Strait to the Topp
Steven Devadanam for HouStoned Images Ltd., Ulmtd. Bull riding stud Cody Hancock poses with a bigass Rodeo boot. At the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo’s major press conference today, I got to meet Cody Hancock, a badass who has taken a bull horn to the face and has a plate…
Mrs. Non-Smith Goes to Washington
Clearly, DeLay staffers couldn’t handle the pressures of working for a doctor… Flying in the face of common sense, newly elected Congressman Shelley Sekula-Gibbs promised to make a difference during her very, very brief time replacing Tom DeLay in Washington. Many scoffed at her, but it didn’t take long for…
Re: Make That Elephant a Guinness!
Photo by Steven Devadanam for HouStoned Images Ltd., Ulmtd. We think he totally looks like a Guinness, but whatev… Remember when we told you that the Houston Zoo needed help naming their new baby elephant? Well, the votes have been tallied, and the little guy (well, little in elephant standards…
The Houston Hump
Looking for a little music to help you get over hump day? Something low-key, but fun? We have a few suggestions. Miss Leslie & her Juke-Jointers are at the Continental Club for tonight’s Honky Tonk Happy Hour (7 pm to 10 pm), 3700 Main Street. Call 713-529-9899 for more info…
ESPN.com to Houston: Don’t Hate Mario
Admit it, Texans fan: The jersey looks good on Mario. Native Houstonian Bomani Jones is a damn good sports writer for ESPN.com and columnist for AOL’s Black Voices (one of the few readable things on AOL.com). Today, he offers up a fresh take on the whole Mario Williams vs. Reggie…
Little Joe Washington
National treasure: Little Joe Description: The last of the Third Ward blues guitar greats, Little Joe is also the wildest and perhaps the most creative musically. The pint-sized bluesman is just as likely to musically quote Gershwin as Lightnin’ Hopkins. “National treasure” is not an over the top description. Discography:…
Michael Haaga
Description: Slightly surreal pop-rock genius. It’s been compared to everything from the Shins and the Flaming Lips to Tori Amos fronting Metallica. Haaga himself calls this music “heavy mellow.” Members: Michael Haaga (vocals, guitar), Kelly Doyle (guitar), Jason Davis (bass), Brian Davis (drums), Dave Cummings (keyboards, guitar) Courtesy of Michael…
The Fatal Flying Guilloteens
Description: Austin punk legend Tim Kerr once called them “The garage-rock Gang of Four.” Writing for Popmatters.com. Jeremy Hart called them “a dangerous band,” “lo-fi, full-on rock,” and “rock ‘n’ roll at its primal best.” Members: John Adams (drums), Roy Guilloteen (bass), Brian McGuilloteen (guitar), Shawn Guilloteen (vocals), Mike Guilloteen…
Dixie Doc
15 little words changed everything for the Dixie Chicks. In an instant, the Dixie Chicks went from country darlings to America’s scape goats, and two filmmakers caught it all. Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck were not in London in March 2003, when Dixie Chick Natalie Maines told a Shepherd’s Bush…
Dynamo Druthers
Less than thrilled with Roberston’s “posh” digs? Oliver Luck hears you, Dynamo fan. The pavilion area outside Robertson Stadium is where the Houston Dynamo likes to host its special VIP parties. Sometimes it comes complete with lakeside dining, Dynamo president Oliver Luck says. That’s when it floods. All things being…
Scenes from the Cup
What, you think we wouldn’t have a correspondent to the biggest soccer game of the year? Please! Our futbol man at-large, Ian Downing-Beaver, captured some memorable scenes from Sunday’s Dynamo win. Extra points to Ian, who plays soccer for Austin College, for finagling a darn-near-on-the-field spot behind the goal, considering…
Scenes from Dynamo Sunday: Homecoming
All photos by Steven Devadanam for HouStoned Images Ltd., Ulmtd. The Caravan arrived an hour late… “The save, right on the line! And it’s over — Houston has won the 2006 MLS Cup! Pat Onstad denies Jay Heaps, and the city of orange goes wild!” … not that the Dynamo…
Scenes from Dynamo Sunday: Homecoming
All photos by Steven Devadanam for HouStoned Images Ltd., Ulmtd. The Caravan arrived an hour late… “The save, right on the line! And it’s over — Houston has won the 2006 MLS Cup! Pat Onstad denies Jay Heaps, and the city of orange goes wild!” … not that the Dynamo…
Scenes from Dynamo Sunday: The Takeoff
Photos by Steven Devadanam for HouStoned Images Ltd., Unlmtd. A little Sunday morning face paint to get things started… It’s 7:05 on a chilly Sunday morning, and even good Christians are in bed. But hundreds of cars are lining up at Gallery Furniture, ready for the Dynamo Convoy that’s headed…
Scenes from Dynamo Sunday: The Takeoff
Photos by Steven Devadanam for HouStoned Images Ltd., Unlmtd. A little Sunday morning face paint to get things started… It’s 7:05 on a chilly Sunday morning, and even good Christians are in bed. But hundreds of cars are lining up at Gallery Furniture, ready for the Dynamo Convoy that’s headed…
Guitar Shorty
As a young man, Houston born Guitar Shorty was a sideman on shows with artists like BB King, Sam Cooke, Chuck Berry and Ray Charles. But once he became a solo artist, opening spots became harder for him to land. Guitar Shorty spoke with the Houston Press about his new…
HouStoned Rocks!
