Fun with Dick
Jeff Stryker is huge, in every sense of the word. Just ask the guys in the back room of Lobo bookstore on Montrose Boulevard. He’s one of the biggest porn stars in the adult-video industry — bi, gay or straight. It isn’t hard to see why. In the ’80s, when…
Spare Scare
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James’s famous ghost story, is filled with gorgeous gothic images: lonely veils of moonlight, long rustling petticoats, dark spiraling staircases and velvet drapes sweeping the floor. But James, with his massive intellect and psychological curiosity, would never be content to tell a simple tale…
Natural Selection
University of Houston creative writing professor Mark Doty first turned from his poetry to try his hand at a memoir because he no longer felt the limited vessel of a poem could express what he needed to say. His latest work of biography, Firebird, on its face is a story…
Flair for the Familiar
Carmen is one of those rare, familiar operas that ranks as high among die-hard opera buffs as it does among those who couldn’t care a whit about the art form. The story is set in the cinematically rich, mountain environs of Moorish-flavored Seville, in Spain’s desert south. Its plot is…
Mixing It Up
Dylan Murray is bringing it all back home. Born 29 years ago in Houston’s Hermann Hospital, Murray left town 11 years ago after graduating from Lamar High School. First he moved to Austin, where he acquired a degree in Spanish from the University of Texas. Rather than follow in his…
In Plane Sight
If you were to think of, say, the 100 most exciting premises for an exhibition, aerial photographs of Houston would probably rate No. 99, right above “The History of Air-Conditioning Filter Design.” After all, it’s not like we in the Bayou City benefit from dramatic geography, and besides, most of…
Price Paradox
Speaking off the toque: Ronnie Berman is the owner of Maxim’s Restaurant and Piano Bar [3755 Richmond Avenue, (713)877-8899]. In keeping with the restaurant’s French-inspired style, Berman maintains an extensive wine cellar. Along with the famous labels, he acquires many little-known wines that meet his taste criteria. Q: Wine stores…
The Authenticity Myth
(713)461-1503. Lunch hours: Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Happy hour: Monday through Thursday, 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Dinner hours: Monday through Thursday, 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 6 p.m. to 11 p.m.; Sunday, 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday brunch, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Taqueria Tacambaro…
Desert Rose
The Joshua Tree, California, home of Victoria Williams and her husband, former Jayhawk Mark Olson, is not easy to find. Situated on ten-odd acres, a mile or so off the main road on an unmarked, unpaved street — trail might be a better word — the home rests in the…
Thai One On
Those who think of salad as just another side order will have to reconsider their opinion after sampling the Thai eggplant salad at Thai Gourmet [6324 Richmond Avenue, (713)780-7955]. This colorful dish features generous portions of lightly grilled, slightly sweet eggplant. Add to that chunks of chicken, a half-dozen shrimp,…
Paying the Price
First of a series (see Part II: “Pumped Dry,” November 2) Gus Taxiarchou built a thriving business at his Exxon station on Aldine Bender at I-45. The prototypical service station dealer, Taxiarchou worked long hours waiting on customers and managing the repair shop. He increased gas sales to a high…
He Be Jammin’
To look at Max Cavalera — his wild dreads, his loose-fitting clothing — you can believe the Soulfly front man listens to Bob Marley. Cavalera apparently listens to so much of the late Wailer that some fans have branded him the “Marley of Metal.” It’s not a title he cares…
Stirred and Shaken
Last week my fax machine spit out a press release from Canyon Cafe [5000 Westheimer, (713)629-5565] touting a candy-corn margarita. It sounded interesting, so I went to sample one. The two giant tiki torches on the stairs leading up to the Canyon Cafe made me think of Survivor. But the…
Name-Calling at the Pump
Getting into the gas business used to be a simple proposition. A prospective dealer would hook up with a brand, go to training school, buy out another dealer or maybe even be given a vacant station by the company, and start pumping. Most were lessee dealers, who rented stations from…
Green Party
Clubs have personality as much as performers. Take McGonigel’s Mucky Duck: The breath of a thousand Anglo-Irish pubs hangs in the air at the modest Norfolk Street venue, hovering among all the bookish, buttery comforts that seem to encourage the behavior that the Brits and Irish are really good at…
Station Breaks
Oil company officials are fond of saying that their lessee dealers continue to have a role in the market. And they’re equally emphatic in denying any deliberate effort to get rid of them. But evidence obtained by the Houston Press in a federal lawsuit shows that talk is cheap. The…
Still Angry After All These Years
