With little fanfare, Ross Perot launched his plan to rescue the embattled Dallas public schools. In January and February, a team from Sirota Consulting, a New York-based firm specializing in rehabilitating Fortune 500 companies, not ragtag urban school districts, held focus groups throughout the district to find out what was…
That’s ho—m’fo—bik Like many, Buzz, uh, forgot to vote in this week’s primaries. It’s not that we don’t care about good government. It’s just that all those Republicans look alike to us. Fortunately, the Dallas Gay and Lesbian Alliance is a little more attentive. They monitor the races and send…
Science war Thanks for the excellent article on Dr. Robert Haley’s work on Gulf War Syndrome [“The war over Gulf War Syndrome,” March 5]. As a graduate of the UT Texas School of Public Health, I applaud the thoroughness and rigor of his approach. I thought it was interesting that…
When the Conduit Gallery invited Good/Bad Art Collective to stage the first show in its new annex, the union evoked a list of strange but workable partnerships. A shot of whiskey in a beer. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. CBGB’s and early punk rock. The common thread? Each of these…
How’s this for a novel idea, Dallas: A black school board president. Thank you. It took me a long time to come up with that. We’re supposed to be way beyond racial hang-ups, I know. We’re sophisticated folk, savvy enough to purge the N word from our vocabularies and subject…
Just as HDTV is the television of tomorrow, DVD is the compact disc of tomorrow–and most likely the laserdisc of tomorrow and, quite possibly, the videotape of tomorrow as well. Of course, with DVD, “tomorrow” is really today. DVDs have been on the market for a year. Short for Digital…
In the end, Terry Gilliam will be most remembered for his feature film direction, and perhaps rightly so. From high-profile works of great ambition like The Fisher King and 12 Monkeys to his irony-laden fairy tales The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Time Bandits, and most impressively, his cult-followed satirical…
Robert Smigel, denizen of late-night TV and member of the new creative royalty of animation for adults–a white-hot humor elite that includes the masterminds of South Park and King of the Hill–is set to receive the Dallas Video Festival’s Ernie Kovacs award this year for his pioneering work in TV…
Best known for his just-this-side-of-cloying giant Polaroids of his Weimaraner dogs, William Wegman has kept one foot in the elitist high-art sphere while cultivating larger commercial success since the mid-’70s, when he broke from his post-art-school conceptual experimentation to work with his beloved pooch Man Ray. In video shorts and…
Ask a roomful of college graduates how many have waited tables for a living. Don’t be surprised by an impressive show of hands. Or by a high turnout of those still making their living from tips rather than tackling the corporate world. The real surprise: that a documentary about the…
The case of Texas vs. Joel Pruitt was depressingly typical among those in Judge Marshall Gandy’s court. In the latest of a string of violent episodes, Jeanie Pruitt had accused her husband of knocking her across a room with one punch. But the outcome would be anything but typical. In…
For Charles Townsend, war, as the saying goes, was hell. Among the first troops deployed to the Middle East during Operation Desert Shield in August 1990, Townsend worked long days in blazing sun and menacing sandstorms to set up a base camp in the Saudi Arabian desert. Repeated fogging of…
For 11 years now, the Dallas Video Festival has been better appreciated across the country and around the world than it has in the city whose name it bears. You could offer this as evidence that Dallas has earned its reputation: that of a Southwestern money mecca whose residents would…
Have rubbers, will travel It was a nice gesture. DISD board members, who’ve come under fire in the past for their supposedly excessive travel at district expense, received rather handsome green travel bags from the Dallas Rotary Club at a luncheon last week in Union Station. When Don Venable got…
It is late on the last Friday evening in February, and most employees on the fourth floor at City Hall have long since gone home. But Assistant City Manager Mary Suhm is still bouncing from one crisis to the next. Not only is a city councilman camped in her office,…
Saipan’s slaves Thank you for running your article on the Saipan garment workers [“Our man in Saipan,” February 19]. My wife and I live in Saipan as well and witnessed the horrific working and living conditions that exist there for these people. I, too, have been inside these barracks, and…
Judge John Creuzot looks down from the bench at one of his new charges and apparently doesn’t need a probation officer’s report to figure out what’s going on. “You’ve got a pretty good buzz going, don’t you?” Creuzot says. “You’re high right now. What have you been doing?” “Well,” the…
It’s 7:30 p.m. on a mid-December evening, two days before the restaurant Avner at Preston is scheduled to close. The caviar bar upstairs is quiet, the dining room downstairs empty but for two guests. The atmosphere–the silence, the untouched settings all perfectly assembled–is haunting. A single server mechanically goes through…
They were just a bunch of buddies, cruising Red Bird Mall, trying to stay out of trouble while killing time. On that summer day in 1989, Kevin Abdullah, who had just graduated from Dallas’ Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, didn’t even notice the approaching…
Dallas Observer staff writer Miriam Rozen has won a 1997 Benjamin Fine Award for Education Reporting, given by the National Association of Secondary School Principals. Rozen won in the non-daily newspaper category for her September 11 cover story, “See Yvonne. See Yvonne run. See Yvonne run from the truth.” The…
Garbage in One man’s trash is another’s news story, at least at The Dallas Morning News. On Tuesday, the News devoted 47 column inches to an article and photo about an Irving man, Jesse Rincon, who believes he has found a historic homestead on a vacant lot behind his house…
Below the belt Wow, “skunk stripe” and “bathroom throw rug”? The Dallas Observer certainly is a hard-hitting news outlet. Hitting below the belt, that is. With the departure of Laura Miller, I expected the mean-spirited half-truths and personal attacks synonymous with her column to wane. Given the content of a…
