Hoochie Hoochie, Ya-Yas, Ta-Tas
Right from the jump, Darcy Bryan-Wilson lets it be known that she would rather be referred to as Fanny LaFaye. “Darcy Bryan-Wilson is a suburban mom, and Fanny LaFaye is a burlesque star,” she says. No, the woman isn’t on that “stuff,” nor is she leading the kind of tawdry…
Opera for Philistines
From the vagaries of fashion to trends in cuisine, the world looks up to the French. Two centuries ago, when the music literati believed Italy had a monopoly on fine opera, the French came along and changed everything. They believed theater wasn’t any good without dance and well-crafted stories, so…
Duck Soup
We’re heaping spoonfuls of tuna tartare onto slices of baguette like a sushi spread and washing it down with crisp Roederer Estate sparkling wine. The raw tuna melts in your mouth like butter. It’s the ideal consistency: chopped into tiny cubes, not minced into mush. And the Asian-French accent of…
The Reluctant Spokesman
William Kentridge was born white and affluent in Johannesburg, South Africa, seven years after the enactment of apartheid laws in 1948. For better or worse, Kentridge’s nationality has become his work’s defining characteristic. While democratic elections brought an official end to apartheid there in 1994, its victims bear deeply etched…
Golden Gate Garage
Shea Roberts doesn’t mind it at all when passersby in his San Francisco neighborhood comment on his British Invasion styles. “Cool…Beatles!” they say, noting his Carnaby Street gear and over-the-collar coif. Roberts smiles appreciatively, even if his rooster-shag look is way more Faces-era Ron Wood than Fab Four. “If I…
Skate or Die
“This is contrary to how we grew up,” Stacy Peralta is saying a few minutes after getting dropped off at a newspaper office by a limo driver. The 45-year-old Peralta, still SoCal handsome and boyish beneath a ball cap and behind a well-trimmed beard, grins long and hard–a real hell-yeah…
Fightin’ Words
Craig Feazel, singer/guitarist/ pedal steel player of the local rock band Drifter likes a few things, among them Led Zeppelin, Jug O’ Lightnin’, Horseshoe, Rudyard’s, the Tequila Cowboys and especially Jonathan Richman. He also likes Valhalla, the Rice grad-student pub where he’s being interviewed for the Press. “I like this…
Summer Love
I could hear the pounding rhythm section and smoking lead guitar halfway down the block. When I walked into the Continental Club (3700 Main, 713-529-9899), the Thursday-night happy hour was well under way, and the Clay Farmer Band had everyone in the place either two-steppin’ in front of the stage…
Pop Goes the Bastard
What do you call a song that has the vocals of Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious” welded onto the backing track for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”? “Smells Like Teen Booty,” of course. What name do you bestow upon the offspring of a shotgun marriage between Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a Bottle”…
Truth in Advertising
I have long been a proponent of honesty in advertising, but when I saw Road Kill Hog Meat on the menu at Daniel Wong’s Kitchen (4566 Bissonnet, 713-663-6665), I hoped it was stretching the truth. The hog meat is available on the lunch menu for $4.95, but it morphs into…
Bleak House
Albert Rowan, better known as DJ Bizz, is in a rueful mood. After a year’s absence from the local house scene (he’d retreated to the more esteemed DJ booths of San Francisco), Rowan has come home and faced the facts. “Man, you know what?” he says. “Those days are long…
Paul Westerberg
The “official” record–Stereo, credited to Paul Westerberg, remember him?–is sloppy in an “artful” way, meaning songs abruptly end when the tape runs out while others collapse when the guy singing them peters out; they’re demos, or sound like them, assembled from two years’ worth of basement tapes, literally. The “unofficial”…
Elvis Costello
In 1998, around the time Painted From Memory–his team-up with Burt Bacharach–hit stores, Elvis Costello gave up on the idea of playing rock and roll, or so he said. But he didn’t really need to put it in words: Costello had already spent much of the 1990s taking sidesteps, sparring…
No Doubt
The advance poop had it that Rock Steady was to be No Doubt’s return to fun, a reaction to the serioso and largely forgotten (quick, name the single!) Return of Saturn. Not exactly. Gwen Stefani as a performer is best summed up in that image from the “Don’t Speak” video…
Child Support
