Big Band Bayou?
You’ve no doubt heard by now that Bayou City Theatre is abandoning its live music format. As far as we know, a 104-KRBE party featuring the timeless music of The Knack is still on for May 7, but that’s the last one. Anthrax, scheduled for the 5th, and Phish, on…
Paris, Texas
She was staring at my omelet. And for good reason: it wore the sunny, glistening face of eggs that have been coaxed rather than manhandled; tendrils of stewed red pepper and onion crept from its gilded rim. She snared a bite, considered the way fresh basil snapped everything into focus…
A Bad Place to Die
Saturday, July 24 of last year was typically hot and humid. It was around noon — not quite the warmest part of the day — when three teenage boys walked single-file into a wooded area near Bear Creek Park, ostensibly to fetch a box of marijuana. Allegedly, once they were…
Trash Men
Although Moody Gallery is filled with recent works by veteran Texas artists David McManaway and Jim Love, the exhibition will most likely send you time-tripping back to the ’60s and the earliest flurries of contemporary art in the state. There was a brief period when Jermayne MacAgy and her ex-husband…
Rotation
King’s X Dogman Atlantic I’ve never been much of a fan of the King’s X oeuvre. I got my Rush-like prog virtuosity from Rush and my Beatlesque harmonies from the Beatles, it didn’t strike me to look for a spiritual fix on hard-rock radio and I’ve never had any particular…
Press Picks
thursday may 5 Cinco de Mayo: Grupo Folklorico Children’s groups perform traditional dances in fabulous costumes, whirling for Cinco de Mayo. Often called Mexico’s Independence Day, the holiday actually honors the defeat of French troops by outnumbered Mexican forces at the city of Puebla in 1862. More of an “Alamo…
Polanski’s Passion
The opening-credit sequence: ocean waves undulating behind a luxury liner’s porthole while the camera slowly pulls in and out of the circular frame. The conclusion: Roman Polanski is back, this time with Bitter Moon, a gleefully nasty foray into psychosexual morality — and abnormality. The Love Boat chartered by voyeurs,…
Union Blues
When I heard that director Claude Berri was filming the Zola novel Germinal, I didn’t know whether to consider him courageous or crazy. Adapting a massive 19th-century novel about the pre-union tribulations of French coal miners sounded like a hernia-inducing endeavor. On the other hand, I thought that maybe Berri…
The Second-Movie Itch
When filmmaker Mario Van Peebles spoke at Texas Southern University last fall, he emphasized the problem of black filmmakers’ “second movie” — that is, the one they make outside the hood. He spoke in the wake of John Singleton’s Poetic Justice, which opened to high expectations and big first-weekend money,…
A Fine Mess
Something about a pay bonus for staffers of the Texas Department of Human Services didn’t sound right to state Representative Talmadge Heflin, a Republican from southwest Houston, when he heard it discussed at a recent appropriations committee meeting. One of Heflin’s constituents, community activist Sam Perlin, had asked the representative…
Letters
A Chase Conclusion I’m an average citizen (not a police officer). I don’t agree with your opinion concerning the “Deadly Pursuit” article in your magazine [by Brian Wallstin, March 10]. It seems that every time something happens, it’s easier to jump on the good guy than the bad guy. We…
Hot plate
Play It Again, Fuad “So what can I cook for you?” Small and dark and foursquare, chef Joseph peered at us through the eternal twilight of Fuad’s dining room, which might have been transported directly from some long-forgotten corner of Manhattan. “What do you have?” we dithered, as Frank Sinatra…
A Month of Mutt
Dyn@mutt don’t give a shit. It’s not that the members of the Houston band are all completely self-absorbed nihilist punk sorts — they’re not — it’s just that they’re all in college, see, and there’s not much time to practice with finals coming up, and some of them are going…
Phish Bait
Hippie rock has been back for a while now, epitomized by a Spin Doctors/Blues Traveler circuit with a loose jamming feel that’s great for about ten minutes, until the players hit their skill plateaus and start relying on dulled synapses and feel-good accommodation to carry them through the next hour…