Screen Playing
THU 10/14 It’s a tenet that we in Houston understand all too well: Austin, as our cooler, hipper sibling, puts on the best festivals. First South By Southwest, then the Austin Film Festival. Why, it’s almost unfair. But there’s no reason to shun these shindigs — especially this week’s Austin…
Inspect Yourself
Houston’s mayor and City Council, in their never-ending effort to bend over backwards for developers, have come up with a positively surreal proposal: Instead of using city inspectors to make sure new homes and other construction is up to code, let builders hire their own inspectors. If you think this…
Cold Play
SAT 10/16 Lockout, schmockout. The zillion-dollar National Hockey League stars are sitting on the bench, and at least one — concussion-prone Philadelphia and Team USA whiner Jeremy Roenick — is having his head examined. But while they’re in limbo, the strapping, developing prospects in the minor leagues will play a…
Up in the Air
Angie Smith, a Houston Press retail sales employee, got on the Continental flight with her boyfriend, all set to enjoy a fun time in Las Vegas. The August 13 trip was a reward for top salespeople with the paper. Flight 197 from Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport was on a huge…
HUSH Money
WED 10/20 Did you know that, thanks to the popularity of shows like Celebrity Poker Showdown, poker players are now cooler than, like, pro athletes? Just kidding. But for the moment, poker players are definitely trendy, as is playing Texas Hold ‘Em surrounded by attractive people inside a massive club…
Party Animals
You are young, single and unmistakably right. You love Fox News and the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page. You’ve got “yahoos” for Chris Baker; “mega-dittos” for the Maharushi. You stood in line opening weekend for The Passion of the Christ. You’re fed up with activist judges, teachers’ unions, illegal immigrants,…
The Passion of the Cruise
THU 10/14 In perhaps the most sick and twisted original play that Houston may see this year, the sick and twisted playwright-actor Troy Schulze takes on the intersection of Scientology, Tom Cruise, Celebrity and Truth in Me-sci-ah (Or, How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tom Cruise). It’s the…
Steak and Peanut Butter
After school, when no one else was home, I used to experiment with new peanut butter sandwich combinations. If peanut butter and bacon tasted great, how about peanut butter and ham? And since I loved peanut butter and banana, why not try peanut butter and pears? But in my wildest…
Too Sexy for Their Rock
I went on vacation three weeks ago. It was a spontaneous trip. My best friend, Kevin, was about to head off to England for a year, so on a Friday morning I decided to hop a plane to Southern California, take the following week off and go climb a mountain…
Marvelous Meat
The chateaubriand ($62) at Chez Nous (217 South Avenue G, Humble, 281-446-6717) is probably the best piece of meat in town. It’s a USDA Prime, dry-aged, large-enough-for-two filet of beef, so tender that no knife is required. Because the meat’s so thick, it’s a difficult cut to cook correctly, but…
Dishing the Dirt on Dirty
The thin red line between genius and spectacular craziness is one that musicians of every genre stumble across all the time. But almost no one has engaged in as much high-stakes, high-profile lunacy as The Artist Formerly (and Sometimes Currently) Known as Ol’ Dirty Bastard. A founding member of the…
A Pair of Aces
John Evans and Jesse Dayton have long been the kings of Inner Loop Houston country. Together, the two have won a score of Houston Press Music Awards, played innumerable well-attended shows, and released half a dozen albums that fans treasure years later. Both came here from points east — Dayton…
Playbill
Mary McBride, with Hacienda Brothers Mary McBride, one of the gutsiest female singers in the alt-country genre, has avoided the female folksinger ghetto. No sensitive wilting flower, McBride has huge pipes, writes a mean song, counts Fred Eaglesmith as one of her most ardent supporters and comes with a band…
Sunday Bloody Sunday
Waking up on the morning of Sunday, October 3, I just know it: This will be either one of the greatest sports days in Houston history or another addition to the heaping inventory of frustrations. Either way, drinks are going to be required. As the first pitch is thrown, I…
Capsule Reviews
