Ryan Adams, with Alanis Morissette
Some may blow off the ’70s-style rock on Ryan Adams’s second solo LP, Gold, as derivative of everyone from Gram Parsons to Adams’s biggest fan, Elton John, but you’ve got to give the former Whiskeytown front man his bona fides as rock’s first and only aw-shucks megalomaniac. Prepare to see…
The Dutiful Son
After school, 14-year-old Ted Stubbs rode his bike a mile down Galveston’s oyster-shell roads to visit his Catholic-school classmate David Hisey. They both lived in Fish Village, a cluster of streets a few blocks up from the seawall, all named after tuna and trout. David had a record player, and…
Shadows of the Empire
Three years have passed since The Phantom Menace thrilled some and infuriated others, yet the schism in the Church of Lucas remains. Die-hard supporters still refuse to admit that Episode I has some truly awful acting, dialogue and borderline offensive caricatures; and dyed-in-the-wool detractors won’t acknowledge that, despite its faults,…
Small Wonder
“I wish it wouldn’t take so long to enjoy someone else’s life,” says 61-year-old Frank Davis. He’s painstakingly repairing one of the many locomotives his late grandfather crafted out of toilet paper rolls, balsa wood and bits of wire. The magnifying eyeglasses on his nose make him look like a…
Salton Crackers
If you enjoy movies about a violently widowed man who’s unsure of his identity — and is covered in tattoos that remind him of his mission of vengeance — but you can’t be bothered with the frustration of watching a movie that’s edited backward, put that Memento DVD back on…
Doobieous Bust
May 4 was more than just another Saturday night at Fitzgerald’s. Roughly 500 people gathered at the gritty rock ‘n’ roll venue to mark Liberation Day, an international event for the decriminalization of marijuana. While bands jammed on the upstairs and downstairs stages, drug-reform advocates dutifully distributed information on medical…
Game Boy
It’s appropriate that Universal would debut About a Boy against the latest installment in the Lucas juggernaut. Certainly it’s daring, which is the last thing one ever expected to say about a film starring Hugh Grant. Consider: Clones is an enormous movie that signifies nothing outside of itself, as disposable…
Swept Away
The local television stations are still rolling out their best market-researched items for sweeps month, often to the chagrin of hapless viewers. We haven’t seen everything, but we’ve been unable to escape some things. What’s hot this year? Getting up close and personal with the on-air staff. Channel 2 has…
Mighty Hermaphrodite
An 18th-century battle of the sexes, The Triumph of Love contains a radiant performance by Mira Sorvino as a princess whose complicated scheme to win the man she loves finds her juggling three suitors at once, all while disguised as a man. “I’m losing track of my own plot,” she…
Bringing Out the Dead
When “Titanic: The Artifact Exhibit” docks at the Houston Museum of Natural Science this weekend, you’ll find that the term “exhibit” is a little misleading. With an accompanying IMAX film and a planetarium show of the night sky on April 14, 1912, this memorial to the disaster could become a…
A Classic Mistake
Main Street Theater’s latest offering is simply a tough play to like. Frederick Lonsdale’s 1927 On Approval takes us to a rarefied universe that hardly seems relevant to current American audiences. It’s a place where snooty dukes recline across silk-covered chaise lounges, wealthy grandes dames in diamonds whine about the…
IMAX by Extraterrestrials
A narrow tunnel closes in on you. You squeeze your way through an opening that looks no bigger than a doggy door. The tiny room beyond — that’s your destination. But wait, there’s another astronaut already there, and you’re going to join him. Space may be vast and grand and…
Arsenic and Old Lace
Mark Flood is making pretty paintings, and that’s okay. The conceptual malcontent, who has sold ad space on his canvases and had his work seized by Houston police as evidence of a satanic cult, is now creating lushly colored canvases of, um, lace — the parlor tablecloth kind. His smart-ass…
A Restaurant Maxim
