Concrete Abstractions
Joe Mancuso’s work has always been about subtlety rather than grand gesture. For years, the Houston artist has painstakingly transformed basic materials such as wood, brick and concrete into abstract shapes — triangles, ellipses and cubes — that radiate a serene confidence. The sculptures’ seductive qualities stem partly from Mancuso’s…
Rotation
Goo Goo Dolls Dizzy Up the Girl Warner Bros. My first clue that the Goo Goo Dolls had completely lost touch with their working-class garage-band roots came by way of a brief backstage conversation with bassist Robby Takac back in 1996. Me: “So, how about those Sabres?” Takac: “Huh?” Me:…
Art and Craft
Jim Isermann renders his work — “flower power” furniture, shag-rug “paintings,” stained-glass panels, stitched fabric wall hangings and other decorative objects — with an emphatically hip ’60s bearing that brings to mind bell-bottoms and Brady Bunch bedspreads. He’s long been known as the retro master, and for those unfamiliar with…
Static
Rap-A-Lot gets busy… It looks like Houston’s Rap-A-Lot Records — once the only Gulf Coast label that truly mattered to the above-ground consumer — has finally been shaken from its self-satisfied slumber by surging competition. It’s hard to blame the company for kicking back a bit after the surprising platinum…
French Disconnection
Leelee Sobieski is a mouthful of a name (40 years ago, studio moguls would have made her change it to something short and unassuming), but get used to it, because the young actress behind it is going to be attracting a lot of attention. She almost single-handedly carries A Soldier’s…
Clubland
Get ready to duck. There’s a disco-ball barrage brewing on the Richmond Strip. Polly Esther’s, an upscale ’70s- and ’80s-themed dance club chain with franchises in Austin and eight other locations nationwide, has moved into the former Rock Bottom Brewery, much to the chagrin of another retro-trendy nightclub, Boogie Nights,…
Backwoods Bin of Sin
Have adultery, murder and greed all moved to the sticks? Once firmly rooted in the big city, the seven deadly sins have taken on a distinct country-and-western twang in recent years, thanks to noirish, tough-minded scam-fests such as John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1993) and The Last Seduction (1994), James…
Family Style
It could be the stuff Nashville wet dreams are made of: two strapping, handsome brothers from a Wild West small town in Texas, both of whom sing and write songs. They grew up ranching, working on an oil pipeline and playing in a local band before they both won sports…
Bar Patrons
Robert Amass, a bartender at Catbirds, shows off his new Camel Zippo lighter in its case. “That’s real pewter. I just got this one. They got all kinds of Zippos.” It goes further than that. In a moment of self-analysis, he glances down, then reveals: “All my clothes say either…
The New Originals
“We have always been an original band. The idea to do [covers] came strictly as an afterthought, as a way to make money,” says Toy Subs lead singer Jamie Jahan Daruwala. “And even when we did the covers, we have never tried to sound like a record, and we only…
Steel Reunion
On June 24, at precisely 11:30 a.m., a group of almost 100 workers emerged from the Union Tank Car manufacturing plant on U.S. 90 near Sheldon Reservoir. Wearing hardhats, protective shoes and expressions of defiance, they marched toward the plant gate 100 yards away as a uniformed officer kept casual…
No, No, Annette!
In her four years as a family court judge in Harris County, 48-year-old Republican Annette Galik has presided over a stream of divorce and child-custody cases in which spouses have alleged infidelity and adultery by their partners as reasons to receive favorable cash and property settlements as well as control…
Letters
Hello, Mayor Brown? The continuing saga of the Houston Renaissance housing (or non-housing) scandal, more than ably covered by Brian Wallstin [“On Borrowed Time,” September 10], leaves me wondering what it might take to make some city agency or the citizenry respond to what clearly represents blatant fraud. Not only…
News of the Weird
Lead Stories *This past summer, the city councils of Fostoria, Ohio, and Victoria, British Columbia, adopted codes of conduct for their citizens; in Fostoria, to provide a “moral compass,” and in Victoria, to restore “courteous behavior.” Fostoria implores people to “try to do what is right and try to help…
Dames. Doublecrosses. And darkness.
You already know the icons. Rain-slicked streets. Neon signs shining on ceiling fans at bizarre angles. The cynical, alcoholic private eye casing the femme fatale, a spiderwoman whose motives are as hidden as her dress is revealing. And of course, venetian blinds etching striped shadows across a snickering, sadistic villain…
Tori Can Dance
Tori Amos has certainly earned her reputation as the eccentric woman on pop music’s fringes. Her piano-bench gyrations and provocative lyrics leave some people cold, and her assertions that her songs come to her via voices, spirits, even Vikings make her seem, well, kooky. But beneath the faerie-queen veneer lies…
Night & Day
Thursday October 1, 1998 W.S. Merwin wrote, “I want to tell what the forests were like / I will have to speak in a forgotten language.” The Orion Society, a nonprofit environmental organization, has taken up the challenge with their Forgotten Language Tour. By dispatching nature writers and poets on…
Dish
Gripes with Gourmet The October issue of Gourmet magazine heralds the results of its third-annual readers’ choice restaurant survey. “North America’s Best Restaurants!” trumpets the company press release. More than 500 restaurants made the final cut from the original pool of 3,500: The 24 highest-ranking establishments overall were anointed “America’s…
Meet the Aztec Love God
When Tony Diaz was in fifth grade, he helped his father buy a car. One Saturday after the chores were done, they went to see a man in their southside Chicago neighborhood. On the way, Tony’s father impressed upon his son the importance of buying a good car, for a…
Taking No Chances
Visiting Cafe Chino for the first time, we were seated in front of a massive and handsome floral arrangement containing some very substantial lengths of bamboo. It made one grateful that Houston didn’t experience earthquakes because, had the earth moved even slightly, that arrangement would have come toppling down and…
Street Smarts
In his mind, Nicolas Kanellos is still the same radical who did street theater to publicize the agenda of the civil-rights movement in the ’60s and sold copies of his journal of Latino literature and art, Revista Chicana-Riquena, at street festivals in the ’70s. Though he’s received an award for…
Hot Plate
In Italy, a bowl of minestrone is as good as a road map. If the soup contains lots of tomatoes, you’re in the Italian south; if it contains beans, you’re in the central region; and if it contains rice, you’re in the north. If it should happen that your minestrone…
Uneven Weave
Small staged performances have a certain allure that’s hard to find on the big stage. Perhaps it’s the tiny barrier between performer and artist. Or maybe there’s no such thing as an intimate crowd. DiverseWorks has everything a repertory buff could ever want. The warehouse-converted-into-art-space is somewhat out of the…
Made to Suffer
It’s easy to see why Richard Buckner is such a fan of the Pacific Northwest’s clammy climate: Rainy days are a legitimate excuse to sit around the house, dim the lights and brood. As if he needs a reason. Buckner could find the black-slate lining in the sunniest of warm…