Arabian Knight
On October 3, there appeared in The New York Times an article about how movie studios are struggling to find new villains in a post-September 11 environment. Writer Rick Lyman rounded up the usual suspects: a few film producers, a couple of screenwriters and the requisite amount of film scholars,…
Angola Bound
Too many mornings gonna wake up soon and Oh Lord, eat my breakfast by the light of the moon Oh Lord, by the light of the moon If you see my mama tell her this for me Oh I got a mighty long time, Lord, cause I’ll never go free…
Letters
Consuming Hate Better than vengeance: Excellent story of the mother and daughter confronting the killer of a loved one [“Face to Face,” by Scott Nowell, September 27]. That’s food for thought about revenge. It’s tough to get actual revenge — as elusive as justice. But there’s a lot to be…
Prime Meridian
To borrow a phrase from the man himself, just what kinda guy is Steve Forbert? Nearly 25 years ago he was the latest “new Dylan,” thanks to his battered acoustic guitar, harp on a rack and gravelly voice seasoned beyond its years. By his second album, he’d even scored a…
All Dogs Go to Heaven
The boy who would become St. Francis of Assisi led a group of youngsters known for extravagant all-night parties before he founded a religious order of monks who forsook all material possessions in the 13th century. You can’t starve a fasting man or steal from an impoverished man, Francis came…
Racket
Ah, October, perhaps the most glorious month for Houston weather. What better way to while away a cool afternoon in the sun than hoisting a few beers and listening to German song? These days the Germans seem like just another of the legions of ethnic groups hosting festivals, but in…
A Firefighter’s Life
Hollywood is usually known for hyperbole, but in the case of fictional firefighting, they’re guilty of toning down the fireworks. For instance, as Senior Captain Calvin Mendel explains, while you can actually see flames in “TV fire,” all the naked eye can see in a real blaze is putrid black…
Playbill
“Where I see my music going,” Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown told Texas cultural historian Alan Govenar in 1987, “is where the modern blues player has never been able to go, to a vortex on the other side of Mars, beyond that. In order to get there, you have to suspend the…
Stirred and Shaken
Morton’s is an institution. The high-end chain began in Chicago and spread across the United States and abroad, opening up steak shops as far away as Sydney, Australia. The Beverly Hills Morton’s is a sort of Spago lite for the movie biz meat-eater set. The Morton’s Web site lists the…
Playbill
When the first lady disses your song, you know you’re onto something good. Canadian rockers the Guess Who were asked to give a performance at the White House in 1970 because Tricia Nixon, daughter of Pat and Dick, thought they were simply the grooviest. Except, Pat ordered, they could not…
Chicken Run
Sitting at a long, shiny stainless-steel table outside Frenchy’s Chicken, my daughter Julia and I juggle three pieces of too-hot-to-eat fried chicken. There aren’t any plates, so we have to keep the chicken in the air while we tear up the bag for use as a place mat. It’s a…
Hairy Situation
Plot aside — way aside, as it’s almost a nonissue in a film that telegraphs its final scenes during its opening moments — Bandits is really about one thing: Billy Bob Thornton and Bruce Willis’s bald heads. As Joe Blake (Willis) and Terry Collins (Thornton), two bank-robbing fugitives in search…
True Colors
The first clue that the Nachos Jorge ($7.45) at Pico’s Mexican Restaurant (5941 Bellaire Boulevard, 713-662-8383) are not your basic Tex-Mex is the crown of marinated red onions atop the appetizer’s massive mountain of chips. The peak soon yields other color-coded signs of adventure: White cheese — Chihuahua, to be…
The Younger Man
The beautiful little conceit at the heart of Brad Anderson’s Happy Accidents is that audiences will sit still once more for the crackpot notion of time travel — and in a movie that’s not science fiction. To his credit, and with an implied bow to Back to the Future and…
Herald and Mod
No one has more to say about life than someone who hasn’t lived it yet. While pop culture’s juvenile slaves would shout down this concept to their last breaths — jeans slung at half-mast, navel rings linked in passionate solidarity — there’s only so much material to be strip-mined from…
A Day in the Life
The accoutrements of daily life are the most fascinating and revealing discoveries of an ancient civilization. Knowing how people spent their time, what they ate and the mundane objects they surrounded themselves with is much more interesting than lists of rulers or accounts of battles. Two current exhibitions, “Daily Life”…
Reunited, and It Feels So Bad
There is an almost mystical loveliness to Craig Wright’s The Pavilion, now playing under Rob Bundy’s direction at Stages Repertory Theatre. Kirk Markley’s graceful set of curving glass walls and wide wooden porches casts the first spell. Then narrator Philip Lehl spreads wide his arms and asks for stars. Suddenly,…
Great Expectations
“This place is dead,” says Joe Hernandez, stating the obvious. It’s the middle of a Saturday at Joe’s Sandwich Shop at the corner of Main Street and Webster in Midtown. The middle-aged Hispanic businessman sits next to a wall of chips in the middle of a small sea of black-and-white…
Paying the Price
For Dr. Pat McColloster, she is one of the patients who got away. He treated the 32-year-old woman in 1995 for a routine case of hypertension at Casa de Amigos, a clinic in the Harris County Hospital District system. Between her regular visits, the robust woman, a house cleaner from…
Missing Mantis
If leprechauns were full-grown, they might resemble something like Ron Lee Wehnes, whose ruddy face sports a bulbous nose and a short beard. And instead of guarding pots of gold, they might look after rusty sculptures, like Wehnes does. For five years, the welder has created trains, airplanes and other…
Austin Shocker
In the aftermath of last week’s ruling on congressional redistricting, the first reaction of state Democrats was that they’d been screwed by one of their own. Party officials initially had cheered when the Texas Supreme Court assigned the controversial case to Austin Democrat Judge Paul Davis rather than Republican Jane…
Return to Normalcy
President George W. Bush has urged all Americans to return to normal, and the Houston Chronicle has eagerly stepped up to do its patriotic duty. For the Chron, that generally means two things: 1) protecting Houston’s delicate sensibilities, which it ably did September 23 when it ran a story from…