After Oprah
The audience of The Oprah Winfrey Show was incredulous. Barbara Davis was telling them about the judge who had just let her husband’s killer out of jail — and she was defending him. Winfrey explained the background: Michael Hubacek Jr., 18, had slammed into the Davis family’s minivan on the…
Playbill
Angie Stone, with Anthony Hamilton By now, you’d think Angie Stone and Jill Scott would be embroiled in the same kind of she-said, she-said drama Hilary Duff and Lindsay Lohan can’t stop getting themselves into. You’d think that the music media would declare that there’s a rabid rivalry between the…
Letters
Best Beefs and Bouquets Sandwich job: Your Best Contribution to Downtown Redevelopment [Best of Houston, September 23] commented that most light rail accidents were “usually the car’s fault.” I take issue with this. I was in a line of cars heading south on Fannin toward Old Spanish Trail recently, when…
Hell of a Catch
There are at least three movies contained within the covers of H.G. Bissinger’s best-selling 1990 nonfiction book Friday Night Lights. One is concerned with the socioeconomic life of a small West Texas town built on the wobbly foundations of oil and racism and the out-of-whack worship of a high school…
Ford Country
It might be a little intimidating to perform at an open-mike event right after a drag king named “Daddy Dick,” but the stage-frightened can take heart. “People might feel a bit more comfortable coming up and being introduced by a big fat dyke,” says Nancy Ford, lesbian comedienne extraordinaire and…
The Power of Yes
Imagine it’s a weekday morning and you’re at a trade conference in Finland. You’re sleepy, maybe a little jet-lagged, as you prepare for the next speaker. He’s a representative from the World Trade Organization, and he has come to talk to you about “The Future of Textiles.” First, he presents…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, October 7 Guys: Are you in the doghouse this week? Tell your sweetie you’re taking her on a tour of Venice. Today, Mercury Baroque opens the new season with “A Day in Venice, 1725,” which promises to take you back through time to the city’s watery canals, via compositions…
Good God
If you aren’t familiar with Bishop T.D. Jakes, it could only mean you’re white or, like much of the entertainment industry and American media, generally clueless about the lives of this country’s tens of millions of evangelical Christians. To black Americans, Jakes is an icon — a preaching, teaching, entrepreneurial…
Thumb‘s Up
How very un-Houston. There’s construction going on near Allen’s Landing on Commerce Street, and it doesn’t have much to do with commerce. The folks at the Buffalo Bayou Art Park will be showcasing the work of eight different contemporary sculptors for an exhibition called “In Situ,” which will be inexorably…
Presidential Affairs
If you feel the earth has tilted off its axis in recent months, rest assured, it’s not Mother Nature. It’s the weight of the gargantuan amount of material — written, filmed, sung, painted and broadcast — bashing our president. The colossal weight of it all should spin our globe right…
Getting Kinky
SAT 10/9 For someone who projects such an air of tequila-drenched laid-backness, Kinky Friedman is one hell of a multitasker. The cigar-and-Hawaiian-shirt lover and cult singer-songwriter has written such sensitive, postfeminist numbers as “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed” and the deeply spiritual “They…
Capsule Reviews
The Calling of Jericho Jones Some questions for playwright C. Jean Montgomery and her “Texas tragic-comedy”: Why does it take seven years for this Irish family living in Clute to hold a séance (a “calling”) that will bring back wastrel eldest son Jericho (Jay Menchaca) to explain his mysterious disappearance?…
Trip Art
FRI 10/8 We could go on and on about how romantic an evening boat ride sounds: the quiet flow of the current, your sweetie’s face against the setting sun. But that ain’t squat compared to witnessing a gator nail his prey firsthand. “We once saw an alligator leap out of…
The Route to Rote
You’ve got to do your work all the time…The same kind of work, the same style, over and over again, so people recognize it and don’t get confused. Then, once you’re famous, you have to keep doing it the same way, even after it’s boring, unless you really want people…
Sportin’ Style
It’s like the organizers of the Houston Sports Gala are trying to give you Adult ADD. They’ve planned a fashion, sports and art event, featuring the launch of a new multimedia networking site, inside a restaurant that combines cuisines from Africa, Asia and the Americas. Having trouble focusing? There’s an…