At other times, the large domed building on the Baylor University campus would have served as a lecture hall for discourses on higher education. But on this gray, biting-cold early April morning in Waco, crowds began gathering for far more than another day of academic enlightenment. About two dozen wheelchair-bound…
Chris Whitley
It’s easy to stack Chris Whitley’s CDs in the blues bin; isn’t that where every player of a National steel guitar belongs? But Whitley bridles at being called a bluesman, describing his music as “psychosexual, socio-spiritual love songs that hope to fuck with the stereotypes.” Maybe Whitley’s right. His most…
You Don’t Know Mac
Jim “Mattress Mac” McIngvale has done plenty to annoy Houstonians for the past 20 years, whether it’s blasting endless crummy TV commercials, grabbing plenty of free publicity for pseudo-events, producing the Chuck Norris movie Sidekicks or selling more plush power recliners than any man has a right to. At least…
Les Savy Fav, with 764-HERO and Swearing at Motorists
Les Savy Fav is a group of skilled musical surgeons soaring through complicated rock operations. The Brooklyn band stitches the intense, quickly changing rhythms of emo into the body of driving indie-pop songs, then adds robotic melodies of industrial noise. Go Forth, the art school act’s third release, still exposes…
God Only Knows
When Marti and Donna Rickard walked into the Vineyard Church in the Heights for the first time, they knew this was the church for them. “They did three or four of our very favorite songs, including the one played at our wedding,” Donna says. The atmosphere was contemporary, the band…
Rock ‘n Boil
Great local bands, free crawfish (for the first two hours) and the Hawaiian Tropic girls in bikinis. Ah, spring is a good time to be alive in Houston. This first of a (possibly) yearly series of Rock ‘n Boils is an attempt to marry music with mudbugs. The lineup (in…
Barry, Barry, Quite Contrary
In mid-March, Houston Chief Deputy City Controller Judy Johnson and Banc One executive Barry T. Smitherman were winding down a tense conversation about the technicalities of a controversial bond deal, when Smitherman asked a colleague to leave Johnson’s office. According to Johnson, Smitherman then had a few choice words of…
James McMurtry
Though he hasn’t put out a new record since 1998’s Walk Between the Raindrops (whose advice-to-a-teen title track should rightfully appear every May as a graduation gift alongside that damn Dr. Seuss book), James McMurtry’s fans are usually just as content to hear his rich story-song back catalog one more…
Delayed DeLay
Imagine a world without Tom DeLay. Now, snap out of your reverie and force yourself to face the heinous reality that Tom DeLay is, indeed, a part of this world. No one said this life would be easy. DeLay, the GOP leader from Sugar Land, has long been busy putting…
World Wide Web
Kick a boy enough times, and he’ll become a man. The question is, of what sort? In his long-awaited feature portrait of the comic-book hero Spider-Man, director Sam Raimi brings forth a kaleidoscopic answer full of hope and verve. Flashy enough for kids and insightful enough to engage adults, the…
Great American Sway
Great American Sway Undeserving immigrants: When reading the “Lost Boys” article [by Jennifer Mathieu, April 18], I was amazed. I guess I didn’t realize how America looks to (some) people not living here — i.e., the streets paved with gold and plenty for everyone, just for the asking! As those…
Ol’ Dirty Bastard
Ten years after The Scandal — and its negative effect on the size of his audiences and his power and independence — Woody Allen broke his longtime avoidance of the Oscar telecast with his pro-New York stand-up shtick at this year’s ceremony. The positive audience response suggested that all is…
Lucky Charms
Charms, cranes, champagne, music, film and oh, yeah, dancing. It’s the third Pink Ribbons/Dancers in Motion Against Breast Cancer gala, Pink Charm. Executive director Jane Weiner puts the fun in fund-raising, inviting artists from three disciplines to donate their work for the evening. This time around, the former Doug Elkins…
Brace for Impact
Politics and theater have always made uneasy partners. Put the two together, and the results can run the gamut from dangerous to dim-witted to yawn-inducingly dull. When the politics involve something as overwhelming as the September 11 assault on the World Trade Center, really bad theater seems imminent. When such…