Rhythm is All
It’s quite likely that someone near you is drumming fingers, or jangling keys, or tapping feet, or opening and shutting a snap over and over and over again. Or maybe you’re working late and here comes the cleaning crew down the hall, sweeping and spritzing in soft-shoe rhythm. People –…
Soul Music
A floozy, preparing to host a cocktail party she’s not at all ready for, nervously rehearses the social niceties she plans for one of her guests, a writer: “I love your books, I just read the new one, I mean, I just bought the new one, but — I lent…
Neither Man nor Monster
Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (what a mouthful) gets off to a roaring start. In the opening scene, composer Patrick Doyle’s score is pounding away as if you’d got to the symphony late and missed the overture, and the camera shows us the white sweep of the Arctic where the…
Decadent Glories
Film lovers have begun to look on the early ’70s as the last golden age of Western film (the golden age of Asian film is on us right now). Those years are also known as the Before Lucas and Spielberg era. The French, with Godard and Truffaut (among many others),…
Dummy Love
In the night of this night, the people of the lost world emerge from the bayou weed patches and the four-bit flops, out of the jungles and from under the bridges, and come out into the electric evening, blinking and rubbing bloodshot eyes, waking from one nightmare into another, spreading…
No Mercy
Rebecca Wardlow met her future husband when she was a 16-year-old girl whose world was limited to the boundaries of her hometown of Lufkin in the piney woods of East Texas. She and Johnny Wardlow were married a year later. Both had jobs with insurance companies, and for the first…
Too Pharr-out?
The voice of a local Republican activist had a conspiratorial edge when he phoned two weeks ago, asking if the Press would be interested in a story revealing how Ann Richards helped an old buddy obtain an early parole from prison. “Well, sure, who wouldn’t?” was the answer. The caller…
Letters
Nose Job? Upon rereading your issue of the Best of Houston [September 22], I noticed that in the music store selection, you’ve slammed some of your music store advertisers. I just can’t believe how polarizing that must be from their point of view. What makes this city so vibrant is…
Press Picks
thursday november 9 National Conference on Children and Violence Everyone who works with or around children, has children, might have children, knows a child or simply lives in this country, which, in case you haven’t been paying attention, is well-populated with children, is urged to attend all or part of…
The Trouble with Harry’s
In the expanding world of bar/restaurants, you have your Q Cafes — where the food is better than it has to be — and you have your Harry’s American Bars, where it’s only as good as it has to be, and sometimes worse. Harry’s, a pseudo British-colonial watering hole that…
See and be Scene
“Uh-oh” is the natural response to the slogan, “Q Cafe, The Only Thing Square About Us Is The Ice.” This hipper-than-thou tone suggests a scene rather than a serious restaurant; so do the brand-new Q Cafe’s glamorous good looks, studiedly cool clientele and location in the burgeoning nightlife hub around…
The Lost Houston of Sig Byrd
On a recent Saturday, a couple of firemen were washing a truck outside the fire station on downtown’s western edge. It was a hot day and they were wet and shirtless, and glad to stop their work even to answer such a strange question as, “You guys ever heard of…
Street Song
If the progression of tunes on Ted Hawkins’ recently released The Next Hundred Years (DGC) reads like an emotional rags-to-riches story, that’s because the life it documents is just that. To compress a long story into a blurb, Hawkins was born to a father he never met and an alcoholic…
Halloween Hangover
I never considered myself a Nine Inch Nails fan; listening to The Downward Spiral reminds me of the unhappy coincidence of noise that hits me when the Federal Express trucks start rumbling past my bedroom window at the same time the ratty static from my clock radio alarm blares into…
Live Shots
Kevin Salem Urban Art Bar Friday, October 28 What’s a gifted singer/songwriter — not to mention hotshot guitarist/producer — to do? You play on the most highly acclaimed indie album of the year, write songs with Butch Vig (producer of Nirvana, Urge Overkill and Freedy), produce college fave raves (Madder…