Bordeaux on the Bayou
La Tour d’Argent (2011 Ella Boulevard) has reopened, with French chef Cedric Guerin in the kitchen. The restaurant, which first opened in 1981, went out of business in March 2003 at the height of the French boycott. Cedric Guerin’s restaurant, Guerin’s Bistro, suffered the same fate back in those heady…
Love Machine
First produced in 1999, Alan Ayckbourn’s Comic Potential, about a man who falls in love with a beautiful android, trips lightly over what has become familiar territory. The possibility that machines might develop human characteristics, like laughing or falling in love, is a story that’s been done to death. Still,…
How to Dismantle an Atomic Mom
Let it be known that I do not take the release of a new U2 album — or the public disparaging of same — lightly. Harsh personal experience taught this lesson. For after writing a few discouraging words about the band’s last record, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, for…
Capsule Reviews
Crimes of the Heart Wow, what a magnificent production of Beth Henley’s 1981 multi-Tony Award-nominated comedy. In the hands of the Country Playhouse, this tale about the three Southern Magrath sisters, which takes place on one memorable October day, is rendered as crisp as fried chicken, as rich as pecan…
Boxing the Rock
After the advent of downloading and CD burning, the humble little CD has fallen from the ranks of “Nothing says I love you like…” gifts to the mere stocking-stuffer department. No, these days, to make a real statement-type gift of music, you have to dig deep in your wallet and…
Fat Beuys
Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments” at the Menil Collection is billed as the “first Beuys sculpture exhibition in the English-speaking world for 25 years.” This is partly because the oh-so- Germanic and more than a little messianic Beuys can be a hard sell for Americans. But it’s also because showing…
Puke Fest ’04!
Yeah, I know. You’ve got a stomach like a goddamn billy goat. But for the rest of us, sometimes feats of gut-dumping athleticism are unavoidable. They come after chasing beer with liquor, drinking on an empty stomach, drinking on a full stomach, drinking too much, too fast, or drinking too…
Capsule Reviews
” ‘Hot’* ‘Hotter’** ‘Hottest’*** : Important New Works from the Lockhart River Gang” The young artists on view at Booker-Lowe Gallery blend contemporary art with their 50,000-year-old culture. The Lockhart River Gang is a group of mainly twentysomething Australian aboriginal artists who are heirs to one of the oldest continuous…
Super Unison Brothers
Four years ago, when a coterie of then-teenagers named themselves Hands Up Houston and starting booking indie-rock, emo and punk concerts, this city’s music scene was much, much less vibrant and hip than it is today — at least in the sense of being in the mainstream of national culture…
Irish Italian
The sign outside Kenneally’s Irish Pub (2111 South Shepherd, 713-630-0486) says “cold beer and great pizza.” But Kenneally’s pizza is better than great — it’s legendary. The “shamrock special” ($12.55) has a definite Irish twist. The toppings include generous helpings of non-greasy cheese, mushrooms, onions, bell peppers and wafer-thin slices…
Free Lunch
Patrick Lyons stands in the middle of a Dumpster, staring at a can of meat. “I don’t know who eats this stuff,” he says. He chucks the can aside and keeps on digging. His ball cap is slung low over his face; it connects to his long, thick, brown sideburns…
Eminem
Things haven’t boded well for Encore, Slim Shady’s first full-length since 2002’s gajillion-selling The Eminem Show. D-12’s genuinely awful summer single “My Band” was eclipsed in wretchedness by Encore’s first offering, “Just Lose It,” a formulaic and unfunny ditty with a video that took aim at the easiest targets in…
Landmark Fajitas
My dining companion thinks she has ordered Herrera’s Mexicatessen’s “fajitas bravo,” which come with sautéed bacon, onions and mushrooms. But when her meal is delivered, the bacon and mushrooms are missing. The waitress says she thought my friend ordered the “fajita dinner,” a subtly different dish which appears in the…
Talking Turkey
In an annual rite that goes back to the Truman administration, President Bush recently spared two turkeys from the ax and sent them to a petting zoo. If ever there was going to be a year when the White House decided to buck tradition and offer up some kind of…
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
Since disbanding the punk-fueled Chisel in the late ’90s, Ted Leo has emerged as a pub-rock hero, championing everyone from the Specials to Thin Lizzy while also creating his own revved-up version of the real thing. His engaging knack for storytelling lyrics and infectious passion for punk rock and politics…
For Whom the Hell Tolls
For years, residents in the Houston Heights have been pushing to build a bike trail along an abandoned rail line, connecting their historic neighborhood with the heart of downtown. Last week, many of them learned that Harris County bureaucrats have been discussing plans of their own for the route: a…
Tonetraeger
