Golfin’ Fools
There’s something about Houston’s municipal golf courses that brings out the worst in the city’s public officials. Less than two years ago, the Lanier administration tried to orchestrate the giveaway of the Sharpstown and Brock courses to a private operator, despite numerous internal reports warning that the deal was a…
The Insider
Quotable O’Quinn U.S. District Judge David Hittner and plaintiff’s attorney John O’Quinn had a history long before the Kennedy Heights toxic-tort lawsuit brought them together in August. Several years back, Hittner issued a contempt of court citation against O’Quinn after catching the lawyer catnapping at a table in another judge’s…
Letters
Angry Magic Geeks: We’re Cool and We Don’t Stink! The good news: Your lead story about Magic: The Gathering [“Do You Believe in Magic?”, by Alex Hecht, September 4] actually contained occasional outbursts of literacy and insight. The bad news is that overall the article reflected negatively and unfairly on…
Press Picks
thursday october 2 The Quadroon Ball: An American Tragedy The New York Times described Damon Wright’s play about a mixed-race southern family as an “intelligent, affecting new play about race, family, honor and freedom.” In it, Jeanette, a quadroon in 1830s New Orleans, wins the heart of a white French…
Side Order of Chaos
In every sense of the phrase, eatZi’s is a happening kind of place. The high-class take-out at the corner of San Felipe and Post Oak has been open for just over a month now, and all indications are that Houston’s haute have warmly welcomed the newcomer. The lines are long,…
The Impotence of Being Earnest
Despite himself, Phil Ochs just didn’t like the cut of his gold lame suit. The liner notes to the excellent new Ochs retrospective, Farewells & Fantasies, tell us that the folk musician — more usually decked out in the studied proletariat garb of early 1960s Greenwich Village — first wore…
Rotation
The Rolling Stones Bridges to Babylon Virgin In 1994, I listened with a straight face as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards told me that in time, Voodoo Lounge would come to be viewed as one of their best releases ever, maybe even up there with Exile on Main Street (which,…
Static
X files… How do you spoon-feed the classics to sensory-taxed post-baby-boomers and actually get them to open their ears? Is there really a way in which Bach, Beethoven and Wagner might be seen for the ageless superstars they are by a generation raised on TV theme songs, fast-food jingles, top…
Super Squeak
“I saw it coming,” Rick James says, “and subconsciously, I asked for it.” He foresaw it in his own public profile, jagged as an EKG, which stretched across nearly 30 years of popular music and eccentric behavior; James had mutated from sing-along ’60s folkie to braided-and-spandexed ’70s funky to top-of-the-world…
Fly Like an Eagle
The Ensemble Theatre’s current show, Black Eagles, is based on the story of the Tuskegee Airmen. During World War II, the squad of black fighter pilots flew 15,553 sorties, completed 1,578 missions and proved themselves expert airmen, in spite of a dubious white military that labeled training black pilots an…
Modest Chunk
Over the years, an inordinate amount of ink has been devoted to just how humdrum a bunch of folks the members of Superchunk really are. Somehow they’ve avoided the Sturm und Drang that seems, for most bands, an indelible part of rock and roll life. Indeed, their remarkably consistent eight-year…
Playing Around
When I walked into Yayoi Kusama’s installation at the Rice University Art Gallery recently, I saw a bunch of students lying around on the floor, staring at the ceiling. I took this to be a good sign. The gallery has been transformed into a perceptual playhouse, one whose antiseptic feel…
Groove United
It’s a place where the boundaries of race, culture and genre are ignored daily, hourly, within the span of minutes — even seconds. Here, dance music knows no limits — other than those of the human variety — and the term “family” can apply to just about anyone with a…
Road to Nowhere
Kevin Corrigan doesn’t act as much as he seems to stumble from scene to scene, like a guy who doesn’t follow a script but rather his own internal stage directions. He’s got skin so pale it’s almost translucent, and he wears the face of a guy who’s always this far…
Moorstruck
Janeane Garofalo plows right through her new film, The Matchmaker, with the same disgruntled sarcasm that typifies her testy, standard-bearer-for-the-underdog persona. Try though it may to cast “America’s favorite anti-star” in a “romantic comedy for people who don’t like romantic comedy,” this script, a wholesale retread of Local Hero (which,…
Fastest Filmmaker in the Fatherland
While in some ways as redolent of his era as disco and free sex, the work of German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder has lasted better; it still speaks to us today with its impressive blend of storytelling, formal experimentation and challenges to conformist shibboleths of every sort. Starting this weekend,…
Pulp Without Politics
Oliver Stone’s low-budget, hopped-up film noir, U-Turn, is being billed as a change of pace for the Conspiracy Dude, but actually it looks quite at home in the maestro’s hothouse. After all, aren’t conspiracies and the workings of fate what noirs are all about? Stone’s JFK pulped history with the…
Why Don’t They Want This Man to Be Mayor?
One evening in early September, George Greanias dropped in on a meeting of the Harris County Democratic Women’s Club in north Houston. Only a dozen or so people, including a few men, had waded out into a thundering monsoon to hear author Ann Crawford recount the history of women in…