Change Happens
Just as memory allows us to learn from our mistakes and move on, it can also condemn us to live in the past with our transgression. What happens when you commit an irrevocable wrong is at the heart of The Pavilion. In the play, two high school sweethearts reunite at…
Stirred and Shaken
Filled with an angry despair while contemplating the howling void at the center of existence, I decide I must seek solace in the company of like-minded individuals, people who have read Kant and Nietzsche in the originals, people who understand Mann’s works besides The Confessions of Felix Krull. I enter…
Chain for Fools
There are dog people and there are cat people. There are Bush people and there are Gore people. There are even Nader people, for that matter, but they probably don’t want us to know who they are at this point. There are Houstonians and there are Dallasites. We know these…
For a Good Time, Call…
“You’ll never believe what just happened while I was in the bathroom,” Sonia says when she comes back to the table. She seems a little miffed. We are eating dinner at Garson, a Persian restaurant on Hillcroft. While she was in the bathroom, I was sampling her stew. Maybe that’s…
When Worlds Collide
At first glance, the “Coyote Caesar” ($5.90) at Café Compliqe (1525 Westheimer, 713-529-5449) sounds as ’80s as a metal kokopelli sculpture. Its mixture of lettuces (romaine, curly endive), Southwestern-style ingredients (roasted corn, black beans) and Tex-Mex flourishes (fried tortilla strips, green peppers) only hints at the classic Caesar from which…
Famous Potatoes
With his signature laid-back style, soft-spoken Doug Martsch, front man for Boise, Idaho’s Built to Spill (yes, Boise), ruminates over his seven-year-old son Ben’s taste in music. “He likes the Backstreet Boys, but I don’t care about that,” says the 31-year-old. “I want to trust him. I don’t want to…
Farewell, Fair Toadies
In March, the four members of the Toadies — Todd Lewis, Lisa Umbarger, Clark Vogeler and Mark Reznicek — sat around a table at a Metroplex Italian restaurant to celebrate the impending release of the band’s second album. They were giddy with anticipation, a welcome relief after so many months…
Face To Face
…with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt — and there is the story of mankind. — John Steinbeck, East of Eden Five miles south of Wichita Falls and ten miles east of nowhere sits a depressing…
Birth of a Texas Bar Band
College students have been a vital part of the live music audience since the days when Glenn Miller, Jimmie Lunceford and Benny Goodman beckoned couples to trip the light fantastic across ballroom dance floors. These days in Texas, a substantial college crowd has arisen to support a mini-movement of Lone…
Tamarie’s Time
The moment definitely calls for a Big Number, and Tamarie Cooper, the all-singin’, all-dancin’ Toast of Montrose, no doubt began imagining it immediately. After six long years, she is finally quitting her job at Whole Foods Market to work full time in the theater. For six years she has been…
Racket
On September 14, Clear Channel Communications HQ in San Antonio issued what is being termed a “suggestion” to its 1,213 American radio stations, encouraging programmers not to play some 162 songs over their airwaves, along with broader guidelines such as a blanket ban on the entire oeuvre of the politically…
Close Quarters
Almost four years ago, a state law quietly took effect that eased the property tax burden on nonprofit organizations that rent apartments to the working poor. In Houston, community groups have been slow to take advantage of the tax break. To date, just two nonprofits — one of them based…
Where the Streets Have No Lanes
The following statement may sound coarse, but there isn’t a polite way of putting it: Midtown Houston has gotten completely jacked up! The potholes, the detours, the narrow streets, the half-streets, the Day-Glo safety cone galaxies, the rerouting — did we mention the freakin’ potholes? Metro’s light-rail Xtreme construction zone…
Wrong Call?
