Pas de New
At the Ensemble Theater, the fragrance of anticipation mixed with the scents of fruits, cheeses and an exquisite apricot punch that grandma might have made. A freckled Debbie Allen look-alike in leggings and a crushed-velvet dress worked the room, beaming like a child showing off her artwork on parents’ night…
Dish
Ecstasy la Carte “Why can’t our weather always be like this?” whined one of my neighbors recently. I thought the answer was obvious: If Houston had china-blue skies, brilliant sun and balmy breezes every day, then everyone would want to live here. All the fruits and nuts would emigrate from…
Loud and Strong
There are restaurants — and it’s my good fortune to have eaten in some of them — that offer not just good food but spectacle as well: views of the Sphinx, the Bosporus, the Coliseum, Hong Kong’s glorious skyline. The new Cabo downtown, sad to say, doesn’t number in that…
Action Incorporated
If Howard Stern still believes he carries the burden of being “King of All Media,” he should pick up a copy of the urban-music bible The Source sometime. He’ll find that many of today’s rap impresarios are kicking his ass in that department, probing any hot spot they can find…
Keen on the Past
Hey kids, it’s another Robert Earl Keen album. Time to crack some brewskis, get rowdy and howl at the moon as you pilot that pickup toward some border town. Better be ready for some serious scrapes with trouble, right? Not exactly. As the title of Walking Distance implies, Keen has…
Night & Day
Thursday October 22 We’re living in an age in which a government-funded entity, the National Endowment for the Arts, has the power to decide what We the People consider “indecent.” Why don’t you come decide for yourself what’s decent or otherwise at DiverseWorks’ “full frontal, exhibited, hung” in the Subspace…
In the Clear
Add Ian Moore’s name to the growing list of artists who have graduated from the apparent grind of major-label commitments to working for themselves. The Austin guitar prodigy released two albums for the Capricorn imprint earlier this decade, only to part ways with the label after an unspecified dispute surrounding…
Twin Freaks
Some people call it metaphysical dread, that deep-in-the-night, creepy kind of useless terror that can send shivers up the spines of slumbering babes and grown men alike. It’s a gut-crawling anxiousness, a face-numbing fear of the everyday, ordinary world, a world full of flittery bugs, strange food, squirmy snakes, sexual…
Rotation
Joni Mitchell Taming the Tiger Reprise It’s another Joni Mitchell album, and here we go again with the hue and cry from the media about how Mitchell’s genius is criminally ignored by the masses. Not to mention the interviews in which her disgruntlement with the Big Mac marketing of pop…
Grand Slam
The first time we see Ray Joshua, the young black hero of director Marc Levin’s impressive feature debut Slam, we get a vivid taste of the conflicting forces that rule him. His olive-drab pants, so hip-hop baggy that you could fit two rail-thin Rays inside, are stuffed with bags of…
Static
One-man show… For a guy who abandoned his native city for Austin years ago, Darin Murphy sure was spending a lot of time slumming in Houston a few months back. And while Murphy loves his mum as much as anyone, the reasons for his frequent visits home were, in truth,…
Haunting Happiness
For filmmaker Todd Solondz, it’s always midnight in suburbia. Life is lonely, and the natives can be hostile. In his daring second film, Happiness, the darkness engulfs victims of all ages: a boy in the throes of impending adolescence, three New Jersey sisters tormented by sex and love, an obscene…
Clubland
The Village Brewery quietly surrendered to the lounge fad earlier this month when it was absorbed by the Orchid Lounge next door. Jim Florence, owner of both establishments, decided that the more successful of his two ventures at this point needed room to expand. So he transformed the Brewery space…
Making a Killing
In Dallas’s high-rent West End, on the fourth floor of the marble-halled Paramount Building, Michael Lee Davis was fumbling through a stack of papers in his office’s reception area. The vice president of Southwest Viatical, he looked up hopefully when a visitor entered the office. A viatical company buys the…
Hot Plate
Chiles rellenos can be hell on wheels or paradise on a plate. For an Elysian version, try chiles rellenos en nogada at Pico’s (5941 Bellaire Boulevard, 662-8383). A pair of glossy, dark-green poblanos is roasted, then packed with a textured mix of wild and white rice, stir-fried peanuts, slivered almonds…
Partners for Pay
At first glance, the Fiesta Ballroom might seem like almost any other Houston Tejano club on a Saturday night. There are the lights, the ear-scorching sounds from the conjunto accordion, and the hybrid Spanglish being spoken by patrons and employees. In the dusky atmosphere of cheap cologne and cigarette smoke,…
Letters
Burial Plots Thank heaven someone has the courage to take on SCI [“Last Chance to Save,” by Randall Patterson, October 8]. I think SCI is probably the worst of corporate America; they prey on the bereaved and grief-stricken just because they can. Thank you, Mr. Lambert. Gevais Jefferson via Internet…
Rodney Made Me Do It
Here’s evidence that perhaps Mayor Lee Brown’s staff has a little too much time on its hands. A memo from Brown’s chief of staff Jay Aiyer last month exhorted City Council members to send a get-well card to one Craig John. According to the memo, John is a seven-year-old English…
News of the Weird
Lead Stories *In August, a Virginia Circuit Court, ruling in the divorce case of Glaze v. Glaze, said that “sexual intercourse” was not a legal requirement for having “sexual relations.” The court did rule, however, that sexual intercourse was necessary for the ground of “adultery,” and since Mrs. Glaze was…
Judicial Arts Endowment
Civil Judge John Devine is a self-proclaimed religious conservative, and he’s gone to great lengths to decorate his courtroom to showcase his views. Since Devine’s election in 1994, he’s used cash from his campaign account to purchase all manner of patriotic and religious paraphernalia for both the public and private…
Wagner for Beginners
This weekend, when the Houston Grand Opera opens its season with The Flying Dutchman, much attention will be paid to the production’s visual elements. As directed by Julie Taymor — the Tony Award-winning director who brought quirky, high-art puppetry to Broadway’s version of The Lion King — Dutchman features several…
Novel Experience
Most of us crowded between sea and shining sea are from someplace else. If we didn’t arrive here under our own steam, then it was our parents, or grandparents, or someone our grandparents’ parents might vaguely remember hearing about, crashing the first Thanksgiving supper or crossing the frozen Bering Strait…