In the Crosshairs
MON 10/13 Gunning down a moving target isn’t easy — whether it’s a living creature or not. But the sport of shooting is fun, especially if you’re doing it for more than glory and trophies. At this year’s ninth annual “Shoot to Cure” Sporting Clays Classic, which benefits the American…
Claire Holley
Another female Americana singer-songwriter. Ho-hum, you say? Three years ago, that yawn would have been justified over Claire Holley. Her eponymous album, her debut for Yep Roc and her first outing with a band, wasn’t bad, mind you. She showed off honeyed pipes and the ability to thread words and…
Purple Performer
>By now, most kids have traded in Barney for SpongeBob. But the singing purple dinosaur’s still got some fans, and he’ll be taking them on a trip around the world at his “Barney’s Colorful World” show this weekend. Kids will visit the green rain forests of the Amazon, the frozen…
John Hiatt and Robert Cray
This is a piquant pairing if there ever was one. At their best, Hiatt and Cray concoct music that rests on the edge between suave and rough, and when they get into that groove, their work is undeniably compelling. They come at it from different sources. Hiatt is the keen…
Go West
It’s easy to see why director George Stevens picked the mesas of Marfa as the setting for Giant, the epic Western starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean and Dennis Hopper. Only the wide Texas sky could handle so many stars. Artist Donald Judd probably chose the same place for…
A Ball, Screwed
It’s beginning to look as though the films of George Clooney are less the works of fiction than the products of documentary crews following around the actor leading his enviable life. In film after film he’s seen dining with beautiful actresses in gorgeous surroundings perfectly lit for an evening’s seduction:…
Class Is Out
Whoever said cooning was dead has obviously not seen a Tyler Perry production. His Madea plays take comedy to new levels of ignorance. They are politically incorrect, funny and popular on the bootleg video circuit. And they’ve made their creator, Tyler Perry, extremely rich. The New Orleans native was homeless…
Half and Half
The opening credits insist Kill Bill: Volume 1 is “Quentin Tarantino’s fourth film,” when it’s actually only number 3.5. The movie’s too incomplete to be measured as a whole; it’s half a film waiting for a proper ending, due to arrive in the next volume in February. Until then, we’ll…
A Tale of Two Critics
“The french fries are awful,” Alison Cook whispers. I pick one up off her plate and eat it. She’s trying the chicken wings and french fries at Le Bec Fin, a tiny French cafe on Milam. I’ve had that dish before. The fried wings are flambéed in cognac, but they…
Frank Theater
Get ready to descend into the absurd — again — at the Axiom on McKinney Street. In its coal-black theater on the dark edge of downtown, Infernal Bridegroom Productions is once more tipping the world on edge and asking us all to gaze into the gloom residing in the dark…
Georgia on My Mind
The Rice Village Alliance doesn’t want shoppers getting lost or confused within its 12-block maze of stores and posh shops. So the group printed a slick business guide and map to help visitors navigate the area. As for the location of the district itself, there’s an illustration of the region…
Stacy’s Mom’s Got It Going On
Take a look at the Buzzfest XII roster, and it quickly becomes apparent that some pretty important elements are lacking from almost all of the bands. Namely, subtlety and musicianship. The opposite of innovation reigns. Take the headliners: Staind and Trapt. Here we have not one but two bands with…
Extreme Makeovers
Today we’re hyperaware of learning disabilities of all kinds, but in the ’40s and ’50s, when artist Chuck Close was in school, kids with dyslexia and other LDs were classified as slow or lazy. Close didn’t figure out he himself had a learning disability until he attended a talk about…
In Search of Bogus Bill
Even by Houston’s offbeat political standards, it was a very strange meeting indeed. In Internet whistle-blower Brenda Flores’s humble Spring Branch-area bungalow sat an unlikely confab of political power: Congressman Chris Bell, mayoral candidate and millionaire executive William H. “Bill” White and Metro board member Janie Reyes. They had come…
Hit the Road, Jack. Permanently.
When it comes to rock and roll, you would think that a garage is a garage is a garage. Sure, the space might not actually be a garage per se. Maybe the rock and roll lab in question is actually a warehouse, or a “practice studio.” But the physical structure…
Pilot Projects
Through October 15 at Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery, 4520 Blossom, 713-863-7097.
Sumo Cum Laude
Once again, Mr. Tattoo is the bad guy, flailing a folding chair and trash-talking an opponent in some East Texas Elks Lodge. Sure, it’s fake, but try telling that to your bones after a 600-pound, dreadlocked monstrosity named the Rasta Savage falls on you. And you can take a chair…
Time Trial
A snap decision led Ed Hamell to name his act Hamell On Trial. One day, three years ago, he would learn how fateful that moniker would become. While he was driving through Erie, Pennsylvania, on the way to another gig, an errant vehicle forced his car off the road, where…
Catching Elevators
Elevator number 14 on the second floor of Christus St. Joseph Hospital’s George W. Strake building was closed for four days. Since the elevator was being repaired, physician’s assistant Karin Leah Steinau took the stairs on Thursday and Friday. On a mid-August Saturday, around 9:30 a.m., the elevator’s out-of-order sign…
Thirty Seconds Too Late
It was the last day of the Smiths’ family vacation in Bethel, Maine, two years ago. They planned to go downstairs, have breakfast, check out of the motel and drive home to Maryland. School was to start three days later. Jeff Smith, a pilot for Southwest Airlines who frequently flies…
Do You Know the Way to Balmorhea?
