The Kids in America
It’s a Friday night at the Continental Club, and an elbow-to-elbow crowd is partying like Nirvana and Bill Clinton never happened. The band on stage rips through an all-the-hits sonic travelogue of the ’80s: “Whip It,” “Centerfold,” “Jessie’s Girl” and “Hungry Like the Wolf.” The nominal home of roots music…
Dr. Seuss Special
Eating spinach for breakfast may seem a little strange. But if you mix it with chives, bell peppers and eggs, it turns into a sort of omelette, albeit a somewhat runny one. Order the Green Eggs and Ham ($6.75) at The Breakfast Klub (3711 Travis, 713-528-8561), and you’ll get this…
Vanity Plates
With the rise of brick-and-mortar megastores marketing countless toys, chews, clothing and hair-care products to man’s best friend, word is spreading about a company marketing a set of vanity plates made exclusively for the dog who has almost everything: Neuticles. Neuticles are testicular implants for pets. Produced by Missouri-based CTI…
Change Is Good
The tangible appeal of college rockers is based on the way their musical personalities reflect the lifestyles of their core listeners. Indie, punk and noise mavens flying high on the CMJ charts possess a scruffy, unconventional charm, much like that of their fans, stumbling to 10 a.m. classes in pajamas…
Stoner Science
It all started at the Houston 420 on Washington Avenue. Mind you, I went to college, so I’m no stranger to head shops. But I’d never tried salvia before, so I asked the red-eyed counter jockey for some advice. He recommended a small wooden pipe and a high-powered torch lighter…
Behind the Happy Face
Around 3:30 p.m., two men walk through the Wal-Mart parking lot just off Interstate 45 in Friendswood. A bald plainclothes police officer trails ten feet behind. As they near the entrance, a small crowd of employees scatters. Once inside, the pair breeze past the shopping carts and ask a cashier…
Sweet Recovery
Musicians get their gear ripped off all the time. Someone unhitches a band’s trailer and hauls ass. Another guy snatches a guitar off the stage and steals away into the night while the band is busy chatting up girls at the bar. People break into motel rooms and vans and…
The Best Freedom Restaurant in Town?
In a rave review of the new restaurant called Rouge (812 Westheimer, 713-520-7955), Houston Chronicle critic Alison Cook says, “For what I presume are marketing purposes, the place bills itself as serving New American food. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s the best French restaurant in town.” It’s easy…
Is This Guy Too Smart to Be Mayor?
Bill White looked as if he’d been mugged in a political back alley, and he hadn’t even begun to run for mayor of Houston yet. Sitting on a couch in his sunlit Stablewood living room overlooking the tree-shrouded banks of Buffalo Bayou, one of his arms dangled in a sling…
Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man
Beth Gibbons’s first album since her last Portishead project is both agonizingly beautiful and uncomfortably intense, a pairing with Paul “Rustin Man” Webb (formerly of Talk Talk) that dives headfirst into her vocal eccentricities. At various times she coos soft, comforting lullabies (“Sand River”); strains her voice into a thin…
Bonding with the Community
Neighborhood boosters have long wanted to rid the historic Sixth Ward of its eight bail bond outlets and the accompanying neon, crime and 2 a.m. traffic. Their hopes ran high when the Washington Place Brownstone Lofts opened recently. The idea was that this mixed-use explosion of bricks and palms –…
Plaid
By the time Ed Handley and Andy Turner split from intelligent dance music’s flagship group the Black Dog in the mid-’90s, they’d managed to throw some subversive shuffle and bleep into techno’s generic dance-floor thump. On their first two albums as Plaid, Not for Threes and Rust Proof Clockwork, Handley…
Letters
Big Wheels Bike safety for all: I was pleased with the feature [“Collision Course,” by Craig Malisow, October 16]. It was well written, factual and well researched. It quoted many parties of interest and perspectives. It was intriguing reading — it kept my interest to the end. It did not…
Step Rideau & the Zydeco Outlaws
In recent decades, zydeco has emerged to mingle on the margins of the mainstream. Its delightfully funky washboard rhythms and accordion riffs are regularly featured at festivals, certain mega-restaurants, and clubs all over (and well beyond) the Gulf Coast. The strength of the sound is obviously its inherent danceability. The…
Forget Freud
9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Sunday, November 2. Verizon Wireless Theater, 520 Texas Avenue. For information, call 713-230-1600 or visit www.hayhouse.co m. $95.