On June 18, 1999, a suicidal housewife was admitted into Methodist Hospital’s Psychiatric Unit for overdosing on her father’s prescription medication. As the woman was stabilized and kept under observation for the next five days, hospital workers came to learn more about her situation. Her residence was a converted Greyhound…
Playbill
The advance of Onward Quirky Soldiers, Chomsky’s sophomore effort that rocks like a senior on the last day of high school, is slowly erupting out of the Metroplex. At Good Records, Dallas’s No. 1 indie record shop, it sits atop the best-selling album list, outstripping the likes of Björk, White…
Fowl Deed
In 12 years of running a pet store, Lewis Dooling has learned to deal with crimes both common and uncommon. Shoplifters have made off with his $500 Chihuahua, his $80 turtle, and he’s even had tarantulas taken. Kids are always trying to steal his snakes, so he has security cameras…
Playbill
Despite the name, there’s little that’s attractive about the music of this husband-and-wife duo. Brett (he of the droning vocals and subdued guitar/mandolin work) and Rennie (she of the lyrical lyrics, backing vocals and autoharp) Sparks have carved a unique niche in the Americana genre with their dirgelike Southern gothic…
An Early War Casualty?
It’s been an uphill fight from the get-go for Houston City Councilmembers Chris Bell and Orlando Sanchez. In challenging two-term incumbent Mayor Lee P. Brown last spring, they took on an opponent whose lock on Houston’s black voters and most of the downtown establishment guaranteed him millions in campaign contributions…
Minibill
While the baby born “new wave” is now old enough to buy a drink, it’s a genre that has neither garnered much respect nor aged well. The flat, robotic phrasing of lead singers and the electronic blorts and bleeps emitted from synthesizer acts like Depeche Mode, Gary Numan and A…
Bush Spiritual Adviser: Blame the Church, Not Bin Laden
When Pastor Kirbyjon Caldwell rose to give the keynote speech at a community memorial service for terrorist attack victims, listeners no doubt expected a mixture of prayer and solace similar to what a handful of ministers already had delivered during the two-hour session. Instead, Caldwell, the Windsor Village United Methodist…
Minibill
The last time this writer spoke to Bob Schneider, it was nearly 3 a.m., and he had just played his butt off with one of his now semi-defunct bands, the Scabs, at the Fabulous Satellite Lounge. He paid the band, and then hopped into his rented BMW Z3 and took…
It’s Only Business
The Houston Chronicle was moved to righteous indignation by reports of price gouging in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. “Blood and Gutless,” read the headline on a September 14 editorial, which said events had brought out the best and…
Can’t Buy a Thrill
Lacking the good taste to postpone the release of this silly thriller until a less volatile time in American history (assuming one ever comes), the producers of Don’t Say a Word have opted to foist upon us images of detonating New York City buildings, carefully calculated acts of violence and…
Law & Disorder
Rene Balcer, like you and everyone you know, can’t stop talking about what we now refer to simply as The Attack. We may resume our lives, fall back into our routine until it again feels mundane and comforting, but sooner or later, The Attack becomes the only topic of conversation…
Two Hearts Beat as One
The cynic may notice only how Hearts in Atlantis plays like a Stephen King best-of compilation. At times, it feels so much like Stand By Me — with its nostalgic flashback tale of cherubs and bullies accompanied by sad and weary narration — you might confuse it as a remake…
Letters
Rotten to the Corps Floodplain follies: I’m a former U.S. Corps of Engineers flood control project manager, but I have no particular knowledge of the unique circumstances behind the Clear Creek project [“Not Worth a Dam,” by Brian Wallstin, September 13]. In fact, yours was the most comprehensive report I…
Bleak House
The trio of liars who populate Harold Pinter’s dark, disturbing Betrayal are an astonishingly civil lot, especially given the rather rotten way they treat one another. But what else would we expect from Pinter? No contemporary playwright knows more about the eviscerating power of irony. These smart, martini-sipping characters never…
Parks’s Big Score!
On NPR’s Weekend Edition, film critic Elvis Mitchell once said, “I think these movies require a second viewing, just so we can get a sense of what it was they communicated when they were first seen in a movie theater.” He was referring to The Learning Tree and Shaft, two…
Image Versus Reality
Written the week prior to September 11, this review, in a peculiar blend of bad timing and understatement, began: “In case you haven’t heard, Americans aren’t winning any popularity contests abroad these days.” The horror of recent events has devastated all Americans, and there has been an unprecedented outpouring of…