Rotation
Various Artists Searching for Jimi Hendrix The Right Stuff/EMI Okay, this record is supposed to showcase Jimi Hendrix’s great songwriting prowess by having mostly non-guitar-oriented musicians rework his tunes. Fine. But by neglecting to include any real guitar players on this list of Hendrix reinterpreters, the people at The Right…
Judge This
Surya Bonaly is not a champion; she’s just a three-time World Silver Medalist. But Bonaly is performing in the John Hancock Champions on Ice Summer Tour because she’s better than a champion — she’s a skating rebel, and not in a Tonya Harding way. In perhaps the only women’s sport…
Mooning the ’50s
Stages’ production of Hugh Herbert’s 1951 script The Moon Is Blue is fast, funny and flawless. William Hardy’s expansive direction is rich with sophisticated nuance and impeccable timing. John Gow’s retro set is gorgeous. And best of all, the small cast is smart, joyful and very talented. Even so, this…
Food Fit for Drinking
Angry rumblings reached our ears recently, rumors of drastic changes made at the Houston Brewery [6224 Richmond, (713)953-0101]. “They’ve ditched their whole menu and fired all the kitchen staff,” one irate customer told us. “Now all they’re serving is disgusting fried bar food.” Like many such apocalyptic stories, this latest…
Light but Likable
The Last Session, Steve Schalchlin and Jim Brochu’s musical about AIDS, is likable, sentimental and absolute fluff. Full of melodrama, tearful songs and witty irony, the show somehow manages to reduce the devastating disease to a two-hour Hallmark moment. It starts out on a dark enough note. Gideon (Richard Laub),…
Rise Up, Texas
Robert Earl Keen wants to set the record straight. While the critically acclaimed Texas troubadour is busy pushing his latest record, Walking Distance (Arista), and headlining the “Texas Uprising” package show, there’s a story from his past that dogs him worse than the self-doubt of a character from, well, a…
Abstraction Made Personal
Sam Reveles’s hot-blooded, sensual paintings and drawings put you through a grueling emotional workout. Just as you’ve submitted to the deep melancholy of one, the next yanks you into anguish, and the one beside that, into ecstatic jubilation. The rich, autumnal colors and wild tangles of lines sweep you up…
Hot-blooded
If they don’t look closely, Heights Boulevard joggers will miss the white, wrinkled Opera in the Heights banner loosely hung in front of Lambert Hall’s Performing Arts Center at the corner of 17th and Heights. From a distance, the sign is a cozy symbol of Houston Heights cohesion. Up close,…
Oh, Bui!
The story behind the making of Three Seasons is almost as interesting as the film itself, and that’s saying something. Writer/director Tony Bui, 26, was born in Vietnam, where the film was shot (it was the first American-financed film made in that country since the war). But he grew up…
Angels Redux
Arc Angels reunion concert? The band was, for a minute, a genuine Lone Star State-bred supergroup ready to fly off into the new decade with a muscular, sweeping guitar sound. The quartet, which formed after jamming together at the Austin Rehearsal Complex (ARC, get it?), seemed to have all the…
Write On
The Love Letter has the dubious distinction of being the other studio film to open this week. In a week when all the other majors have run for cover, Dreamworks has taken a gamble with a classic bit of counterprogramming: In nearly every way, this sweet romance/romantic comedy is the…
Lifting Principals, Spilling Guts
When they agreed to attend a weekend in-service program two months ago, a group of F.M. Black Middle School teachers had no reason to expect anything beyond the usual seminar on classroom instruction techniques. After all, training sessions are a routine way of filling the annual quota of professional development…
Fire and Ice
Julio Medem’s Lovers of the Arctic Circle is arguably an even more intriguing work than the recent truth-and-illusion triller Open Your Eyes, done by his Spanish counterpart Alejandro Amenabar. The two stars of Medem’s film, Najwa Nimri and Fele Martinez, were supporting players in the Amenabar movie, but the similarities…
94 Percent Dogma-Free
On my lifetime list of No-Place-But-Houston cafe concepts, Ziggy’s Healthy Grill leads with a bullet. Ziggy’s may cater to vegetarians and health food fans, but it also cooks up the most comprehensive menu of exotic meats I’ve seen anywhere. That’s right, a whole Disney cartoon’s worth of fuzzy animals with…
