Letters
Taste of Turpentine I found your rather scathing and venomous attack on state Representative Sylvester Turner [“Man Overboard,” by Jim Simmon, October 24] to be characteristically similar to Wayne Dolcefino’s $5.5 million-dollar story — grossly misleading and extraordinarily biased. Surely, we (your loyal readers) would expect you to jump to…
Heavy Mettle
Nobody has ever accused German food of exhibiting a minimalist sensibility. The hearty meat and potato dishes that make up the cuisine’s canon are clearly designed to stick to your ribs (and probably, truth be told, to the walls of your arteries as well). Heft makes a certain sense in…
Where the Sidewalk Ends
West Webster Street is a rutted excuse of a street that skirts the southern edge of the Fourth Ward, veering west off of Webster Street for about seven blocks before dead-ending into Taft. It’s a very old street by Houston standards — old enough to be named for a 19th-century…
Hum Along with Marshall
Any fan of quality-tested singer/songwriters is obligated to reserve a little empathy for Marshall Crenshaw. If the sky is truly for the stars — as Crenshaw proclaimed in his 1987 role as Buddy Holly in the Ritchie Valens biopic, La Bamba — then certainly he has logged sinfully little flight…
Press Picks
thursday november 21 On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family Lisa See has written a long and detailed (if not particularly elegant) book telling the story of her family. One ancestor emigrated from China in 1867, and his story is one of missionaries, concubines, nightclubs and illegal…
Flawed Diamond
Full disclosure: Neil Diamond was my first real concert, in my fourth-grade year, the result of my mother’s ardent fandom. Me, sis, mom and dad at the Summit. What I remember most is this: Someone who couldn’t have been paying much attention tried to pass a joint to me through…
Dish
Perfectly Simple Ethnic encomiums are the watchword this week. So let us now sing the praises of Niko-Niko’s, the odd little Greek joint located in a former gas station on Montrose that is, mirabile dictu, one of the few multiple-winners of Marvin Zindler’s Blue Ribbon award for cleanliness. And that’s…
Static
Ezra’s Wonder… What qualifies as success obviously depends a lot on perspective. Case in point: Throughout their brief career from 1965 to 1968, Thursday’s Children never had a single that made it out of Texas. They never recorded a full-length release. Hell, the group never traveled farther than Dallas or…
Rotation
The Presidents of the United States of America II Columbia Records Waiting for the arrival of the Presidents’s sophomore effort, after the pleasant Top 40 experience that was the Seattle band’s eponymous 1995 debut, was a little like anticipating Men at Work’s second release, Cargo. The first one was great,…
Songs and Sickness
“It’s not an act,” insists the voice over the phone. Nor is it — to paraphrase the voice — some brash pop-culture statement on life imitating art. Rather, the voice implies, D Generation’s story represents something eminently more real: hard evidence of rock music’s ability to save lives. It was…
Sappy Siblings
Tree houses, Santa Claus and lots of sickeningly cute lyrics about aiming high and dreaming big. A brother and a sister playing school, and later arguing about sibling rules and regulations. Have we stumbled onto the set for a weepy long distance commercial? No, it’s Theater LaB’s warm and sappy…
Sweating to the Aussies
Tap Dogs — flinging sweat and flipping skirts as it arrives in Houston this weekend to wind down its U.S. tour — has been lauded for reinventing tap dancing, for making tap down and dirty and, perhaps most of all, for making tap very, very male. So male, in fact,…
Love and War
Anthony Minghella believes in ghosts — and, at his best, makes believers out of viewers, too. The writer/director of Truly Madly Deeply and this heartfelt, eye-filling (but problematic) adaptation of the Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient salts his movies with passionate specters. In Truly Madly Deeply the main ghost…
Boldly Going
On its 30th anniversary, Star Trek exists only as fetish or fool’s pastime. The original series continues to air as a faded relic; the Next Generation cast was put to pasture as a film enterprise before its time; and Deep Space Nine and Voyager run and rerun so often you…
Show Bees-ness
The ratings system has its inconsistencies, but, after reading a synopsis of Microcosmos, you’d have to wonder just what the MPAA was thinking. This French import is rated G, despite more on-screen violence than all three Die Hards put together. Murders, accidental deaths, mortal combats, cannibalism and attempted genocide are…
Blood Sport
The Vasquez cousins were dead; the dogs were alive. Neither made a sound as two HPD detectives investigated the murder scene. In fact, it would be hours before Sergeant Butch Doyle and officer J.C. Bonaby noticed the 78 dogs in the back yard — and even longer before they realized…
Dog’s Best Friend?
Bobby Hall — one of the most famous dogfighters in America — literally wrote the book on his profession. In BullySon and His Sons, printed in 1986 by Walsworth Press, Hall chronicled his at the time 26 years as a dogfighter and trainer in Houston. Hall did not respond to…
The Insider
He’s Out of Here Achieving faculty diversity at the University of Houston has been the subject of much rhetoric by its administration in the last few years, but the school apparently won’t put its money behind its mouthings. Christian Davenport, a talented young political scientist who was also the only…
Burned Out
From the driveway, Bert and Connie Long stared, shocked, at their house — or at what had once been their house. Where the middle-aged couple expected to see their upstairs bedroom, there was now a big burned-out hole. The bungalow’s first floor still stood, sort of. The front door was…