These days, you can get strawberries all year long, but there are only a few months out of the year when you can get Girl Scout cookies. The only seasonal food left is now on sale door-to-door, but if you don't know a Girl Scout, you can wait for the...
I was asked recently by a neighbor what standards I use when assessing a restaurant. This is the question that comes right after "what qualifies you to be a critic?" as the top-three most commonly asked. (No. 3 is "How often do you go out to eat?") If I'm not...
Every actor wants to be a drunk, and every actress wants to be a hooker. I don't know why exactly, but I know you can take the straightest white-bread suburban nerd out of an acting class and say, "Hey, how would you like to play a crack-addicted serial killer?" and...
When the new Ridley Scott film, White Squall, really gets rolling, it lives up to the energetic image of its title. The sea rages on like some great, angry ogre of wind and water as a schooner--a floating Outward Bound high school called the Albatross--is mercilessly batted about by a...
thursday february 1 Perspectives: A Concert of Electroacoustic Music: When Jerry Garcia died last year, critics across the country who had never said a kind word about the musical narcotic he and the Grateful Dead created struggled to be kind, or at least respectful. Usually, the memorials emphasized his worldwide...
More news from the pizza front. Not long after responding professionally to the growly-sounding phone call recommending Al's ("best pizza in town"), I received another message on my voice mail also sounding like Harvey Keitel with a head cold. "Ya keep eatin' pizza but you don't come to Al's," the...
His mother begged him not to sue. Rapper Tracy "The D.O.C." Curry says this in a rasp that sounds a little like resurrection's whisper and a lot like Miles Davis' parched bark. "She's afraid something bad is going to happen to me," the 27-year-old Dallas native says from his new...
Baddest of the Bad (Livers) When the Bad Livers make their return to the Sons of Hermann Hall January 26--"We're the anti-Springsteen," says Liver multi-instrumentalist Mark Rubin, referring to the other concert that night--they will bring with them as an opening act a former Dallasite whose presence has long been...
Before 1993, Louis Bickel Jr. had no interest in the music business outside of buying a few CDs and listening to his car radio. He was an upper-class kid from Highland Park whose father is a partner at a prestigious Dallas law firm, a young man with money in his...
Szechuan Pavilion used to be the hottest Chinese restaurant in town. The original place in Preston Center was hip and snappy-looking, with colorful Chinese kites, soft lights, and none of that Chinese kitsch. The Pavilion was fast-paced and stylish and lots of fun with good food. But in the life...
I went down to Austin last weekend to waste time and eat Mexican food. That's only a slight paraphrase of one of my favorite motivating sentences in fiction--the one that starts the whole chain of nonevents in Larry McMurtry's book, All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers--a favorite because...
If Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino aren't careful, they'll risk overstaying their critical welcome even before they've had a chance to get really cozy. Both directors' careers have followed arcs that quickly intersected: Each directed independent, critically lauded feature debuts (Rodriguez, his $8,000 miracle El Mariachi; Tarantino, the festival-circuit hit...
Ever since Queen of Venus, there's been something about outer-space women wearing pointy hardware on their chests that just brings out the appreciation of cinema in its purest form. But in Caged Heat 3000, the finest futuristic women-in-cages exploitation movie ever made in Tijuana, Cassandra Leigh does more than just...
The surprisingly strong, sensitively handled feminist themes that run through the films of Chinese director Zhang Yimou have earned him praise around the world and vilification at home. In Ju Dou, a Double Indemnity-style drama set during the 1920s, he told the story of a peasant girl who dared to...
In the early-morning hours of July 8, 1995, Sky Callahan staggered through the dark and unfamiliar streets of Guatemala City, his mind and body reeling from a brutal beating. Two men whom he believed to be government agents had kidnapped the Dallas documentary filmmaker, forced him into their car at...
It began with the battle of the big men--a bloody scrap they'd still be talking about months later. In one corner was David "Tank" Abbott. A 280-pound 6-footer, Abbott looked the part of the classic barroom brawler--big, with an enormous beer belly, buzz-cut hair, and no discernible neck. His martial...
D and Bartlett to make match? Hot publishing buzz has unprofitable D magazine, just out with its (yawn) "How to marry a millionaire" issue, about to hook up with a new set of monied mates. The word is that owner Glen Solomon, who restarted the moribund monthly, will step down...
A campaign targeting gay journalists launched last month by the Christian, conservative American Family Association has chalked up its first victory. Responding to a complaint from an AFA member, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram has transferred a gay editor out of a job that occasionally required him to work with schoolchildren...
Go ahead, touch that dial I feel like I have just lost a very good friend. I feel like I should be in the middle of some kind of "identity crisis," because I don't know where I fit in at KERA radio ["Stop the music," January 11]. I am a...
Sitting in one of those hard seats in the cavernous central jury room of the George L. Allen Sr. courts building in downtown Dallas, I knew only two things for certain: That my day was shot to hell; and that I was bored out of my mind. Well, things change...
News' child-custody saga probes Wright and wrong The January 21 edition of The Dallas Morning News contained an extraordinary story: the saga of Channel 5 anchor Brad Wright's messy, messy divorce and custody battle. The Sunday piece, by Tim Wyatt and Howard Swindle, began at the bottom of the front...
Before Stanley and Blanche and George and Martha, there was Julie and Jean. The leads in Swedish playwright August Strindberg's gripping psychodrama Miss Julie set the pattern for modern stage couples who take turns ripping great bloody chunks from each other's psyches. The play is considered a seminal work not...
