Gang Signs
TUE 11/9 They hail from one of the toughest settlements in Australia, but this gang isn’t pushing CDs about hard-core street life. The Lockhart River Gang is a group of mainly twentysomething Australian aboriginal art stars who are heirs to a 50,000-year-old culture — and one of the world’s oldest…
Flora, Fauna and Victoriana
Given his smart-ass sense of humor and his history of using collaged porn in his artwork, Scott Calhoun is one of the last people you would imagine making works that draw on things like Victorian faerie paintings and chinoiserie. But for the past several years, Calhoun has had a day…
Fight Club
FRI 11/5 Those crazy ancient Romans with their gladiators and their thing for feeding Christians to lions! Is it any wonder their glorious civilization crumbled? What can you say about a society’s values when its citizens delight in watching horrendous physical violence? As you ponder this socioanthropological question, we’d like…
Capsule Reviews
“Al Souza” You may have seen Al Souza’s puzzle paintings. But if you haven’t, they’re pretty much what they sound like: paintings made out of puzzles. Souza hunts puzzles high and low, in thrift stores and on eBay, and has freelancers assemble them. Then he takes strategic sections of the…
Hudson, Texas
SAT 11/6 The last time Turntables on the Hudson came to Houston, rain was forecast, and a few ominous drops were falling as Nappy G, Mariano and Nickodemus took the stage. Three hours later, the rain was still coming, but frankly, a tornado could have blown through, picked up the…
Dancing Delicacies
A large black Mercedes swoops to the curb while I’m trying to hand my keys to the valet in front of Saffron, the new Moroccan restaurant next door to Mia Bella on Lexington. The valet ignores me while he attends to the driver of the luxury sedan, a beautiful woman…
Flashy Dance
THU 11/4 Modern dance is like haute couture: Even if you don’t really get it, it’s cool to look at. And if Suchu Dance’s Roseburn, premiering this weekend at the Barnevelder Movement/Arts Complex, is brain food for the dance set, then it’s definitely eye candy for the rest of us…
Prize-Winning Paella
Earlier this summer, Rioja Spanish Tapas Restaurant (11920 Westheimer, 281-531-5569) ran away with the first prize at the Houston International Paella Cookoff. Not bad for an upstart that hadn’t even opened its doors yet. Rioja’s paella ($16.95) is made from quality ingredients: authentic rice from Valencia heavily infused with saffron,…
Die, Jeff Buckley, Die!
Jeff Buckley needs to die. Again. Like that photo of Michael J. Fox’s parents in Back to the Future, his beloved image — swoony alt-rock icon, weepingly tragic cult hero — is slowly fading into nothingness, but this time a horrible image is hardening in its place: the White Tupac…
Holly’s Hobby
“I might have to go all of a sudden,” Holly Golightly says by way of introduction. “I’ve got food in the oven.” Golightly has cooked from a musical perspective since at least 1991, when she made her first impact on the global garage-rock scene. Still, it’s difficult to reconcile the…
Blizzard of Oz
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” — The Wizard of Oz Have the last six or so weeks in America been real or just a twisted fever dream? Will all of us and all this weirdness simply vanish when the teenage Judy Garland wakes up? Life has…
Elvis Costello
“In a certain light he looked like Elvis,” croons the former Declan MacManus with consummate irony on the title track to his new disc. The Delivery Man is easily the most abrasively rocking thing Costello has released since 1986’s Blood and Chocolate. By the same token, it’s also the most…
Ely Guerra
On the heels of Tijuana’s Julieta Venegas’s alt-pop smash hit and her Latin Grammy-winner Sí comes yet another Mexican norteña that should make as much noise. Monterrey-born Ely Guerra’s fourth album is true to its name. It has a strong pop element during the “sweet and sour” segment (the first…
No Virgins, No Velvet
For many artists, opportunity knocks once or twice. For Ibsen Espada, it banged incessantly. The part-time dog catcher was asleep with a hangover on a Saturday morning, in his ramshackle White Oak painting studio, when somebody began pounding on the door. Naked, Espada climbed out of bed, leaving behind a…
Le Tigre
Strummer/Universal
Daddy Day Care
Who in the world could possibly be against the idea of having a bar right next to a day-care center? It gives Dad a chance to relax with a few shots before picking up snot-nosed Junior, who no doubt is gonna start immediately whining about how his friend Jimmy got…
Devin the Dude
You’ve no doubt heard of wine, women and song. Devin the Dude, the funniest of Houston’s rappers, has too. But what really gets him going is weed, women and bongs. Almost every one of To Tha X-Treme’s 17 songs concerns either smoke or hotties — as he says, he’s “a…
Eating It Up
The cafeteria workers at Jefferson Davis High School run their breakfast program with factorylike precision. Into the big blue Igloo coolers go foil-wrapped taco pockets, cartons of milk and boxes of apple juice. Each kid gets one breakfast. Each classroom gets one cooler. The coolers are shipped to classrooms at…
Playbill
Further Seems Forever and Sparta, with Copeland and Sunshine Hearts-on-their-sleeves emocore slashers Further Seems Forever cycle through lead singers the way Spinal Tap goes through drummers, albeit not under circumstances involving death by spontaneous combustion. The Florida group’s original mouthpiece, Chris Carrabba, departed after 1999’s The Moon Is Down for…
Letters
Straight to Heaven Gay “healing” program: Your exposé on Reparative Ministries was right on [“The Reorient Express,” by Craig Malisow, October 14]. I, too, was one of the desperate who felt that these types of ministries would heal something that my church said was an abomination. I put my “naive”…
Candy Caine
Writer-director Charles Shyer’s Alfie is less a remake of the 1966 film that made Michael Caine a star than it is a retooling that softens the horrific blows struck by the original; it’s sweeter, too, cotton candy spun from decades-old arsenic. The original, written by Bill Naughton (who also penned…
Hair Supply
Joy Marcelle thinks her job is fabulous. Good thing, too. As the hair and makeup supervisor for Hairspray, she’s responsible for the more than 150 wigs that travel with the show’s touring company. And Hairspray wouldn’t be Hairspray without the hair — the 2003 Tony Award-winning musical is filled with…
Super, Ordinary
Since its initial publication in 1986, myriad filmmakers have attempted in vain to film Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s comic book Watchmen, in which costumed superheroes have been outlawed and are being summarily exiled and executed by an unknown baddie. At the moment, Darren Aronofsky (Pi) is set to direct…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, November 4 Truthfully, unless you’re a glad-handing, card-hurling businessperson with a frozen smile, there aren’t a whole lot of reasons to hit a chamber of commerce event. Understanding that, the folks at the Asian Chamber of Commerce are tempting folks with food. At the Westin Oaks Hotel for the…
Mild Salsipuedes
The staid world of opera has let down its hair with Houston Grand Opera’s world premiere of Daniel Catán’s Salsipuedes, A Tale of Love, War, and Anchovies. There are ushers sporting tropical wear, salsa demonstrations in the grand foyer, palm tree shadows reflecting off lobby walls, a “cruise” photographer snapping…
Tall Cool One
Being on reality TV is much like your first sexual experience: It’s your golden opportunity to either shine or — ahem — blow it. Comedian Gary Gulman used virtually every moment of his time on NBC’s reality series Last Comic Standing to shine. The chiseled, six-foot-six native Bostonian dispatched stand-up…
Capsule Reviews
Houston Ballet on the Edge This Cullen Series showcase featured Blindness, Houston Ballet artistic director Stanton Welch’s first creation since he took over the company. After tempting us with Diversions, then mostly boring us with Tales of Texas (which he created before taking over as artistic director), Welch has gone…