A Death to Remember
Sadness, the kind that is dark, utterly alone and so constant and deep that it moves into the marrow of your bones, is one of the richest yet most difficult to articulate of human emotions. In its very nature it is lonely and private. Taking that private emotion and giving…
Keeping Up With the Kennedys
It’s hard to fault The House of Yes, the wry toast of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, for its limitations as a film. In fact, it’s hardly a film at all; rather, it’s a barely staged five-handed farce that trails its amiable cast around a looming Victorian mansion over the…
Porn Yesterday
Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights opens with a sinuous, breathlessly extended tracking shot that swoops us into a San Fernando Valley disco and then does a curlicue around a succession of faces. In the discotheque’s low-lit luminescence, these people pop out like jack-o’-lanterns. They have the look of trashy…
Start Making Sense
I am sympathetic to the problems of following up a masterpiece like Wings of Desire…. The history of film is filled with mediocre films by great directors, but Until the End of the World might as well be Plan Nine from Inner Space — neither a noble failure nor a…
Trauma Mama
The assistant head nurse stared through the trees outside Ben Taub, waiting for the lights and the sirens to bring something to do. People die, she said. You have to accept that. You only hope the dying will arrive on your shift. This was not the case at the moment…
Decrescendo
Jeanne Kelly is a pistol, a boundless bundle of energy and ideas whose persistence can be daunting to less-motivated individuals. It was that galvanizing enthusiasm that won over Tom Crow, chairman of the music department at the University of St. Thomas, who recommended that Kelley be hired early last year…
The Insider
Home Cooking Mayor Bob Lanier is going all out to convince voters to retain the Minority, Women and Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program for city contractors, which is being put to a referendum on the November 4 ballot. But a behind-the-scenes struggle over food concessions at Bush Intercontinental Airport could be…
Letters
Stark Contrast I would just like to commend the Houston Press for its in-depth articles on the leading candidates for mayor, all of which are conveniently archived on your website. The October 2 story by Brian Wallstin on George Greanias [“Why Don’t They Want This Man to Be Mayor?”] was…
Press Picks
thursday october 16 The Misanthrope High school theater is usually not much fun for anyone except the kids involved and perhaps their loving parents. But unlike most high schools, the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts — still going strong after 26 years of starry-eyed kids dreaming of…
Pampering — at a Price
Aldo ElSharif was a chef to watch before his name went above the door. Presaging the current mania for things Tuscan, the Egypt-born, Milan-bred transplant built the first incarnation of Buttarazzi’s on intelligent Northern Italian cooking and reserved, mannered service, and the buzz that radiated from his kitchen on FM…
Rude Boys
The advisory stamp that graces Vatos Rudos, the latest CD from Houston’s Los Skarnales, is issued as a warning, though not in the way you might think. Virtually identical in style to Tipper Gore’s indelible contribution to music industry censorship, the imprint hasn’t a thing to do with explicit contents…
Utmost Blue
All sorts of hip musical movements have grown up around Toronto’s Blue Rodeo, from the odd Canadian country of the Cowboy Junkies and pre-Ingenue k.d. lang to America’s so-called No Depression bands, which are creeping across the continent like half-lemming/half-George Jones creatures. The thing is, Blue Rodeo proverbially rode into…
Static
Grabbing a trend by the cojones… A little more than an hour and a half into Sugar Hill Recording Studios’ painstakingly planned rock en Espanol booster event, the rain was coming down in sheets. Studio staffers hurriedly disassembled the PA system on the outdoor stage, the barbecue pits were extinguished…
Rotation
Everclear So Much for the Afterglow Capitol Art Alexakis is a walking tangle of contradictions, an extremely driven (some say overdriven) ex-drug addict prone to getting snared by life’s extremes — the black and the white, the good and the bad, the happy and the sad, the living and the…
Charles in Charge
Ray Charles tells people that there are three things he never wanted to own: a dog, a cane and a guitar. To the blind music legend, they symbolize helplessness, the down-in-the-mouth stereotypes that surround a backwoods blues singer. Charles may be a self-professed country boy, but he’s anything but helpless…