"We're not looking for a shot at the big time. We just want to make great music." Funland singer-guitarist Peter Schmidt says he likes to do interviews, if only because they force him to think about the things he has often relegated to memory. As he sits on a couch...
I just spent an evening learning about and tasting Texas-grown escargots. That's right, an evening with the only snail rancher--not just in Texas--but in these here United States. Dr. Richard Fullington is a malacologist (formerly with the Dallas Museum of Natural History) who got practical. Snails are yucky, as any...
I went out to El Lay last week and, for the first time in my life, I felt nekkid without a cellular. I actually wanted to hold a cellular in my hand. I went to lunch with three guys at one of those restaurants with a veranda where you can...
When you hear that an upcoming film has generated a positive "buzz," that usually means one thing--studios expect it to make money and win positive critical reactions and a fistful of Oscar nominations. Jocelyn Moorhouse's multi-generational comic-romantic epic How To Make an American Quilt has created so much advance excitement...
thursday october 5 Women in Exile: Refugee Rights and Realities: The recently convened fourth annual U.N. World Conference on Women provided the first chance Hillary Clinton got in a long time to stop playing Barbara Bush and start spouting off on the issues of women's health and safety across the...
Knowing chances were good that Snuffer's would once again garner the Reader's Choice award for best hamburger in this very newspaper, I thought I'd go check it out again. It's been years (as many as Chips has been open) since I'd eaten at Snuffer's. To give you an idea how...
As Chandler would put it: Could there be any more bagels in Dallas? Yes, there could, I answer, and you'll be glad there are. Benny's Hearth-Baked Bagels was founded by three twentysomething ex-corporate climbers who followed their feeling about the bagel business. Benny's claims to be, and seems to be,...
This production poses for the umpteenth time the hoary philosophical question, "If a tree falls in the woods, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?" It's not the play itself that's directly concerned with this conundrum, however. Rather, it's the fact that the play is being performed...
Country radio does not exist. It's a misnomer, a myth, the great lie--Top 40 hiding behind a Resistol hat and a pair of Tony Lamas. Country music itself is an antiquated term, a marketing tool--pop music hiding behind twangs and pedal steel guitars and fiddles. Country radio and country music...
In a move that seems to disregard citizen crime concerns and the complaints of the city's police union, the city of Dallas will turn down $2.85 million in federal funds for additional police officers. Dallas was in line to get $5.25 million as its share of the federal Cops-Ahead program...
You're a poet and you know that Heather Nova is a woman of pedigree - claims the Velvet Underground and Neil Young as childhhood heroes, shares bills with Pearl Jam Neil Young and Pavement and Bob Mould, records with sometime-U2 producer Youth. She's been compared to everyone from Sinead O'Connor...
There are isolated moments in writer-director Carl Franklin's adaptation of Devil in a Blue Dress when you roll your eyes heavenward at the familiarity of it all. This is the story of a man caught between two different forces who would use him for their own ends, then throw him...
If you have to compare watching the NC-17 "erotic drama" Showgirls to a non-cinematic experience, it might be getting a mammogram. There are dozens of breasts on display in this film, and they are constantly being poked, prodded, criticized, praised, bitten, licked, rubbed with ice cubes, and generally wielded as...
Reading the press materials for A Month By the Lake, the latest bit of curdled whimsy from our mother country, you discover that there is a prestigious English film institute called the London School of Film Technique, and that director John Irvin (Widow's Peak, Hamburger Hill) graduated from it. One...
thursday september 28 UAKTI: Although the sounds of the Brazilian trio UAKTI (pronounced wah-ke-chee) may sound completely foreign to you, they come from a tradition, that, in fact, preceded the arrival of the lighter-skinned among us on this continent. UAKTI is composed of Artur Andres Ribeiro, Paulo Sergio Santos, and...
One year ago, Lisa Loeb became the first musician ever to land a song at the top of the pop charts without a record deal or a manager. She was a freak occurrence in the music business, able to achieve in a split second what most musicians grasp for in...
"I'm sorry sir, your beer will take a few minutes because the computer's down." I swear a waiter said that to us this week, and it just seemed to sum up how weird modern life is. How full of contradictory baloney. The waiter worked at The Hard Rock Cafe, and...
The latest film by writer-director Todd Haynes (Poison, Dottie Gets Spanked) has barely earned a nickel in its limited theatrical engagements around the country, yet it's the canniest, most intriguing American film to be released so far this year. The reasons for its box-office reception are not hard to fathom...
Henry Clayton is a short, plump man with a sharp, angular nose. He wears a pearl-button western shirt, a beaded necklace and ties his hair back in a pony tail. He looks, at least, like what he claims to be--the chief of the largest Indian tribe in Texas. A 48-year-old...
Taking a stand In a recent long-winded column, the publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's Arlington edition explained the paper's refusal to take NC-17 movie advertising, an issue that came to a head with the opening this week of MGM's Showgirls. Mac Tully explained the difficulty a bastion of free...
No sacred cows--not even Nate Reader Lindell Singleton [Letters, September 7] must expect affirmative action to extend into a writer's mind. Not only does he chastise Jennifer Briggs' excellent, non-cliched observations regarding Nate Newton ["Secrets From Cowboys Camp," August 17], but then tries the old tired reverse psychology that is...
Lawsuit? What lawsuit? It is a remarkable fact that Dallas' daily of record has yet to publish a single word about the lawsuit three TV stations owned-like the News itself-by A.H. Belo have filed against David Goldberg, the news director of rival KDFW-Channel 4. Dallas station WFAA-Channel 8, along with...
