the movie biz. After producing and distributing such projects as Henry Fool, Laws of Gravity and The 24 Hour Woman, the company has launched the Shooting Gallery Film Series, a sort…
Dish
Call it a second helping: Weingarten Realty, once again, is politely escorting one of its longtime tenants out of his space in the River Oaks Shopping Center to make room for someone else. A recent deal has been worked out to move ALLRECORDS [soon to be at 1955 West Gray,…
Scotch on the Rocks
You’ve got to feel sorry for the Scottish Board of Tourism. First the Loch Ness monster is exposed as a fake, then the nation’s film industry starts to pick up speed. Now normally a successful film industry would be great for a country’s image, but in the case of Scotland,…
Inner-City Suburban
One of the many things I like about Montrose is its defiant rejection of cookie-cutter, franchised theme restaurants. It’s a source of neighborhood pride, and rightly so. Neartown dining patterns seem to skip straight from the hiply scruffy ethnic joints like Taqueria La Jaliciense or Niko Niko’s to the swanning…
Out of Orbit
Garry Shandling does not have a face for the big screen. He has a mug that seems to spread to the edges of the theater; it’s like an approaching storm front, a sky full of billowing clouds roaring in from the north. And it’s a face built for two emotions:…
Jungle Fever
I ate my last slice of Chuck E. Cheese’s pizza in 1990, when my five-year-old daughter attended a friend’s birthday party. I remembered thinking at the time, if I never have to suffer through another impromptu jam session from mechanical bears “plucking” their banjos and “beating” their drums, it will…
Run to Ground
Lynette Barnett swiped her ID card at the security gate. Then she swiped it again for the man four feet behind her. The blond prison guard at Crossroads Correctional Center in Cameron, Missouri, walked through the last check the way she did every day and strolled to the parking lot…
Justice on the Block
Lawyer Michelle Leitner pensively studies the first lines of a script for a minute-long radio commercial being taped for her husband, Jim. “It just starts strange,” she says, as they wait in a cramped production booth at the KPRC talk radio studio on the Katy Freeway. “Concerned voters!” exhorts Leitner’s…
Demolished Dreams
Like most of the rental houses in the Freedmen’s Town section of the Fourth Ward, the two-story duplex at 1023 Bailey Street hadn’t received much in the way of even routine maintenance for years, if not decades. Last fall an inspector from the city’s Neighborhood Protection Division discovered that Lizzie…
Porn At Peace
On one side of Fairdale Lane, the signs at Rick’s Cabaret beckon the breast lovers of Houston, as they always have. As many as a few hundred customers daily may be drawn to the topless dancers of this club. Rick’s bills itself as an upscale adult establishment, but it was…