Letters
Manual Labor Waste I laughed out loud reading about the “desk manual” program at HISD [Insider, by Tim Fleck, April 22] until I got to the part about ten employees and a half-million-dollar-a-year budget to administer this insanity — a sick, sad combination of Dilbert, Saturday Night Live and The…
Beethoven, Schumann and… Carter?
By the time Beethoven finally tried his hand at writing string quartets, he’d already written a dozen piano sonatas, three piano trios, several sonatas for violin and cello, and five string trios. But still he was intimidated by the new form. In 1801, after revising String Quartet in F Major,…
News of the Weird
Lead Stories *New Scientist magazine reported in April on how weaker males in two animal species end up fathering almost as many offspring as their studly competitors. Researcher Brian Preston told a conference in Newcastle, England, that strong rams get more sex but that toward the end of mating season…
DJs in Daylight
When the velvet ropes came down and the downtown club Spy introduced a new afternoon event called Remedy to an unsuspecting public on April 11, the first couple of hours were somber. There wasn’t much of a crowd. The limited-English bartenders on the patio deck were talking among themselves. Box…
Capital Improvement
The scene from the iron-roofed sidewalk tables of the Travis Cafe is bona fide urban Houston. On the south side of the cafe, scaffolding cocoons yet another turn-of-the-century building morphing into condos. The next doorway to the north opens into the freshly facelifted Hermann Lofts, with busloads of well-heeled Memorialites…
Hot Plate
Pocket-size pies: From the “other” empanada bakery, Marines Empanadas Delicias [3227 Hillcroft, (713)789-2950], I’m particularly partial to the Apple Supreme pie ($2.15). Partly it’s the precise dice of the tart Granny Smith apples that fill the golden crust to bursting, swimming in cinnamon and sugar-sweetened juice and studded with rich…
Scabba-Dabba-Do
It was the kind of career that hundreds of bands would gladly give up at least some groupie privileges to reach: two releases on a mid-level record label (also home to nationally known acts such as 311 and Cake), a spot opening up for the Dave Matthews Band on tour…
Shit Hole
It’s easy to hate Hole and its leader, Courtney Love. She does her best to make her defenders look like fools and her enemies look brilliant thanks to her caustic comments, plastic surgery and inconsistencies (like indie-rocker-turned-Hollywood-starlet). Like Madonna, Hole has too much cultural baggage. But the music is undeniable…
Burning for Faust
In composer Arrigo Boito’s version of the Faust legend, our favorite Biblical tempter returns for another celestial duel with the god who kicked him out of heaven. This time the fallen angel hisses at how low Man has sunk, and how he’s not worth corrupting anymore. Riled, God’s faithful cherubs…
Dumb or Dumber?
Man or Astro-man? claims to be from outer space. The story is that the band’s spaceship crashed in Auburn, Alabama, and that the band members took on human identities and formed a rock band to covertly search the Earth for parts of the craft lost on landing. It’s a story…
Dear Abbey
Sir Walter Scott wrote that novelist Jane Austen’s “exquisite touch … renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting.” Such is the case with her earliest manuscript, Northanger Abbey, about the girlish tribulations of 17-year-old Catherine Morland. And Main Street Theater’s production of the novel, adapted for the stage by Matthew…
He’s Ba-ack
It’s easy to be awed by Burt Bacharach. He’s one of the most prolific quality pop songwriters of the past four decades. His melodic tunes have broken into the Billboard Top 40 on 66 occasions, beginning with Marty Robbins’s version of “The Story of My Life” in ’57, and 28…
Best of Burt
Burt Bacharach’s songs have been covered by so many artists that his royalty checks stack right up next to Paul McCartney’s and the estate of Henry Mancini’s. It’s probably safe to say Bacharach has a very nice house. But who has done the best of the best? 1) “What the…
Beyond Teens
The latest release from Paramount Pictures’ bouncing baby, MTV Films, is set in a high school and has been inoculated with the usual doses of teenage angst, teenage wit and teenage lust. Here’s the surprise: It declines to get down on hands and knees to woo Generation Y to the…
Stormin’ Mormon
The SLC in SLC Punk! stands for Salt Lake City, but it might as well stand for Some Lucky Chump. The filmmaker, James Merendino, has stated that this tale of two punk buddies trying to spread anarchy through the Utah capital in 1985 reflects his own rebellious teenage years there…
Rotation
Tom Petty Echo Warner Bros. Records Just because an important record — which must be reviewed — gets a bad write-up does not mean it should be passed over by the consumer. That said, Tom Petty’s new record sucks. But like most works Petty has concocted over these long, long,…
Truth or Fantasy
We seem to be in the middle of one of those thematic blitzes that happen every now and then in the film world. Last year there was Dark City and The Truman Show; this year, so far, there have been EDtv and The Matrix. Add to that David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ…
Sadler’s Crowd
In Bill Sadler’s mind, his restaurants run together. Was it at the River Cafe or Cafe Noche where Ntozake Shange wrote parts of a novel? Was it at Noche or the Moose Cafe where Al Reinert and Bill Broyles polished the dialogue for Apollo 13? Was it the Blue Agave…
Dead, Dead, Dead
The man in the sport coat didn’t look like a revolutionary, but he sounded like one. Standing in the hallway of the Harris County Courthouse, Aaron Ruby was fuming for the press corps gathered to cover the latest chapter in the police killing of Pedro Oregon. In court, a police…