Calling the Shots
It started with a lady in the clouds issuing you a challenge in a 30-second TV commercial. “As you look at your next phone bill,” she said as dark billows moved rapidly across the sky behind her, “try and make sense out of the fact that it’s more expensive to…
King of the Drive-Thrus
If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, well, then, it must be a duck. This rule, however, does not apply to El Rey, a terrific Cuban/Mexican restaurant masquerading as a fast-food joint. Sure, you eat with plastic utensils, and the food comes in wax-paper-lined plastic baskets…
Sick and Fired
Mr. Karl H. Peterson, age 41, walked into the office of the Houston Press in May 1998 and started telling his story to the receptionist. Karl’s arms were bulked up and covered with tattoos of Gila monsters and Guatemalan palm vipers. He had a ZZ Top beard, long, stringy hair…
Hot Plate
Crawfish cuties: The latest tale of creative cuisine fusion comes from D’Amico’s Italian Market Cafe [5510 Morningside, (713)526-3400] in the form of crawfish ravioli ($10.95). Six sizable ravioli pillows are plumply stuffed with a piquant blend of ground crawfish, poblano peppers and two kinds of cheese, for good measure: a…
News Hostage
We’re Great, Say Judges Professional groups representing schoolteachers, lawyers and doctors all sponsor journalism contests, some with hefty cash awards. Either indirectly or not, the contests tend to generate stories describing the nobility of, not suprisingly, schoolteachers, lawyers or doctors. The judges in Harris County’s criminal courts-at-law don’t sponsor such…
Mr. Moore’s Opus
In some ways, last August was no different from the rest of their 57 years together. Bob Moore and his wife, Maxine, spent each day together. He was the stubborn one. She was the strong one, telling him what needed to be done. “You go home, you go eat dinner,”…
News of the Weird
Lead Stories *Frenchman Richard Moureau upset Brit Terry Burrows in the European Window Cleaning Championship in Paris in March by wetting and streaklessly wiping three standard panes in 14.31 seconds. Moureau’s time was very fast, but, according to a Wall Street Journal report, a jurisdictional dispute between the International Window…
Letters
Captured Audience Jim Pirtle is weird and authentic [“Unreal Estate,” by Lauren Kern, May 6]. You captured everything so well. So well that I want to get down to No tsu oH and give him some business. John Staples via Internet Follow Up? Overall, I commend you for a job…
Cornball Castle
The Castle is a modest little comedy from Australia that falls into the subgenre of Capraesque idealism, in the little-guy-triumphs-over-evil-powers-that-be division. The story revolves around the unpretentious Kerrigan clan. Darryl (Michael Caton), the father, has his own little towing business. Sal (Anne Tenney), the mother, is the family cook and…
News Is Flat, But Yuks Are Up
Dour Ubermeisters of the Houston Chronicle have never been particularly forthcoming about the business operations of their paper, despite its oft-repeated slogan: “Houston’s Leading Information Source.” The truth, however, has a way of leaking out of even the leadened corridors of the Lords of Texas Avenue. Scarborough Research Institute International…
Episode I: What Did You Expect?
Fans call it “that Star Wars feeling”: the raw emotional high achieved by watching or even just thinking about the films of George Lucas. It’s a sort of gut-swirling, swooning sensation, the effect of tripping on a fantasy world, a wonderland, a place unlike Earth or even the movies. And…
Hot Flash
You’d never guess 55-year-old Peggy Shaw’s Obie-winning one-woman show is about, as she puts it, “the sadness and loneliness of being an elder in the middle of the night.” There’s nothing old about Menopausal Gentleman. Standing on a bare stage, in the hot white light of a single spot, Shaw…
School Outings
Walt Wingo is a 39-year-old man with a bright smile, a black cowboy hat and an IQ less than his age. He has lived in state institutions for the mentally retarded since he was four years old. Every other weekend his mother takes him from Richmond State School to her…
Night & Day
Thursday May 20 They say that Linda Eder is the heir to Barbra Streisand’s throne of pop-divadom. That position would sure be a far cry from Eder’s early 12-week stint as queen of the Star Search. But there have been a lot of prominent pit stops along the way –…