Ladies Luck
After almost a decade, Barenaked Ladies’s slow-and-steady wooing of America finally came to fruition this summer. Upon its June release, Stunt, the Canadian band’s fourth full-length CD, debuted at number three — not bad when you consider its predecessor, Born on a Pirate Ship, was a commercial disappointment. Stunt’s success…
Cat Stats
Last year Andrew Lloyd Webber’s T.S. Eliot-based, Tony Award-winning musical about frisky felines became the longest-running show in Broadway history, and the 11-year-old Fourth National Touring Company (the one that’ll be at Jones Hall this weekend) pushed Cats to the top of nationwide record books as well. The plotless, and…
Change Is Good
For McCoy Tyner, one of the most pivotal moments in his musical evolution was also one of the most casual. “My mom asked me, ‘Do you mind if Bud Powell uses our piano?’ He came in and played my piano and I offered him a sandwich. Years later, I saw…
Dish
The Scoop on Ruppe Houston gourmands have been watching 3939 Montrose, the space formerly occupied by Monica Pope’s Quilted Toque. Earmarked for Tony Ruppe’s new bistro more than a year ago, the room has remained shuttered as the opening date slid from early to mid- to late summer. Now it…
Tales to Treat
In the opening act of Houston Grand Opera’s The Tales of Hoffmann, raucous patrons of Luther’s German tavern urge the wine-filled poet Hoffmann to sing about a legendary monster called Kleinzach. Inspired by his muse, the lovelorn writer momentarily forgets his sorrows and begins an odd ditty about a splayfooted,…
Fine, Fine Fusion
Lately I’ve become disheartened by big-city life. I migrated here 20 years ago from the heart of darkest Appalachia seeking hot restaurants, cool nightlife, and a professional basketball team. Now, jaded and cynical, I’m tired of waiting three cycles at each traffic light on Kirby, depressed by nosebleed ticket prices…
Getting the Picture
Like anything that confidently demands your participation, “Blurred Boundaries” is enough to make you tired in advance. Just a glance through Winter Street Art Center’s mazelike galleries and corridors — filled with nearly 100 works by 32 Houston artists — tells you this stuff is loaded with heady ideas. Sponsored…
Hot Plate
Mango Mango Chicken caught my eye on the otherwise regulation-Chinese menu at Tien Fu (2390 West Alabama, 526-3868). But I hesitated — what if it’s too sweet? Not. Tender white-meat chicken strips alternate with firm curves of just-ripe mango in Chef Joe Wong’s summery stir-fry. The saving grace is the…
Glam-rock Goldmine
Fifteen minutes into Velvet Goldmine, director Todd Haynes’s love letter to England’s glam-rock scene of the late ’60s/early ’70s, the film has already promised to be many things: a missing-person mystery, a meticulous period piece, an essay on sexually liberated dandyism, a quasi-musical, a portrait of the Machiavellian as an…
Rights Out
Fascism is in the air … well, at least it’s on movie screens. In a two-week stretch we’ve seen old Nazis (Life Is Beautiful), neo-Nazis (American History X), old Nazis training neo-Nazis (Apt Pupil), and book-burning (Pleasantville); and now, with The Siege, a story of full-blown military rule on American…
Surreal Appeal Still
Postwar Italy’s most heralded contribution to world cinema may have been neorealism, but its most distinctive and beloved filmmaker was Federico Fellini (1920-1993), who found his true voice when he abandoned neorealism for its polar opposite. While the conventional wisdom has Fellini moving abruptly from his neorealist roots toward a…
Appealing Alarmist
The hero of Evan Dunsky’s The Alarmist is a dopey innocent named Tommy Hudler (Scream’s David Arquette), whose only sin seems to be falling in with the wrong crowd. A rookie salesman with all the aggression of a baby chick, Tommy sells residential burglar alarms door-to-door in Los Angeles for…
Bad Sports
Kris Wingenroth hoped she’d put the worst behind her. The Rice University swimming coach had survived a team revolt in 1996, and even though a couple of the athletes still routinely telegraphed their obvious dislike, they were no longer actively agitating to get her fired. The 1997 season had passed…
Fugitive Justice
When the Big Moment came, Deputy U.S. Marshal Richard “Marshall” Baker was in the unlikeliest of places — flopped out on his living-room couch. For six months, he had been working 18-hour days trying to track down a fugitive named Gary Robert Williams, a violent, lifelong criminal wanted most recently…
Downtown Dumping, Dog-Style
Bill Thompson is the grandfatherly type — very accommodating, kind of quiet, very relaxed in his decostyle office. At 64, he’s come out of retirement to do what he likes doing best — running a steamship line. Throw in the excitement of downtown living and his four-legged companion, Anastasia, and…
Davidian Branches Out
Former Houston Chronicle reporter Geoff Davidian’s work at the paper early this decade — particularly his pieces on slave women held at a local hotel by visiting Saudis — often seemed like Technicolor clips in the daily’s otherwise black-and-white local coverage. Now Davidian has taken to the Internet as a…
Letters
In Only Five Years? Just bouncing around from one site to another here in the newsroom — CBS-TV, Toronto — and happened onto your piece about the murderous fellow with the new social security number and the fascinating job in the insurance business [“Making a Killing,” by Steve McVicker, October…
Children of the Korn
Korn’s 1998 harvest is more bountiful than anyone could have expected, and younger metal/punk/rap hybrid acts like the Deftones are reaping the benefits. Not that the Sacramento quartet hasn’t been working hard on its own account. Road stints with Bad Brains, White Zombie and, yes, Korn — not to mention…
News of the Weird
Lead Story *A University of California professor’s request to see FBI records on Groucho Marx was granted in September. Included in the records were reports of Marx’s friendships with other liberal Hollywood types and public quotes by Marx critical of the United States, some obviously made just for laughs. Despite…
Rotation
DJ Spooky Riddim Warfare Outpost/Geffen Remember the episode of Friends where Ross thinks he can make it as a musician? The one where he dusts off the old keyboard he got as a teen, makes a bunch of nasty, incoherent sounds and labels the result avant-garde, only to have his…
Night & Day
Thursday November 5 The two-week-long 26th Annual Jewish Book Fair brings 33 authors to Houston to speak about their recently published books and offers some 6,000 titles for sale. Today at 12:30 p.m., Brandeis University professor Joyce Antler discusses her book The Journey Home: How Jewish Women Shaped Modern America,…
Static
Last words … Perhaps it was inevitable that Houston and I would part ways — eventually. But I never thought it would happen this abruptly. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were scoping out houses in the Heights, intent on hanging around a while. Today, we’re in the harried…
The Farb File
What’s an event planner to do when a fundraiser turns into an organizational nightmare? These days divine intervention is no longer the stuff of wishful thinking. All it takes is a computer, an Internet connection and $1500. Pricey, you say? Ah, but wait. This isn’t any old ethereal intervention: It…