Dream Urchins
When we first see Isa, the 21-year-old heroine of Erick Zonca’s The Dreamlife of Angels, she’s trudging under the weight of a huge backpack through the chilly dawn of an almost featureless European city. With her close-cropped dark hair and street urchin’s sniffle, she seems to be carrying the burden…
Allen Parkway Village: The Movie
The big yellow backhoe reared up and, with a hydraulic bang, slammed its wicked-looking claw into the building. Nothing happened. It was August 23, 1996, just after 1 p.m., somewhere on the sprawling grounds of Allen Parkway Village, the 1,000-unit, 1940s-era public-housing project just west of downtown Houston. A herd…
Game Over
Friends told me I’d love Dave & Buster’s. It’s like Chuck E. Cheese for grown-ups, they said, a restaurant with Skee-Ball. Others darkly warned that I’d love it so much that I’d need deprogramming. Unfortunately, both camps were wrong. D&B describes itself as “53,000 square feet of food and fun…
Political Splashes and Splats
Reading the Press archives, we see that the decade’s politics was even weirder than we remembered — a decade of surprising triumphs and, perhaps, none-too-surprising flops. Future political scientists will no doubt catalog the Houston 1990s as the Bob Lanier years. But will they remember that it was an outdoor…
State of the Art
1989 Company press release: “Compaq Computer Corporation today introduced the world’s most powerful and expandable desktop personal computer, the 33-MHz COMPAQ DESKPRO.” Model: Deskpro 386/33 Processor: 33MHz Intel 386 Memory: 2MB RAM Hard drive: 84 MB CD-ROM: What’s a CD-ROM? Diskette drive: Takes five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies Operating system: MS-DOS, MS/386 Mouse:…
Smoot Operator
It’s funny how little it takes to fan a spark of restaurant gossip into a full-blown rumor fest. The latest contretemps started with the removal of the international gallery of Rubenesque beauties from the walls of the Empire Cafe last month. “You wouldn’t believe the uproar from the customers,” sighs…
Urbane Cowboy
One of pop culture’s worst myths is that country music performers chew tobacco, drive low-end pickup trucks, hate Northerners and sing songs about achy-breaky hearts. It’s like saying that all Houstonians wear dime-store cowboy hats all day long, even while smacking the racquetball at the Texas Club. But still, that’s…
Roll Over, Selena
On August 14, 1994, Second Ward residents opening their windows for a warm breeze could hear, in the distance, Tejano music hitting its peak. Selena, the Lake Jackson-born superstar, was performing “Como la Flor” at the Tejano Superfest at Guadalupe Plaza. Her conjunto band shared the stage with a who’s…
The Channel 13 Exclusive
The candidate could already savor the rich prospects awaiting him in the runoff election only six days away. Ascending to the chief executive’s office of the nation’s fourth-largest city would be heady enough. But this victory would be historic: He’d be the first black mayor of Houston. Eight years ago,…
Dependable. Reliable. Ken Hoffman.
1989 (January 8, The Houston Post): “I went to Fuzzy’s and ordered an extra large pizza with sausage and green peppers. Gotta admit it, that was the finest pizza I’ve had in Houston.” 1999 (February 14, Houston Chronicle): “The best-kept secret along Kirby Drive is Fuzzy’s Pizza. The pizza is…
Back to the Front
There was never any question Sara Fitzgerald would make it. Even though some 25 years ago a local bank wouldn’t lend her money to buy her first home — lending to single women was risky — and even though her bosses at Xerox, where she was the first woman in…
The Killer-est B
Houston has had its fair share of sports luminaries since the Press first hit the streets. Well, maybe not all that many relative to such hotbeds as New York or Chicago, but enough to fill a modest Who’s Who: Bagwell and Biggio on the baseball side; hoopsters Hakeem, Clyde and…
Unreal Estate
Jim Pirtle discovered a safe full of guns in his downtown pawn shop-turned-hangout. To Jim, it was no big deal; in 1996, when he had just begun exhuming the building’s contents, he was always finding things like that. Tired, he wandered upstairs to sleep a little and forgot to lock…
The Bush Chronicles
The most traumatic change of the last ten years in the world of Houston journalism is easy enough to pinpoint: the 1995 death of The Houston Post. With the Houston Chronicle comically denying any role in the event — beyond admitting to just putting out the best darn paper ever,…
La Dolce Vita
Pull up a mug, my young friends, and sip a spell while we regress one-tenth a century to a bygone Houston, when “loft” described something substantially less and yet somehow more than a $1,200-a-month studio apartment with sealed windows, when any investment over twelve bucks on the east side of…
The Art of Raising Hell
“It’s really funny,” says 34-year-old Rick Lowe, hunching over fried catfish at Luddington’s in the Third Ward, the neighborhood where he now works and lives. “I never thought I would be one of the Old Guard of Houston.” Lowe has caught himself halfway into a tirade about Young People Today,…
Houston Press 10th Anniversary Issue
“Alternative newsweeklies,” the industry calls free papers like this one, and many of them started back in the era of hallucinogens and VW vans, when some Vietnam-protesting college kid corralled a few buddies to start an underground newsletter. Those guys wanted to wrest power from the establishment media. They wanted…
Night & Day
Thursday May 6 By now, choreographer Jane Weiner is ragged and worn from preparing for Hope Stone Dance Company’s latest production for the Pink Ribbons Project. Weiner gets out of breath just talking about it. Though her feet sting, her spirit’s at rest knowing Dancers in Motion Against Breast Cancer…