Son Set
Those Reservoir Dogs are proving hard to shake, and in Knockaround Guys, which could be renamed Knockoff Guys, the comparisons to other contemporary pulp fictions fly fast and furious. Herein — thanks in part to Quentin Tarantino’s producer, Lawrence Bender — are contained familiar elements such as the shticky members…
Acid Trips
With all the damn drama this column reports week after week — the gossip, the rumors, the closings, the construction, the indictments, the drunken acts of public debauchery — the Nightfly needed to take some time out to talk about something positive that’s going on in Houston nightlife. Let’s give…
School Daze
Roger Avary’s screenplay for The Rules of Attraction is a remarkable work of literature: the disassembly and reconstruction of an impenetrable book by Bret Easton Ellis; a simplification and amplification of the 1987 novel’s attack on the bored, beautiful and wealthy; a streamlined and mainlined version of a story originally…
Definitive Jux Tour
Whether people know it or not, 2002 will most likely be remembered as the year the underground hip-hop revolution officially began. Players from all across the nation (New York’s Anti-Pop Consortium and Jean Grae, L.A.’s People Under The Stairs, Newark’s Dälek, Minneapolis’s Atmosphere) have already launched their sneak attacks with…
Out of Focus?
No one denies that a man’s head was smashed in, most likely with a camera tripod, on June 29, 1978, in an Arizona hotel room. No one denies that this same man was a porno freak, a maker and watcher and star of homemade sex films. No one denies he…
Use Your Noodle
They look like noodles, but they taste like fish. So what are they? my dining companion wants to know. He discovered the long, skinny ribbons in his seafood soup, or to be more precise, his cazuela de mariscos. The names means seafood casserole, although the huge bowl of creamy stew…
Kentucky Caver
Floyd Collins, the title character of Adam Guettel’s musical about a Kentucky backwoods man who winds up trapped in a cave for two weeks, was a real-life legendary spelunker. In 1925, the story of the man caught 150 feet below the surface made national news. In fact, amazingly enough in…
Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz
The line of people coming out of the Continental Club had us peering through the windows to catch Billy Joe Shaver and Kinky Friedman on stage. Yelling and applauding from outside the barred windows grew a little old, so we went next door in hopes of a barstool and some…
Democracy of Photographs
Photograph No. 1621 is a panoramic view, from a great height and distance, of the twin towers of the World Trade Center poking up through a roiling mass of clouds. In the crystalline sunlight, the towers glow golden against the fleece of the clouds. The receding sky in the left…
Diva of the Deal
Water conferences are usually boring affairs. Filled with too many middle-aged men whose fashion sense favors the timeless pocket-protector-and-a-tweed-jacket look, the conferences attract few dynamic personalities and even fewer women. But the water wonks who went to New York City in mid-1999 knew to expect something different. Not only would…
Certifiably Crazy?
It was never Rachel Rodriguez’s dream to be a high school teacher. She just happened to be good at it. On August 15, four days before the new school year, the five-year veteran was organizing leadership meetings at Reagan High. As head of her school’s Professional Development Action Team, the…
Honey, I Implicated the Kids!
After his arraignment on 140 years’ worth of felony charges, Andy Fastow’s inglorious exit from the federal building last week bore a certain resemblance to the bill of particulars compiled against him by the government. The former Enron chief financial officer, who glowered with a clamped jaw during most of…
Bayou Dreams
From the glowing, prominent treatment given the event by the Houston Chronicle, we’d say a crusade has begun. Somehow, the paper got its hands on a report — just a day before the formal press conference! — outlining an ambitious $800 million plan to improve Buffalo Bayou through downtown. “On…
Midtown
If you’ve watched any MTV2 lately, you know that today’s landscape is littered with many, many YM-worthy punk poppers. While most are fourth-rate Green Day and Blink-182 knockoffs, an occasional act shows up to the party with more than just a six-pack of Bud Light and a new tattoo. With…
Best Wishes
Best Wishes City thoughts: Thank you for the Best DJ We’ll Miss award [Best of Houston, September 26]. It’s an honor to know that I was able to touch anyone through my music, especially enough to have any of them miss me when I moved on. To be considered one…
Frode Gjerstad Trio
There was a time when touring avant-garde jazz acts rarely came to Houston. Thanks to the Pauline Oliveros Foundation, all that is changing. Joe McPhee, Sam Rivers and Jon Butcher have all graced stages here in the past few months, and the home stretch of 2002 promises even more interesting…
Bringing Out the Baby
You’re going out there a nobody, but you’re coming back a star — or at least a scale actor. Seven talented locals have roles in Theatre Under the Stars’ What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, a premiere of the big Broadway-style musical based on the Bette Davis/Joan Crawford psycho-horror flick…
Skeleton Key
Talk about real industrial metal music. These New York-based “junk rockers” are just as likely to play a battered coffee pot, frying pan or Radio Flyer wagon as their “normal” instruments. A synthesis of clang-and-bang sounds and the gloom-and-doom lyrics of singer/bassist Erik Sanko, the Keys are equally at home…
Space Center & Me
Every clique has an “out” group that insiders make fun of. For stoners, it’s kickers; for kickers, it’s hipsters. When I was a research assistant during my brief stint as an astrophysics major, our whipping boys of choice were the UFO believers and perpetuators of the theory that aliens built…
Project Row Houses Arts and Music Festival
Every year, this small festival has an intriguing bill. Like last year’s affair, where you could have caught Lil’ Flip and Gatemouth Brown back to back, this year’s lineup is a study in eclecticism. HP Best World Music act DRUM, Philly R&B songstress Jaguar Wright, local rappers Big Pokey and…
Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy
“Burger and fries” and “healthy” don’t usually go together — unless, of course, you’re talking about the burgers and fries ($5.50 to $6.50) at Ziggy’s Healthy Grill (2320 West Alabama, 713-527-8588). Ziggy’s burgers are made with lean, high-protein, low-calorie, 94 percent fat-free exotic meats. The big “M” can reduce all…
Clipse
It’s so easy to get obsessed with the Neptunes. They produce practically every song on the radio, which would be a Ja Rule-sized hassle if so many of them didn’t sound right on the money. Nelly’s “Hot in Here”? Yup, that’s one of theirs. N.O.R.E.’s “Nothin'”? That’s theirs, too. How…
Tipsy Gypsies
When Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hütz was 14 and living in Striy, a small Ukrainian village near the Hungarian border, he caught wind of the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown while listening to BBC Radio. Moments later, he and his family were packing their suitcases and preparing to flee. “I’m trying to think…
Lise Liddell
The cover photo of the artist shows a pretty bleached blond holding an electric guitar and wearing a low-cut bra under a transparent white blouse. Her earring is color-coordinated with the graphics. Eye candy on the cover of a CD usually doesn’t bode well for the weightiness of the enclosed…
Isn’t He Lovely
There are a couple of things stopping American audiences from realizing that World Outside My Window, the debut album from soul singer Glenn Lewis, is one of the more brilliant, satisfying R&B albums of the past year. For starters, Lewis hails from Toronto. When you think of the future of…
Foster Pussycat
Good Lord, there hasn’t been this much blond hair on screen since the Von Trapp children sang and danced their way across the Alps in The Sound of Music. The fact that these latest golden locks belong to the likes of Michelle Pfeiffer, Robin Wright Penn and Renée Zellweger suggests…
Songbird Silenced
To call Mickey Newbury, who passed away on September 29 after struggling for years with emphysema, a “country singer-songwriter” does the man little justice. Newbury, a native Houstonian, and his contemporaries Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, Roger Miller, Bobby Bare and Tom T. Hall, turned the art of Nashville songwriting on…