Press Picks
thursday may 2 Susannah Samuel Ramey is back, in the opera that made Carlisle Floyd. Floyd, no fool, builds his operas not from the weird, large-scale drama of ancient classics but from the weird, large-scale drama of the Bible Belt. His Willie Stark (based on All the King’s Men) and…
Vallone (Jr.) Does Dallas
Shoving my way through the crush of patrons in Dallas’ joey’s — the six-month-old restaurant owned by Joey Vallone, 24-year-old offspring of Houston dining doyen Tony Vallone — I noted that my companion, a real head-turner, was the target of even more appraising looks than usual. When I commented on…
What Invasion?
At best, the latest campaign to move English pop bands back atop the American charts has netted mixed results. So far, Oasis is absorbing a majority of the platinum benefits, while other U.K. groups are left to the cult-sized remains. And now, just when all the talk of the next…
Static
Surreally ordinary… It’s tough being subversively normal. The Surrealtors suffer from that dilemma — average guys with average lives trying to market what sounds like relatively average pop music. As a result, they don’t really fit in anywhere in Houston. “We don’t sound like anything around here,” says George Kovacik,…
Rotation
Stone Temple Pilots Tiny Music … Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop Atlantic It’s difficult to muster up any pity for Stone Temple Pilots. The San Diego quartet has sold a gazillion albums, and still bandleader Scott Weiland can’t manage a smile, because people keep saying nasty things about his…
Sex Sells
R&B crooner R. Kelly — a.k.a. Robert Kelly — has never been one for modest amounts of anything. A prolific sexual honesty pervades his work — sometimes discreetly, but more often blatantly. Recent song titles such as “Hump Bounce” and “Down Low (Nobody Has to Know)” pretty much sum it…
Noise, or Art?
It’s just after 10 p.m. on a Sunday, and 42-year-old Scott Sommers is right where he’s been, more or less, once a week for the past 20 years: in the DJ booth at Pacifica radio KPFT/90.1 FM, hosting one of that station’s longest-running programs, The Avant-Garde Show. A slightly paunchy…
Dead Woman Walking
Somewhere down the road, maybe a year or two from now, it may be possible to pass impartial judgment on Last Dance, a death row drama that deserves at least a footnote in the history of bad timing. It comes to us less than six months after the release of…
Punchy Fun
Very much like politicians on the campaign trail, most mainstream Hollywood movies try to be all things to all people. And that goes a long way toward explaining why possibly divisive subjects are treated so gingerly, if at all, in the glossy attractions at your friendly neighborhood multiplex. More often…
Meat Market
“It’s alive!” gasped a friend. What she was talking about was part of the menu offerings being presented to her at the new Morton’s of Chicago. One of the last things you expect to hear — or for that matter, want to hear — when you’re dining at an upscale…
Tales From the Brookside
To a traveler passing by on the highway, Brookside Village, a tiny, blue-collar community 30 minutes southeast of Houston, seems the picture of bucolic tranquillity. If, that is, you happen to notice it: for anyone driving along FM 518, the main drag of Pearland, the green sign quietly noting that…
Goin’ South
Aside from the headlights of our Toyota 4-Runner, there is little illumination along the narrow, dusty road leading into the village of Coatlan del Rio in south-central Mexico. The hot line of a forest fire on a nearby hill, small torches keeping the crops warm in the fields and a…
Oh, Ken! Oh, Aladdin!
Over the last few weeks, Jeff Owen has become something of an expert on Walt Disney’s Aladdin. Walking into a meeting, he carries an oversized children’s picture book that details the story that turned the Arabian Nights personality into a star of the American screen, and without much prompting he…
Case Closed?
Early on the morning of May 4, 1995, Houston Police Lieutenant Alan Mabry left his home in the Pecan Grove subdivision to get some milk at a nearby convenience store. He never returned. About ten hours later, his body was pulled from Jones Creek in a rural part of Fort…
The Insider
Face on the Cutting Room Floor It’s been a few decades since Bob Lanier looked as good as he does on the cover of BodySmart magazine, but that hasn’t kept the Chronicle from backing out of a signed agreement to distribute 67,000 copies of the debut issue of the health-and-fitness…
Stadia Watch
It appears the latest plan o’ the day may result in a cozy baseball-only stadium for the Astros, with or without a retractable roof. Such a vintage-style ballpark would be another coup for owner Drayton McLane, whose negotiations to sell the team to an out-of-towner netted him a free PR…
Letters
My Friend Jay Having known Jay Hamburger for a number of years and having been involved with a few of his philanthropic endeavors, I feel the need to comment on Steve McVicker’s recent article. [Ana’s Angel, April 4]. While much (not all) of what was written is true, why the…