Guano Grief
The everyman hero of the horror movie Bats, a small-town Texas sheriff played by Lou Diamond Phillips, is given an odd character trait. After he and some other people have barricaded themselves into a school building and are awaiting attack by a flock of mutant killer bats terrorizing his little…
Rotation
Tori Amos To Venus and Back Atlantic Tori Amos is from Venus. Everyone else is from Mars. But is there such a thing as gender-specific music? Can you really tell if it’s a boy or girl playing an instrument? If it’s Tori Amos, yes. Tori Amos rocks from her cunt…
Thelma Kills a Mockingbird
Based on his directorial debut, there are three things we can safely say about Antonio Banderas: 1) he’s an actor’s director — he can pick a good cast and coax great performances from them; 2) he knows how to make a good image and where to point the camera; 3)…
Local Rotation
Yolanda Adams Mountain High…Valley Low Elektra On her latest album, Mountain HighŠ Valley Low, Yolanda Adams sets a trap for the listener. After ten years as a gospel recording artist, with four studio albums and one live release to her credit, Adams seems poised for a crossover, this being her…
Punks, Jocks and Justice
It lasted, at most, two or three seconds. Enough time to send a million impulses that ripped through her mind like neural buckshot. They are stuck there as memories today, two years later, and Elise Thompson can feel them viscerally; she recalls the sounds, sights and sensations as though they…
The Insider
Spotts Park lies in a natural bowl just northeast of Waugh and Memorial west of downtown. In times of rain the park fills with the brown backwash from Buffalo Bayou. Otherwise, it resounds in the evening with thumping basketballs under a covered, lighted pavilion, and with the crack of bats…
Coming Out
When the couple argued, Lisa threatened to drown the dogs or snap the kittens’ necks. A year after the verbal and mental abuse began, when it was clear that Nichole had nowhere to turn, Lisa made good on her threats. After an argument, a pet would disappear, and Lisa would…
Playbill
Shadow Boom-Boxing GoodFellas director Martin Scorsese has said that in the making of his films, there are no accidents, happy or otherwise. Every light, sound, word or gesture is thoroughly constructed in his head before being committed to celluloid. DJ Shadow, née Josh Davis, makes this same claim regarding his…
Virtual Vouchers?
Pastor Leon Spivey thinks he knows what black people need: a basic education and some spiritual guidance. Problem is, he says, the black people who most need him can’t afford his help. At $240 monthly per pupil, Spivey’s Life Ministries Christian Academy is inexpensive by private-school standards, but out of…
News Hostage
Daring You to Stay Tuned What does it take to make you switch the channel from a news broadcast? For some, it was when a Fox reporter perkily promo’d an upcoming investigation recently with the hard-hitting line, “Silicone without surgery! Is this the ultimate bra?” For others, it was when…
Ad Nauseam
“What do we pay?” asks the stilted, reading-from-a-script female voice. “Us? Nothing,” coos a second voice. “No new sales or property taxes. Just some minor taxes on tourists and arena tickets. That’s it.” “So we get a brand new arena downtown, and everything that comes with it, and it doesn’t…
News of the Weird
Lead StoriesIn August, Bob Thompson, who had just sold his Thompson-McCully road-building firm in Belleville, Michigan, for $422 million, dished out $128 million of it in bonuses to his 550 workers, with each of 80 managers and salaried workers receiving an annuity worth at least $1 million. Thompson said the…
Heavy on Their Feet
The choreographers in the Cullen Contemporary Series, Houston Ballet’s sleeper hit of the season, have a lot more than pretty moving pictures dancing through their heads. In this, the last Cullen concert of the millennium, Houston Ballet principal Dominic Walsh and New York-based dancemaker David Roussève are after substance. “If…
Bogey Nights
It’s post-World War III and there’s martial law. What would you expect to be roaming the apocalyptic landscape? Zombies? Bulbous-headed aliens? Ravers? If you’re the aorta-choking creators behind Alice Cooper’s Brutal Planet, then yes. Cooper himself may have had little to do with Brutal Planet’s design (sadly, there is no…
All You Can Meat
When I took this job, I thought it would be easy to find volunteers willing to join me for free eats. I mean, surely anybody anywhere would welcome a free meal. Wouldn’t they? The reality is that I end up flipping frantically through my address book, calling friends, neighbors, former…
What Tex-Mex?
Any Houstonian with half a nose for the local cuisine can direct an out-of-towner to the best Mexican plate or the freshest Gulf seafood. But where does one direct a group of visitors who want these tastes under one comfortable roof? Look no further than Tampico Seafood and Restaurant, located…
Dish
Depending on how you count them, there are now three Barnaby Cafes, or at least two and a half. The newest Barnaby’s location [1701 South Shepherd, (713)520-5131] opened September 27 in the space abruptly vacated by Cafe Take Away this summer (which is next door to the now-razed red brick…
Hot Plate
Dynamite Dining: Tony Mandola’s Gulf Coast Kitchen [1962 West Gray, Suite 213, (713)528-3474] might not be the first place you think of for a fast, cheap lunch, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays, it should be. Those are the only days the $5 seafood pasta plate known appropriately as “Mama’s T-N-T…
American Dream
Last time Martin Sexton played Houston, people were willing to sell their souls to, well, not necessarily the devil, but at least the manager of Instant Karma, the venue at which Sexton was scheduled to perform. Says Tinna Powell, Instant Karma manager/booker: “People drove from miles. We had a Louisiana…
Fresh Lemonade
Lemonade runs through November 7 at the Alley’s Neuhaus Arena Stage, 615 Texas, (713)228-8421. $37-$42.
Love Supreme
Houston’s Carol Fran and Clarence Hollimon are to contemporary blues what Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy are to golden-era Hollywood films: the ultimate couple. Veterans of the music business for an amazing 97 years between them, Fran and Hollimon are two individually gifted, highly respected performers whose finest work has…
Rewriting the Good Book
Corpus Christi runs through October 30 at The Little Room Downstairs Theater, 2328 Bissonnet, (713)523-0791. $12-$15.
The Dish
Trish Murphy’s a living study of the nature versus nurture question. Is she so talented because she’s got music in her veins? Or because she grew up surrounded by musicians? Or maybe because she works so damn hard? Murphy’s first solo record, Crooked Mile, introduced her as a roots rocker…
Mortal Soul
“That reminds me of the movies Marty made about New York,” stammered Lou Reed somewhere in the mid-’80s. “All those frank and brutal movies that are so brillyunt.” It was a clumsy, rhyme-impaired album track (“Doing the Things That We Want To” from New Sensations), but, as has often been…
Third Coast Roast
At around ten o’clock on a Friday night at Club Oasis, a silky brother named Golden Gangsta and a hefty homey named Jamal stepped up to the stage and proceeded to barrel through their rap routine. With Golden Gangsta’s scatting dance-hall-style rhymes and Jamal’s busting out baritone soul riffs, the…