Diamond in the Rough
On a hot, muggy night in Beaumont, with the insects in full bloom and a view over the outfield fence of traffic tooling along Highway 69, the Beaumont Bullfrogs of the Texas Louisiana League — an unaffiliated, bottom-of-the-ladder baseball association started only this year — are trying to protect their…
Letters
We’re Confused Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Annise Parker. I have been a community activist in Houston for almost 20 years. I am past president of Houston Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus and an active member of the Police Advisory Committee. Many of my volunteer activities have…
Past Imperfect
Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. Not if my recent time-tunnel excursion to Memorial’s venerable Lantern Inn is any indication. Prompted by ads touting the Inn’s 30th anniversary (an age that passes for ancient in this city), I headed west, my brain filled with hazy memories of a dim,…
Calling All Night Owls
Houston needs another pasta joint the way it needs another parking lot on poor old Market Square. Nonetheless, I welcome the advent of Loulu’s Spaghetti House for a compelling reason: they serve a truly great spinach lasagna, and they serve it late. Very late — as in 4 a.m. on…
Juicy Stuff
Newsy Stuff: You may remember a cover story by blues historian and Press contributor Jim Sherman that ran in this paper some months ago regarding a certain Roy Ames and his Clarity Music and Home Cooking Records companies. Local blues artists certainly do, and a recent bit of mail from…
Dana Cooper, Roughly Speaking
Was a time, and not so very long ago, when Houston was, as they say, a happening music town. The bottom had yet to drop out of the oil bidness and the nightclub-hopping general public spent its money freely. It was, if you can imagine, a good time to be…
Young Blood
The good-timing virtues of properly energized zydeco music are nobody’s secret, at least in this part of the country, and most everyone can list five or so regional practitioners they’ve seen at various clubs around town and someone or another’s wedding, but when’s the last time anyone added a new…
Rotation
Voice of Eye Vespers Cyclotron Industries Voice of Eye’s 1992 Mariner Sonique documented a trippy improvisational session of mood music and ambient sound created with the help of a variety of homemade and manipulated instruments. At the time, caught up in the idea of the “song,” I didn’t really know…
Coming Unraveled
Upon its 1979 premiere, Michael Weller’s Loose Ends was hailed by many as the most acute depiction of the Me Generation in American theater. After skewering Vietnam from the perspective of misguided anti-establishment college seniors in his breakthrough Moonchildren (1971), then following these moonchildren into their groping thirties in Fishing…
Press Picks
thursday september 1 Dizzy’s anniversary celebration This narrow spot on the curve has been cooking for a solid year and so, quite obviously, a celebration is in order. Tonight is the first evening in a full week of quality entertainment, drink specials and special commemorative T-shirt sales. For those who…
Queens of Australia
Drag queens in the Outback, laddies. Wearing Scarlett O’Hara outfits and showing a Carmen Miranda flair. Lip-synching to the Village People, ABBA and Gloria Gaynor. And driving around in a lavender tour bus christened “Priscilla.” This is a road show never dreamed of by Crosby, Hope and Lamour. But if…
Gallic Glories
That right now is roughly the 100th anniversary of the birth of the movies is a little-noted fact, even by the Hollywood studios. Maybe that’s as it should be, as the original American film companies have long since gone under. Still, the American movies do feed off of a curious…
Media Mad
Forget James Brown. Oliver Stone is the hardest-working man in show business. He’s directed nine films since 1986’s Salvador, and in each of them he seems to labor so mightily for effect that you imagine his camera lenses and blood vessels popping with strain. Once in awhile, he seems to…
Crisis on Cullen Boulevard
If you’re looking for the chancellor of the University of Houston System during working hours, don’t bother dropping by the main UH campus off the Gulf Freeway, the one that philanthropist Hugh Roy Cullen endowed back in the 1930s with the idea that it would provide a higher education for…
Curiouser and Curiouser
It was Sunday, December 1, 1991, and Sylvester Turner was as close as an African-American has ever been to becoming mayor of Houston. The election was six days away, and while an upcoming Houston Chronicle poll would show him trailing slightly in his runoff with Bob Lanier, Turner seemed to…