Rotation
Guy Clark Keepers: A Live Recording Sugar Hill “Keepers” is exactly right. The title of Guy Clark’s latest disc suggests that what we have here is a collection of a legendary songwriter’s best songs, recorded live. And we do. But what makes this one of the year’s best albums is…
Food for Thought
“Layer cakes,” Martha Stewart’s Living advises us in this month’s cover story, “have always had a special emotional power.” As ludicrous as that sounds, it’s probably true. And that’s likely the reason so many artists have used cake as material (a New York grant-giver once told me his agency had…
Gay Old Time
It is perhaps a measure of the Houston gay community’s clout that the first Houston Gay and Lesbian Film Festival is sponsored not by queer activists, but by organizations more closely associated with movies: Landmark Theaters, the Museum of Fine Arts, DiverseWorks, the Rice Media Center and the Southwest Alternate…
Warm! Fuzzy! Gay!
In the age of don’t ask, don’t tell, when networks are rating their own shows for mature content, Ellen DeGeneres has very publicly declared herself a lesbian and staged her coming-out party in 14 million American living rooms. Why is it okay for Ellen to be gay? Simple — the…
Spielberg’s Lost
The appearance of The Lost World: Jurassic Park carries a double burden. Not only is it the sequel to the most popular movie ever made but it is also the first film Steven Spielberg has directed since 1993’s Schindler’s List. Now that he has finally won his Oscar and achieved…
Brothers of the Road
Back in April 1994, Roger Hord, the transportation policy director for the Greater Houston Partnership, heard some troubling news from North Texas. Envisioning a river of trucks running from Mexico to Canada because of the North American Free Trade Agreement, officials along Interstate 35 had banded together in Dallas and…
Rough Justice
Through his wire-rimmed glasses, attorney Barry Abrams stared numbly at the Plexiglas window. On the other side, he could see his client, 36-year-old Anthony Ray Westley, strapped to a hospital gurney. Connected to each of the large black man’s arms was an IV line dripping neutral saline solution. Abrams dreaded…
Wrap It Up
I admit that it took me a while to warm up to Mission Burritos. And I’ll further admit that I seem to be alone in this. Almost everyone I speak to who’s eaten there talks about it with almost, well, missionary fervor. When I suggested to one friend that we…
The Insider
Stop the Music Though he denies it, at-large City Councilman Orlando Sanchez is conducting a behind-the-scenes crusade to prevent artists from Castro’s Cuba from performing in Houston. Two weeks after jousting with Houston International Festival organizers over their booking of the band Cubanismo, Sanchez and several fellow Cuban-Americans have successfully…
Letters
Reality Avoidance Does being an alternative weekly excuse your reporters from simple things like providing attribution? The account of the paddling incident involving Classical School principal Alvin Jackson [“The Boom Boom Method,” by Lisa Gray, April 24] is provided without attribution, so as readers we do not know whose version…
Press Picks
thursday may 22 An Intimate Evening with Maya Angelou Maya Angelou — national poet laureate, actress, author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and civil rights activist — brings her beautiful words and booming voice to Houston in support of the National Kidney Foundation. 7:30 p.m. University of…
Grrrls No More
Though the term “riot grrrl” may go down in history alongside “grunge” and “slacker” and “Gen X” as little more than buzzwords of the early ’90s, in reality, the Northwest’s feminist-punk movement wasn’t just fodder for the hip lexicographers at Sassy and Newsweek. It involved real people — real young…
Scare Tactics
Depending on which side of the Atlantic you hail from, the Boo Radleys’ short creative attention span could be seen as either an asset or an Achilles’ heel. In their native England, the Boos’ seeming unwillingness to keep focused on any one idea is the stuff of renown. An up-and-down…
Lip Service
For much of the ’90s, rock and roll scenesters — from Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson to Alex Chilton and Peter Buck — have moved to New Orleans, drawn as much by the city’s Flowers of Evil darkness and spirit of perpetual carnival as by its musical heritage. It’s interesting,…
Static
Accidental tourist… The last time I ran into Slaid Cleaves, he was wandering the floor of the South by Southwest Music Conference trade show. The Austin-based singer/songwriter was alone, and he looked clueless but content, like a little boy lost at a carnival. Our eyes met, and we shook hands…