Outside In
When last we encountered Peter and Bobby Farrelly, they were pelting movie houses with industrial-strength jokes about retarded kids, lost semen, found excrement and exploding house pets. Good plan. There’s Something About Mary turned into last summer’s surprise hit and catapulted the brothers to the top of Hollywood’s A-list, where…
Good Goo Dolls
It might help to think of this summer package tour as a sandwich. Buffalo New York’s Goo Goo Dolls is pretty much the white bread. Not exactly Wonder Bread, but something with a bit of taste. Like sourdough. The trio (touring with a keyboardist and second guitarist) slogged it out…
Law and Disorder
For a moment, Judge E. Janice Law seems baffled during the morning docket call. She has just read out a defendant’s name, but he hasn’t stepped forward. Instead, the man with the balding head continues to sit in the jury box, staring at her. “Oh, Mr. Slaughter, you may come…
News of the Weird
Lead Stories The city commission of the border town of El Cenizo, Texas, voted in August to establish Spanish as the town’s official language and to prohibit municipal employees, under penalty of firing, from cooperating with the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service on undocumented aliens. Mayor Rafael Rodriguez has acknowledged…
Here Come the Brides
Eleanora Piombino is not sure she likes what she sees. Staring at the pearly white heels with typical pointy toes, she adjusts the atypical diagonal straps across the top of her left foot. Now for the test drive: She stands and struts down the imagined church aisle. Abruptly she stops…
Cash Cow or White Elephant?
There’s often a never-never land quality to the way current events unfold and are reported in Houston. It’s as if everything that has gone before vanishes into an Orwellian memory hole, and this morning a new sun shines on virgin landscapes. Such is the case with the return of the…
Race Cars
One moment Ken Williams was asking the Houston traffic cop if he knew what racial profiling was. The next moment “there were five police officers around me.” Nope, this wasn’t the drug bust of the century or the apprehension of a serial killer. This was making a right turn without…
Houston, Humor Hotbed
Lest we forget how much humor is nestled in our little town, the tight-knit Houston comedy industry has spent recent months engaged in an Elyse Lanier-style public relations campaign: Did you know that the late, great renegade comedians Sam Kinison and Bill Hicks started the infamous Texas Outlaw Comics here?…
Art House
It was over a decade ago that Mike Myers sucked in his cheeks, squeezed into a tight black catsuit and announced, “Now is the time on Sprockets when we dance.” We laughed at the Saturday Night Live lampoon of the postwar German aesthetic (Mike Myers is a funny guy), but…
Urban Refuel
You can have all the trendy restaurants, cafes, bars, clubs and jazz joints you want. You can even convert all the old buildings within a two-mile radius into co-ops and lofts. But if you don’t have a place where you can buy white-truffle oil at $12.95 for 3.52 fluid ounces,…
Hot Plate
Talking Turkey: A wrapped-in-plastic turkey sandwich that dares to cost $5 had better be fabulous. Luckily for us all, the one at the Empire Baking Company [1616 Post Oak Boulevard, (713)871-9779] deserves every penny of its price tag. Peppers are the dominant motif: Green slivers of jalapeño speckle the exemplary…
Zydeco’s Birthplace
Quick question: What major urban metropolis has been the most crucial, historically speaking, in the development of that funky accordion-based music known as zydeco? If you answered New Orleans, you’re wrong — though the Crescent City has done a splendid job of cashing in on zydeco’s popularity (and promoting the…
Soul Brother No. 1
Music writers toss around the term genius so often the word is almost meaningless. Madonna’s a genius. Kurt Cobain was a genius. Trent Reznor’s a genius. Yeah, right. Fact is, musical geniuses don’t come around so often. The 20th century has produced only a handful of inarguable geniuses, such as…
Ideal Houstonians
On the CD sleeve of Ideal’s latest record, the name of the song is “Get Gone.” But in Houston (and probably other parts of the country by now), the song is referred to by its most noticeable, most frank line: “Get the Hell On.” The phrase is like a subtitle…
Scat’s First Lady
If VH-1 ever decides to dedicate a portion of its “Behind the Music” series to jazz, it would be well-served to produce an episode on Anita O’Day. Her story is filled with all the career rises and falls and personal tabloid trash the series’ producers crave. That her music was…
Storm Damage
The heartbreaking pathos was so evident on the screen that you just wanted to reach out and give the people a reassuring hug. Mother Nature had yet again capriciously struck, inflicting damage and crushing dreams. In this case, the damage was to the career hopes of television reporters who were…
New Releases Reviewed
Tricky with DJ Muggs and Grease Juxtapose Island Trip-hop godfather. Hip-hop aficionado. Pot-smoking paranoid. Eccentric artist. Whatever. Tricky has never shied from trying different directions, though no matter where he roams he’ll never have the same impact he did on his first record, the five-star Maxinquaye. Still, claustrophobic, slow beats,…
Grim Meal
Chris Lee’s Eat the Enemy is a long way from appetizing. Violent, mean-spirited and as cynical as it gets, this sitcom-style British play — it wants to be a telling look at contemporary culture and sex — is in desperate need of a message. Instead of profundity or depth or…
Local Music Reviewed
Phil Settle & Friends Santa Monica Pier Sand Canyon Records Houston nightclub veterans of the ’70s and ’80s might remember Settle as a local singer and picker and leader of bands such as Bittersweet, Sweetrush and Bounce. During the past decade, though, the graduate of North Texas State University and…
Ensemble Excess
As a filmmaker, actor John Turturro clearly believes in drawing from personal experience: His directorial debut, the 1992 Mac (which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes), was avowedly based on his father’s life. For his second feature, Illuminata, Turturro takes a look at the theater, showing us the ambitions, fears…
Local Music News
Everybody’s a poseur in his/her own circles. In journalist circles, it’s the height of fashion to drive jalopies and wear body-unconscious clothing, baker hats and blinders. (Just kidding.) On Wall Street, it’s a paradox in motion. Traders don overpriced clothes, which have no resale value and depreciate the moment they’re…