Reggae Buffet
The Jamaican curry goat at Tropical Grill on Bissonnet is a sumptuous, spicy stew containing long-cooked pieces of meat clinging to chunks of bone. I try to explain to my wary dining companions that the goat bones are responsible for the rich flavor of the curry gravy. But they aren’t…
Over Eating
Michael Hollinger’s An Empty Plate in the Café du Grand Boeuf, now running at Main Street Theater, is a most unusual comedy. Wildly ambitious, this play, set in Paris in 1961, invokes some of American literature’s most familiar images. Ernest Hemingway, a Parisian cafe, a lonely suicide, a bloody bullfight,…
New releases available this week
Da Ali G Show: Da Compleet Second Seazon (HBO Home Video) Sacha Baron Cohen is inching closer to Tom Green territory; come this time next year, his HBO show is likely to be on the pop-culture junk pile. Which isn’t to say this double-disc set doesn’t hold up — it’s…
Riot Girl
The truth is only known by guttersnipes. — the Clash, “Garageland,” 1977 London calling and speak the slang now. — M.I.A., “Galang,” 2004 Cult of personality: If Khrushchev hadn’t coined the phrase to describe Stalin, someone might’ve had to invent it for M.I.A. The source of the loudest international underground…
Capsule Reviews
Assassins For Broadway hep cats, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s 1990 cult musical about presidential assassins may be catnip, but it’s a difficult work to cozy up to. This is a musical in which the mentally unhinged principal characters (John Wilkes Booth, Charles Guiteau, Leon Czolgosz, Lee Harvey Oswald, “Squeaky”…
The Houston Press‘s top DVD picks for the week of September 13
After Sex (New Yorker Video) Ben-Hur: Four-Disc Collector’s Edition (Warner Bros.) Candlemass: The Curse of Candlemass (Navarre) Carlito’s Way: Ultimate Edition (Universal) Escaflowne: The Movie — Ultimate Edition (Bandai Entertainment) Everybody Loves Raymond: The Complete Fourth Season (HBO Home Video) Fever Pitch (20th Century Fox) Happily Ever After (Kino International)…
Zevolution
Zach Sciacca wanted to know one thing, and one thing only: “Did that motherfucker just grab his dick at me?” That motherfucker was big-time raver DJ Icey, and, yes, that motherfucker had, in fact, just grabbed his dick at Sciacca, then a fast-rising hip-hop battle DJ and all-around audio alchemist…
Capsule Reviews
“Bill Traylor, William Edmondson and the Modernist Impulse” Bill Traylor and William Edmondson are two African-American artists whose work came to the attention of the art world and the broader public in the late 1930s because of its modern aesthetic. This Menil exhibition explores the modernist aspects of their work…
Battle Scars
We’ve just walked up and down the Montrose on an August day so hot you can hear the heat, and Big John is sitting in a bar with his shirt off. He leans back in a crappy chair, half-finished Busch in hand, and starts talking scars. “Surgery,” he says, tracing…
Trem, Texas
In a well-intentioned but flawed Fox News article that came out in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, columnist Roger Friedman railed against the lack of zydeco and Cajun music performers on the slates of many of the high- profile benefits that aired on TV. Friedman said that those two…
They Did It My Way
Brown Bag Deli (2036 Westheimer, 713-807-9191), customization is the name of the game. Customers pick up brown bags outside the deli’s front door, then check off on the bags what kind of bread, filling, cheese and toppings they want. Because they make decisions before getting to the front of the…
Overstimulated
Wayne Kanuch’s gambling addiction dropped him to his knees — literally. He spent nights searching for lost wallets between cars in the parking lot outside Sam Houston Race Park. Crawling the tile floors for discarded betting slips. Begging for change from the ladies at the concession stand. “I did things…
Answering the Musical Question
Giant outsider performer Wesley Willis’s connections to Houston were somewhat tenuous, but the Chicagoan did have a couple. For one, local scene fixture Jamie Sralla was friendly enough with the guy to have almost served as his road manager, and for another, Willis once immortalized Geto Boy Bushwick Bill in…
Blocked Signals
James Ellinger scuttles to a parked van, lifts another heavy cardboard box nearly half his size and hauls it through the Astrodome parking lot. The 52-year-old Austin native takes temporary refuge from the heat under a tree and pauses to draw a breath. Re-energized, he snaps to his feet and…
Lyle Lovett
The most interesting thing about Houston’s own Lyle Lovett is the way he’s never quite what people assume he is. Even when people see past the surface of his laconic, gentlemanly demeanor, they seem to get it wrong. The Crying Game notwithstanding, the disturbing thing about his cover of Tammy…
Fear the Quilters
Katrina evacuees have for the most part moved on from the Dome and the convention center, but when they first got here officials estimated they might be living on cots in the facilities for months. There was also talk of federal aid to subsidize some residents staying at reduced rates…
Barbez
Dan Kaufman never worries about having an audience. “In every town there’s at least a hundred weird people,” he says from his home base in New York City. “There is an underground, and that’s been our salvation.” Though Kaufman’s band, Barbez, is more accessible than much of the experimental rock…
Take Our Katrina Kwiz!