Just a little ol’ reminder to check back here Monday ayem, as we’ll launch HouStoned Rocks, the Houston Press music blog. Expect all the good stuff from our regular Music section, along with tidbits from John Nova Lomax and Olivia Flores Alvarez. Sounds pretty cool, no? (See what I did…
Welcome to Make the Cut
Monica Fuentes for HouStoned Images Ltd., Unlmtd. Leave your cutline in the comments section, you funny SOB. Judging from all the death threats hate mail cease & desist orders feedback we get, it’s obvious that many of you think you can do our jobs at least as well as we…
Bidge on a Budget
MLB.com Another year, another chance for Biggio to get dinged. Houston baseball fans, relax. We know you’ve been on the edge of your seats, wondering if the 2007 season might not provide the opportunity to experience the heartwarming and longstanding Astro tradition of watching an old white guy try to…
Lunch on 290!
A little tire track and asphalt just adds to the flavor, really. Forgive the quick hits here. It’s just that we’re thinking about lunch, and that we could’ve eaten for free today, just by taking a little drive to 290. Our pals at KHOU have some great raw footage of…
Somewhere, Bono Is Screaming…
Courtesy of World Economic Forum Wait…could Bono have known about this…? Holy Mother of God. This is bad. Really bad. Don’t watch it. Please. MBNA and Bank of America hell… We tried to warn you. — John Nova Lomax…
Football U: Garden State Variety
Last time, the guys dropped names like Fellini and Proust in their preview. This week, Rich references Sondheim. Let’s see Lee Corso do that! This week, pigskin pundits Richard Connelly and John Nova Lomax bring us thier usual brainy, witty takes on college football. A must read: Their preview on…
Football U: Garden State Variety
Last time, the guys dropped names like Fellini and Proust in their preview. This week, Rich references Sondheim. Let’s see Lee Corso do that! This week, pigskin pundits Richard Connelly and John Nova Lomax bring us thier usual brainy, witty takes on college football. A must read: Their preview on…
Buck for Their Bang
Waiting to hear back from Dr. John D. Stobo, president of the University of Texas Medical Branch regarding today’s BP settlement. We’re guessing the folks at UTMB are pretty excited about the $12.5 million-deposit they’ll soon be making thanks to Eva Rowe’s tenacity and BP’s stupidity. Stay tuned. — Steven…
Q&A with Alex, Your Real World Home Boy
Courtesy of MTV Alex says he didn’t get a whole lotta action in high school. We think he’s probably doing okay now. Ok kids, it’s that time again. The Real World is coming, and to properly hype the new season, MTV has released a show teaser, which opens with some…
Boston Cream Bet
You can call him Bill. We’ll call him “The Gambler.” The Houston Dynamo are just now traveling to Frisco, TX for the big game, and already, the betting has begun. We’re not sure what the over/under is yet, but we do know that Mayor Bill White and Boston mayor Thomas…
Boston Cream Bet
You can call him Bill. We’ll call him “The Gambler.” The Houston Dynamo are just now traveling to Frisco, TX for the big game, and already, the betting has begun. We’re not sure what the over/under is yet, but we do know that Mayor Bill White and Boston mayor Thomas…
Meet the Tunesmith
Jesse Winchester Born in Shreveport and raised in Memphis, Jesse Winchester is an unlikely Canadian. One of the exceptional songwriters of his day, Winchester’s records wobbled between folk and country-rock, never neatly fitting into any one genre description. His flight to Montreal after receiving his draft notice in 1967 made…
Tilly and the Wall
Not many bands have to make their set list based on breaks for their tap dancer, but indie pop group Tilly and the Wall does. “We don’t want her to get too tired,” laughs vocalist/percussionist Neely Jenkins. “She gets really worn out by the end of the night, so we…
SOAKED SANDWICH
The torta ahogada ($8.49) at Paparrucho’s (3055 Sage, 713-212-3178) is an eight-inch hoagie roll covered with refried beans, filled with delectable pork carnitas and smothered with lime-marinated onions. The name of the dish, which comes from Guadalajara, literally means “drowned sandwich,” because before serving, it’s dunked into a spicy tomato…
Be Your Own PET
Be Your Own PET (BYOP) has been wreaking havoc since their inception in 2003. Back then they were just some crazy-talented teenagers sitting around a Nashville basement. Now they’re still crazy-talented and teenaged, but they’re out of the basement and on the road. Of course, they had a little help…
Tough Guys
