The Food Experience
At Copeland’s of New Orleans, every table is emblazoned with the restaurant’s name in large gold letters — useful, I suppose, should you suffer a memory lapse and not be able to remember where you are. And the pillars here are painted a curious mottled mauve that reminded me of…
Dumb Like a Fox
When it comes to investigating ill-advised construction projects that could threaten public safety, perhaps the Channel 26/KRIV “City Under Siege” report should have a look close to home. Management of the Fox-owned station has been trying since last summer to get city approval for a station helipad deemed unsafe by…
Dish
That Brazilian Beat My friend Pete Selin recently explained to me that Houston is the opposite of New York City. “You know how they say New York is a great place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there?” he asked. “Well, Houston is a great place to live,…
Heal Thyself
Karen Augustine remembers being a nursing student in Pennsylvania, where she was raised, and hearing from her teachers that “one in seven nurses would become chemically impaired” in the course of their careers. She just didn’t know at the time that she would be the one. And until the past…
Hot Plate
Ducks greet you when you enter Bistro Cuisine (4925 West Alabama, 871-9722). But don’t let that worry you. They’re the ceramic kind and never likely to end up in the cassoulet. While Bistro Cuisine is proudly French, it’s not going to convince you that you’re in Montmartre, hobnobbing with the…
Static
Uncertain Justice… It’s hard to know what’s in the stars for Houston’s once-mighty Justice Records these days — what with all the rumors of stormy major-label courtships and deals falling through. Needless to say, it’s not looking good: Label A&R activity is at a virtual standstill, and the long-awaited sophomore…
Clubland
Strange how things work: Trammell Crow has informed Voodoo Lounge owner Dan Robinson that he’s in default on his lease at Shepherd Plaza. The letter arrived August 25, less than a week after my story (“Stirring the Pot”, August 20) documenting the apparent troubles that arose between Robinson, his landlord…
Catching Up with Gil
Gil Scott-Heron has never been one to wait around for life’s battles to come to him. He’s expended enormous amounts of energy publicly lambasting three U.S. presidents (Nixon, Ford and Reagan), and yet he has still managed to publish three influential novels and three volumes of poetry. When he first…
Clay’s Choice
Plain and simple, there’s an ongoing love affair between Houston country music fans and singer Clay Walker. Friday’s concert at Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion has been sold out for weeks, and his appearance at this year’s Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo still has people talking. Though that event was more…
Weird Ways
The Gourds have taken almost as much critical lip for their unsparingly eccentric ways as they’ve been praised for their timeless appreciation of the basics. Fall behind on either count, it seems, and they wouldn’t be doing their job. Formed in 1994 out of the remains of the punk-skewed Picket…
You Go, Gil
Years before outspoken rap outfits like Public Enemy unleashed their politically charged verbal arsenals, Gil Scott-Heron was taking on relevant social issues via intelligent, articulate rhymes. In 1994, Scott-Heron cut the scathing “Message to the Messenger,” on which he criticized modern hip-hop for appealing to the lowest common denominator and…
The Insider
Licking Their Wounds Republicans still dominate Harris County, but an inside-the-party tiff may be a harbinger of harder times ahead The great Harris County GOP tax assessor-collector shootout of 1998 is now history, and triage reports on the political damage are still pouring in. Few participants escaped the scattershot without…
Rotation
Hole Celebrity Skin Geffen/DGC Courtney Love has proven over and again that she is capable of polarizing opinion like few female pop-culture icons can. She says what she thinks and rails on about what she feels, and that’s what makes her perpetually unsafe. Hell, most people have a hard time…
Letters
Helping Paws? Obviously, Ms. Tesar had a bad day on July 16 [“Hound’s Hell,” by Russell Contreras, August 20]. I can’t understand what she might have done to ruffle the cops as she apparently did on that night. After what happened, even if she was acting ornery or whatever, most…
Made in the USA
The Houston Symphony program notes billed last Friday night’s Woodlands concert as An American Celebration. In honor of Leonard Bernstein’s 80th and George Gershwin’s 102nd birthday anniversaries, there were free cupcakes for everyone in the Woodlands Plaza. A nice little public-relations touch. But after the sun went down and everyone…
News of the Weird
Lead Stories *A man whose name was not released checked in to a motel in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on July 15 for two days and left behind twelve jars’ worth of Vaseline smeared on the carpet, furniture, curtains, walls, bedspreads, sheets, and towels, necessitating a $1300 cleanup. No motive was apparent,…
Theater District Open House
Though last weekend’s afternoons felt as miserably hot and humid as any day this summer, the Theater District Fifth Annual Open House made it worth a drive downtown. It was somewhat magical as all theater experiences should be. Smidgens of free food were passed out. And though you had to…
Blue and Gray Musical
When Gregory Boyd, artistic director of the Alley Theatre, decides to do a brand-new musical, he doesn’t tap-dance around. Getting right down to business, he hooks up with the hugely successful Frank Wildhorn, the only American composer with two original shows running simultaneously on Broadway, The Scarlet Pimpernel and Jekyll…
Outdated Dinner
Once upon a time, many moons ago, long before performance art, videos, and like, way cool coffee bars, there was a sweet homely kind of live theater. It was never intimidating and the shows were almost always familiar, and wholesome, and full of good old fashioned funny-bone tickling jokes. It…
Return to Picnic
Long, long before he directed The Truman Show this year, Peter Weir filmed Picnic at Hanging Rock in 1975 on a budget of less than $500,000. The eerie and atmospheric film became a worldwide hit. The movie, about the unexplained disappearance of four schoolgirls during an idyllic Valentine Day’s romp…
Barely Staying Alive
Shane, the teenage hero of Mark Christopher’s 54, wears the petulant expression of a Raphaelite cherub, and he comes complete with a halo of curly blond hair. He’s played by a pretty newcomer with the exotic name of Ryan Phillippe, but there’s nothing exotic about the voice that comes out…
Night & Day
Thursday September 3 Kids can try out a variety of pretend careers during a pre-Labor Day family night at the Children’s Museum. Hands-on exhibits give them a taste of what it might be like to be a scientist, cashier, artist, architect, television director or engineer. At 6:30 p.m., the Houston…
Audacious Adolescents
With the hyper-naturalism of Kids still very much in mind, newcomer Manuel Pradal transplants the horrors of feral youth to the sun-pocked post-card vistas of the French Riviera. Specifically, he’s set us amid the ready-made mythology of the Bay of Angels surrounding Nice — a blend of sky and sand…
Morris the Cad
What do disgraced Presidential adviser Dick Morris, Everest-climbing filmmaker David Breashears and Polish hero Lech Walesa have in common? Nothing that comes to mind, really. But that unlikely trio will be kicking off a lecture series this fall, a private venture apparently designed to epitomize the word “eclectic.” International Celebrity…
Rogue Elephant
Inside a dimly lit banquet room of a tony downtown Dallas hotel, about 250 Americans who consider themselves brave soldiers for civil rights sit around tables adorned with pots of plump pink and red roses. Almost all of them men, they enthusiastically devour an entree of beef medallions and celebrate…