They’ve Got Game
It’s a sign that a nation may be losing its collective mind when it grants a nutty hack like Quentin Tarantino an exalted title like Officer of Arts and Letters, but there’s France for ya. Whether Gallic pop culture is rousingly progressive or embarrassingly adolescent is anyone’s call, but few…
School’s Out, Art’s In
Alyson Shotz’s The Shape of Space glitters in a closed gallery Looking through windows and looking at shiny things are two kinds of fun. Now you can do both at Rice University Art Gallery, even though it’s closed over the summer months. Alyson Shotz’s The Shape of Space, a curtain…
Hard-Knocked Life
Those people who live in small towns, they’re not like you and me. So naive, so innocent. And adorably quirky. Why, they’ve got so many lovable quirks you just wanna run up and hug ’em. Or, if you’re a filmmaker, perhaps you can make a movie about these simple folk…
Ribbit Pimps
Frogwatch helps track mating amphibians There are watchers among us. They creep around in bogs and bayous in search of randy frogs, otherwise known as — here it comes — horny toads. Yes, there are frogwatchers among us, people who do their part for science while being serenaded by amphibian…
Oh, Christ
Beware the exclamation point. When found at the end of a title, it almost inevitably signals a level of self-hype rarely justified by the content of whatever it hopes to name. In the case of the movie Saved! — an amusing, if facile comedy about a good Christian girl gone…
Colorless Chicken
If ever there was a monochromatic dish, it would be the chicken Natalie ($15) at Café Natalie (2012 Highway 90A, 281-232-9191). Its one-dimensional color scheme, however, is not an indication of its taste. An oven-roasted, skinless white chicken breast basted in herbs sits on a bed of garlic mashed potatoes,…
The Unlikely Lambs
Moviegoers who know the tides of recent Brazilian history will likely get more from Hector Babenco’s new prison movie, Carandiru, than the rest of us, because the filmmaker tells us so little about the society beyond the walls that helped shape the violent yet carefully ordered world within them. On…
Rome If You Want To
The thespians at the Alley Theatre are known for tackling the radiant poetry of Shakespeare, the domestic psychosexual shenanigans of Edward Albee and the linguistic gymnastics of Tom Stoppard. But a Broadway musical? Yes, they’re taking on the 1962 Tony Award-winning A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the…
Playboy Models in Bikinis
Need we say more? SUN 5/30 Okay, dudes, here’s the scoop: Mikki Chernoff, H-town’s favorite former Playboy model, is splitting from husband No. 2. And along with a group of similarly enhanced sirens, the single 34-year-old with 34D cups will take the stage at the Memorial Day bikini contest on…
Capsule Reviews
Boy Groove “You make my hips buck,” sings the gyrating boy band, voguing in front of the audience. Aaron Macri and Chris Craddock’s musical spoof Boy Groove is having its U.S. premiere at Theatre LaB Houston, and in it, fictional teeny-bopper sensation Boy Groove gets screwed just like it ought…
Range Rovers
Barnevelder’s dance festival bounces around THU 5/27 You may feel that you don’t really “get” modern dance. The leaping, dipping, swaying — it looks great, but you’re supposed to know how to interpret it, right? Wrong, says Louie Saletan, who is heading the Barnevelder Movement/Art Center’s second annual Big Range…
Gay Love
The white sheets cascading in Kelli Connell’s Clothesline almost tickle your face. Hung by two women staring at each other, they dangle in the breeze in front of a wooden fence. One of the women, wearing a white shirt, stares forward at her lover, who hangs a white bra on…
Plano Tex-Mex
Fajitas $11.75
Bistec tampiquena $20.95
Chicken and mushrooms $12.75
Shrimp with chile and garlic $16.95
Lunch specials $6.95
Capsule Reviews
Fade In: New Film and Video This Contemporary Arts Museum exhibition, curated by Paola Morsiani, presents a group of works by eight international artists. American Luis Gispert’s installation, Foxy Xerox (2003), is a witty take on the appropriation of hip-hop culture by white America. On one wall, a blond girl…
Remaking the Band
Tickets for the Pixies’ October 17 show at Reliant Arena are on sale now.
