Capital Blues
Forgive W.C. Clark if he makes the most of his association with Stevie Ray Vaughan. Clark isn’t just some opportunistic sideman who did a stint or two with the late Austin blues rocker and is trying to parlay his brief brush with fame into a career. No, the soulful Clark…
Static
The Communists are coming!… Foul weather wasn’t the only thing conspiring to keep Cubanismo off the Houston International Festival’s World Music Stage this year. A few high-profile members of the city’s Cuban-American community were none too pleased when they discovered that the band was slated to perform at the event…
Press Picks
thursday may 8 Bill Davenport: Recent Work Houston artist Bill Davenport makes starfish out of tinfoil, needlepoints Atari video game motifs and even knits Popsicles. And he’s none too neat in creating his cheerful little works; a recent laudatory review in Artforum noted that his out-of-square woodwork would “barely earn…
Down the Road
There are rare moments in theater when the line between art and life fades and the twain meet. Tamarie Cooper knows about that line, and about that meeting, and in Tamalalia Two she greets them with a martini in hand. Two, as the name implies, is a follow-up to Tamalalia!,…
Missing the Marx
Judy Davis is often at her ravaged best when she’s playing women pulled apart by their own warring impulses. Torn between their isolating desire for freedom and their need for solace, the women in such films as High Tide, Husbands and Wives, The New Age and A Passage to India…
Star Lard
In The Fifth Element, the all-knowing, all-powerful Supreme Being of the Universe turns out to be Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), an orange-haired babe in a skimpy, Band-Aid-thin mod outfit who speaks in a kind of Slavic scat and cries a lot. It’s as if the filmmakers started out to make a…
“One-Man Mob”
Even by the standards of divorce court, John Shike was behaving badly. On that Monday morning in late April, as the judge prepared to sign an order granting Saba Hameed Shike the divorce she’d sought for three and a half years, her soon-to-be ex spewed objections. The tall, heavyset man…
The Insider
Seeking Closure in Fort Davis Maybe it’s the thin mountain air, but the foolishness out in Fort Davis last week was not just confined to the house-trailer “embassy” of lien-filing lunatic Richard McLaren and his pistol-packing compatriots in the Republic of Texas. According to a discerning observer of our acquaintance,…
Letters
Magnificent Survivor Congratulations to Randall Patterson for his sensitively written, compelling story of one woman’s magnificent obsession and her daughter’s magnificent survival [“Momma’s Girl,” April 17]. Two unusual people coping with the challenges of their lives and making a contribution to the world they live in — a lesson for…
Rich Stuff
Nowhere is the old real estate adage about “location, location, location” more important than in the world of restaurants. Pick the wrong site for your bistro, and you could well be doomed, no matter how good your food may be. So when Regine’s opened last November in a building on…
Greed is Good
Years ago, children’s novelist Roald Dahl created a spoiled girl who wanted it all — especially a tour of the psychedelic chocolate factory operated by Willy Wonka — and wanted it yesterday. Her insatiable greed eventually landed her in Wonka’s bad-egg chute, and she was never heard from again. On…
Talking Revolution
A quarter of a century ago, proto-rapper Gil Scott-Heron informed us that “the revolution will not be televised.” This year, with a soulful baritone and a revolutionary consciousness that echoes hip-hop’s forefather, Michael Franti is here to tell us the revolution isn’t going to be on-line either. “I’ve been excited…
Rotation
Graham Parker and the Figgs The Last Rock ‘n’ Roll Tour Razor & Tie It was basically a one-off deal: The Figgs, a semi-obscure power-pop quartet out of Saratoga Springs, New York, would open for Graham Parker on his fall 1996 tour and, while they were at it, provide musical…