Blogs

Lee Child’s use of allegory in his latest Jack Reacher novel Nothing to Lose would make William Faulkner proud. Caught between the towns of Hope and Despair in Colorado, Reacher gets stuck when people want him gone which only makes him more determined to stick around.

Set upon by four louts in an unfriendly restaurant, the six-foot-five Reacher dispatches them in his usual efficient manner after warning them that they really don’t want to give him a hard time. Then after he shows them why by hammering them into the ground, he, not they, is arrested and subsequently found guilty of vagrancy and deported from the town.

So he, of course, comes back again and again. Although what he comes back to isn’t much.

Be sure to scope these preview photos of the Lee and Joe Jamail Skatepark...

Fasten your grip tape and polish those trucks, all you skaters. Finally, there’s a place to grind the rails and carve up the bowls without the cops busting your balls. That’s right, the city’s first skate park, located along the Buffalo Bayou, opens up to the public this Sunday.

When I first moved to Houston eight years ago, I found myself asking several questions:

Is it legal to make freeways this wide?

Is this furniture salesman for real and is he actually going to save me money?

Oh my God, what the Hell is slime in the ice machine and why the Hell is that older man in blue glasses talking about it so much?

Why not pronounce the H in Humble?

And, perhaps most important, Why do they let someone’s old gym teacher do the weather here?

If “Lost” were a girl, she’d be that girl who always lets you get to second base and then keeps her knees pressed firmly together even after you’ve told her she’s got eyes that are like the windows to her soul or some crap like that. If “Lost” were a guy, he’d be that dude you meet at a party who spends hours talking with you and flirting with you, acts completely bemused and delighted by everything you’re saying, says he’s gonna call you…and never does.

“Lost” is just a big old tease, but like a bad relationship, I can’t get away. I can’t break up with “Lost.”

Okay, enough with the damn dating metaphors already.

Mireille Hassenboehler and Simon Ball in Little Dancer

Trust Canadian choreographer James Kudelka to take the posture of Edgar Degas’s iconic sculpture La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans and impose the little girl’s titled head and hands-clasped-behind-the-back motif onto a bunch of men. That’s so cool.

The world premiere of Kudelka’s Little Dancer last Thursday for Houston Ballet’s “Four Classics, Five Tangos” repertory evening was a typical immersion into this creative choreographer’s mind. Forget Degas’s love of the classical ballerina baby -- this ballet was all about men and contemporary movement and sound. Set to Philip Glass's Symphony No. 8 (with a shout-out to Maestro Ermanno Florio and the Houston Ballet Orchestra) this dance for 12 men and five women begins with a 20-minute-long section in which the men pose thoughtfully in fourth position before dashing to and fro across the stage in elegant, yet somehow frantic, patterns. Dressed in Denis Lavoie’s black kilts and knee socks, they are vaguely reminiscent of ballerinas in tutus, yet more powerful, and more self-possessed. When setting this new work, Kudelka mused whether men were the new women in ballet. In this one, they are indeed.

UH President and Chancellor Renu Khator says she loves athletics but she doesn’t want to be on the sidelines if any new medical schools are handed out in the state.

“We can be top tier without a medical school so it’s not a must for us,” she said in a face to face with the Press at her office last week. But if she had her druthers, she’d like one and she thinks Houston, the fourth largest city in the country deserves its own med school. And when she rates the top three strengths of Houston, “health” is in there right next to “energy” and “the arts.”

She also thinks UH “is really not funded for excellence.” You don’t build top ranked schools on the backs of enrollment, she says, so she’s looking for the state to cough up some more cash. And she finds absurd the idea that a state like Texas would have only two public research universities.

Are you living in poverty? Do you dislike the poverty lifestyle? Do you have $25 ($30 at the door)? Then you might want to check out tonight’s talk by Houston Vetter, “Bust Loose From Poverty,” at CenterPoint, 1920 Hollister, 713-932-7224. (CenterPoint is described on its site as a “spiritually based, non-profit educational center for mind, body and spirit.”)

So who is Houston Vetter? Well, he’s a “Human Potential Expert” who helps people discover their “unique power to attract boundless prosperity, optimum health, and lasting happiness.”

I called up Vetter (whose first name is Gerhard) to ask why he’s charging people to learn how to “bust loose” from poverty.

“You’re thinking,” Houston said, “…from the concept that money’s real and that money’s limited.”

He was of course correct. I was, in fact, thinking that money is “real.” Which just proves why I need to go to his lecture tonight.

Welcome to a four-day week. Hell. Yeah. We hope Memorial Day treated y'all right. On with the show.

11:27 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Voxtrot, Car Stereo (Wars), The Mathletes and Skull Gang Disco played the MFAH on Saturday, May 24, for the Starbucks Mixed Media Music Series. We got plenty of photos.

During his 34-year career in law enforcement—23 of those as a Detective/Sergeant with the Houston Police Department Homicide Division-- Sgt. Brian Foster always kept both his notebook and his ears open.

But not just to record the confessions, bizarre incidents, statements, stories, and lies that were told him by both cops and crooks. Like any good sociologist of the streets, he was collecting material, and many of the best tales featuring junkies, winos, burglars, wife-beaters, fellow officers, and lawyers appeared in his self-published book Homicidal Humor.

It was written under his pseudonym of “Von Auld Kopp” (read it aloud) to understandably avoid certain, uh, repercussions. A disclaimer about stories being embellished, secondhand, or outright “fiction” was also (wink, wink) included.

Now on the verge of retirement, Foster has penned a sequel, More Homidical Humor, and this time under his own name. Houstoned trolled through its pages and took a tour of the seamy (and often stinky) underbelly of Houston crime and criminals, and spoke with Foster about his new beat of the printed page.

It’s a tough competition, but we think we have a clear winner for Most Thin-Skinned Organization in town: The Friends of BARC.

BARC is, of course, the city pound. FOB is a private non-profit that does things for the pound, like buy equipment. They also spend an inordinate amount of time bitching if the publicity they get is not absolutely 100 percent glowing.

We wrote an item in Hair Balls about how members of another group were complaining about Friends of BARC’s close relationship with BARC. There were claims FOB was “gaming the system” to get the best dogs.