The More Things Change
About 200 people summoned by the Justice for Pedro Oregon Coalition surrounded a makeshift podium in Market Square Park last week for a rally marking a national day of protest against police violence. Houston police cars and mounted patrolmen formed a wider, more discreet cordon around the area, just in…
News of the Weird
Lead Stories *Public relations executive Jim O’Connor opened the Cuss Control Academy in Chicago in September; he charges $300 for a five-day program promoting patience and less-hostile language. In a Chicago Sun-Times story about the class, a Northwestern University professor pointed out that discouraging profanity might create “a loss of…
Night & Day
Thursday October 29 True or false: Holocaust atrocities were committed by Nazi Party members, SS men and those they coerced. Not so fast. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Harvard professor and author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners, will tell you that your first reaction is wrong. According to his shocking primary research, it…
Marilyn’s Makeover
Marilyn Manson’s primary talent seems to be pushing people’s buttons. With his earlier work, he went out of his way for shock value, mixing imagery of serial killers, bondage and fascism with straight-ahead goth and the roar of heavy metal. The 14-year-olds cheered as he tore pages from the Bible…
Ballroom Brawls
A bad boxing match either ends too quickly or, like a midlist porno movie, stretches on into tedious monotony. It’s hard to hit it somewhere between those two extremes, but tall, handsome Southern boy Jim Browning manages to make some pretty even matches, with enough fear and blood to make…
What’s So Great About Painting
History is not only not over, it has reawakened after fever dreams of history. –Peter Schjeldahl Sometime around 1950, Franz Kline was hanging out in Willem de Kooning’s studio, where there was a Bell-Opticon overhead projector. Kline took one of his black ink sketches of a rocking chair and projected…
Hot Plate
Just the name of this appetizer is enough to restore the twinkle to your eye: Vuelve a la Vida! While the menu at Rudy & Paco’s (2028 Postoffice Street, Galveston, (409) 762-3696) loosely translates the dish’s name as “back to life,” partner Francisco “Paco” Vargas good-naturedly admits that in Central…
Malice in Wonderland
If you’re looking for an interesting Halloween evening, consider starting off the ghoulish night with a trek into the bowels of Houston’s warehouse district. Infernal Bridegroom Productions has put together yet another very strange production. Even better, the vagabond theater troupe has found a wasteland space in which to present…
Of Time and Tila’s
Info: Of Time and Tila’s The Original Tila’s isn’t the same as the original Tila’s. It’s good anyway. By Margaret L. Briggs Once upon a time, in the waning of the 1980s, a very popular restaurant called Tila’s was born on the bend of lower Westheimer. Its crisp black-and-white-tile exterior…
Mixed Boat
“I can listen to the music in my home and imagine the most amazing imagery,” Tony Award-winning Lion King puppeteer Julie Taymor told the Los Angeles Times in 1995, when her version of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman opened at the Los Angeles Music Center Opera. “But quite often, when I…
Dish
Bilbo Bags It? No, But the Hobbit Has a New Hole News of the Hobbit Hole’s unexpected August closing had Montrose health nuts shaking in their Birkenstocks. After all, the Hole’s been a fixture on Houston’s smoothie-and-sprouts circuit since forever. Despite the coy answering-machine message (“The Hobbits are on a…
And The Band Plays On
The Boys in the Band, one of the first popular modern-day plays about gay life, opened in New York City in April 1968. To celebrate the play’s 30th anniversary, New Heights Theatre has dusted off the cobwebs and revived this old warhorse. The play is full of swishy characters and…
Anti-Swing Objective
The noise from the Orchid Lounge stage sounds suspiciously like tuning in an orchestra pit. On the dance floor, a handful of couples practice their steps. One graying twosome struggles in vain to stay in synch, their feet unable to cooperate with their brains. The woman is done up in…
All in Vein
When Montoya, one of the fearless vampire killers in John Carpenter’s Vampires, tells another character that nobody believes in the title creatures because nobody wants to, there’s no mistaking the ancestry of the line. It comes down, through two generations of horror films, from the moment in the original Dracula…
Smut Circus
Think of industrial Bozo Porno Circus as horny exhibitionists given free rein to act on their sexual/musical urges in public. On stage at a Bozo show, female dancers in bondage gear writhe and cavort to the delight of gawking young males while the entire crowd bobs en masse to the…
To Die Laughing
In 1994’s The Monster (Il mostro), his most recent film to gain wide American release, the Italian writer/director/star Roberto Benigni put himself at the center of a mistaken-identity farce about a serial killer. In Life Is Beautiful (La vita e bella), Benigni plays a wacky, high-spirited man who convinces his…
Clubland
Initially, the concept seemed a little odd: booking local underground bands at an infamous all-nude nightclub. But when you think about it, the idea of a punk night at the Pink Pussycat makes some sense. After all, we’re talking about groups that take their inspiration from one of music’s most…
Hard Body Tex-Zen
The Lone Star State supplies an extremely unlikely subject for a documentary — Hands On a Hard Body — that develops into one of those Zen parables that can be found all things. In the northeast Texas town of Longview, 24 contestants gather for a competition against each other and…
Static
The color of money… Anyone waiting for front-row seats to Gulf Coast hip-hop’s final showing might want to take a number: Master P’s No Limit label empire is expanding like a balloon on a helium tank. Come December, he’ll have upward of 15 releases in stores, a good number of…
Closing Costs
No way is John Cobarruvius going to even think about selling his home. The location is good, for one thing, anchored near the bulb end of a quiet cul-de-sac in Clear Lake City’s Bay Knoll development, just a few minutes via the family minivan from NASA’s Johnson Space Center, where…
Just the Basics
From the beginning, the harmonica has been one of the basic tools of the blues — and for good reason: It’s readily affordable, easily portable and relatively simple to learn. Its distinctive, reedy tone, rendered by both exhaling and inhaling, seems especially right for the genre. It can honk like…
Easygoing George W. Bush
Info: Easygoing George W. Bush With help from Democrats Pete Laney and Bob Bullock, Bush has been a Republican governor Texans love. But who’ll be his pals if he sets his sights on the presidency? By Stuart Eskenazi He’s dressed in gym shorts and a raggedy white Texas Rangers T-shirt,…
Investigating the Investigation
Critics of a Harris County grand jury’s vote to clear six Houston police officers of homicide in the shooting death of Mexican national Pedro Oregon Navarro have a convert with inside information — the assistant foreman of that grand jury. Simon Rodriguez tells The Insider he wants to talk about…
All Together Now
Just two years ago, voters soundly rejected a $390 million bond proposal from the Houston Independent School District, with potential supporters being understandably unmoved by an inept, underfunded, anemic campaign that succeeded only in stirring up the area’s die-hard tax-hike opponents. On November 3, district officials are coming back to…
Letters
A Big Deal While it is true that throughout James DeAtley’s reign as U.S. attorney, his office has tended to make a federal case out of often petty offenses, he has applied a common-sense approach to dealing with larger matters, which is something we have not seen around here for…