Pray
The two tables had been set up as a sort of gateway, 17-year-old Jennifer Mason says, and they flanked the path to her locker after her last class at Santa Fe High one day in the spring of 1993. As she neared the tables, Mason saw that each one held…
The Insider
How to Profit from Special Relationships The Insider dearly loves documents stamped “confidential,” and a proposal from Austin lawyer Pike Powers of Fulbright & Jaworski literally shouts “print me.” A former top aide to Governor Mark White, Powers heads the team coordinating strategy for a number of energy companies that…
Pagodas on the Prairie
It’s noon on the first day of dove season, and hunters in green and brown camouflage are packed into the Live Oak Restaurant & Bar on Highway Boulevard in Katy, recounting their morning’s luck. The same scene could be playing out in almost any small Texas town — a reassuring…
Letters
Rick’s Colors Don’t Run Gee, Paul, I can’t understand why a four-panel cartoon about Hiroshima would make you hit the ceiling [Letters, “Gone to Canada,” by Paul Allen, August 24], but let me make a few comments, anyway. The reason pointy-headed intellectuals (and especially liberal/leftist PHIs) agonize about the A-bomb…
Critic’s Choice
As long as the Bottle Rockets sing about what they know, it’s more than likely that there’ll be plenty of trendy types who won’t care to listen — even when the band’s simple sentiments come in such hook-adorned packages as “Gravity Fails” and “I Wanna Come Home.” Both are love…
Maxwell’s Demons
The South Belt-Ellington Leader was knocked on its heels a few years ago after it took up the fight against plans to burn contaminants at the Brio hazardous waste site off Dixie Farm Road. The community newspaper’s crusade cost it advertisers, causing it to shrink from 28 pages down to…
Out of Vietnam
All the world’s a sandwich shop. Was it Shakespeare who said that? No matter. Wherever there’s bread, there are sandwiches, and here at the cultural crossroads that is Houston we’re fortunate to have undersung Vietnamese fast-food shops serving sandwiches. Think of them as a hoagie, a sub, a grinder or…
Sour Success
Radiohead’s Thom Yorke is a miserable sort, but so far this year no other shoe-gazing Brit has reveled in his sadness quite so beautifully — and thoroughly — as Yorke does on Radiohead’s sophomore effort, The Bends. The band’s sobering reply to its million-selling Pablo Honey — and, more particularly,…
Rotation
Steven Kowalczyk Moods and Grooves Atlantic Suave New Englander Steven Kowalczyk fancies himself a young Tony Bennett — or, at the very least, a thinking man’s Harry Connick Jr. Moods and Grooves is not so much an introduction as an outline of what to expect in years to come from…
A Band’s Dissolve
The boys in Banana Blender Surprise have the gift of self-awareness and perspective, a decidedly precocious gift for a bunch of twentysomethings. These guys know who they are. They’re a group of post-collegiate kids — and a pre-collegiate one — from rather well-to-do Houston families, a pack of still-living-with-the-folks white…
Diner’s Notebook
For full-fledged members of the brotherhood and sisterhood of boudin, no trip is too long if, at its end, can be found authentic examples of the legendary Cajun pork-and-rice sausage. That’s why some don’t think twice about traveling through the piny woods and across the border into Louisiana to find…
Byte Me
Since the title of the film is Hackers, not Garbage Men or Meter Maids, it should come as no great surprise that this is a story about high-tech pranksters who get their kicks by illegally entering corporate and governmental computer systems. Nor should it surprise you to learn that, this…
Running Out of Time
You’re still getting settled in your seat, balancing the popcorn on your lap, when Clockers first backhands you across the face. The opening credits glide past a series of shockingly realistic, horribly graphic still photos of police crime scenes. This, director Spike Lee wants us to know, is death on…
Press Picks
thursday september 14 Los Dias Que Vienen: Anticipating the Days of the Dead Anticipating Dias de Muertos, native Houstonian Agapito Sanchez has a collection of crisp black-and-white photographs of Days of the Dead decorations, photographs he has hand-tinted and toned, on display. Sanchez is best described as a folk-art photographer,…
Caught on History’s Wheel
With College of the Mainland Arena Theatre’s production of Robert Schenkkan’s The Kentucky Cycle, Part Two, the 1995-96 theater season gets off to a vital start — or maybe the 1994-95 season comes to a vital finish, since this is the follow-up to Mainland Theatre’s dynamic June mounting of Part…
Merry Window Dressing
This past year hasn’t been particularly kind to America’s best known ballet companies. The New York City Ballet, the American Ballet Theater and the Joffrey Ballet, among others, have struggled to meet their payroll, with the Joffrey going so far as to pull up roots and move to Chicago in…