Closet Case
Howard and Emily’s marriage is the talk of Greenleaf, Indiana, a small town idyllic enough to repel Norman Rockwell. The town has waited three years for the couple to make it official — and slimmed-down Emily (Joan Cusack) has waited three long years for Howard (Kevin Kline) to consummate their…
New Studio, Same Old Stuff
The Peacemaker is the first feature from DreamWorks, the studio headed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. It stars George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, and it’s about terrorists who steal Russian nukes. As an intelligence officer with the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, Clooney gets to model his jutting…
All Apologies
Two years ago, this newspaper published an in-depth profile of Lloyd Kelley, who was running for city controller after one term on City Council. For the cover of that issue, we spliced a picture of Kelley’s head onto the body of a bulldog, and in the headline we asked whether…
The Outsider
Weird Power Trip The world-class pyrotechnics have turned to ash, the world-class traffic jam has dispersed and the world-class mountain of garbage has been collected, but a burning question about Houston Industries’ Power of Houston ’97 celebration remains: Just what the hell were we celebrating? We figured it was just…
Letters
Sad Precedent Regarding Bob Burtman’s article on the subsidizing of the Professional Players Club by Harris County [“Sweet Deal,” September 4]: Tax abatements to attract private enterprise — phased out gradually in a specific term and to compete with surrounding counties — are acceptable government practice. Relieving private developers of…
Press Picks
thursday september 25 Playboy Models Autograph Party Though there is much bickering over where it all started, some say that topless/nude table dancing began somewhere in Florida back in the early ’70s, the wee years of the sexual revolution. Of course, it took a city as big and manly as…
Static
Jeers of a clown… “It’s like a little kid with a chemistry set. He may be really on to something, but then his dad comes home from work, goes into the garage and says, ‘Dammit Timmy, I told you not to fuck with my tools,’ and he smashes up the…
The Reich Stuff
Repetition is an element common to virtually every musical style. African drummers pound out beats that conform to set patterns. Rhythm-and-blues figures such as James Brown vamp atop roiling grooves that gain power through their very immutability. Pop tunesmiths such as Hall and Oates sing melodic hooks again and again…
Rhythm Kings
It’s a late June Tuesday night at the Ensemble Theatre’s former home on Holman and Main, and it’s hotter than Salma Hayek in a Norma Kamali bikini. That is, when you get inside the unventilated corridors of the upstairs facilities known as the Midtown Art Center. The air conditioning is…
Smear Campaign
Blur’s Graham Coxon flat-out refuses to reveal his alias. “That wouldn’t be very good to tell you, because then it wouldn’t be my code name, would it?” says the guitarist in a pissy tone, as if being pressed to spill vital state secrets. Such anonymity games are apparently standard practice…
Rotation
Bjork Homogenic Elektra Following the release of her wildly eclectic 1995 record Post, Bjork told me that “the album is sort of a challenge. It’s like saying, ‘Okay, life, you can throw whatever you want at me — an earthquake, a devaluation of all currencies, or maybe I’ll fall in…
Bully Boys
Comedian Chris Rock has certainly become comedy’s stand-up flavor of the month, but what you might not know is that Bone Thugs-N-Harmony is at least peripherally responsible for his recent success. It is the mystic, Cleveland-based rap/hip-hop act, after all, to whom Rock pays homage in his hilariously pointed “Niggas…
Desi Dance
There’s a new dance in clubland. It begins with a solid wall of dholak beats emerging from a swirling mix of hip-hop and disco. Then out snakes a groove of tabla, and all the dancers let out a loud whoop and throw their arms high in the air, as if…
An Up-the-Hill Battle
In a decidedly patriarchal world, can a woman build an independent female identity and fall in love? This is the question posed in Jane Martin’s play Jack and Jill, this season’s opener at Stages Repertory Theatre. The question is an old one, and generally, literature has allowed women one or…
A Fish Tale
Some years back, the late Jacques Cousteau told a House Committee on Science that “the sea is the universal sewer.” Well, if that’s so, it doesn’t seem to bother the folks who swarm to a jewel of a restaurant out on Airline Drive called the Golden Seafood House, where the…
Vive le Vampire
Critics and audiences outside France have been going on for so long about the decline in French cinema that it’s fun to see a French film, Irma Vep, that says much the same thing. The rap is, of course, somewhat unfair — most raps are — but there’s no question…
Police Brutality
The 1950s-era Los Angeles of L.A. Confidential is Noir Central. Its denizens are tattooed in shadow; the play of light and dark in the streets, the police stations, the morgues, is fetishistic. The postwar L.A. touted in the travelogues and billboards is a boomtown, but what we actually see is…