Beneath the Dogs
When two bolts broke from the industrial-strength blade of his grinding machine, operator Alejandro Blasio assumed his supervisor at USA Polymer Corp.’s plastics recycling plant would tell him to shut down until repairs could be made. Instead, the supervisor told him to keep working. A little while later, another bolt…
Darko’s Game
Darko Rop is tall and thin and amiable, and he looks about as imposing as a grown-up Opie Taylor. This is your basic world-class Ping-Pong athlete. “I love the table tennis,” he says in his Yugoslavian way, and he and his sparring partner are going at it, and the ball…
Letters
The Case For Hurwitz Your April 25 cover article by Laurel Brubaker Calkins defames Charles Hurwitz. The heading, “The Case Against Hurwitz,” sets the blatantly prejudicial tone of the article, which continues into the subhead, “for once, Hurwitz may have no place to hide,” and grows more inflammatory with each…
Press Picks
thursday may 9 MFA Spring Sale Antique Turkish urns, handcrafted burl-wood boxes and other fine items from the museum store must go, and some prices are reduced as much as 75 percent! We are told that the charming clay couple — a pair of anatomically correct, foot-high statues coveted by…
Tropical Twist
In Houston, a town not particularly lacking in Latin-American eats, it’s easy for diners to get jaded, to think that they know everything that’s going on, food-wise, south of the border. That’s why it’s instructive every so often to stumble across a place such as Mama Judy’s Tropical Cuisine and…
Really Super
If the supergroup concept seems a tad stale, it’s probably because few bands have lived up to that billing. And if a “supergroup” inflatedly titled the Legends of Irish Music fails to inspire instant confidence, well, we understand. But if the supergroup changes its name to Patrick Street and sticks…
Rotation
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds Murder Ballads Reprise In the past, I’ve never much cared for Nick Cave. It always seemed to me that he was reaching just a bit too hard for some shapelessly ominous black cloud of gothic pretense, and grasping only the shapeless pretense part. Murder…
Static
World of persistence… It’s been a long time coming — six years, to be exact — but the groove-happy Houston ninesome Global Village has finally squeezed out a CD’s worth of original material. Global Village offers ten tracks of well-executed, airtight funk with the mild cross-cultural aftertaste you’d expect from…
The Kids Understand
The air is thick with anticipation at the Blue Iguana as it grows late on a Thursday night. On-stage, a man tunes a six-string Fender, then sets it carefully on its guitar rack. Meanwhile, a pickup truck wheels around a corner to park near the club’s side door, and a…
Revival Time
Unlike many of the operas that have been composed in the second half of the 20th century, Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah is very accessible. It features some lovely arias, touching duets and stirring choruses — elements often lacking in other modern operas. The music is pure Americana, drawing its inspiration from…
Hidden Treasure
Once in a great while in a Houston diner’s life comes that singular moment when she stumbles upon a truly terrific divey Chinese restaurant. If she’s smart, she’ll do her part to make sure the restaurant is stocked with enough patrons to keep it healthily humming along, and thus protect…
Poster Points
Visitors to “Crime and Punishment and Other New Paintings,” Peter Saul’s current exhibit at Texas Gallery, are greeted by a Day-Glo rendition of the Mona Lisa blowing chunks. It’s a lampoon that would work as an animated promo on cable — a red-eyed La Gioconda turns green around the gills…
Robinson Redux
Sometimes a movie will stake its claim to a particular premise or subject so firmly, so definitively, that it must be acknowledged any time another movie ventures into the same territory. For example, if someone films an autobiographical drama about a troubled adolescent boy, rest assured that critics will feel…
Witchgirls
There’s a thin line between muttering bitterly to yourself and casting spells — at least that’s the way it works in The Craft. Here, the bright girls who cross that line are three moody loners with crystals and incantations. They enlist the new kid in town, invoke the power of…
Bitter Lesson
Well before the first bell rings at Lamar Consolidated High School, Phyllis Landes arrives at classroom 238 to tutor students in algebra. A sturdy, middle-aged woman who was an outstanding basketball player in high school and college, Landes has a no-nonsense manner about her. She skips the small talk and…
The Invisible Girl
Ever since that day in 1981 when she rode a grimy bus into Houston, a 12-year-old dispatched to support her family back in Guatemala, Maria has been almost invisible. Granted, Maria, who asks not to reveal her full name, sought at least part of her anonymity. She was illegal, and…
The Insider
It’s Just a Flush Away… The “managed competition” for operation of one of the city’s wastewater treatment plants has brought out the usual cast of City Hall characters — and then some — to do battle, and that skirmish may be just a prelude to the competition for an even…