Consummate Gentleman
American pop culture has been heartily indulging its fascination with a hopped-up, watered-down update of traditional jump blues, evidenced most readily by the rise of neo-swing. But the original swingers were digging that sound decades before it was co-opted by today’s retro trendsetters and corporate deities. If there was ever…
Nature Boy
It’s not often that a musician inspires fans to drastic measures. Case in point: Greg Brown had trimmed his tour schedule a few years back and hadn’t played Texas since. With no gigs in sight, his legions in Austin took matters into their own hands: They formed the Society to…
Purveyors of Perk
Financial matters are of little pressing concern to the members of Phuz. That much is evident simply from glancing around the Houston band’s high-end townhouse headquarters in West U. Though all five members of the group are milling about inside, not a single car clutters the driveway, and the garage…
Deadly Pitfalls
Every Tuesday morning, the diminutive great-grandmother with the white hair and glasses would leave her tidy house in the country, get behind the wheel of her 1992 blue Ford Taurus and drive the short distance into town to attend Bible class at Immanuel Lutheran Church. She would pull up to…
Rotation
Splitsville Repeater Big Deal If there’s a special CD rack in heaven where all the great pop failures of the ’90s are filed away, chances are there’s a section for the Splitsville family of recordings — just down the row from the Posies and Redd Kross. The crucial lesson to…
It’s Jackie’s Neighborhood
“Prices in the Heights are up 23.9 percent in the last year and 43.5 percent over the last five years.” — Real estate agent quoted in the Houston Chronicle, August 12, 1998 Jackie Harris likes to tell a story. It’s about the cantina next door to where Jackie lives, in…
Family Foibles
Slums of Beverly Hills is the first feature by the young writer/director Tamara Jenkins, and it has its mild amusements. It’s one of those movies that gets bonus points for being “personal” — it bops along from episode to episode as if the filmmaker were discovering her subject as she…
Bum Deal?
As restaurateur Irma Galvan rose to address the Houston City Council committee on economic and community development last week, most everyone in the audience figured they knew her script in advance. After all, the owner of Irma’s, a lunchtime feeding trough for politicians and the downtown crowd, had been one…
Family-Style Friction
One True Thing, directed by Carl Franklin, is trying to be the Terms of Endearment of the ’90s. Scripted by Karen Croner from the 1995 Anna Quindlen novel of the same name, One True Thing pushes the same high-gloss homilies about making peace with your family, and it caps everything…
Letters
Bush League Stuart Eskenazi [“Rogue Elephant,” September 3] both overstates Log Cabin’s enthusiasm for Governor Bush and understates Governor Bush’s very public jabs at anti-gay elements in the GOP. As a gay GOP precinct chairman, I can tell you Eskenazi is wrong on both counts. Although most of us like…
Titanic Tale
You can’t keep a good ship down. No sooner have a billion or so Titanic videos hit the shelves than a little-known Spanish moviemaker complicates the issue with a French-language film called, in English, The Chambermaid on the Titanic. Cheap profiteering? An attempt to cash in? Absolutely not. In fact…
News of the Weird
Lead Stories *Among the street-theater performances at New York City’s International Fringe Festival in August: a 45-minute satirical, bigoted rant against hunchbacks from Nebraska; a six-person troupe performing Eugene Ionesco’s Bald Soprano continuously, for a total of 24 times in 24 hours; and “Brown and Blue,” an “ode to excrement,”…
Trouble in Tinseltown
For better or worse, the confessional memoir has become the most popular literary form of our time, prompting ballplayers, Irish bartenders, prosecuting attorneys and mothers of quadruplets everywhere to lay bare their deepest thoughts and secrets, all based on the presumption that their miserable lives are more interesting than anyone…
Oldie but a Goodie
Steve Allen, the creator and first host of the Tonight Show, is still swinging at 76 — and on September 17, he brings his act to Houston. Allen was multimedia before the word had been invented. Sometimes called “one of the last great jazz musicians,” he is also the author…
Going Batty
In one of the most arresting scenes of the Houston Ballet’s Dracula, the centuries-old vampire satiates his blood thirst by ravaging a young village girl who lives near his castle. In a hypnotic pas de deux, the svelte count is an erotic captor, seducing Flora into swaying her limp body…
Night & Day
Thursday September 17 After you see the Houston Ballet’s production of Dracula, learn more about the bloodsucking count at the University of Houston Dracula Gothfest. Renowned Dracula expert (we never knew there was such a thing) Elizabeth Miller, a professor of English at the University of Newfoundland, shows slides and…
Playing Politics
With three major works by playwright Wendy Wasserstein having graced its stage in seasons past, it’s not surprising that Wasserstein’s An American Daughter gets Main Street Theater’s new season off to a comfortable start. It’s not that American Daughter says anything outrageous, illicit or titillating about the human condition; nor…
Class Photos
For the last four years, Yates High School photography teacher Ray Carrington II has taken his kids to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — not simply as spectators or visitors, but as artists. In the annual “Eye on Third Ward: Yates Magnet School Photography Exhibition,” students’ photographs capture the…
Dish
Hooked on Hatches South of Albuquerque and north of Las Cruces lies the little New Mexican town of Hatch. Snuggled alongside the Rio Grande, shadowed by the Mimbres Mountains, the Hatch valley is home to some of the best green chile peppers you’ll ever eat; it’s a mecca for chile…
Down (and Out) on the Farm
Right now, you don’t know Darrel and Juanita Buschkoetter, a young Nebraska farming couple with three daughters. But soon, you’ll have the opportunity. Over three nights (and six and a half hours), PBS will offer the Buschkoetters’ lives for public inspection. The Farmer’s Wife, director David Sutherland’s absorbing documentary, will…
The Accidental Italian
There are several things you should know about the owner of Nick’s Pasta Place. First, her name isn’t Nick. It’s Gina. And she’s not Italian. Gina Koutros is Greek. It’s true that she’s been to Italy. She spent a week there last year. And it can’t be said that she…
Hot Plate
My hair is falling out, my nails are brittle, and my eyes have lost their luster. (Or what little luster they had.) Do you think my eating nothing but onion rings for the past four weeks might have something to do with it? Not that I care. I look awful,…
Static
Minimizing the carnage… While locals are busy debating the significance of the Abyss’s sudden demise and its potential impact on the scene, touring acts and booking agents around the country have their own mess to deal with. Upon its closure at the end of August, the Abyss had national-caliber live…
Clubland
The beer coolers and jug bottles of Jim Beam were out in full force September 4 at the Fabulous Satellite Lounge, as there was no booze to be had at the bar, by order of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission. An unspecified problem in the liquor-license-renewal process meant the Satellite…
Reunion Rigor Mortis
Heading north on Highland Avenue in Los Angeles, 7/10/98, 8:49 p.m.: En route to first Bauhaus show in 15 years. Thought: If most recent spate of high-profile band reunions has proved anything, it’s that simpering nostalgia and artistic desperation are not unique to a specific generation. Used to be that…