Turkeys (and Other Creatures) On the Ballot
First came the water in leaden sheets and raging torrents. Then the pipeline burst and the river burned, sending billowing black columns to the sky and oil slicks to Galveston Bay. And finally, on November 8 in the Year of Our Lord 1994, comes the largest flock of contesting, contentious…
Hung Out
After five and a half years as an employee in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Kenneth Williams knows that in prison each minute of visitation time is a precious commodity. A former guard who is now a laundry manager at the Jester III unit in Richmond, Williams has been…
Press Wins Awards
In recent weeks, the Houston Press has picked up awards both statewide and national for stories published during the last year. At an October 22 awards ceremony in Dallas, it was announced that the Press had won a Katie, a statewide award presented by the Dallas Press Club, for Best…
Funny Business
Collection agencies are generally not that hard to find. Most of the time, in fact, they’re hard to get away from, given that their purpose in life is to be so ubiquitous, so in your face that people who’ve avoided paying off debts finally succumb and put that check in…
Letters
Damn Good Please inform Michael Berryhill that his “Terminator of TSU” article [October 6] was damn good. I declared war on Lady Joann even before she got here, and it wasn’t just because Dr. Otis King is a childhood pal of mine. Bud Johnson Houston Editor’s note: Johnson is managing…
Press Picks
november 3 22nd Annual Jewish Book Fair Hoo-boy, a couple dozen authors are scheduled to read and sign, Booktronics will be promoting audio books and trendoid multimedia items, and Barbie’s mom and Gene Siskel will appear. (He’s the skinny, balding one.) Fiction, non-fiction, children’s storytelling and a 15,000-volume bookstore add…
The Fruit of Il Dio di Vin’
I hardly know what to make of Il Dio di Vin’, the most curious and confounding restaurant I’ve encountered in almost a year of weekly reviewing. I can’t decide if the mock-grotto decor is slightly grim or engagingly daffy. I don’t know whether the food is good or bad (probably…
Great Tastes Jr.
I arrived at City Hall plaza on Halloween noon primed for some serious grazing. The sea of ink touting the Great Tastes of Houston Festival, relocated to Elyse World this year from its Summit-area vacant lot, had been quite specific: all week long there’d be booths from 33 restaurants offering…
Rotation
Mississippi Fred McDowell Good Morning Little Schoolgirl Arhoolie Through the 1960s, Chris Strachwitz roamed the South, looking for old farmers with guitars and accordions. The quality of his resulting field recordings, and of subsequent studio sessions, led to his reputation as one of the most accomplished producers of the genre…
Fatal Attraction
As last Friday’s opening-night audience arose in unison to applaud Denyce Graves’ sensual, passionate performance in the title role of Carmen, the name “O.J.” inevitably arose from the murmuring of the crowd. Whether or not Simpson murdered his estranged wife has, of course, yet to be decided by a jury…
Live Shots
Joshua Redman Cezanne Friday, October 21 There’s only one word to describe jazz saxophonist Joshua Redman live: phenomenal. His concert performance surpassed anything even hinted at by his recordings. Of course, his last recording is seven months old, and in Redman years, that’s at least a decade. Time seems to…
Children’s Hour
When asked about Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, the ubiquitous response seems to be, “I vaguely remember it from high school.” There’s a reason most don’t continue a relationship with the play past when it’s forced on them: despite the seriousness of its subject, The Crucible is a hollow and rather…
Living the Unexamined Life, Happily
Ever since fashion provocateur Malcolm McClaren set the Sex Pistols for self-destruct and aimed the band’s tick-tocking stagger for the heart of rock and roll, the destruction of the prevailing rock establishment has been at the top of each successive underground’s agenda. Punk was supposed to kill it off for…
No Punchin Judy
The Stonewall riots, three days of uprisings in 1969 that helped launch the gay rights revolution, began hours after the funeral of Judy Garland. A play documenting Stonewall’s causes could be powerful; dramatizing who perhaps started the riots could be moving. Examining what role, if any, Garland’s funeral bore could…
The Soul of Storyville
Storyville singer Malford Milligan wasn’t even a singer a few short years ago, just your run-of-the-mill black albino sociology student at the University of Texas with a growing interest in the tenets of Buddhism. The Buddhism, Milligan has said, opened his mind to the idea of performing publicly, which in…
A Fine Finney Version
I confess; I used to be a Latin teacher. So there’s a soft spot in my heart for any film in which the protagonist attempts the impossible, i.e. teaching classics to high schoolers. Maybe that’s why I’m willing to cut The Browning Version some slack. Go along with it a…
Goodbye to Lanny Steele
Skipper Lee Frazier stood in the chapel of the Eternal Rest Funeral Home and glanced at his watch. “It’s about time to get started,” he said. “I’m just waiting for Lanny to tell me who the first band is.” But after 18 years as master of ceremonies at the SumArts…
Enema of the People
Alan Parker’s The Road to Wellville is a prettily detailed movie about the prettily detailed fascination with bodily functions that marked turn-of-the-century America — or, at least, that part of America with enough money and free time to pursue medical obsessions. Based on T. Coraghessan Boyle’s novel, which in turn…
Puke Sick
There are plenty of ways to pass a chilly Thursday (meeting my deadline would have been the practical, if not ecstatic, option), but when some unidentified bug has got you disgorging bile on a regular schedule and there’s nothing to do but huddle under a dirty blanket and hope for…
Making Change
Here’s another independent filmmaker’s dream come true. Like Hal Hartley, Richard Linklater and Richard Rodriguez before them, Kevin Smith (director) and Scott Mosier (producer) maxed out a handful of credit cards and hocked prized personal effects to produce a prized — and prize winning — progeny. Smith’s and Mosier’s is…
Sons (and Daughters) of Lindsay
Before you go the polls, please observe a moment of silence for one turkey who’s flying the coop, Harris County Judge Jon Lindsay. Lindsay found himself in hot water last year when his mid-eighties’ dealings with the now-deceased sleazy developer Robert Corson surfaced in print, largely because a former Corson…