When Maxim’s, a Houston dining institution for half a century, served its last meal in January 2001, it was expected to reopen within a year as the Pappas brothers’ first French restaurant. But a spokesperson for the chain says the Maxim’s renovation is on hold. Rumors throughout the restaurant industry…
Pie Kids
At first, they approach tentatively, their pens and posters timidly extended as though afraid the two men standing beneath the blank movie screen might bite or bark them out of the theater. “No, no,” insists Chris Weitz, standing next to his older brother Paul. “I’m happy to sign your poster,”…
Wheat Meat
Wheat meat Hard-core Texas carnivores may sniff disapprovingly at the concept of meatless barbecue, but in the right hands, simple, unassuming wheat gluten can be turned into a convincing doppelgänger of its fleshy counterpart. You’re never going to get any closer to a chopped beef sandwich — without hardening your…
Death of a Bar Band
If there’s one band that could single-handedly prove Racket’s belief in a Houston Press Music Award jinx, it’s the Hollisters. They harvested a bushel-basket of our awards in the mid- to late ’90s (and dared to boast that fact on their Web site). Then, after a typically blistering set at…
Go Ask Alice
Americans make dismal historians. Most of us can’t name our own great-grandparents, much less offer a coherent explanation for the decline of the Roman Empire. Perversely, this amnesiac regard for the past has become a manifestation of national pride. Unlike, say, England — a country still wringing money from druids,…
Gays and God
Gays and God Pick the battles: When will we in the gay community learn that not all churches and places of worship are willing to welcome us into their services, hearts and homes [“God Only Knows,” by Margaret Downing, May 2]? Right now we are at the midpoint of our…
Sitars in Her Eyes
The sitar is one hell of a difficult instrument to play, much less master. With up to 21 strings, it is an unwieldy beast that one must be pretty limber just to hold properly. Players treat the instrument and its music with deep respect, often announcing pieces in hushed tones,…
Midtown’s New Attitude
The little black tablecloths and the giant red lipstick columns make my heart beat faster every time I walk into Blowfish. The high dividers between the booths are covered in an electric crimson fabric with silver spirals and zigzags, and the banquettes are upholstered in a print that looks like…
Moving On Up
It was Saturday night, and it looked like the White Shirt Fashion Fling Weekend was starting to unravel. The first half of the two-night fiesta, designed by Houston-based promoters Reginald Rhodes and Sedrick Brass to celebrate the duo’s one-year anniversary as media promotions group I10 Media, had gone off without…
Force of Nature
They say a hurricane is one of the strongest forces of nature. But at Floyd’s Cajun Kitchen (1200 Durham, 713-864-5600), they’re as casual about their house cocktail as a Florida native is about high winds. They don’t even bother to use the traditional hurricane glass, opting instead for a plastic…
Nappy Roots
Here’s how you find Nappy Roots. Leave Atlanta, where Outkast reigns. Then head northwest through Tennessee, the state Arrested Development once employed as a metaphor for black (nay, human) tradition and transcendence. Keep going, and eventually you’ll wind up in the presumably unlikely stomping grounds — western Kentucky! — of…
Various Artists
Tribute albums are generally “great ideas” that in most cases should have stayed just that. Sure, there are some that work — from the Sweet Relief collection of Victoria Williams songs to the recent Ray Davies/Kinks set This Is Where I Belong — but rarely do they do so in…
Garbage
Squeezed from the piss-and-vinegar concoction that is Shirley Manson and Butch Vig, Garbage has more bouts of trash-talking, fits of pique and snotty stand-offs in an average week than most bands could endure over the course of their existence. Odd, then, that these pop-rock existentialists have lasted seven years and…
The Googe
While this band’s name might evoke some nasty creature from the Lord of the Rings trilogy — Gollum versus the Googe, anyone? — it’s actually the correct pronunciation of singer- songwriter-guitarist Denise Gouge’s surname. The Houston-based act, which released its debut, Consume Me, at the tail end of 2001, is…