The Comfort of Friends
One of the perks of directing a theater company is that once in a while you can take time out from the thousand headaches of management and play a big juicy role. About this time last year the Alley’s Greg Boyd flashed and raved as Cyrano in an over-the-top production…
Pulped Fiction
Quentin Tarantino’s opening move in Pulp Fiction is so similar to its Natural Born Killers counterpart that you’re reminded that Tarantino, current patron saint of American cinematic ultraviolence, wrote both films. One opens in a coffee shop, the other in a roadside cafe; both feature off-kilter couples who chat a…
Good Wood
“Visions are worth fighting for,” a minor character informs a major one late in Tim Burton’s visually striking, charmingly loopy Ed Wood, and we agree with this declaration. Especially since the actor speaking it (Vincent d’Onofrio), sitting at a dimly lit booth in the back of an empty bar, is…
God is Our Interior Designer
The following are excerpts from a letter Eugene Fontenot and his wife, Reina, distributed to visitors who toured their home in Spring when it was included on the 1992 “Symphony of Homes” tour sponsored by the north area chapter of the Houston Symphony League. “Many people say this house reminds…
Candidate
Take I-45 north out of downtown Houston and go about 30 miles, past the point where the coastal prairie slowly begins to give way to the heavily forested flatlands. Get off the freeway at Spring Stuebner Road and make your way west into the deep sticks of north Harris County,…
CondoMania
Weary of waiting for the operators of Houston’s posh Huntingdon condominiums to market the unfinished floor space in the tower, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is moving to take control of the troubled building’s future. The tower, home to a flock of mostly geriatric Houston movers and shakers — including…
Punny Man
The phone calls commence at the Khyber North Indian Grill around 11 a.m. “What’s on your marquee?” people ask expectantly, awaiting owner Mickey Kapoor’s latest groaner of a pun. Since opening his nouvelle-Indian place this spring, Kapoor has livened the arid commercial landscape along Richmond at Kirby with a torrent…
Press Picks
thursday october13 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Sugary goofball and Oxford and Cambridge medieval lit prof C.S. Lewis published this mellow theology of cocoa and magical animals in 1950, and children throughout the English-speaking world have loved it ever since. The A.D. Players present a dramatization by le…
Live Shots
Dave Alvin The Fabulous Satellite Lounge Friday, September 30 In 1982, in the wake of the second British invasion, American rock was in the doldrums. Exene Cervenka and John Doe of X had to plead in song: “The last American band to get played on the radio, please bring the…
Bluegrass Angel
Bluegrass diva Alison Krauss isn’t the sort of musician to rest on her laurels. After a prodigious teenaged career winning fiddling contests across the breadth of these great states, Krauss had a minor revelation. “I was quite a showy player,” she says, “or trying to be, and it wasn’t necessarily…
What’s Bootsy Doin’?
The name is Bootsy, baby, and if that’s all most folks know for sure about the world’s most flamboyant practitioner of the low end, it’s also quite likely all they need to know. It’s also, unfortunately, all they’re likely to get, at least from the horse’s mouth, since William “Bootsy”…
Burger Heaven, Burger Hell
When is a burger not a burger? This is a riddle to which there is no longer an easy answer. Not since cholesterol consciousness and animal-fat paranoia came between Americans and their national dish, loosing a virtuous tide of ground turkey and tempeh and esoteric vegetable substances. Not since chefs…
Pursuing Jerry
A red-eyed sun peeks over the pines of the self-proclaimed “Livable Forest” of Kingwood at 6:30 a.m., finding county commissioner candidate Jim Lindeman assiduously working a line of potential voters as they pile into Metro park-and-ride buses for the 35-minute commute to downtown. Lindeman wears the businessman’s armor of well-tailored…
Letters
Not Just Two Parties I only voted for two Libertarians in 1992, but I was still annoyed that your article on the race for County Judge [“Son of Lindsay … Son of Driscoll,” by Tim Fleck, September 29] failed to even mention the Libertarian nominee, Sanford Smith. I know he’s…
Twilight of the God
Part of the not insignificant joy of employment as a music writer is getting to see new and unproven acts when they’re still young and hungry, and the corresponding smugness that comes later — when the same act has made the leap to broad popularity — and you’re able to…