Taking Back the Blight
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, CORNER OF STUDEWOOD AND EAST NINTH STREET — Some two dozen Heights residents march the chain-linked periphery of The Lincoln Man’s recently opened used car lot, pumping homemade signs — “Save Our Studemont!” and “Go Back to North Shepherd!” and “Bad Credit? BIG Problem!” — into the…
Extra Poppy
His band has two hit songs, two major-label albums and a recent appearance in Rolling Stone, yet Jimi HaHa of Jimmie’s Chicken Shack still pays $200 rent and drives a car he bought from his mother. “If I figure how much I’ve made, hourly, over the last ten years,” HaHa…
Blight Savers’ Manifesto
Friends, Citizens, Fellow Houstonians! We are under SIEGE! The Powers That Be would have us cast our votes our hopes and our lots at large with “redevelopment.” With REVITALIZATION! For flower-bedded medians and tidy concrete curbs and stadiums no end. The ghost of Eleanor Tinsley haunts the city’s halls, moaning…
Local Rotation
Various Artists J. Prince Presents Realest N!@@az Down South Rap-A-Lot Various Artists Get Crunk! Tommy Boy Rap-A-Lot’s J. Prince Presents Realest N!@@az Down South and Tommy Boy’s Get Crunk! are two new compilation discs that are looking for a place in every ghetto busta’s heart. But which CD does the…
Shermann Bilks’s Top 10 Signs of Blight Slippage
x•Landlords begin demanding pet deposits •Cars parked at the curb for more than 24 hours are actually ticketed by HPD •Landscaping •Benches installed at bus stops •Central a/c •Taqueria menus printed in Spanish and English •Retractable dog leashes •Labrador retrievers •”Historic District” petitions •H-E-B closes. Kroger Signature opens…
Amplified
Smoke Signals at KPFT Ahhh, nothing like the morning shift for a DJ. Drive the traffic-less streets to get to the studio at around 5:30. Make a cup of coffee. Dial 911 because the storage garage in the backyard is ablaze!Š That was the morning for Mary Ramirez, host of…
Sherri O’Malley, “Poet of Blight”
Sherri O’Malley is a creative-writing student at Houston Community College. Originally from Pasadena, Texas, O’Malley says her work deals with “celebrations of unlikely beauty” and is intended to help readers “reclaim the overlooked nobility of urban life.” Her poems have appeared in the HCC literary quarterly Commute-ications, and she has…
Playbill
Outsider ArtMost musicians are eccentric. Fine. But the members of Royal Trux do not subscribe to the usual eccentricities of dressing weird, taking drugs or pining for an acting career. Jennifer Herrema and Neil Hagerty live on a farmhouse in the middle of rural Virginia with their recording studio and…
Insider
Krisna Acuña already had a little girl named Destiny when she became pregnant again last year. The father-to-be, an older boyfriend of the 19-year-old, immediately refused paternal responsibility. Acuña’s parents, Jose and Bertha, were already raising Destiny in their home in Converse outside San Antonio, so Krisna decided the burden…
Fairy-tale Postscripts
Fairy tales are seductive. In them the poor get rich, the lonely find love, and everyone lives happily ever after. They are worlds of simple justice, where every good girl is beautiful and every villain a beast bound for destruction. Leave it to a composer as lyrical and dark as…
Reefer Madness?
Angela Jenkins grabbed her common-law husband by the shoulders and shook him from his sleep. It was time; the baby was coming. At three in the morning on September 22, Aaron Asher rushed Jenkins to the Memorial City branch of Memorial Healthcare System, where she gave birth to their second…
News Hostage
Gone Where the Goblins Go In many ways, Laura Morris’s career at KTRH-AM was remarkable: She started as a receptionist in the lobby, moved her way up the ladder with astonishing speed and for the past 12 or so years has been the general manager of the city’s top-rated AM…
Dub Hub
Dan Rockwell has a wide grin and an enthusiastic woo-hoo! for Sonic the Hedgehog’s current position on the Billboard video-sales charts. He whoops, “Move over The Mummy, we’re coming to town!” Like many at ADV Films, Rockwell is an anime jack-of-all-trades and is devoted to the cause, which is bringing…
News of the Weird
Lead StoriesIn October Washington state’s Department of Labor and Industries began an investigation of Seattle’s Internet pornography giant Clublove, according to a report in the Seattle newsweekly The Stranger. The investigation will focus on, among other things, Clublove’s workers’ break policy (less than the state-required one hour per eight-hour shift…
Sex Toys and Videotape
Judge James Anderson will be helping Santa this holiday season examining the contents of 70 boxes of toys. He’ll be inspecting almost 2,200 cock rings, artificial vaginas, vibrators, butt plugs and dildos — trying to decide what’s naughty or nice. The judge says he’s a “pretty hip guy,” but he…
Dish
Dining Blind We had a letter recently from a reader who dined at Aldo’s Dining Con Amore restaurant [219 Westheimer, (713)523-2536] and was taken aback — to put it mildly — when the tab was presented at the end of the evening. “Imagine our surprise,” she wrote, “at the bill…
Rewriting History
