Full Court Press
One by one, they trudged into a conference room on the campus of Houston Baptist University, all of them at least slightly nervous, whether they’d admit it or not. Four young men — three current or former HBU basketball players and an assistant coach — took a turn entering and…
Minibill
Surf on to the U.K. e-zine known as urban75 (www.urban75.org) and tap the page called “warp a superstar DJ.” Here, underground dance fans who feel they have been screwed by “rich tossers turning up for ten minutes and then swanning off to count their money” can slap or facially disfigure…
Bar Tabs
Back in 1998 when he was an assistant district attorney, Chuck Rosenthal regaled colleagues with a list of endorsements to guide them in the Houston Bar Association’s pre-election judicial qualifications poll. His descriptions of candidates ranged from dismissive to ribald. One aspirant for an appeals bench “can’t find his ass…
Minibill
For a songwriter whose lyrics dwell on anxiety and loneliness, Freedy Johnston’s music is exuberantly melodic. Full of power chords, Johnston’s new CD, Right Between the Promises (Elektra), is a delightful rush of guitar pop laced with a couple of dark acoustic pieces, all buoyed by Johnston’s wide-eyed voice. But…
Fat Chance
Despite a softened edict by Reliant Energy, nearly 50 overweight company linemen are expected to have their jobs go to waist next week. In May, the utility set a November 1 deadline for linemen to tip the scales at no more than 280 pounds. Those who didn’t measure down would…
Minibill
While fans have dubbed their music “lesbocore” and “queercore,” these Durham, North Carolina, riot grrrls have more on their mind than just their out-front homosexuality: They want rock without the cock. “Who wants it like it was before / who wants it like Traffic / like Zeppelin?” singer, guitarist and…
Hail to the Chiefs
Terry Abbott, the masterful public relations guru for Rod Paige when Paige was superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, resigned his position last January, took a pay cut and joined his former boss as chief of staff at the Department of Education. Many sources credited Abbott with presenting educators…
Minibill
Those in search of a jump-start to their weekend need look no further than this rocking little Midtown benefit. Mark Halata & Texavia (see “Squeeze City,” by John Nova Lomax, June 14) will provide the polkas, be they Bohemian, Moravian, Bavarian, Texan, Mexican or some combination of all of these…
Prayola Time
One of the less savory aspects of Houston’s election season is the “donations” that candidates regularly fork over to various church ministerial alliances and political action committees. Although recipients of these legal contributions invariably claim the money pays for push cards and polling-place workers, in reality the politicians are buying…
Life As a Sappy Movie
Like the lovable baseball catcher in Bang the Drum Slowly, like John Wayne’s poignant gunfighter in The Shootist, like hundreds of doomed movie protagonists before him, the hero of Life As a House doesn’t have long to live. By the second reel, you may find yourself wishing his time on…
Running on Empty
Say you’re running for the office of mayor of the fourth-largest city in the country. It’s a hot race, with a possibly vulnerable incumbent being challenged by two photogenic city councilmen. You set up a perfect photo-op press conference, maybe in front of some pothole that seems to be setting…
Deep Thoughts
If you’re a college freshman, don’t read this. Just grab your newfound peers and go see Richard Linklater’s new movie, Waking Life. Then head off to one of those ethereal late-night dining establishments for which you’ll desperately pine once the real world gets ahold of you. Discuss. For others, this…
Letters
Cell Medicine Dedicated jail docs: As a charter member of the inmate fraternity in the Harris County jail and a person with a chronic illness (I was incarcerated there slightly over three years), I believe I am well suited to address Melissa Hung’s article [“Drug Resistant,” September 13]. In general,…
Emmy or Not to Emmy?
