Hot Sauciness
“Oh, shut up, darling,” one member of the Bliss family pronounces to another. The inflection is both cultured and frivolous, as are the characters in Noel Coward’s charmingly jaunty Hay Fever. Enjoying a modestly successful revival by The Company OnStage, this lighthearted 1925 comedy about the smart set offers cool…
The Perils of Being Human
Bill Forsyth has never made a bad movie. Until now. Being Human, the writer/director’s mostly flat and lifeless look at what he thinks being human has meant throughout the ages, lacks the flair and mindful touches that have made Forsyth the darling of critics (even if he’s much overlooked by…
City Life, Family Strife
What is it about movies that causes them, or at least their essential ideas, to so often appear in matched sets? Until a few weeks ago, I had never seen a ’70s-era black film that featured a child being sent out of the city to spend the summer with the…
The Battle for Lavaca Bay
On a windy day last March, Diane Wilson planned to sink her shrimp boat in Lavaca Bay, one of the state’s most important estuaries and a major nursery for shrimp, oysters and fish. While she loved the Seabee, a 42-foot-long wood and fiberglass trawler with which she had fished for…
Decades of Delay
When a petrochemical firm dumped 200 tons of mercury into Japan’s Minimata Bay during the 1950s, fish floated to the surface, waterfowl dropped from the sky and cats that had eaten fish from the bay went crazy. Several hundred people died and more than 10,000 were made ill, many of…
Panic in Memorial Park
Mountain bike enthusiast Jason Horan steered his small pickup truck, with his bicycle in the bed, into the parking lot of the southern half of Memorial Park near the entrance to what area cyclists refer to as the Ho Chi Minh trails — 15 miles of cycling trails through the…
Letters
Incomplete Coverage I am writing in regard to the April 21 article “Still Lives” [by Ann Walton Sieber]. As an active participant in the community of artists’ models, I was excited to participate in what I hoped to be a long-overdue expose of this widely misunderstood occupation. I therefore regret…
Press Picks
thursday may 19 Mama Makes Up Her Mind Renowned author, National Public Radio commentator and first-grade school-teacher Bailey White will read homespun prose from her new book, Mama Makes Up Her Mind. Her tangled tales of not-so-simple life include a yarn about taking her mother to Rosey’s Cafe to eat…
Hot Plate
Eat at Mom’s You know that old saw about never eating at a place called Mom’s? Forget it. At Mom’s Cajun Rotisserie, a radically unpretentious lunch spot next door to the original Antone’s on Taft, you can acquire a Louisiana-style plate lunch better than anything your mother ever served up…
Elvis and Other Attractions
If any other artist were pulling this reunion stunt, we’d call it bankrupt revivalism, or gross opportunism, and dismiss it with a sneer. Much like we’ll soon be doing with the bankrupt revivalist reunion opportunism of the Eagles’ unwelcome reformation. But this isn’t any other artist we’re talking about. It’s…
Rotation
Hole Live Through This DGC As the coverage of Kurt Cobain’s death has so aptly proven, rock critics have never been embarrassed to chip away at the tenuous barriers that musicians erect between their art and their lives. It’s a nasty habit, because it implies that rock musicians, unlike other…
Like Father, Like Son
Rock critic Ed Ward tells a funny story in the liner notes to Early Spanic Boys, a recent Rounder reissue of the Milwaukee band’s long-lost first album. Amongst the flood of product arriving through the mail in hopes of review, Ward noticed one album on a label called Permanent Records,…
Mucking It Up
Well, kiddos, with the Houston Press Music Awards looming on the horizon, we find ourselves embroiled in a minor controversy, and I could use your help. The charmers over at McGonigel’s Mucky Duck — Houston’s premier venue for eclectic-acoustic music — have launched a lobbying campaign to add a category…
Commedia Dell’Art Car
If there’s a theatrical equivalent to Houston’s Art Car parade, I suppose it’s commedia dell’arte. So Carlos Goldoni’s 18th-century farce Mirandolina, in a new translation by Eberle Thomas, was a witty choice by Stages artistic director Sidney Berger, in honor of Italy and the Houston International Festival. The play has…
Gawkers’ Palace
“Mr. Tanenbaum spent $3 million redoing this place,” chirped the perky young waitress, gesturing expansively around the neo-Creole palace called Lagniappe. I believed her. My jaw had swung loose on its hinges as I passed beneath the lowered faux-alabaster ceilings of the bar, where outsize murals of Ingres’ Odalisque and…
The Emperor of Swing
“I’m an acquired taste,” sings Nanki-Poo’s would-be bride, Katisha, “and I’m educating his palate.” The same might be said of the light operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, whose oh-so-English-whimsy The Mikado receives an invigorating American update in Theatre Under the Stars’ current production of Hot Mikado. This big-band, neo-Mikado is…