1. After surviving Katrina, the Superdome and a fetid bus ride to the Dome, one New Orleans resident promptly got hit by a light-rail car. This was: a. Bad news for the guy involved, but sort of funny when you think about it. b. Irrefutable proof this was one person…
Every Time I Die, with the Red Chord
Every Time I Die isn’t a hardcore band — at least, not anymore. On Gutter Phenomenon, the Buffalo band adopts a much more straightforward rock sound in tracks like the heavy “Tusk and Temper.” ETID exemplifies hardcore’s roots in punk rock as well, keeping things high-speed and gritty. The five-piece…
Letters
Covering Katrina Naked exploitation: Didn’t anyone at the Houston Press think it was a bit exploitative to show a photo of vulnerable male Katrina evacuees, with no privacy already, trying to clean up in the Astrodome bathroom [“Katrina & The Waves,” by Richard Connelly, Ray Hafner and Todd Spivak, September…
Clay McClinton
Check out either his new album, Out of the Blue, or the video of a recent live performance at Nashville’s Exit/In, and it is immediately obvious that Clay McClinton is not the problem child who revolted against Dad. He may not have the resources yet to afford horn sections and…
Cha Cha Sisterhood
There are few coming-of-age stories like Maria Elena Fernandez’s Confessions of a Cha Cha Feminist. The autobiographical comedy, full of breezy, sassy dance and music, is about a girl who learns how to break boundaries in order to become a whole woman. Fernandez, who grew up in a strict religious…
Bob Dylan
This official soundtrack to the Martin Scorsese-directed PBS biopic No Direction Home could well be subtitled The Alternatin’ Bob Dylan. The two-CD set consists entirely of rarities and previously unreleased versions of Robert Zimmerman’s best-known songs. While a few selections lack the polish of today’s sonic standards, the unparalleled musical…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, September 15 Here’s one reason to revel in adulthood: You’re finally old enough to eat dessert for dinner without getting in trouble. Unleash your sweet tooth and show off your dance moves at the Just Desserts Dinner + ’80s Dance Night at Rickshaw Bambu. We suggest you don your…
The Hold Steady
What we’ve got here is a rock band fronted by a pudgy, bespectacled singer with a receding hairline. Therefore, according to the teachings of the seer Diamond Dave Roth (e.g., “rock critics only like Elvis Costello because rock critics look like Elvis Costello”), it would seem that the Hold Steady…
Sitar Star
Quite frankly, as far as musical instruments go, few are more suicide-provoking than the Indian sitar. Just playing a simple melody on the stringed instrument takes years of practice; to effectively learn advanced techniques often takes a decade of study, with the player serving as an apprentice to a teacher…
ODB
Pieced together by an all-star team of producers (RZA, Raekwon, Mark Ronson) and bolstered by guest vocalists like Missy Elliott, Macy Gray and fellow Wu-Tang alumni Ghostface and Method Man, A Son Unique feels more like a posthumous tribute to the late Russell Jones than an actual ODB album. Even…
Surls’s World
FRI 9/16 Anyone who has strolled through downtown’s Market Square is familiar with the art of James Surls. His 1991 sculpture Points of View, a 25-foot alien pinecone made with treated pine and steel, might be Houston’s best example of public art. Surls has had a greater impact on Houston…
The Stooges
Every once in a while, someone rises from the muck of modern music to spit in the face of all his detractors. These people are the ones who seem to be living on a fixed timeline, unable to die until their predetermined time. Iggy Pop is one of these people…
Getting the Drift
The last thing most Katrina evacuees probably want to see is water (tell that to the smart folks who’re putting them on cruise ships), so we’re guessing that Houston’s newest guests won’t be lining up for this weekend’s canoe tour down Buffalo Bayou. But for locals, the paddle tour, which…
Death Warmed Over
If you’re a character in a movie, and the rain is coming down so heavily that you cannot see out of your car’s windshield, for the love of God, don’t drive! Mack-truck drivers interpret such conditions as carte blanche to be reckless and will assume that honking their horn provides…
Super-Size Relief
SAT 9/17 Like many in the Houston area, DJ- promoter-club owner Sean Carnahan was personally affected by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina: His New Orleans club Ampersand was a casualty of the raging waters. Now determined to help others, Carnahan is welcoming UK-based drum ‘n’ bass DJ and producer Roni…
Good Shot
Andrew Niccol’s first two films as writer-director, 1997’s Gattaca and 2002’s S1m0ne, were hollow, sterile sci-fi masquerading as earnest satire. The former told of a near future in which parents could genetically engineer perfect children; the latter proffered an actress who became the most famous and beloved movie star in…
Walking Paradox
Back in 1979, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber turned Eva Perón’s up-by-the-bootstraps tale into one of Broadway’s most famous musicals. Beautiful, sexy and epic in scope, Evita won seven Tony Awards the following year and turned Perón’s story into a pop-culture phenomenon. Today, most everyone knows something about the…
Senior Moment
If The Memory of a Killer were not mostly in Flemish, it would be easily mistaken for a Hollywood movie. The story of a hit man with a conscience and the cop who’s always a step or two behind him as they pursue the same villains, it’s full of familiar…