Rotation
Lisa Stansfield Lisa Stansfield Arista The rock and R&B traditions have long made a fetish of privileging the new. Typically, critics praise the sounds that no one appears to have made before while dismissing as irrelevant any music that too obviously displays its rootsiness. The latest new sound perpetually dominates…
Static
The Hatta with the patter… As an ambitious army brat growing up in a variety of locales, Benjamin Thompson — better known as Da Madd Hatta — spent a lot of time in his own head. And though life eventually settled into something resembling stability when Hatta was a teenager,…
Dub and Dumber
In their zeal to make sense of new and ever-evolving genres, rock critics are always quick to hold high a familiar sound from the past as the forerunner to and “seminal” influence on whatever is happening in the present. But Arkology (Island Jamaica/Chronicles), the new collection of reggae rarities produced…
Steven’s Lament
Near the end of an interview in which he’s spilled his guts over the problems that surrounded Aerosmith’s new CD, Nine Lives, ’70s cock-rock icon Steven Tyler issues a few words of caution. “You’ve got enough stuff to get me sued, buster,” the singer says. “I would just say be…
Earthbound
Man or Astro-Man? are from outer space — or so it seems. The way they tell it, their ship crashed, leaving them stranded. So they must roam Earth recovering pieces of it, and when they finally have the thing reassembled, they’ll destroy Earth and go home. Of course, it’s more…
Negative Seven
By its very definition, a thriller should, you know, thrill. It should not only scare its audience with a quick jolt, that sudden noise in the dark that comes from nowhere and fills everywhere, but with its slow burn. It’s not enough for a thriller to tell its story, to…
Huynh-ing Combination
The Miss Saigon Cafe is unexpectedly fetching. The cool, modern decor — terra-cotta walls, a smooth concrete floor and a striking mural of a Vietnamese street scene — prevents the place from sliding into either the abyss of tearoom preciousness or the slough of fortune-cookie Asiatica. The hands-on owner and…
Art for the Masses
To sell those as yet unsold on the idea of public art in Houston, Jessica Cusick uses a simple weapon: a slide show. Culled from photos taken during Cusick’s visits to public art projects in other cities, it has proven capable of shaking the most frigid engineer from a bottom…
The Wild Side, Circa 1954
The seventies were so awash in fifties nostalgia that it’s surprising Dan Wakefield’s 1970 bestseller Going All the Way is only now turning up in big-screen form. Of course, not all fifties coming-of-age stories are the same: unlike The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti — which pretty much dominated…
Killer
Despite its title, Licensed to Kill isn’t a thriller. Rather, it is a thriller, just not the sort one would expect. Arthur Dong’s documentary — which won two awards at the latest Sundance fest — may not take place in a world of cleverly miniaturized weapons and gadget-rigged cars, but…
Deeply Shallow
Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days in the Movie Theater. It refuses to come to life — not even when Brad Pitt, hirsute as a yak, wanders the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach the hives. It’s an epic about how…
The Unchanging Face of Milby
Under the front stairs of Charles H. Milby High School is a place that, almost 35 years after I graduated, still casts a spell on me. For no obvious structural reason, the bottom portion of a newel post from the second floor protrudes a foot down into the space above…
Voluntary … or Else
David Bearden would rather have been digging a sewer trench on October 1 than sitting in the front row at a Houston City Council meeting, listening to a cranky four-hour debate over the wording of the upcoming referendum that will determine the fate of the city’s affirmative action program. Like…
The Insider
Money Changes Everything Listening to officials of the Houston Police Officers Union endorsing ex-chief Lee Brown’s bid for mayor last week, you might have flashed back to 1984, George Orwell’s onetime futuristic novel in which history gets rewritten daily and official attitudes and pronouncements change constantly, depending upon the ally…
Letters
But How Was the Sunset? After reading your choice for “best park” (Cullinan Park) in the Best of Houston issue [September 18], my girlfriend and I decided it would be a wonderful place to watch the sunset. We also decided that whoever picked this godforsaken spot as the best park…
Press Picks
thursday october 9 The Radiators They worked their way up from playing Louisiana high-school proms a decade ago to being praised by music writers all over the country. In Florida, the Orlando Weekly called them a “scorching fish-head feast”; the L.A. Reader said that the Radiators “get into a space…
Getting a Grip
The members of Clutch have been jammed into neutral since early summer, and you can’t help but sympathize with their plight: The band’s been waiting months for its third CD to surface in stores. Now, it looks like they’ll wait some more. Atlantic has decided to postpone the CD’s release…