The first blasts shot up at 7 this morning, setting off car alarms and cheers and waking up Sunday sleepers for miles — and those were just the pre-implosion fireworks. Minutes later the real show began, as a series of dynamite blasts horseshoed around Texas Stadium, throwing up a monster…
Two years and a million misfires ago, local Latino groups began a push to rename a street in Dallas in honor of Cesar Chavez.No luck at Industrial Boulevard, Ross Avenue or Young Street, but the saga reached a poetic finish as the first signs went up today, lining the road…
This week’s Observer features the tale of Michael Manos, a parole jumper, party planner and would-be reality TV star. Unfair Park’s more fashionable readers may remember meeting him last fall as “Mordan Stefanov.”Before a few employees got wind of his real identity — and complaints from his old associates in other…
Seems like it was just yesterday that the Dallas Opera announced they’d picked a new general director, Keith Cerny — and then, there we were at the Winspear Opera House later in the day to meet the man himself.The intervening hours were about enough time to tackle Cerny’s biography — music…
To the list of things Erykah Badu, Stephen Hawking and Amy Tan have in common, we can add this: they’re all portrait subjects in photographer Stewart Cohen’s book Identity: A Photographic Meditation From the Inside Out. For this collection of expertly lit portraits, Cohen traveled the world tracking down a…
It was the kind of night Mordan Stefanov lived for: red-carpet treatment, limos, high fashion and free-flowing drinks—an A-list of moneyed guests, society and business types, and the poseurs who needed to be seen at the hottest party in town. The January 8 celebration would mark the pinnacle of all…
While we’re at it, here’s your YouTube link too.Jimmy Menkena knows as well as anyone how satisfying it can be to let loose screaming and just wail on the guitar onstage. By the time he moved to Dallas in 2006, he’d already done that, in a past life in a…
Bubba’s Cooks Country6617 Hillcrest Ave.214-373-6527Dude Factor: 9, or Benjamin Buford Blue, on a scale of 1 (Bubba the Grouper) to 10 (Bubba Ho-Tep)There’s not much in this world that couldn’t do with some more gravy, but Bubba’s chicken-fried steak may top the list.That aside, it’s hard to find fault with their…
For the first time since fall, the smell of hot dogs on the grills overtook the Ballpark in Arlington Friday afternoon, as the stadium came rumbled back to life for an evening exhibition against the Royals — a dry run for the park’s support staff, and C.J. Wilson, before the sold-out season…
It’s not often that community art, religion and public transportation overlap, but they will tonight as the DART Stations of the Cross marks Good Friday along the Red and Blue Lines. Last year’s ride was organized by a couple of Dallas churches — the Church in the Cliff and Journey…
Nothing brings out a neighborhood’s true colors like a street festival–that sweaty, dreadlocked, beer-swilling cousin of the farmers market. You just don’t know a place till you’ve walked its streets with a clever T-shirt and a party cup, and for 16 years now, the Deep Ellum Arts Festival has been…
If you want to YouTube it instead, here’s your link.It’s not that any of the guys in Sleep Whale have something against their parents–to hear them tell it, by last year they were just plain over their old moniker. Especially after touring through Europe, where their old name, mom, had a way…
Never a friend of unsanctioned urban marking, Dallas City Hall has been particularly vocal in its graffiti opposition in the last few days.Coinciding with Council Member Delia Jasso’s latest anti-graffiti happening — a conference at Hector P. Garcia Middle School — the city announced its report-a-tagger tip line (214-670-TIPS) and a…
A couple weeks ago, you may recall, we brought you a look inside what’s left of Texas Stadium, which, to our eyes, looked just about ready to come down.Not about to let the stadium go quietly, though, the city of Irving organized yet another tour of the old stadium today,…
It was easy to go home a little unimpressed last year by Dallas’s Earth Hour 2009 showing — but then again, you know they were just setting up a sequel. Sure enough, along came World Wildlife Fund’s Earth Hour 2010, and City Hall got on board to make sure this year’s blackout-with-a-message…
While Central Dallas Ministries CEO Larry James had our attention last week with news on his latest urban rebooting project — his “center of hope” at the southeast corner of Malcolm X Boulevard and I-30 — he drew attention back downtown Thursday afternoon to 511 N. Akard St. to toast…
By now we all know better than to trust a vegetarian, but 20 years ago it took a visionary Italian director named Claudio Fragasso and a little movie shot in rural Utah to set us all straight. Like zombie-movie indictments of corporate greed or the slasher flicks that warned us…
New York Sub3411 Asbury St.University Park214-522-1070Dude Factor: 7, or Ghost Busters on a scale of 1 (hunter green Slanket) to 10 (You’d Butter Believe It!)The ad guys who dreamed up that “You can’t beat the real thing” line got it all wrong. Competition’s always a good thing, and if the original New…
Blabbermouths: Buzz is thinking about starting our own political faction. Call it the Beer Party Movement. In it, people gather at bars, drink beer and watch sports on television. Nobody talks. In fact, if anybody so much as whispers a word about politics, the rest of the Beer Party members…
YouTube, we link.When Dust Congress frontman Nick Foreman lost hockey — the thing that drew him to Denton in the first place — he found music. And only after staring down his troubles performing solo did he find his bandmates — first Jeff Barnard and Ryan Williams, then James Kerr and Taylor…
On April 11, Texas Stadium’s going to be one great big pile of roof-and-buttress rubble and, to hear the City of Irving tell it, some of the prime real estate the DFW region has to offer.The explosives will take about a minute to detonate, beginning sometime around 6:30 or 7…
Hands up, waiting for their turn to talk and asking the woman across the table to speak up a little louder, please, about 20 people gathered at The Generator in Garland on Saturday afternoon to mull over political questions at one of about a dozen local Coffee Party USA kick-off events.Billed as a…