Jesse Dayton has always been a man of motion. His band names (the Road Kings, the Alamo Jets) reflect a sense of movement, as does his restless curiosity about music — recently he was into 1950s Cuban swing — and Texas lore. It even extends to his choice of offbeat…
Man Eating Mermaid
Man eating mermaid: The elephant is the Thai national symbol of power and peace. Erawan Authentic Thai Cuisine (9402 Richmond, 832-242-7272) is named for a shrine to a three-headed elephant located just outside Bangkok. A dish at the restaurant, Hot Little Mermaid ($12.95), is aptly named. Two fillets of charbroiled…
Looking for Higher Ground
Kristie Lee Tautenhahn, 42, worked as a proofreader at a downtown Houston law firm. Her normal shift at Mayer, Brown & Platt was from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. Because the streets were flooding as Tropical Storm Allison raged, employees decided it would be safer to stay the night in…
June Carter Cash
Her voice careens out of the hills ravaged by time. Then the harmony chorus to Keep on the Sunny Side, as if bestowed by the angels, comes to lift her home. It is a poignant opening to the posthumous Wildwood Flower by June Carter Cash, wife of Johnny, stepmother of…
No-Fault Elevators
Tameka Ellis was a 24-year-old pharmacy technician delivering medication at Texas Children’s Hospital on April 8, 2001. As she wheeled her cart off the elevator, the doors slammed, crushing the five-foot-one, 179-pound woman’s right side. She was trapped for more than three hours. “For three hours she thought she was…
Bubba Sparxxx
Born of Bisquick, lumpy Georgia MC Bubba Sparxxx turned grits and good ol’ boys into a gold-selling gimmick on his 2001 debut, Dark Day, Bright Nights. But aside from wrasslin’ pigs in his videos and treating Skoal as a sacrament, Sparxxx’s actual music contained few touchstones to the Southern heritage…
Letters
And the Winners Are 1 percent short: I have been an avid reader of the Houston Press since its inception. I have very discriminating taste, and while I try the restaurants you review, I don’t always agree with the review. Your Best of Houston edition [September 25] has finally earned…
The Darkness
The Wolf Island
Still the Word
Slick hair, slick engines and slick attitudes — the 30-year-old Broadway hit Grease has got them all by the tube-full. This souped-up show is roaring into town courtesy of Theater Under the Stars, which has brought back ’50s pop star Frankie Avalon as Teen Angel, the same character he played…
Sandra Collins
Sandra Collins will appear as part of Steel on Saturday, October 11, at Rich’s Houston, 2401 San Jacinto. Brad Copeland and Phealan & Robert will also perform. For more information, call 713-759-9606 or visit www.steelparty.com.
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, October 9 If the hassle of decorating a new house is what’s keeping you in your shabby old place, then today, come out and browse the Pink Ribbon House. The Houston Chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers has seen to it that this 5,200-square-foot stucco-and-stone home in…
Holly Golightly
Her highest-profile gig in this country has been the recent sonic three-way with Jack and Meg on “It’s True That We Love One Another,” which finishes the White Stripes’ Elephant. But across the pond, Ms. Golightly — and yes, Audrey Hepburn devotees, that is her real name — is on…
History Lessons
“I’m afraid ‘Houston history’ is an oxymoron.” So says a Southern Methodist University history professor in Tracy Daugherty’s fourth novel, Axeman’s Jazz. And indeed, it does seem that Houston would rather charge ahead than dwell on where it’s been. This is opportunity-minded Space City, after all, and the wide-open future…
Califone, with Clem Snide and Scattered Pages
Here’s a little word problem for you. If a van containing Son Volt, whose members are listening to the Harry Smith anthology, is traveling at 70 miles an hour for three hours driving from St. Louis to Chicago, and another containing the Latin Playboys, who are rocking out to Exile…
Arms and Race
When Manny Garcia returned from Vietnam in 1968, the young Mexican-American soldier had won a chestful of medals and the prestigious Purple Heart. But he’d become so disillusioned that he let the government know just how he was feeling — by driving straight from Fort Bragg to the White House…
Twinemen
After Morphine singer-bassist Mark Sandman’s untimely fatal heart attack in 1999, the remaining members — saxophonist Dana Colley and drummer Billy Conway — formed the nine-piece Morphine Orchestra. And now, from the Orchestra they pulled vocalist Laurie Sargent and started the Twinemen, named for one of Sandman’s cartoon drawings. Morphine…