Mel as Mogul
Fresh from his epic adventures in the Oscar-winning Braveheart, Mel Gibson returns to the 20th century as a somewhat less heroic figure in Ransom. Under the vigorously efficient direction of Ron Howard, Gibson stars as Tom Mullen, a charismatic self-made man who isn’t above a bit of bribery here and…
More Panting than Painting
Whenever someone makes a film about a great artist, it is much easier, and a great deal more cinematic, to show him hopping into bed instead of daubing at a canvas. In the case of Surviving Picasso, a prosaic but fitfully fascinating portrait of the artist as a randy old…
Holy Warrior
The morning always began with a prayer and always proceeded with gospel music. It would have been easy to believe this was Sunday service, if the temple in Houston were not called the House of Pain, and if the prayers did not always end, more or less, with these words:…
Don’t cry for me, Amarillo
In the annals of business history, what took place in the high-ceilinged ballroom of the posh Omni Mandalay Hotel in Las Colinas late last July surely qualified as a moment: T. Boone Pickens Jr. very nearly cried in public. The occasion was the annual meeting of Mesa Inc., the oil…
The Insider
Encore, Mayor Bob, Encore! Fresh from his boffo performance on Court TV as folksy Uncle Bob in the Sylvester Turner-Wayne Dolcefino trial, Bob Lanier is now preparing for another starring performance, this one before the federal grand jury weighing evidence in the FBI’s City Hall sting. The mayor is set…
Just Say No (to Open Debate)
To some of those fighting on the frontlines of the war on drugs, open discussion can be as dangerous as bad smack. Besieged by growing legions who favor the reform of zero-tolerance drug laws — including prominent conservative judges, police chiefs, physicians and businessmen — the say-no foot soldiers are…
Letters
Who’s Responsible I read the article “The Victim’s Victims” [by Steve McVicker, October 17], and I am appalled that Bob Carreiro would victimize the Wiley family by suing them and State Farm, claiming their 14-year-old son Jeremy could have prevented the murder of Kristin and Kynara. I agree with Kip…
Press Picks
thursday november 7 Ninth Annual AIDS, Medicine & Miracles HIV Retreat Conference A variety of healers — including Dr. Marge Poscher, “Diva of Comedy” Karen Williams and Native American storyteller Terry Tafoya — will converge for this gathering of HIV-positive persons and their loved ones. Traditional scientific methods and other…
Bonjour, Neighbor
There are plenty of restaurants in Houston that call themselves bistros, but most of them do so simply because they think the word adds a certain Continental sheen to the same old fare. But when folks refer to Europa, a hidden gem near Rice Village, by that Left Bank term,…
Dish
Heavenly Hopes This summer, when the quondam church on the lower reaches of Westheimer gave up its identity as Dream Merchant, clothier to the outrageous young, we were pleased to see the site revert to being a restaurant. As Gantry’s (yes, as in Elmer), it had once been the home…
Static
Anthology anticlimax… I have to admit that I expected something a little more blustery out of Capitol to mark the conclusion of its three-part Beatles Anthology series. Rather, the two-CD Anthology 3 — the final installment in the trilogy — seems to have snuck its way into local stores October…
Hip and Hawaiian
Thanks to their consolidation under the respectable classification of world beat, types of music once considered weird or indefinably alien have found new friends. One genre that can be found beneath this far-flung heading is Hawaiian folk music, which is finding a growing number of converts among those who never…
Guitar Goddess
A short while back, a friend walked in while I was playing “Campanas del Alba,” a track off a new album titled Tico Tico. He stopped to listen, and when I asked him to describe the artist whose carefully plucked, hauntingly precise notes of unaccompanied classical guitar were flowing out…
Rotation
Wilco Being There Reprise Leave it to Jeff Tweedy to take a rock-star notion as pretentious as the double-length concept album and reduce it to something about as nonchalant as a trip to the corner store for cigarettes. Tweedy was, after all, the less-affected of the two songwriters behind roots-rock…
Mr. Loud and Sensitive
Throughout his scrappy ’80s career with seminal hard-core pop threesome Husker Du, his ’90s stint with the more accessible power trio Sugar and spurts on his own, Bob Mould has never been one to cling to an idea with an expiration date — or to stick around any place for…
Surrealpolitik
The truth is often absurdly funny. In the ’60s, European dramatists celebrated that tenet, and their cryptic absurdist plays both entertained audiences and offered temporary relief from the oppression of totalitarian regimes. Playwright Slawomir Mrozek’s Tango is considered a masterwork in absurdist humor (think Ionesco with a plot). In iron-curtain…
Street Walking
The street of galleries known collectively as Colquitt (as in “Been over to Colquitt?” “Yeah.” “See anything?” “Naw.”) is a glorified strip mall, but one that has succeeded in dominating the Houston art world by sheer force of numbers. By holding their art openings on the same night, every couple…