Award-winning author Walter Mosley has tackled nearly every form: fiction, nonfiction, essays, poetry, theater, even film. But he’s most famous for his best-selling novels featuring Easy Rawlins, the reluctant sleuth played by Denzel Washington in the flick Devil in a Blue Dress. Some may know him for his story collection,…
Rotation
Garden of Dreams Everything Seraph Oh, the Drama — with a capital “D.” A goth band that claims not to be goth. And anyone who knows goth knows that it is so dreadfully goth to claim Not to Be Goth. Despite a previous gothic endeavor called The Seraphim’s Desire, Garden…
Boys Will Play
Mozart’s morality tale of the sexual exploits and punishment of legendary seducer Don Juan finds flawless musical expression in Don Giovanni. Juicy, lascivious scenes set in 17th-century Seville catch the seasoned fornicator in his underwear, inspiring chuckles as well as sympathy pangs for the innocent victims. In one hilarious scene,…
Rise Up, Ye Music Mortals
Last season on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the demonic Mayor of Sunnydale planned quite a world-ending, vampire-empowering, slayer-destroying “Ascension,” but even if Buffy and her pals hadn’t foiled his plan in the season finale, that “Ascension” couldn’t hold a candle to the event of the same name that takes over…
Faith’s Fusillade
When the time comes for historians to reflect on the decade of the ’90s, one of the troubling issues they will face is the headline-grabbing litany of violence that all too regularly has visited unlikely places. Misguided outcasts sprayed lethal gunfire into schools in Pearl, Mississippi; Littleton, Colorado; and West…
The Burbs
You travel through Nic Nicosia’s photographs as a voyeur might through a neighborhood, inspecting window after window for some illicit thrill. Your glance may be quick and incomplete, even hazy. At times you do a double take, not sure of what you just saw. Nicosia’s grasp of cloaked emotions and…
Righteous Meats
Given Houston’s joyously polyglot restaurant marketplace, why shouldn’t one of our best New York kosher-style delis be owned by a Los Angeles transplant who buys his corned beef in Chicago? I mean, this is a town that welcomes Vietnamese steak houses, Thai barbecue joints and Armenian-made poor boy sandwiches. So…
Tobacco Toad
In the eyes of the general public, Michael Mann is still best known for Miami Vice. He has received a great deal of critical acclaim for films about serial killers, Mohicans and bank robbers. So who would have guessed that his most engrossing and suspenseful film to date would be…
Snack Food
Some of us have never forgiven Cortés Deli for abandoning our baby pictures when the Mexican eatery ditched its humble space in a strip center on West Alabama. The staff had rewarded us for years of patronage by tacking up pictures of our beloved toddlers — the only charming touch…
Twin Peeks
And now… a G-rated movie from David Lynch! No, Lynch hasn’t lost his mind. He hasn’t gone soft in the head. And he hasn’t sold out to the smiley-faced bean counters at Disney. While the notion of America’s King of Weird — the man who brought us Blue Velvet and…
Hot Plate
Polished Gems: I keep close watch on Alice Vongvisith’s experimental back page “off-the-menu menu” at Nit Noi Thai Restaurant [2462 Bolsover, (713)524-8114]. That’s how I happened to be the lucky first customer to try her newest dish, the Siamese Ruby ($14.95). This exotic seafood curry stars Pacific surf clams, mollusks…
Control Freaks
The first rule of Being John Malkovich is you do not look at the poster for Being John Malkovich! Sorry to crib from that inferior tale of incredible shrinking men (throw a rock at any multiplex marquee this season — please! — and you’ll hit several), but really, avoid that…
Happy Daze
One of the worst things about listening to Led Zeppelin was the munchies. Sure, “When the Levee Breaks” sounded just as good stoned as sober, but being sober was for sports or science class. And listening to Zep was what you did when you wanted to forget about form tackling…
Jailbreak Babes
Katja von Garnier’s Bandits is technically a French film, made with French money. But in every other sense, it’s a German film — in German, with a German director and cast, all taking place in Germany. It’s important to establish this point, because, together with Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run,…
Yesshow
Yes still can’t say no to making mystic rock. Last week more than 1,700 folk packed the Aerial Theater for the 30-year-old band’s first show here since 1997. The band is famous for its part in creating the genre known as progressive rock, sometimes known as art rock, sometimes ridiculed…
Far East Epic
Much like the religion that has swirled around the Star Wars trilogy for 20-some years, the fanaticism evidenced among American fans of Japanese anime remains a mystery to some of us. Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s megahit Princess Mononoke does very little to cast light on this obsession: More’s the pity, since…
Sonic Portraits
Nick Currie’s motives and intentions aren’t always easy to understand. After all, this is the same Scotsman who has been releasing records since 1986 under the pseudonym Momus, the name of the Greek god who criticized Zeus and was consequently banished. The faux moniker definitely fits Currie. He has made…