Critic’s Choice
It’s good to run across a legend who refuses to rest on his laurels. Many of the artists from the 1960s — men and women who translated social upheaval into innovative musical statements — have been content to continually repackage what was on their mind 30 years ago as though…
Ready to Rise
At 10 p.m. on a Thursday night, Sugar Hill Studios in southeast Houston looks quiet. Four or five cars share the parking lot with an 18-foot Ryder truck, and you can hear the crickets complaining. But walk through the open door, across the lobby plastered with Freddie Fender’s gold records,…
Sound Check
What has a kora, a couple of bajo sextos, some drones and driving fiddles? World Music, of course. But only if you believe what you hear from lazy clerks at music stores. As a musical category, World Music has been around some eight years now. The term was originally used…
A Glut of Gurney
I don’t mean to sound like a crank, but Houston theater companies, come on. Enough with A.R. Gurney already! Some half-dozen Gurney plays have been produced in the past year or two, the infernal Love Letters seemingly a half-dozen times itself. If Houston hadn’t been entertaining Gurney lately, it might…
Stage Notes
Lively Albee: Never one to rest on his laurels, Edward Albee — whose Three Tall Women recently won him his third Pulitzer — just finished directing the Southern premiere of his most recent play, Fragments, at New Orleans’ Contemporary Arts Center (CAC). Invited by CAC executive director and old friend…
Classic Strut
Mark Arvin was moving across the rehearsal space on the second floor of the Houston Ballet’s home on West Bell as though he’d suddenly fallen under the spell of a witch from a children’s fairy story. His arms were bent before him, hands cocked and rigid as claws. His head…
Not Worth Remembering
Some movies are so bad that they make you look back over your recent moviegoing life with the merciless eye of an FBI agent assembling a dossier, desperately trying to figure out whether the people responsible for the picture that ruined your evening showed signs of obnoxious incompetence early on…
Love for Sale
When 16-year-old mail-order bride Riyo (Youki Kudoh) gets off the boat that has borne her from her old home in Japan to her new one on a sugar cane plantation in Hawaii, she is shocked by the sight of her spouse-to-be. She expected that the man who paid for her…
Third Time, Semi-Lucky
When an action movie proves to be a success, there’s almost inevitably a sequel. And hey, if it works twice, why not try for three? Unfortunately, the formula that worked in the original tends to become hackneyed in the process; attempting to stage a three-peat usually results in tarnishing memories…
Diner’s Notebook
Trouble in paradise? Though still a hot dining ticket — literally, with its air conditioning strained past endurance during the recent heat wave — there are signs the kitchen at The Daily Review has cooled off. As in far-from-dewy (and far-from-interesting) crab and three pepper salad one Saturday night, plus…
Mad Mel’s Epic Adventure
In the 16 years since he made his screen debut, Mel Gibson has seen plenty of action. Part of what makes him so charismatic is his ability to take a licking and keep on ticking: enemies can beat him, shoot him, torture and humiliate him, but he always comes back…
Bonds Away
Maybe John Burns is just a bad judge of character. For years, Burns worked as an independent bail bondsman, but it seems too many of his customers were failing to appear in court. According to records of the Harris County District Clerk, when the county’s Bail Bond Board finally jerked…
A Heritage Corridor
While Buffalo Bayou has been gussied up at the Wortham Center and lined with hike-and-bike trails and public art to the west, in its historic heart, the industrial East End, it has suffered from years of neglect. That, though, promises to change over the next few years under an ambitious…
La Bare-ing It
On a hot and humid evening last week, the two local performance artists who call themselves the Art Guys invaded La Bare, a Galleria area “ladies club” where assorted devotees of exotic male dancing come to peruse and paw the pumped-up pecs of men with names like Amadeus and Christian…
From the Allens to today, Buffalo Bayou has helped define the city of Houston. Now, after decades of abuse, it may finally be making a comeback as an urban resource. If, that is, we don’t blow our chance.
A few years ago, I came to live in a second-floor apartment overlooking Buffalo Bayou. The complex was situated on the bayou’s flood plain, and probably shouldn’t have been built there at all. But the view of the water was beautiful. Healing from a personal crisis, I would sit on…
Letters
Putting the D.A. On Notice Write all that you want about Harris County Constable Victor Trevino [“Lord of the Eastside,” by Tim Fleck, May 4]. The truth is, the dude is one lean, mean, community-organizing machine. Look out, Holmes! Francisco Delgado Navarro Pasadena Accentuating the Negative In reading Jim Sherman’s…
Do As I Say, Not As I Sue
Houston Lighting & Power is preparing to go to trial this summer in pursuit of a massive claim that the Light Company, along with its partners in the South Texas Project nuclear plant, filed five years ago against the Westinghouse Electric Corporation. The suit was lodged in Matagorda County, which,…
Press Picks
thursday may 25 Boutros Boutros-Ghali Last year, Henry Kissinger; this year, Secretary-General of the United Nations Boutros Boutros-Ghali. The Institute of International Education is having its annual luncheon and has, as usual, lured an important guest in to be the speaker. Boutros-Ghali has been secretary-general since 1992, and must have…
The Insider
Shooting (Yourself) from the Lip Loose lips may not necessarily sink ships, but they can cost a Harris County constable some deputies. A recent Press story on Precinct 6 Constable Victor Trevino quoted the colorful lawman calling District Attorney Johnny Holmes and the five members of Commissioners Court “assholes.” A…
Gulf Coast Fried
It’s impossible to conduct a civilized existence on the Texas Gulf Coast without convenient access to a good fried seafood dive. Mine is Floyd’s Cajun Shack, a northside joint that has all the prerequisites of the genre: wooden deck, rolls of paper towels on the tables, colorful owner, cold bottled…
Selling Selena
There’s nothing quite so bracing as an unintended irony, like last Sunday’s Houston Chronicle promo for its Texas Magazine cover piece on Selena, the latest in a chain of top-selling periodical covers produced after the Tejano singer’s murder in Corpus Christi. Directly under the blurb promoting that product of an…
Duran, Again
John Taylor seemed taken aback. The trans-Atlantic connection to London suddenly went dead, and there was an awkward pause on the line. He’d just been told something he was unaware of, and something he obviously doesn’t much care for. The news was that he and his bandmates in Duran Duran…