Capsule Reviews
“Angelina Nasso” Angelina Nasso’s paintings seem to possess a pretty kind of magic. Done in oils as transparent as watercolors, they’re abstract. But their surfaces seem familiar — a single painting, Across the Grass, echoes Monet’s waterlilies, van Gogh’s stars and Cy Twombly’s massive webs. Layered colors, deliberately blurred, create…
Shepard’s Call
FRI 10/8 The moment gay college student Matthew Shepard was beaten, tied to a fence and left to die, Laramie transformed from an obscure Wyoming outpost into an unlikely crossroads for global dialogues about prejudice, acceptance, hate and fear. After the news crews left town, playwright Moisés Kaufman and his…
Wigged Gigs
Singer Matt Kelly of Middlefinger was on stage at the Blue Iguana, and the place was rocking out. It was the late 1990s. Clouseaux singer Thomas Escalante was in the crowd and remembers that Kelly, known for his sly use of props — he’d slip into a coconut bra at…
I Say Tortilla, You Say Tortilla
In Houston, ask for a tortilla, and you’re likely to be answered with “Flour or corn?” — not eggs. But the tortilla espagnola ($3 per slice) at Barcino Seafood and Tapas (8899 Katy Freeway, 713-490-8899) is a kind of traditional Spanish omelet, and one of that country’s most popular dishes…
Cowboy Cookin’
The minute we were seated at The Burning Pear, the cowboy cuisine restaurant in the Sugar Land Marriott, the breadbasket arrived. The mini corn muffin filled with poblano peppers was impressive, and so was the onion roll, which had a slight thyme accent. The cumin crisp, however, stole the show…
Follow Your Snows
Certain musicians change their sound to capitalize on trends and curry mainstream favor. How else to explain Ethel Merman’s 1979 disco album, which featured the senior citizen hustle-fying standards such as “There’s No Business Like Show Business”? Or what about the Psychedelic Furs’ post-“Pretty in Pink” foray into pseudo-tough-guy feathered…
Z-Ro
There’s a lot that’s unusual about local rapper Z-Ro. First, there’s his bio: While many rappers have had harsh lives, his stands out even amid that tough competition. His mother died of cancer when he was six, and since then he’s been shuttled from relative to relative, shot and imprisoned…
Don’t Speak
You’ve heard it before: a huge, airy, electronic beat that crashes against your ears while massaging them with plaintive, heartbreakingly soft melodies. It seemingly rises and falls with every song, taking you on a journey of peaks and valleys, and speaking to you truths and reconciliations. It is a sound…
Murder Music in Sharpstown
“You should know that Capleton burns gays / The same fire applies to lesbians / Say, I burn everything as long as I know that they’re gay / All gays and sodomites should be killed.” So run a few translated lines of Jamaican dancehall superstar Capleton’s song “Give Har.” (In…
The Prince of Perjury Palace
The family court hearing was quick. The child’s mother wasn’t even there, and her ex-boyfriend swore up and down that she was no good: She was a druggie who’d lost her license for driving under the influence. She left their five-year-old girl with a child molester and failed to enroll…
Jill Scott
Here’s a little tip for all of you would-be record moguls out there: If you run a hip label, and you have an album that consists mostly of the female singer coquettishly cooing like Billie Holiday and oozing such sinful lyrics as “I am not afraid to be your lady…
Step Right On Up
Members of the Alabama-Coushatta tribe are hoping to convince Texas legislators to let them open a casino on their East Texas reservation. They’re probably also hoping they have better luck fleecing gullible gamblers than they did getting fleeced themselves. The tribe is suing over a scam in which it lost…
Secret Machines
Secret Machines is the missing link between Brian Eno, Neu!, My Bloody Valentine, Pink Floyd, Neil Young and the Band. So the advance hype claims. To that I say, so what? There’s a good reason why that link was missing. Granted, it does cop the Neu! drum sound a bit,…
Running Over the Defense?
Lawyers for Clara Harris want to oust a judge from their appeal of her murder conviction, stating that he was heard threatening to fire any staff assistant who ever recommended overturning a guilty verdict. The attorneys filed a motion arguing that Justice Sam Nuchia, a former Houston police chief, is…
All He Wanted Was a Pabst
When you’ve got a little too much month at the end of your money, you need a plan to cop a buzz. I could score a sixer at my local Fiesta Mart and drink at home, but imbibing alone at the crib means you have a problem, right? Besides –…