Last Night at Orabella’s The wizards responsible for the nonstop hilarity at Radio Music Theatre are Steve Farrell, Vicki Farrell and Rich Mills, abetted behind the curtain by Mark Cain on lights and Pat Southard on sound effects and keyboard. Last Night at Orabella’s is the first in a 14-play…
USA-holes
A parody of Gerry Anderson marionette shows (such as Thunderbirds and Joe 90), Jerry Bruckheimer action movies, and the ’80s cartoon/toy line M.A.S.K. , Team America: World Police boils all those ingredients down to their essences, starting with the theme song “Americaaa… Fuck, yeah!” (imagine it scored like Kenny Loggins’s…
OCDelight
Sicardi Gallery’s new show is filled with artists suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Okay, well, maybe that’s not entirely true. But OCD would sure as hell help you create most of the work in “Microwave: Troy/desTroy.” These people make drawings in which the entire page is completely filled with tiny, hairlike…
Mind Games
Before he made Primer for some $7,000, Dallas software-engineer-turned-writer-director-actor-editor Shane Carruth had no idea how to make a movie. Some who see his creation will argue he still doesn’t, while others will lavish upon it hearty praise reserved for visionaries who leap from the shadows to the spotlight without any…
Capsule Reviews
Jessica Stockholder There’s something about Jessica Stockholder’s work that makes it instantly recognizable. With bright, broad strokes slathered on large found objects, her work contains elements of both painting and sculpture. She mixes domestic and construction items at will, creating combinations that are visually and intellectually appealing. In her latest…
Say Wha? Say Why?
Maybe it’s the mark of a great film that it can affect an audience member even when he sleeps through the entire thing. Such was the case with my father at a recent preview of David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees, a philosophy lecture masquerading as a comedy in which…
Letters
Grassroots Movement Drug war insanity: Thanks to writer Michael Serazio and the Houston Press for their courage [“Reefer Madness,” September 30]. It takes balls to attack the perversion of the U.S. drug laws, and your attack against the marijuana “laws” is certainly a bold first step. In the 90-year-old “prohibition…
The Passion of the Goy
Part soap opera, part history lesson, part vital and a little tedious, veteran director Margarethe Von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse illustrates an important standoff in WWII Berlin framed by — and sometimes diluted by — an unwieldy present-day scenario. It’s relevant material, very much worth considering, and it may serve as a…
Village Voices
He’s best known for his iconic portraits of celebrities such as Pablo Picasso, Alfred Hitchcock, Truman Capote and Miles Davis and for his high-fashion shoots for Vogue. But photographer Irving Penn has turned his lens toward lots more. For example, in 1967 he traveled to Dahomey (now the Benin Republic)…
Crime: Nothing
In the late ’70s, Kerry Max Cook went to prison for the murder of a secretary from Tyler, Texas. During his trial it was said that he was homosexual. As a result, in prison, he was sodomized and brutalized by the other inmates, who cut offensive words into his flesh…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, October 14 David Crump is either a true-to-form Renaissance man or a guy with multiple personalities. Crump, who teaches law at the University of Houston, is also a baseball player and a guitarist in a rock band who’s worked as an assistant district attorney, an aerospace engineer and an…
The Reorient Express
Attention: Do you suffer from unwanted homosexuality? Do your urges violate Leviticus 18:22? Do you wake up in the middle of the night wishing you were straight? Well, wish no more. Thanks to this not-so-exclusive offer from Exodus Ministries, you can eliminate the sin of same-sex attraction in as little…
Hand Job
The Argentine theater troupe El Chonchón is putting on a new version of Romeo and Juliet, Bill Shakespeare’s tale about horny teens. And Juan Roméo y Julieta María is not only a “sexy” production for “mature audiences” — it’s a puppet show. The tense machinations of feuding families, the politics…
Parts Unknown
Donnie Riley sits drunk in the backseat of a car carrying four friends and at least two loaded handguns. They’re cruising up Texas 288 from Angleton intending to, the prosecution will later say, “fuck with some niggers.” Riley is on probation for selling ecstasy to an undercover cop a year…