Name an alternative lifestyle, any alternative lifestyle, and you’re likely to find it somewhere on lower Westheimer. Pizza and (ironically) alternative music don’t necessary fall under that nonmainstream banner, but The Oven (403 Westheimer), where both can be had, does boast something that’s more underground than even an S&M party:…
Smoke and Mirrors
Tamara Maschino did not know everything about her prospective neighbor’s past. What she did know scared her. The chemical giant Elf Atochem was seeking permits for a new acrylic acid plant less than a mile from her Seabrook home. This was the same company that paid an estimated $100 million…
Lil’ Bow Wow
If this year’s The Source Hip-Hop Music Awards has taught us anything — other than you can take the brotha out the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out the brotha — it is this: It’s getting more difficult for parents these days to trust their kids with rap…
Codes of Silence
Inmates, riled up by overcrowded conditions and escalating friction with guards, passed along the deadly game plan. In the gym of the New Mexico correctional system’s Las Cruces prison, convicts had strategically placed baseball bats as their first-strike weapons for the imminent uprising. The plan: to bash the head of…
Bert Wills
After a flirtation with surf music on 1998’s Pavones Sunset, veteran bluesman Bert Wills returns to his tried-and-true formula with Tell Me Why. Ranging in styles from swamp country and Texas swing to Chicago and Piedmont blues, this collection of roots music conjures up echoes of everyone from Jimmy Reed…
Not Over the Hill
Standing under multicolored streamers just steps away from a white sheet cake that reads “Ray Hill — Still Sexy at 60” in bright blue frosting, the birthday boy himself greets well-wishers to his Saturday-night party with typical Ray Hill charm. “Oh, here’s my dildo!” he says, reaching out to embrace…
Burning Spear
It’s stupidly easy to gush over someone who has been in the business as long as Burning Spear (a.k.a. Winston Rodney) has. Yet the gushing seems more sincere when you’re talking about reggae, because despite brief flirtations with the mainstream over the last 30 years, the music has never enjoyed…
The Olympic Bid
First of all, Dan Morse wants you to know that Texas is home to more than its share of world-class bridge players. In September Texans dominated the World Bridge Olympiad, held in Maastricht, in the Netherlands. Well, okay, he admits, the main event, the open, was won by the team…
Rosta and Kool B
Rosta has been making a name for itself with numerous performances around town, including a soon-to-be-defunct weekly Sunday-night gig at No tsu oH. Now, the jazz improvisers are teaming up with poet and spoken-word performance artist Kool B to present “Chaos and Control,” an evening of what they call “Jazzoetry.”…
Council’s Cell Phone Phanatic
Anyone who sits through City Council meetings knows that District E Councilman Rob Todd loves the sound of his voice projected through a microphone. The Clear Lake staunch conservative attorney and former model delights in driving stolid Mayor Lee Brown to distraction with swarms of needling questions, like a high-pitched…
Groove Collective
Flash back to lower Manhattan in 1991. Brit Maurice Bernstein and South African Jonathan Rudnick, two guys who loved the European dance scene of the late ’80s, have come to New York to open Giant Step, a continual underground party held in a club where people could dance and interact…
Arena Love
Those selfless civic-minded citizens who are determined to build a new basketball arena must be pretty confident these days. We can tell they’re confident not just because they’re flush with cash and have bought off or co-opted every possible opponent, as our Tim Fleck noted last week (we can almost…
Witch Way Did It Go?
Although it must have been a no-brainer to make a sequel to The Blair Witch Project, it was hard to imagine an intelligent follow-up to a film that culminated in the apparent death of all the principals. Romeo and Juliet 2, anyone? Hamlet Returns? But given the inevitability of Book…
The Man of Ink
Before others could reject him, Michael Chabon had convinced himself no one wanted to read an epic novel about comic-book creators, mythical Jewish monsters called golems, New York in the 1930s, daring escapes from Lithuania, Nazis, and the Empire State Building’s elevator system. He wanted to write the book–desperately, one…
From the Mouths of Babes…
The stark simplicity of A Time for Drunken Horses, one of the few films that has slipped out of postrevolutionary Iran to the West, does nothing to obscure its emotional power or the complexity of the geopolitical issues underlying it. Filmed on location in wintry Kurdistan, it is the heartbreaking…
Letters
Brutality Behind Bars Breaking bread and spirits: I would like to thank you for this story about the abuse in our Texas prisons [“Contents Under Pressure,” by Lauren Kern and Steve McVicker, October 12]. My husband is serving 13 and a half years for a crime he did not commit…
Familiar Turf
Any moviemaker who ventures into the sewers of New York City corruption will find Sidney Lumet’s wet footprints. In classics like The Pawnbroker, Serpico and Q&A, this streetwise film master has explored, among other things, individual morality in the face of big-city vice, and individual transcendence of ethnic conflict. Other…