It’s late August. It’s the first week of football practice and it’s time for the nutcracker. The sweat-drenched players lie on their backs about five feet apart with their helmets pointing toward each other. At the whistle, they get up and slam into each other as hard as they can…
Communication Breakdown
It’s time, perhaps, for Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu to stop scrambling his narratives. After making an exciting debut in 2000 with Amores Perros — a movie whose gimmicky Tarantino-esque tinkering with structure seemed fresher en espaol and grounded in gritty Mexico City location shooting — Gonzlez Irritu apparently decided to devote…
Lights On or Off?
What does it feel like to be under those lights? What does it feel like to have everyone watching you and expecting gold? At Kuempel Stadium outside Austin, dreams are either realized or crushed. This football field usually belongs to Pflugerville High School. But last February, a different team walked…
Anchor man?
Once an actor gets big enough to take whatever kind of role he wants, it makes sense that the biggest stretch imaginable, given his current situation, is the part of a powerless man with no control over the world around him. Call it a “nice” movie — a vehicle designed…
Making the Call
“J.J. McDermott has a rocket arm — he can really hang it on a line,” says Lonnie King as he looks down from his press box perch onto a football stadium filled to capacity with screaming fans. “At six foot four and 220 pounds, he’s got good size, and as…
Heart Attack
Pity Max Skinner, emasculated over his lamb chops. On a gray afternoon, at London’s hotspot du jour, his gloating superior unveils a plot to poach his most lucrative client, divesting him of a six-figure bonus (pounds sterling) in the process. Fuck it. The bummed-out bond trader hands in a resignation…
Letters to the Editor
Defending SPM The pain within: If you could only relate to the pressure and pain of being forced to grow up in a household with no father, then you would know how sad it really is [“Don’t Free SPM,” by Olivia Flores Alvarez, November 2]. While it is true that…
Radical Chick
When a red-blooded, macho, flag-waving, Bush-voting American country music fan looks at a gorgeous blonde who also happens to make his kind of music, one doesn’t normally expect him to pay particular attention to the actual substance of her conversation. Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines didn’t think anyone would,…
Brash Melodies
A hundred years ago (okay, somewhere in the early 1990s), I used to play in Houston’s long-defunct psych/stoner band The Mike Gunn. My musical motto was, “We never try anything new, because everything we do will just suck.” Fortunately, our other guitarist and occasional vocalist, Tom Carter, had the sense…
Swiss Miss
“Wishing for Synchronicity: Works by Pipilotti Rist” is one of the best installations in recent memory. The survey of the Swiss video artist’s work, organized by curator Paola Morsiani, has wonderfully transformed the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. The CAMH’s main gallery is filled with projections of Rist’s lushly colored, joyously…
No Ms for the Vatos Rudos
For now, it’s over — after 12 years, hundreds of gigs, beers without number and almost as many brawls, and three dozen members coming and going from their ranks, Los Skarnales have called it quits. Their packed show at the Continental Club on October 27 was their last. Or was…
Capsule Reviews
“A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad” This exhibition, organized by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and co-curated by Shannon Fitzgerald and Tumelo Mosaka, does not set out to make a sweeping statement about contemporary African art; instead, it seeks to raise interesting questions about the West’s expectations of…
Born to Bruise
“I was tied to some train tracks in Cheyenne, Wyoming.” It’s certainly among the best excuses I’ve ever heard from a musician tardy for an interview. And coming from Jolie Holland, it almost seems feasible. After all, this is an artist who actively courts both danger and anachronism, so the…
Capsule Reviews
A Bad Night’s Sleep This crazy-quilt revue from the loons at Radio Music Theatre is really a show about nothing, but RMT out-Seinfelds Seinfeld — and is much funnier to boot. Although one of the 14 Fertle Family shows, Sleep keeps our favorite family gang off stage until Act II…
Krazy Kuzins
Brothers-in-law Matt Lavan and Mike Griffith grew up listening to rap and hip-hop music, and when they became fathers, they wanted to share that with their kids. But they couldn’t find any hip-hop that was clean enough for their preschoolers to listen to. What’s a pair of hip, ambitious dads…
Why do Mexicans love dancing so much?
