Hedberg and the Angry Lynch
THU 9/30 At first, Stephen Lynch seems like yet another in the line of sensitive, white singer-songwriters: choirboy looks, high tenor voice, gentle acoustic guitar strumming. But somehow, we doubt crooners like Jeff Buckley or John Mayer would sing about a father who wishes SIDS upon his ugly child, a…
Reefer Madness
On an average day — with good weed — Clayton Jones smokes eight grams. If he needs to, he can make an ounce last a week. It’s a few hours after his 5 a.m. wake-and-bake on a mid-August weekday when Jones props open the back door to his porch and…
A Salty Salute
I might even wind up a rock ‘n’ roll god / It might turn into a steady job — the Kinks, “Top of the Pops” In 1994, a rock and roll god was born when a tiny label with the vaguely coprophilic name of Scat released a disc now considered…
KISD Off
Anna sits at home on her couch, a pretty girl with blond hair. She looks normal, although it is almost immediately obvious that something is half a click off, as evidenced by how she overarticulates her words and shows frequent flashes of temper. Although Anna claims to have a high…
Love on the Rocks
These days, whenever he puts out a new album from either of the two bands he fronts — the clamorous Cursive or the comparatively subdued, acoustic-based Good Life — Tim Kasher knows the phone calls are coming. Not from family and friends wanting to congratulate him for the achievement. Not…
On the Case
American television has become a fetid waste pit of banality, but we have the solution. The solution involves a spin-off of an existing show, but if you can’t be derivative, you have no business pretending to be a TV exec. Our proposal: Law & Order: Zero Tolerance Unit. And we…
How Long, Oh, Lord, How Long
Radio One, Inc. 5900 Princess Garden Parkway Seventh Floor Lanham, MD 20706 Dear Big Shot Program Director, Well, you’ve done it again. I had known since May that KRTS owner Mike Stude had sold the station to your Washington, D.C.-based radio megacorporation for $72.5 million, but nobody knew what your…
Sinus Headache
There’s nothing new about heckling bad movies. So when comedians Jerm Pollet, Owen Egerton and John Erler formed Mr. Sinus Theater 3000, a tribute to the show Mystery Science Theater 3000, they had no idea how much of a spectacle their first performance at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin was…
A Tale of Two Titties
Some nights just get away from you. You make plans to hit the track, but it’s a struggle to get up off the couch, much less out the door. If your standards are as low as mine, damn near everything you find on the tube is tolerable enough to keep…
Lafayette’s Legacy
The crawfish bisque at Denis’ Seafood House is as dark as chocolate and spicy as hell. Crawfish tails and hush-puppy dumplings hide in its luscious roux-thickened murk. But I can’t pay full attention to the fabulous soup, because I’m distracted by the appetizer, which the four of us can’t quite…
Playbill
Tommy Hall Schedule No less an authority than Ray Wylie Hubbard has pronounced the Thirteenth Floor Elevators the coolest band ever. Recently there has been renewed interest in Tommy Hall, the enigmatic University of Texas philosophy student credited with conceptualizing and founding the band. In a recent Austin Chronicle interview,…
Paper, Plastic or Chocolate
You may not think of seafood restaurants when you think chocolate decadence, but never mind. McCormick & Schmick’s Seafood Restaurant (1151 Uptown Park Boulevard, 713-840-7900) isn’t about just oysters on the half shell, big slabs of mahimahi and Atlantic salmon. It’s also, yes, about chocolate. The national chain puts a…
Björk
Whether you consider her a peddler of precious, pretentious twaddle or an endless font of pure Icelandic genius, you have to give Björk credit for eschewing the safe option. No other platinum-selling diva has had the guts to forge such idiosyncratic paths as this charismatic singer has done over the…
Jackyl
All right, all you ironic Darkness-adoring trendoid wussies, let’s see if you can hang with the real-deal big dawgs. This live CD, cut at the world’s largest biker bar, the Full Throttle Saloon in the Harley haven of Sturgis, South Dakota, gives you exactly zero seconds to know if you’re…
The Prodigy
The Prodigy came of age when big pants and even bigger beats reigned supreme in England, but the band became known to most Americans in 1997 with the sadistic metal twang of “Firestarter.” Outgunned, their first proper studio disc since that time and first without spiky-haired barker Keith Flint, hasn’t…
J.U.F.
