Pop Populist
Some artists rise to the top through careful machinations and sex. Others take great pride in infiltrating the machine, then using it to their own end. Only a few, however, manage to find their inner muse, follow it and wind up at the top of the heap. Moby is one…
No Sissies Allowed
His long-sleeved black jersey is soaked in sweat as Haywood Jeffires stands on the Pearland Patriots’ football field. Retired four years now, he was the Oiler known for catching the ball behind his back with one hand. He averaged six to nine catches per game and helped make the Oilers…
Stolen Thunder
Musicians love their instruments. Take Jesse Dayton and a local blues guitarist who have both recently been ripped off. These six-stringers say they never thought of their babies as commodities. They were surprised to realize others had. Dayton is convinced professionals were involved. The country-rocker is one irreplaceable ’58 blond…
Going Public
Amber Hall was unhappy. Although she had attended Catholic school since prekindergarten and was among the top sophomores at St. Pius X High School, she felt fatigued and depressed. Catholic school had given her a solid education, and she knew her parents intended for her to finish at St. Pius,…
Hip-hop’s House
With alt-country rockers the Jayhawks performing in the background, Lulu Turner sat behind the ticket counter at Fitzgerald’s earlier this month and did her thing. She took tickets and fielded queries while manning the telephones. Then she got the call. Someone had dialed up Fitz’s to ask about the club’s…
In the (O)Zone
Last Monday was one of those lovely late-summer mornings that just begs a person to venture outside. Susana Hansen, a volunteer reader at her boy’s School of the Woods in west Houston, tutored students at a picnic table under a deep blue sky. When the reading sessions ended at 11…
Channeling Music
Tom Harrell has said he’s not so much a creator of music as a channel for it. At 54, Harrell is an exceptional composer and one of the premier trumpeters on the jazz circuit, known for blowing some of the most unique lines in bebop. As his Grammy-nominated album Time’s…
Taxing Tales
As the Houston Community College System considers its largest tax hike in history, two trustees on the system’s board are delinquent in paying their own property taxes, some of which are owed to the community college. County records showed last week that board chairman Bruce Austin and member Michael P…
Blackwater Southern
Suplecs hails from New Orleans and is unmistakably blackwater Southern. The three-piece is touring on the back of its Wrestlin’ with My Lady Friend debut on Man’s Ruin Records. Combining raw, heavy yet bluesy riffs with downright catchy dual vocals, the band creates a dark sonic stew of black-cat bone…
Grave Importance
“HARRISBURG CEMETARY,” announced the sign on the chain-link fence. “NO DUMPING,” said another. I parked on the crunchy grass outside the gate and peered at the modest scattered markers, at the graves of emancipated slaves, black cowboys and soldiers. The place wasn’t much to look at, but better than I…
Forget It
Remember the Titans, based on a true story about how a football team brought together the segregated town of Alexandria, Virginia, in the early 1970s, is the first film from Jerry Bruckheimer’s Technical Black production company, which is meant to offer more contemplative and slower-paced films than his hollow, slam-bang…
Breaking Bigotry
In 1993, Wanda and Brenda Henson, two lesbian lovers, decided to set up shop in Mississippi, a place not particularly known for tolerating alternative lifestyles. Upping the risk factor, the Hensons veered away from the more cosmopolitan state capital of Jackson in favor of the hard back roads of Ovett,…
Pointed Love
According to Patrice Leconte, women live to be vulnerable, men thrive when they’re in command, and the two genders can find a happy fusion only once they’ve tasted one another’s fates — unless they capriciously kill each other. At least, this seems to be the director’s thesis in Girl on…
Rubber Fetish
If you’ve ever had any interest in how car tires are put together, tune in to Channel 11. Hardly a news broadcast goes by without KHOU trotting out that film clip of a Bridgestone/Firestone assembly line manufacturing tires. Straight out of a high school “Industry Works for You!” film, the…
Mac-ro Mess
Brandishing sabers, leaping down flights of stairs and dripping pots of gooey stage blood, this cast of Macbeth struggles to bring to life one of Shakespeare’s most demanding tragedies. Unfortunately the play — full of live-action fight scenes, big ghost-ridden banquets and multiple onstage murders — is too big to…
Letters
From the Balcony Seeking justice: Just finished reading “A Deadly Passion” [by Brian Wallstin, September 7], and once again, it looks like L.A. has failed to do its duty. As a native, it makes me sad; as a human, the story of Sandra Orellana makes me even sadder. Only two…
Snow Job
Houston Ballet’s The Snow Maiden loses none of its icy luster the second time around, returning after its world premiere here in 1998. Artistic director Ben Stevenson presents a Russian fairy tale of Father Frost’s daughter seeking true love with another’s betrothed, and it is still both a balletomane’s treat…
The Latex Glove of God
Martin Gray owns two pairs of pants, three shirts and a pack for carrying his camera equipment. He just so happens to be on a mission from God. His purpose, as he sees it, is to photograph every major religious site in the world, so that their images can be…
The Ballad of Bert and Rob and Susan
The millennial year has been nothing short of a nightmare for District G Councilman Albert Lloyd “Bert” Keller II. And it shows no signs of getting better anytime soon. In early June, he had a late-night visit to a topless bar, then ran amok in an inebriated state and drove…
Off Track
Amid the concrete barriers and miles of plastic sheeting used to block nonpaying spectators from watching the Texaco Grand Prix, Race Car Club, despite its time-appropriate name, is just a party for the sake of a party. The name is pure convenience — the Grand Prix was right around the…
Beating the Autumn Heat
The calendar may claim it’s fall, but you can’t fool Houstonians. Here, autumn is merely an extension of summer, disguised as months appropriately named after ascending Roman numbers, like you’re clicking off months on a prison wall. Seven eight nine ten. “Fall” in Heat City is still ideal for something…
Mama’s Got a Brand-new Bag
Part three of a six-part series Maria Lagunas is slapping dough balls into tortillas. I stand watching her near the front door of the original Ninfa’s on Navigation. After a short wait, we are seated in the old dining room near a huge enlargement of Mama Ninfa’s wedding picture. “She…
Booze in a Blender
Neon lights and old paintings of matadors and señoritas with fans decorate the walls of El Meson [2425 University Boulevard, (713)522-9306] in the Rice Village. The menu says it’s a Cuban restaurant, but the place serves tortilla chips and a bowl of warm hot sauce when you sit down. There’s…
A Mojito? Ya Betcha!
Isaw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, / starving hysterical naked,” wrote Allen Ginsberg in the opening line of his 1956 poem Howl. The poem goes on for many, many lines after that, detailing how those minds were destroyed. In one stanza about midway through, Ginsberg cites…
Pick a Pepper
Speaking off the toque: Diana Ramos, chef and co-owner of Habanero Blue [1601 Commerce, (713)224-4468]. Recently, four scientists in India announced they had discovered the hottest chili pepper on earth. Naming the variety the Tezpur chili, after a remote region in the state of Assam, the scientists claimed the pepper…
Swing Time
In 1939, when a teenage Oscar Peterson was starting to get a bit of an ego about his piano playing, his father sat him down and introduced him to an Art Tatum recording. Awestruck by Tatum’s technique and mastery, Peterson insisted he was hearing two pianists, not one. When he…
Still Howlin’
“Omar” Kent Dykes felt the blues once. At a Mississippi VFW hall more than a quarter of a century ago, a teenage Dykes was performing with his band, all dressed in the appropriate gear — white turtleneck and black sport coat — when a big, drunk bruiser stomped in. The…