Dear Mexican, Not long ago, I attended a Los Tigres del Norte concert at a small hall with no dance floor. The people attending were supposed to sit down and enjoy the music. Five minutes into the music, these jumping beans started dancing in the aisle. Within minutes, half of…
In Style with Nistal
Twenty-six-year-old singer Karina Nistal doesn’t let her day job at an investment banking firm get in the way of her performing around the U.S. and Europe. (“I’m in negative vacation days at this point!” she says.) The Klein High School graduate is part of Rebel Crew, a loose coalition of…
Coke Dreams
Publisher: Vivendi Universal
Platform: PS2, Xbox, PSP, PC
Price: $40-$50
ESRB Rating: M (for Mature)
Score: 8.5 (out of 10)
Joanna Newsom
The word “lavish” has been hanging around patiently in dictionaries and thesauri for years, just waiting to apply itself to the new Joanna Newsom CD. The eccentric harpist/poetess/songbird has seen fit to follow up her rough-hewn, craftswoman-like debut The Milk-Eyed Mender (appropriately dressed down in hand-stitched cover art) with a…
Burning the Yule Log
The Junky’s Christmas (Koch) They just aren’t cranking out claymation Christmas specials like they used to, which makes this a welcome one. Nicer still, it’s got heroin! A mixture of stop motion with a little puppetry and live-action shots of William Burroughs (who may himself have been a Muppet), this…
Mayday!
Two-man band producer/keyboardist Plex Luthor and MC Bernbiz have made Mayday!’s self-titled debut one of this year’s pleasant surprises. Luthor’s early production work for Miami groups like Algorithm and Spirit Agent was simple blues beats that sounded like bedroom soliloquies. In contrast, Mayday! is vivid and colorful, with sounds that…
Our top DVD picks for the week of November 9
Anna Karenina (Kino) Arrested Development: Seasons One-Three (Fox) The Best of the Scripps National Spelling Bee (ESPN) Beverly Hills 90210: The Complete First Season (Paramount) Cinema Paradiso (Weinstein) The Fallen Idol (Criterion) Freak Out (Anchor Bay) Jag: The Complete Second Season (Paramount) The James Bond Collection: Volumes One and Two…
The Killers
Killers vocalist Brandon Flowers makes it very clear that he wants to be Bruce Springsteen on Sam’s Town, judging by the Boss-like quivers and heavy sentiments (“Can we climb this mountain? I don’t know”) decorating the over-the-top single “When You Were Young.” While it’s admirable that the members of this…
Silverstein
Canadian post-hardcore group Silverstein (Neil Boshart and Josh Bradford on guitars, Bill Hamilton on bass, Shane Told on vocals and Paul Koehler on drums) is only six years old, but its members have been busy, busy boys. They’ve done three full-length CDs, an EP and several tours. Of course, it…
Bacon, Eggs and Barbera
To eat the appetizer called “crispy pork belly with Steen’s syrup” at Catalan Food & Wine Bar on Washington, you grab the stout little splinter of sugar cane that’s stuck through the middle of one of the cubes of fatty pork, then bite into the loose layers of crunchy meat…
The Melvins
The Melvins are heavier than heavy metal. The group’s monolithic Sabbath-sludge was the backbone of the Pacific Northwest music scene (i.e., grunge) in the early ’90s and a notable precursor to the rise of doom, stoner and avant-garde metal. But after nearly two decades, during which the band has collaborated…
The G.R.A.B.
I’m sitting at The G.R.A.B. (809 Pierce, 713-655-0707) on a Sunday night talking with Alexa, the foxy, Uma Thurman-esque bartender who’s dressed as a “Renaissance beer wench” for Halloween. In between drink orders, Alexa’s been working on a way to sum up her scene for me. “It’s tough to pin…