Tonetraeger is an electronic duo from Düsseldorf whose dissatisfaction with being an electronic duo from Düsseldorf is their biggest problem. Rather than just stick to layering willowy vocals over humming organs and hiccuping percussion — a trick they turn nicely for the bulk of This Is Not Here — Tonetraeger…
Letters
Renaissance Fare Medieval magic: At first I was a bit leery of what you would write about in your article when you posted on renaissancefestival.com about looking for campers, but let me congratulate you on an awesome article [“Escape Artists,” by Craig Malisow, November 11]. It was well written and…
The Libertines
The Libertines have already earned a reputation for being the UK’s most notorious louts, garnering splashy headlines for canceled gigs, breakups, arrests, stints in rehab and, of course, enough drugs to make them honorary members of the Keith Richards Society. The quartet’s appetite for self-destruction has earned it comparisons to…
Teruya’s Bag
The season of consumption is upon us: We’ve got a month of hard-core eating and shopping ahead. But as you pick up another carload of plastic crap from Toys “R” Us and swing through the Golden Arches for a “Supersize Me!” special, you might want to pause for a moment…
The Concretes
The Concretes were reportedly named after the most prevalent building material in their hometown of Stockholm. A better moniker for the symphonic pop band might’ve been the Delicate Flowers. Or Thrift Store Ski Lodge. Or Sexy Mumbling Epics. On its first full-length (following three EPs), the Swedish octet delivers addictive…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, November 25 You’ve unfastened so many buttons that you’re legally undressed. The football has gotten boring, and your drunken uncle is starting his “gays in the military” talk. It’s time to bail. Smooch Mom good-bye and head out to the Continental Club to see the Handsomes. These days, the…
Playbill
Down With the Scene Festival A year and a half after his successful Down With the Scene Fest, Groceries/Bring Back the Guns front man Matt Brownlie has decided to host another and make it a monthly event. Brownlie says that the event promises to “showcase the best underground music from…
Inside the Glide
They may be ballers or even shot callers, but truthfully, some professional athletes are just plain dumb, lazy or both. Local hoops Hall of Famer Clyde Drexler has no problem dogging such cats — like Ron Artest, the NBA player who recently made headlines when he requested a month off…
No Dicking Around
The most shocking thing about Kinsey, the first film from writer-director Bill Condon since 1998’s Gods and Monsters, is how shocking it is. Within the confines of a standard biopic (A Beautiful Dirty Mind, you might call it), Condon refuses to play it straight — which is only appropriate, since…
“Temporary” Insanity
This is the time of year when everyone is sprucing up their digs for the season. You see the stuff everywhere: fat glowing Santas, wreaths the size of Schlitterbahn inner tubes and foot-long candy canes. In the spirit of the holidays, the Orange Show is redecorating, too. Their version of…
Hip to Be SquarePants
At the bottom of the ocean, inside a giant pineapple, lives a yellow oblong sponge who likes to blow bubbles, eat more ice cream than is good for him and work as a fry cook. The Krabby Patty sandwiches he makes are so popular that a one-eyed plankton, who runs…
Remember the Titans
SUN 11/28 Just why in the hell do Houstonians give two bull droppings about the Tennessee Titans? Have they forgotten the day our once-beloved Houston Oilers were drugged and tossed in the trunk of owner Bud Adams’s car for a midnight ride to Tennessee? Perhaps they’re stuck in some kind…
Ghost in the Machinist
It’s the biopic of the year: Christian Bale is cadaverous industrial rocker Trent Reznor, prone to temper tantrums, brooding, inhabiting colorless environments and keeping your parents awake all night as he fronts the heavy band known as Nine Inch Nails. Oh, wait…that’s not quite right. Christian Bale, in fact, is…
“Fallen” for You
FRI 11/26 Club Go, the downtown warehouse-turned-club formerly known as Hyperia, is hosting a bumpin’ little getaway for all those looking to escape that holiday ambush of football, pumpkin pie and Grandma’s really weird casserole. “Fallen” features a cross-section of DJs spinning everything from house to progressive to nu-skool breaks…
Skip It
As the year stumbles toward its conclusion and critics begin penning their best-and-worst compendiums, here’s a holiday contender fit for the all-time Naughty List. Based on the John Grisham novel Skipping Christmas — which, face it, is less a novel than an impulse item stacked on bookstore checkout counters –…
Here’s to Hope
WED 12/1 Jane Weiner of Hope Stone Dance remembers a time when red ribbons were everywhere; nowadays, they seem positively retro. AIDS, unfortunately, is not. So on World AIDS Day, Weiner is joining nine other area groups for Illumination Project 2004, which she calls “a little bit of a memorial…
Call Him Al
If you’ve ever gone line-dancing with a gaggle of amputees on crank and hallucinogens, you know something of the feeling engendered by viewing Alexander. This broad, bold and ambitious film by Oliver Stone presents itself as a fairly straightforward endeavor, but its rhythms quickly go strange while its participants hobble…