On November 4, some 1,800 television personalities–actors, writers, producers, show-runners, network executives–will, finally, parade into a Los Angeles theater to award their peers and themselves for a job well done. They will, at long last, hand out the golden statues known as Emmy, just as it has been done every…
The Ten Faces of Finley
Ask actor Harold Finley about any of the ten characters he will portray in Rhymes, Reasons & Bomb Ass Beatz, the one-man show he wrote, and he’ll describe them in strictly physical terms. One of his British characters is a “geezer who ducks and dives, in and out,” Finley says,…
Shiny, Happy People
The last time I saw this many pastels was at an Arkansas bridal shower. Patricia Hernandez’s new paintings have the sugary colors and matte surfaces of Jordan almonds and flowery chintz, but they’re about as far from Martha Stewart as you can get. “Patricia Hernandez — phrases for painting” at…
Death of the Party
Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is one of the most un-American holidays. Just translating its true essence into English is more difficult than perfecting NAFTA. The main character in the book Thirteen Senses by Victor Villaseñor touches on one of the reasons for this translation problem…
Spooky Schmaltz
Frank Wildhorn and Leslie Bricusse’s Jekyll & Hyde premiered at the Alley Theatre in 1990, then in ’97 moved to Broadway, where it enjoyed a long and healthy run as the show critics loved to hate. Jeered at for its cartoon-deep characters and its brassy pop-opera sound, the maudlin tale,…
Discomfort Food
Nobody wants to admit it, but the Houston restaurant business is showing signs of a downturn. The real question is how long will it last, and what are chefs and owners going to do about it. We asked Houston’s most celebrated and outspoken chef, Robert Del Grande (Cafe Annie, 1728…
Tears of a Clown
Because Verdi’s Rigoletto so closely resembled Le roi s’amuse, Victor Hugo’s irreverent play that was banned in Paris, it took two rewrites before Francesco Maria Piave could come up with a libretto good enough for the Venetian censors. The opera tells of the agony of a depraved jester whose daughter’s…
Shanty Irish
It’s a Thursday night at the Continental Club, and the Flying Fish Sailors are running through a charming little ditty about deathly disease. “It was the flu pandemic and it swept the whole world wide / It caught soldiers and civilians and they died, died, died / Whether lying in…
Stirred and Shaken
I have always wondered about the cocktail called the Cuba Libre. Which free Cuba are we talking about here? The Fidel-free Cuba of the future? The Batista-free Cuba of Fidel? Drink historians have traced the reference to the Spanish Empire-free Cuba of the post-Spanish-American War era. According to one account,…
Don’t Fence Us In
Picking row after row of asparagus in a sun-drenched field is what some might describe as a character-building experience. For a five-year-old Joel Guzman, one such day in 1964 in Washington’s Yakima Valley was an epiphany. No, he didn’t find enlightenment in the sea of green stalks. But next to…
Patriotic Excess
Where were you when the president warned us that terrorists were trying to keep us from shopping? I am proud to say that I was drinking a slushy Bombay martini and eating “Asian oysters” at Vallone’s. I had to read the president’s comments in the closed captions — the volume…
Racket
“Thank you, people with broken, miserable lives who have nowhere else to go. Thank you, people who are lonely. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here.” So the burly, curly-headed Greg Wood warms the tiny Mary Jane’s Monday-night audience with his typical Bill Hicksian stage banter. With Wood, you get not just…
Good Company
The humble tamale may be the most authentic Texian dish there is. Spanish explorers found the native residents of the region now known as South Texas preparing tamales from a masa of ground mesquite beans filled with ant eggs. These may have been perfectly delicious, but they are certainly hard…
Smackdown at City Hall
The cramped side room of the Dinner Bell Cafeteria on Lawndale Street in east Houston hardly seemed a requisite stop on the route to Houston City Council’s District I seat. An attic fan as big as a ship’s propeller whirred loudly overhead, stirring the steam-table-scented air on a weekday evening…
A>S>H>S to A>S>H>S, Bust to Bust
For quite some time now, the A>S>H>S Warehouse (2805 Pease) has been a hotbed of alternative entertainment in central Houston. Every Monday, Thursday and Friday, Audible Stellar Hypnotic Situations, or A>S>H>S, a sextet that dabbles in genre-tripping percussion pieces, records and rehearses in the upstairs studio. In a large open…
Gunning for a Runoff
The closer the mayoral campaign gets to Election Day, the more it’s starting to resemble the last closely contested fight for the city’s top office in 1997. That year the main candidates were big-bucks Republican oilman Rob Mosbacher, departing city controller George Greanias, and former police chief and Rice University…
Playbill
If country music had its own Mount Rushmore, no doubt the marsupial visage of George Jones would be there carved in stone. As far as country voices go, few if any today possess the qualities that Jones keeps alive from the rural American vocal tradition. His supple, honeyed tenor can…
Split Ticket
Geraldine “Jeri” Lara Kuhleman wore a perplexed look as she stood in front of a South Post Oak shopping center on a sparkling Saturday morning in late September. For the first shot in her surprise campaign for City Council District C, she had scheduled a news conference to showcase a…
Playbill
Tori Amos’s new release, Strange Little Girls, is a collection of covers, to which Amos hopes to give feminine voice through 13 alter egos, or “characters.” No one knows exactly what to call this beast, as it begs comparisons to everything from k.d. lang’s Drag to Liz Phair’s Rolling Stones…