Nada Surf, with Death Cab for Cutie
In one of 2003’s best musical surprises, Nada Surf — a band that has struggled to exorcise the memory of its 1996 novelty hit “Popular” from the record-buying consciousness — has released a disc with the healing power of a dozen Max von Sydows. Like Spoon’s brilliant transistor-radio pastiche Kill…
Talk the Night Away
THU 11/6 Expectations shape attitudes, especially in the capricious world of Midtown’s swinging nightlife. If buzzing nightflies go into a place looking for thump and find six lonely souls on the dance floor, chances are they’re going to pull a 180 and head straight for the door. So it was…
Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys
Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys make music in glorious splashes of color. Boppin’ rockabilly. Swingin’ C&W. Rockin’ hillbilly boogie. Their throwback sound may be ’50s-inspired, but these guys aren’t James Dean wannabes. Robert “Big Sandy” Williams — a large man with a graceful voice — and his crackerjack crew…
When Harry Met Santa
TUE 11/11 In his career so far, Harry Connick Jr. has been a child piano prodigy, a smooth, Sinatra-esque balladeer and an actor (most recently as Dr. Leo Markus, Grace’s husband on TV’s Will and Grace). Now we can add Festive Yuletide Mistletoe Man to that résumé. Connick’s new Christmas…
Silly Humans, The Matrix Is for Kids!
A not terribly long time ago in an uninhabitable galaxy called Burbank, a generally astute movie studio founded by four Polish siblings alienated a young hotshot filmmaker. The studio was Warner Bros., and the project was a cold, disturbing, highly stylized vision of a mechanized future called THX-1138. It wasn’t…
Tennessee Tornadoes
It is the inevitable outcome of the fact that rock and roll now has a well-established history: Whenever a hot new band comes out, the first thing that journalists and listeners do is describe their music in terms of, well, other bands. It’s easy, convenient, and ostensibly a fan can…
Big Wet Kiss
With its soundtrack stockpiled with songs of romance and Christmas and a screenplay by the man who wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, it’s appropriate that Love Actually feels less like a brand-new movie than a greatest-hits compendium. It offers nothing new, instead presenting…
Fight the Right
Wacky, irreverent Eric Lane Barnes, creator of Fairy Tales and Fruit Cocktails, has conjured yet another cartoon of a show about sexual identity. The Stops, now playing at Theatre New West, tells the campy tale of three middle-aged ladies who fight to save a gay writer of Sunday school songs…
Thea Gilmore
Ever-vigilant toy giant Mattel recently blocked production of Thea Gilmore’s upcoming single “Mainstream.” According to Gilmore’s label Compass Records, the singer “defamed [Mattel’s] line of Barbie merchandise by using the doll’s likeness to imply the vacuous nature of pop stardom.” Cease and desist orders aside, one listen to the 23-year-old…
Hail Caesar!
The clouds part, and fog rolls in, bringing with it a strolling chamber orchestra. Behind the clouds sits an art deco pyramid, striped in black and white. Stepping out of some Astaire-Rogers picture, chorus boys dressed in evening wear with top hats tap the front of the pyramid with the…
A Hard-on for Numbers
Newspapers everywhere are desperate to come up with new ways to produce high circulation figures. If the claims in a Harris County lawsuit are to be believed, the Houston Chronicle is a real leader in that effort. What was the Chron’s trick? Offering readers compelling takes on hot topics? Brightening…
Image-Free Art
Seeing artwork in person is different from seeing it in reproduction. Not just because of the quality of the visual but because we don’t experience the contemporary, real-world context of the work. A picture of the Mona Lisa behind all her glass barriers in the Louvre documents the object and…
Election Ennui
It was the sort of nasty little late-campaign spat that usually flares up only when a particular candidate is doing badly and someone needs to blow off steam. Early last month, Buffalo Bayou Partnership president Anne Olson received a Bill White campaign brochure trumpeting his positions on bayou beautification and…
Free Will
Even when people were watching Will Ferrell on television every Saturday night, they weren’t seeing Will Ferrell. They saw no more than a glimpse of him, beneath wigs and behind glued-on beards and buried under characters who became almost better known than he during his seven years on Saturday Night…
Pens and Needles
A case that involved millions of dollars in fraud, undercover operatives and culprits-turned-snitches could expect testimony tinged with sometimes bitter recriminations. And that was the situation in a sentencing hearing played out in an El Paso courtroom in 2000. El Paso attorney Victor Bieganowski had been convicted of massive medical…
Shooting Bambi’s Mom
About 60 yards away, a fat doe is trying to hide in a cluster of scrub oaks. I can see her through the scope, but with all the leaves in the way, I can’t quite put the crosshairs on the thick of her neck. Scrunching down on the passenger side…
Venison Recipes for Gourmet Environmentalists
