Pilot Radio
Say you’ve had a tough day and want to get to sleep or just feel jittery and need to come down, but can’t seem to locate that Tylenol PM. Fear not, my friends! Just play this CD, and you can safely pilot that plane straight to Sleepyville. This is the…
Radney Foster
A couple of years ago, shortly after I quit my job and moved to England to write a damned novel, I went to see Radney Foster play a solo show at a smoky London club. He often stops there on his way to visit his kid, who lives in France,…
The Jewws
After teasing us with an EP and a three-song single, the Jewws arrive with their first full-length hunk of wax, l’explosion du son de maintenant! (“The Now Sound Explosion”). If you’re wondering about the French title, it owes less to Francophilia than to the fact that this local band’s release…
Bo Diddley with Hamilton Loomis
Folks who are hung up on that visual image of Bo Diddley cradling his quirky, rectangular Gretsch guitar, or his 1980s Nike ad campaign, don’t realize his impact on an entire generation of influential musicians. Diddley’s creation of the skitterish “hambone” beat sent a jolt of inspiration through everybody from…
Cut Rate
For those with any kind of pop-cultural memory, it’s more than a little surprising to see Ice Cube in a movie like Barbershop. Not because it’s a light comedy — Friday was too, and that was certainly in character. What’s odd about Barbershop is its seeming embrace of positions that…
Splitting Costs
Splitting Costs Divorce on the cheap: A bargain divorce for $15,000 [“Divorce Over Easy,” by Jennifer Mathieu, August 29]? No thanks. I did my own divorce for around $200 (filing fee, plus do-it-yourself software). It’s a little secret the legal community would rather not let you in on, but the…
Lighten Up
The title character in Manon is usually played as an amoral femme fatale. After all, Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet — based on Abbé Prévost’s 18th-century novel Manon Lescaut — has her betraying her true love, penniless divinity student Des Grieux, to be the mistress of a wealthy man. But as…
Cinema for Circle Jerks
Tacky, 3-D porno flicks from the ’70s aren’t the sort of film you’d expect to find on the Angelika Film Center schedule. Nonetheless, the art-house multiplex is screening Lollipop Girls in Hard Candy, a lost hard-core artifact from the Me Decade that’s strictly for the tongue-in-cheek, midnight-movie crowd. This film…
I Hate My HGTV
I watched in horror as a smiling woman took a pile of old grubby purses and stuffed them with fake flowers to make “charming tabletop centerpieces.” She then took a Linda-Evans-on-Dynasty-width vinyl belt with a massive gaudy buckle and strapped guest towels together for display. Later, someone bored a hole…
The Meatballs Cometh
It’s a task that Connie Nagle doesn’t take lightly, and one she readily admits seems “impossible” to accomplish. Thousands of people not only eagerly await the fruits of her efforts but also will judge them against dozens of other tasty encounters. Still, the member-in-good-standing of the Daughters of Italian Heritage…
9/11+1
As the anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks arrives, there will be no shortage of words trying to make sense of the event. There also will likely be little success in the effort. The mind can reel at t he thousands of moms, dads, sons, daughters, friends and family…
Madonna Eats Here?
A quirky Vietnamese restaurant called Jenni’s Noodle House (2130 Jefferson, 713-228-3400) opened in May of last year in the old Chinatown neighborhood near the intersection of highways 45 and 59. The noodles and curries are pretty good, but it’s the atmosphere and inside jokes that really caught my attention. So…
It’s Wayne’s Fault!
Local television stations have long hated to follow stories by KTRK’s manic Wayne Dolcefino. We can’t especially blame them — Wayne can be pretty braying at times — but it’s a little galling how they typically seem to do the follows without crediting the guy who broke the story. They…
Taste of Trinidad
To the untrained eye, an order of goat roti ($6.50) at Slice of Spice (3755 Southmore, 713-523-0500) looks like an economy-size square burrito. But restrain that Tex-Mex tendency to pick it up and take a bite, because this aromatic entrée from Trinidad doesn’t behave like a handheld. Once you’ve cut…
Chow Time!
Politics is the subtext of much of what goes on at Houston City Hall, but rarely is the musk of rutting municipal wheeler-dealers so overwhelming as at last week’s council meeting. Just about everybody who’s anybody on Bagby Street came out for two distinct plotlines: the first shot in a…
Time Warp
It’s clear from the sign out front that the Old San Francisco Steak House (8611 Westheimer, 713-783-5990) is in a time warp. But I still can’t decide what time warp. Is it supposed to take us back to the late ’60s, when theme restaurants like Victoria Station were all the…
Basic Truths
He took command, grabbing the pulpit, spinning away from it, making and remaking his points in the beautiful rolling tones that spoke to his fundamentalist heritage. His arms held high in exhortation, he twirled and whirled and then stopped to reflect and ponder. At times it seemed the voice of…
God Squad
James Merritt, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, told [President George W.] Bush he had been chosen by God to lead the nation in the fight to protect America and the world against terrorism. ‘I believe you are God’s man for this hour,’ Merritt said. ‘God’s hand is on you.’…
Trial of Faith
Like many custody battles, the fight over Sami Kabbani and Teresa Lauderdale’s two girls has been long and nasty. There were almost 1,000 evidence exhibits. The court transcript alone is so extensive that a copy costs almost $30,000. Kabbani spent nine days of the 31-day trial on the witness stand…
Spies Like Us
In the back room of a Galveston coffee bar, Will Frith hauls a hefty tome out of his backpack and rests it on his lap. The lead vocalist of the ska-fusion band Secret Agent 8 has been reading George Weinberg’s The Pliant Animal, which lays one on the chin of…
The Eel Thing
Chef Tatsumi Toda’s secret unagi recipe involves a slow-cooked, sweetened black sake and soy sauce, but that’s all I can get out of him. Freshwater eel (unagi) is usually broiled in a toaster oven before it’s fixed to the rice with a band of nori, but the version here at…
Rocanrol Rebirth
After some gigs — say, Dylan at Newport or the Ramones at London’s Roadhouse on Bicentennial Day — things are not the same as they were before. These are the gigs that transcend considerations of quality and enter into history. Nobody can remember if Dylan’s first electric set rocked or…
Mali Music
Armed with only a melodica universally referred to as “battered,” Damon Albarn set off from his London digs two years ago on a Malian sojourn. There, in the capital city of Bamako and its satellite villages, Albarn met and jammed with local musicians, both pro and amateur. Eventually he compiled…
Coldplay
On its 2000 debut, Coldplay sounded like a band that took Radiohead’s “Knives Out” a bit too literally, slicing and dicing that group’s sound to bits, trimming away all the ambition in favor of sheer digestibility. Ironically, it only made Coldplay that much harder to swallow — especially with a…