Transglobal debauchery rears its exotic horns when Ukrainian gypsy Eugene Hütz takes a break from fronting Gogol Bordello to mix together the sounds of an underground discotheque. Balkan, Turkish, dancehall and flamenco collide with bhangra, rai, klezmer and international kitchen-sink stylings to produce an altogether foreign strain of Fellini-approved combat…
Letters
Rough Riders Keep the ATVs: There are a lot of reasons why ATVs should be allowed to continue to ride in the Spring Creek area [“Keeping It Real,” by Margaret Downing, September 16]. Also, please be aware that Senate Bill 155 (the law that bans ATVs and OHVs from most…
The Importance of Being Ernesto
Revolutionary idolatry is an odd business. Just ask unruly pop singer Stew, of the unruly pop group the Negro Problem. On his Naked Dutch Painter album, the melodic rebel dares to challenge a very sacred image. “Don’t you wish there was, like, another picture of Che Guevara?” he inquires. “Like,…
Daddy Dearest
Considering its sublimely profane, attention-grabbing title, Nick Flynn’s highly praised new memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, doesn’t exactly scream Oprah Book Club. True, it’s the story of a family reunion, but not exactly the touchy-feely kind. “I spent six years working with the homeless,” explains Flynn, who will…
Floundering
Shark Tale is an animated film, though after you see it you might wonder whether the term is intended as oxymoronic. Put simply, it has no life in it at all. Not even the kids roped into an afternoon preview screening seemed terribly interested. Perhaps they’ve grown tired of computer-made…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, September 30 The local masters of puppets, Bobbindoctrin Puppet Theatre, are kicking off their new season with The Puppet Liberation Front, and they promise to break new ground — as puppets go. “For the first time in Bobbindoctrin history,” says BPT artistic director Joel Orr, “human actors with masks…
Like Moths to a Flame
It was only a matter of time before Hollywood capitalized on the sympathy and admiration that have enveloped the nation’s firefighters since 9/11, and here we are. Jay Russell’s action-packed, flame-broiled Ladder 49 is an all-out valentine to the firehouse fraternity that might never have gotten to the screen were…
In a Wad
Last winter Bob Morgan wrote, acted in and directed Sado-Masochistic Xmas and Immaculate Contraception, the latter of which imagines God as a lesbian with a thing for “hot chicks with big butts.” How can Morgan and his dos chicas theater commune follow that, you ask? By offering up Little Fascist…
Perfecting Peter
Houston Ballet’s Peter Pan pops with Broadway-style panache: fabulous lighting, over-the-top costumes and oversize, overgrown sets. But is this Andrew Lloyd Webber or is it the ballet? Ballet, definitely the ballet. The production values and story line were taken from J.M. Barrie’s 1911 tale about Peter and the Lost Boys,…
Coffee Crusader
FRI 10/1 Repent, ye spendful sinners! Reverend Bill is watching you. Yea, as you buy those cargo shorts from the Gap, that ironic tee from Urban Outfitters, as you stop by Starbucks for your mocha latte, the Reverend will be working for your salvation. To save your soul, the good…
Capsule Reviews
The Calling of Jericho Jones Some questions for playwright C. Jean Montgomery and her “Texas tragic-comedy”: Why does it take seven years for this Irish family living in Clute to hold a séance (a “calling”) that will bring back wastrel eldest son Jericho (Jay Menchaca) to explain his mysterious disappearance?…
Step Up
SAT 10/2 Running or walking 3.1 miles isn’t that hard. It’s not as hard as, say, undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatments, and perhaps losing one or both of your breasts. And this weekend, running 3.1 miles can help lessen the odds that you or someone you know will ever have…
Polar Flair
“Ginnungagap,” the title of Sigrid Sandström’s new show at Inman Gallery, looks like a colossal typo, but it’s actually one of those polysyllabic Swedish words meaning “seeming emptiness,” or so they say. If I’d taken Norse mythology, I would’ve already known that ginnungagap refers to “the primordial void separating Niflheim…
The Perfect Rhyme
FRI 10/1 In his time, Patrick Davis sure has wanted a lot of stuff. “I wanted to have something to do on a Saturday,” says the Houston poet and promoter of the upcoming Starving Poets Poetic House Party 3. “I wanted to raise the bar for what people expect when…
Capsule Reviews
“Chris Akin: Recent Drawings” and “Matthew and Dayna Linton: American Bikers/Views from the Sissybar” The exhibitions in the upstairs galleries of the Galveston Arts Center are a study in contrasts. On one side are Chris Akin’s quiet, precise drawings, which he furtively created while on the job as a museum…