Lost in the Cause
After insisting that he had ordered the racial integration of the very restaurant in which he was now eating lunch, Eldrewey Stearns looked imperiously around his table at the Spanish Village and began spooning hot sauce directly into his mouth. He also began explaining all that is wrong with his…
Shadow Over Texas City
From certain angles, Hester Joiner’s wood-frame house on the south side of Texas City looks like any pleasant small-town dwelling: modest but tidy and well-kept. A 1988 Buick Regal sits in the carport, flanked by a planter and shade trees and shrubs and a mowed lawn interchangeable with millions of…
The Insider
Courthouse Crack-up The State Judicial Conduct Commission’s latest hearing on the behavior of a Harris County judge was temporarily suspended last week after providing fresh evidence, as if any were needed, that Texas’s current method of electing judges is hardly putting the best and the brightest on the bench. When…
Letters
Yikes! Shike! I read your analysis of John Shike’s abuse of the legal system [“One-Man Mob,” by Steve McVicker, May 8] with admiration for your reporting skills, sympathy with his victims and applause for Judge John Montgomery and Stewart Gagnon. As a lawyer who on two occasions has been sued…
Press Picks
thursday may 29 The Biggest Romance Spring Celebration Several hundred singles will vie for each other’s attention at this oversize Houston Press Romance happening. You might get lucky, or you might get really lucky: The grand prize winner takes home four VIP tickets to the Beach Boys and Chicago’s June…
Dish
A Good Cuban In Houston, it apparently takes a good Greek to know a good Cuban. That’s all I could imagine when I bit into the Andros Special at Andros Fine Foods on Fondren. I’d been scouring the town for a good Cuban sandwich for a while, having been introduced…
Static
Raves and wave-offs… In the interest of giving those CDs patiently awaiting a bit of free publicity their due (and in the interest of freeing up space on my desk), I offer the following inventory/critique. A few of these discs were in my hands in early March, so forgive my…
Sound Check
The term “roots” music has come to mean almost everything that’s good and older than the day before yesterday, including rockabilly, swing, soul and ethnic forms such as polka, salsa and conjunto. It’s almost gotten easier to just say what roots doesn’t cover: music on the charts or MTV, apparently,…
Young Gun
You don’t have to be an authority on zydeco music to appreciate where Li’l Brian Terry is coming from. Neophytes to the genre should have little problem adjusting to Terry’s well-slung hash of accordion-based strains, old-school funk rhythms, discreet splashes of reggae and sweet soul vocals spiked with the occasional…
Turning Old Corners
Pavement’s latest, Brighten the Corners, is being widely touted as a return to the cohesive and accessible sound of the band’s 1994 Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. That CD, which scored a modest hit with the song “Cut My Hair,” pushed the group, among the most respected on the independent rock…
A Family Affair
It’s early on a Saturday night, and the young woman in the spotlight at Fitzgerald’s is only part of the way through her 45-minute set. To catch her performance, the crowd has had to be prompt, and they’re psyched. As the small figure rips into a pounding cut, shoving her…
King of the Hill
Located on a small rise at a bend in the road just east of Norhill Addition in the Heights, the King Biscuit Patio Cafe offers one of Houston’s most spectacular vistas — an absolutely killer view of the White Oak greenbelt, with the tips of downtown’s skyscrapers peeking over the…
boringsomething
It lasted a mere four seasons, but thirtysomething lives on. Its legacy began the moment the show went off the air in 1991: The yuppie angst fantasy created by Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick continues to spawn even now, its children looking almost exactly like the parents. First came My…
Black to the Future
Labels, when they’re accurate, can help alert a niche audience to films so close to their lives they’re sure to want to see them, almost regardless of quality. (I, for one, would certainly rush to see even the worst conceivable movies about film critics — if any, in fact, existed.)…
Double Dare
Make no mistake: Twin Town ain’t Trainspotting, baby. Even though on its poster — and the soundtrack — two of its stars are posed in mid-lunge, crouching as though running from a Cannes jury aching to cram some prize down their throats … just like Trainspotting. Even though Twin Town’s…