Welcome to Fire Island
Teresa Cornelison is agitated again. Except for her, the Quintana Town Council meeting has gone completely silent. Mayor James Norvil is preoccupied with his papers. His wife, a councilwoman, is fixated on some point in distant space. Another councilwoman, who once pushed Cornelison off a barstool, looks vaguely annoyed. On…
The Great Pretender
“Bonnie Prince Charlie” was the nickname of 18th-century Scottish nobleman Charles Edward Stuart, who died drunk in France after being exiled by William of Orange. Bonnie “Prince” Billy is the latest stage name of 21st-century singer-songwriter Will Oldham, who is neither Scottish, drunk, dead nor in exile, but will be…
The Final Scratch?
They call it the Scratch Amp. It’s just a little Discman-sized gizmo, round and sturdy, with wires popping out every which way. In the DJ booth tonight, it sits underneath the Dell laptop, in between the Technics 1200 turntables, in back of the Rane mixer. It’s silver, compact, and through…
Trading Groceries for Guns
A little over two years ago, we put forth the theory that winning a Houston Press Music Award brought down a curse upon your band. We had plenty of evidence in hand even then — most prominent among it the cases of Japanic and South Park Mexican. Those two acts…
Survivors
Vanessa Perez started Austin High School with 1,000 other students four years ago. This week she graduates with a senior class of 284 kids. Great for her; bummer for the 716 who fell off the charts. Vanessa didn’t just make it through her inner-city school, either; she excelled. Besides graduating…
Azita and Carina Round
The popular myth of a cohesive entity known collectively as “the female artist” is put to the test by these two new releases. Carina Round and Azita are both estrogen-packing singer-songwriters, and each has just released her second solo disc. As for common ground, that’s about it. Carina Round’s new…
Flowers of Evil
Politics in the boardwalk town of Kemah tend to be a little off-kilter, and luckily for us folks who don’t live there, it doesn’t look like it’s going to change anytime soon. There have been accusations of political opponents stalking one another; now we have an attempted character assassination by…
Jawbreaker
In the early ’90s, emo-punk forefathers Jawbreaker wrote a slew of brazenly honest and desperately depressing tunes that connected them to their audience like old war buddies. Though they were regular spokesmen for staying independent and shunning major labels, the band jumped ship to Geffen in 1995 for their fourth…
Letters
Class Struggles Monitoring the profs: Many thanks to writer Paul Kix for his evenhanded article on the class struggle between young conservatives and liberal educators [“Lessons to the Left,” May 6]. It is interesting to note that of those involved, his approach was the most balanced. It should be no…
Darden Smith
“Life is so damn messy / Love is so unclean.” Former Heights resident Darden Smith doesn’t do mindless little ditties or danceable two-steps, yet he’s one of the giants of that field of indefinable endeavor known as Texas singer-songwriter. Circo finds Smith further exploring the box canyon (or circular cell,…
Mouthing Off
It doesn’t matter how much you brush those teeth, the inside of your mouth is a dank, dirty place. Just think of that weird sludge that comes out every time you floss. Artist Scott Teplin likes to ponder this oral nastiness in some of his drawings — perhaps a little…
Playbill
Friends Night Out Love hip-hop, but tired of the same ol’ beats and bling-bling rhymes? Then Friends Night Out, a new monthly hip-hop/reggae/dancehall multimedia extravaganza at Helios, is for you. This month’s installment features movies, videos, and DJs Steve Swift (of Blunted) and B-Boy Ace (of Rebel Crew) downstairs. Upstairs…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, May 27 Think you’ve got what it takes to hit the court at the Toyota Center? We’re not talking about your dribbling skills here. The Houston Rockets are looking for additional entertainers for their games and events. Houston Idol — The Rockets Talent Search is hosting auditions today for…
Straight to Helen
Sitting through Raising Helen is an exercise in frustration, because somewhere inside this big heap of Hollywood nothing is a something (someone, actually) worth saving and savoring. Her name is Joan Cusack, always a supporting player but never a star, no matter her grace and warmth and charm even in…
Bears in Bed
You gotta love bears. That’s the message of comedian T. Sean Shannon’s latest book, Cough It Up. The collection of stories, cartoons and other short pieces contains three pieces about bears — in two of them, bears have sex with humans, and in another, a bear beds down with no…