The Cloud Over Lightning Strike
Things were going well for David Proctor in the summer of 1993. The 34-year-old West Texas native — a pudgy, bespectacled man who was a self-described “band queer” at Abilene Cooper High — was raising a family at his new home in League City just south of the Johnson Space…
Goodbye, Mr. Smith
Richard Smith was at a crossroads two years ago when something he heard on the radio led him down an unconventional path. A speaker at a Washington D.C. education conference reported that the number of men teaching in elementary schools had hit a 35-year low, and there was a critical…
Faded Love
The chanting, expectant crowd jamming the Galleria hotel ballroom temporarily quieted as two figures stepped to the microphone. On stage to usher in the arrival of Bob Lanier at the December 1991 celebration of his first mayoral victory, Marc Campos and Betti Maldonado embraced and beamed. Few in the moneyed,…
Letters
Victim of sexism? As a faculty member at Texas Southern University for nearly 30 years, I was naturally interested in your cover story of our new president, Dr. Joann Horton [“The Terminator of TSU,” by Michael Berryhill, October 6]. While I do not have information to evaluate the mounting criticism…
Press Picks
thursday october 27 Art that has almost ended “Res Novae: Assemblage,” constructions by Judy Breitenbach and Jacob Drachler in Wierzbowski Gallery’s main gallery. And that’s just fine, for fans of constructions. Wierzbowski also has “In a Tradition: Historic and Contemporary Realism” on the second floor. These drawings by 19th-century French…
Korean Adventure
My first visit to Camellia Korean Restaurant went so well that on my second, I felt brave enough to order pan-fried octopus and noodles without even breaking a sweat. The sweating came soon enough: triggered by the boisterous red pepper that tinted the noodles sunset-red, exacerbated by the alien sight…
Live Shots
Beat Farmers Fitzgerald’s Friday, October 14 In a more perfect world, the Beat Farmers — a sort of mutant Eagles — would be selling out Rice Stadium and Glenn Frey and Don Henley would be out selling Amway. But music execs are notably humorless, and the cultish Farmers are a…
Hole on Halloween
In a week that’s got the sure-bet L7/Melvins tour lined up against the scarier-than-you Halloween bill of Nine Inch Nails and the Jim Rose Circus, I’m going to go out on a small limb here and give highest recommendations — or at least runaway anticipation points — to an act…
A Bad Place to Be Tried
Obscured by the headlines of floods and fires last week was the conclusion of the murder trial of 17-year-old Stanley Nicholas, who was accused of the July 1993 hatchet murder of young Robbie Bayley in northwest Harris County (“A Bad Place To Die,” Houston Press, May 5). Bayley had been…
A Bust on Broadway
The scandal that entered Woody Allen’s life a few years ago seemed not to enervate the filmmaker, but rather invigorate him. Not only did he keep to his nearly film-a-year schedule, but in Husbands and Wives and Manhattan Murder Mystery, his characters and situations seemed fully developed, rather than dashed…
A Fork in La Strada
It had been years since I’d eaten at La Strada. For quite some time, venturing east of Ruggles on lower Westheimer has seemed a bit too much like entering the DMZ. So I was surprised at how pleasantly urban and worldly La Strada felt one evening a couple of weeks…
Love Crimes
Before beginning the review proper, I should confess to not remembering the title of the new Warren Beatty/Annette Bening film, which I only finished watching some 12 hours ago. I want to call it True Romance, but nobody gets shot in it. If we audience members had had our firearms…
Battling Bootsy
This Bootsy’s made for walkin’… I know for a fact I wasn’t the only one weeping in my beer when I arrived at Fitzgerald’s two Saturdays back to find that Bootsy Collins and his band, including Bernie Worrell and Mudbone Cooper, were packing up their bus without having played a…
Dollars for Discs
Time to wake up, dear reader, we’re trying something new. This article that you’re reading, the one with the “Sound Check” logo at its top, is a roundup of more-or-less current CD releases. This won’t replace the regular “Rotation” column that you may or may not read; that will continue…
Clean, Sober and Blue
It’s a common conversational icebreaker in blues clubs all over Houston’s east side, when one of the regulars wants to make a stranger feel welcome: “Hey man, do you know a long-haired white boy named Jerry Lightfoot? How is that blue-eyed soul brother doing, anyway?” He’s doing much better, thank…
Verdi on the Vile and Violent
Verdi’s Rigoletto is an opera of tremendous moral force. Count Monterone is not just an outraged father, but the voice of doom. His solemn curse, which opens and closes the opera, is a judgment on a corrupt, hypocritical world. From palace to hovel alike, this Machiavellian 16th-century Mantua reeks with…
Not Much to Like
Late in I Like It Like That, a smalltime ex-con shares a cup of ice cream with two of his children. It’s the Bronx; they’re on a stoop across the street from a mural memorializing a police officer slain in the line of duty by drug dealers. Nearby, hanging out…