Venison Stock or Demi-Glace The French base their fabulous sauces on stocks, which are meat broths made from bones. These stocks can be reduced, or boiled down, to produce a more intense flavor. This style of cooking takes time and effort, but the results are worth it. To make your…
Slip into Something Comfortable
Although the menu at the Daily Review Cafe (3412 West Lamar, 713-520-9217) changes every day, one dish is ever present: the chicken potpie ($9.75). In this constantly changing world, it’s comforting to know that certain classic dishes will always be around. The handmade puff pastry atop the pie is crimped…
Citizen Arcane
In the hit cult movie High Fidelity, a music geek’s Citizen Kane, there’s a semifamous scene where record store clerk/arch-rock snob Barry (played by Jack Black) scorns a customer’s request for Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” “Ooh, I’m sorry, is your daughter in a coma?”…
Letters
Deserving Moy B-boys forever: Yo! Thanks a lot for writing such a great story on Moy Rivas and B-boying [“Big Steps,” by Michael Serazio, October 23]. I’m a B-boy myself. I know Moy personally, and he’s a terrific guy who deserves everything he’s getting from the dance. Thanks a lot…
My Pork Belly Future
The wooden bowl full of warm milk, poached eggs and white bread comes with a slice of queso fresco on the side. You tear up the cheese and sprinkle it on top, our waitress at Mi Pueblito Restaurant explains. This milky, parsley-flavored soup is called changua, and it’s a popular…
Hit the Decks
House music started out as a trashy little tramp of a thing. Its early hits were built on not much more than a drum machine pumping away at a headboard-against-the-wall tempo and a few breathy pleas to jack your body into the orgiastic confluence of dancers on the floor. House…
Art of Mystery
There will be 1,375,000 of them. They will cover an area 40 feet long and eight feet high. It will take a team of six people four straight days to install them. So what are they? Well, we can’t say. New York artist Tara Donovan made her name creating large-scale…
City Under Siege
Last week we brought you the story of, as they would say in a movie trailer, one man with the courage, the passion, the desire to take the law into his own hands and get all of his stolen musical equipment back from the band that stole it from him…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, November 6 Accordions aren’t just for polka musicians and “Weird Al” Yankovic anymore. They’ve clawed their way into the earnest alterna-mainstream, thanks to musicians like Gloria Deluxe and Mark Growden. After all of Growden’s (mostly jazz) instruments were stolen seven years ago, he stumbled upon an accordion in the…
Basement Jaxx
Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe, the British DJ/producers who make up Basement Jaxx, have never worried about fitting in musically. Rather, they make everything fit into their music. On Remedy, their debut, Buxton and Ratcliffe rebelled against the restrictions of the four-on-the-floor house beat, incorporating many different strains of music…
Lestat’s Ba-ack
Anne Rice has worked her Dark Trick yet again. With her new novel, Blood Canticle, she has brought back the first-person voice of her most popular creation, the decadent and deadly Vampire Lestat. As before, he is bratty, vain and hugely egotistical, but hey, he’s a living-dead legend. He knows…
Jägermeister Tour 2003, with Slayer, Hatebreed, Archenemy and E-Town Concrete
“Disorder,” Slayer’s 1994 collaboration with Ice-T, went over like a fart in church. The lame soundtrack cut stands unique in a catalog nearly devoid of filler. Most of the other rarities collected on the band’s upcoming boxed set, Soundtrack to the Apocalypse, are worth going out of your way for…
Live Through This
MON 11/10 On November 22, 1963, Nellie Connally rode with her husband, Texas Governor John Connally, and a lapful of yellow roses, into the history books. This month, her handwritten, eyewitness account of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination is being published, after languishing in a drawer for 33 years. It’s…
Singapore Sling
Icelandic rock bands for $100, please, Alex. And the answer is: The newest Reykjavík band that’s set to blow up. If you answered Sigur Rós, it’s someone else’s turn; that was last year’s model. But if you replied, “Who is Singapore Sling?” get ready for the Daily Double. The June…
Smoking the Halfpipe
Put down those video game controllers and fingerboards. It’s time to experience skateboarding the way it was meant to be: live and, uh, inside the new Toyota Center.Tony Hawk’s Boom Boom Huck Jam is a hell-on-wheels demonstration, featuring the world’s top ramp skateboarders, BMX riders and motorcycle acrobats. Hawk will…
U.K. Subs
Who’d have thought that a band like the Clash would ever make it to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? True, Joe Strummer and company did flirt with the mainstream a bit, but even in today’s climate of punk patronization, it seems creepy to lump the group that wrote…
You Fix It, You Keep It
Kids in Houston are way more familiar with the backseats of cars than the banana seats of bicycles — which is why Third Ward Community Bike Center co-founder Seth Capron is bringing the bike experience to town, and specifically to kids in the Third Ward, where some parents may not…