Saves the Day/ Taking Back Sunday, with Moneen
For all the flak that emo bands get for their crybaby angst, they’ve shrewdly dried their eyes long enough to figure out the one surefire way to survive in today’s fickle music environment: evolution. Just ask Saves the Day, the Princeton, New Jersey, wunderkinder who had a makeover rivaling Demi…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, October 30 High school is pretty rough on the goth crowd. The black hair, black clothes and black attitude can earn the hairy eyeball from cheerleaders and faculty alike, and it’s a fair bet that the guy in the velvet frock coat won’t be voted prom king. But the…
Paul Oakenfold
The term “superstar DJ” has become just as much of a clichéd oxymoron as “sports entertainment.” Instead of waiting for electronic-music barometers like Urb magazine or Gilles Peterson to anoint which spinsters can be considered upper-echelon talent, many of them take it upon themselves to create their own immortal, self-important…
Roughing It
“The only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.” — Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird For many would-be literary types, writing a novel is a one-day endeavor, as in “One day, I’m going to write a novel.” Most people never get…
Kill Hannah
For those who’ve been yearning for the time when it was acceptable to wear your angst on your sleeve, brace yourselves. It’s back. Armed with heavy eyeliner and defiant scowls, Kill Hannah updates the subversive style attributed to the likes of Joy Division and the Cure for people who may…
Dead Can Dance
SAT 11/1 Frankenstein, the Mummy, zombies: Something is wrong here. Our fear of death is so great that every October we turn the dead — our ancestors, our peeps — into monsters. Mango’s Cantina is offering a fine alternative tonight, with great food, music and dancing, and a chance to…
Solas
St. Patrick’s Day may fall in the springtime, but for me the best time of year for Irish music is fall, or whatever you want to call the beginning of Houston’s other season — the one that is not summer, the one we’re in now. The ozone haze recedes, and…
Slots of Fun
Somewhere among their Mickey Mantle cards, tin soldiers and erector sets, baby boomers may find old slot cars and tracks — you know, the mini autos that race around grooved (“slotted”) tracks. As they resurrect these artifacts — perhaps to sell, perhaps to bond with grandchildren — they may wonder…
Ryan’s Hope
Remember that silly little-girl version of Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, snuffling “I’m difficult!” through a charming tantrum? Well, make it a point to greet Ryan’s new incarnation in the psychosexual thriller In the Cut. Post-Crystal, post-Hanks and even post-husband Dennis Quaid (toward whom this performance almost plays…
Dress You Up
SAT 11/1 Barbie is still a bad role model for girls. At the American Girl Fashion Show, your daughters can indulge their interest in doll clothes without becoming habituated to the sight of high heel-ready feet.Yes, there’s a product tie-in here, but it’s an educational one. American Girl dolls are…
Black Like Me?
Directed by Robert Benton. With Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris and Gary Sinise. Rated R.
Red Light Night
White polyester suit with appropriate trouser bulge? Check. Open-neck black shirt with collar the size of pterodactyl wing? Check. Massive retro bling-bling? Check. Floor-length velvet coat with faux fur trim? Deee-lish. Sporting this wardrobe, you’re either ready to star in a new Snoop video, or you’re ready to scope the…
The Boss
On October 12, BBC America aired the second-season premiere of The Office, the beloved mockumentary that follows paper-selling rats ’round the maze of cubicles leading to the office of head cheese David Brent, a pathetic little man who says in public things no rational human being would even think in…
Steel Strippin’
TUE 11/4 Never fear. Although the stage version of the Academy Award-nominated film The Full Monty is set in New York rather than England, Times Square’s new, sanitized rules do not apply. Full frontal nudity is still the order of the day.The basic story goes like this: A group of…
Fable for One
Anyone who’s ever worked behind the scenes of a snooty uptown eatery will recognize the deliciously nasty types roasted to perfection in the flames of Becky Mode’s Fully Committed. All the usual suspects appear, including a power-crazed chef, a French maître d’hôtel and a handful of demanding New York dowagers…
Houston Vice
It wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect good things from Vizio. Before opening the restaurant, its chef and owner, Tommaso Lestingi, spent seven years at Arcodoro Ristorante Italiano, the popular, critically acclaimed restaurant specializing in cuisine from the Sardinian region of Italy. The young chef, who’s made quite a name for…
Deadly Passions
It’s long, it’s violent, there aren’t a lot of likable characters in it, and it is, in a word, brilliant. In Giacomo Puccini’s psychological drama Tosca, the plot revolves not around true love dealt low by fate, but lovers who are felled by true evil and greed in the form…
Tuba Pooh-Bahs
On the one hand, Drums and Tuba are just your average rock power trio, logging 200 or so dates a year on the road. Typically, there’s guitar, there’s drums and, well, here’s where the analogy starts to fall apart. Instead of a bass, there’s a tuba, and instead of a…
Reverberations
Panoramas of starkly beautiful desert landscapes, haunting vocals sung in a foreign tongue, dark-haired men in crisp white shirts, women wearing chadors — these are a few of the elements in the stunning video work of Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat on view at the Contemporary Arts Museum as a part…