Being in a band can be like reliving high school. It's social hierarchies and gawky self-definition all over again, trying to find one's own group and struggling to fit in with a particular "scene." As in adolescence, there are punks, hippies, metalheads, Edge listeners--the outcasts and the in crowd. And...
I get these catalogs all the time from big-deal art museums like the Metropolitan in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and they wanna sell me art to either wear on my body or put on top of my TV set. And these are not SMALL...
You know how Wayne and Garth aren't quite as funny as Beavis and Butthead, and how Bill and Ted aren't as funny as Wayne and Garth, and how Pauly Shore isn't funny at all. Well, Dags and Reggie aren't even as funny as Pauly Shore--although they certainly try. Dags and...
thursday september 21 Andrew Sullivan: Although The New Republic's 29-year-old editor has been called a conservative gay activist, in his publication - and the essays he's written for The New York Times and other publications - Andrew Sullivan has carved out a fiercely moderate position on social issues (with a...
White tablecloths, good service and, oh, yes, good food, aren't enough to sell a restaurant anymore. Restaurants are theme parks, like movie theaters and malls, and Texas itself, unlike Nebraska, is a favorite theme. In Dallas especially, we seem to need reassurance that we live in the land of Lonesome...
Don't you want one? Notable Dallasites donated pinatas to be raffled off at "Cerveza y Quesa at the Mesa." Take your chance on a Dallas Cowboys pinata filled with jerseys and memorabilia. Sara Hickman's is filled with CDs, Star Canyon's with cookbooks and packaged foods; another is filled with $200...
Bad reception I read with great interest your piece on KERA ["Pulling the Plug," August 31]. If the slant of the article had not been so petty, it would not have held my interest for the length of time it took to read the article. As one of the three...
American cinema usually splits the difference when it comes to depicting the high-school experience. In a hormone-driven subculture where democracy exists only as a popularity contest, most filmmakers have been wary of spreading perspective too thin. So we're offered the views of teachers (Up The Down Staircase, Dangerous Minds); the...
The 1992 bond election passed by a 2-1 margin. The TEA audit had found no illegality in the use of the '85 bond funds. But Finlan and Venable were just getting started. "We had to establish a sense of paranoia in government," explains Finlan. "They had to be afraid of...
Don Venable gulps down a cup of coffee, looking a bit bleary-eyed before court this August morning. Venable had stayed up late the night before with Rick Finlan, his partner in gadfly-ism. They were hoping to divine a trial strategy to convince a judge to take the unusual step of...
Count on DART You may have missed the ad in The Dallas Morning News classifieds. Under the headline "WEEKEND JOBS," the ad seeks people to "ride public buses & count passengers." Does this sound like a cushy job or what? Kick back on a DART bus all day, watch the...
Last of the great dull stories The Dallas Morning News published a story that makes 15 minutes spent watching cement dry seem compelling. The article, by urban affairs writer Chris Kelley, celebrated the retirement of some of the state's most noteworthy and heroic road builders. Yup. Road builders. You knew...
On the theory that it is sometimes helpful to point out the obvious, may I enter the debate on family values by pointing out that there are a lot of unhappy families in the world? Miserable, in fact. Some sociologists study unhappy, unsuccessful families trying to figure out why their...
If there's one thing audiences won't put up with these days, it's exposition. Like a horny teenager, they want to cut right to the chase. The current obsession with getting to the bottom line makes Murder on the Nile a tough play to stage. Agatha Christie, the old sot, likes...
There are two kinds of laws--Mom Laws and Dad Laws. Mom always wants to regulate, control and pass laws about every single second of human existence. Mom Laws are rules like, "Never go out without a muffler, even if you're in a hurry." Or "Never make anybody feel bad, even...
Don't let the title mislead you--Unstrung Heroes doesn't deal with an underdog sports team, or a state psychiatric hospital that wins big against the snobs of a private institution during field day. Still, the film does deal with mental illness--not to mention cancer, religious faith, the human imagination, family relationships,...
At one time, when revolving rooftop restaurants were the latest thing, it was standard restaurant wisdom that the higher you went to dine, the worse the food. (Windows on the World at the top of the World Trade Center in pre-terrorist times being the exception that proved the rule.) Last...
Jimmy Caaaaaaan! Luke Wilson was thrilled. It was November 1994, and the star of The Godfather, Thief, and Misery, icon to two generations of aspiring young actors and a walking template of life's rougher passages, was jogging beside him on train tracks near a downtown Dallas factory. A film crew...
From men II boyz As an ex-employee (of my own volition) of the Dallas Cowboys, I was greatly amused at Jennifer Briggs' tell-all tale on the "plowboys" ["Secrets from Cowboys camp," August 17]. It was great for someone to finally spill some of the beans on America's Team. However, it...
Big Al Dupree sits alone at a table at Back Country Bar-B-Q, happily finishing off a heaping plate of meat and vegetables. This Greenville Avenue restaurant is, by Big Al's estimation, the best barbecue eatery in town--"and I've tried them all," brags the man who's earned the "Big" in front...
Ella Patterson labored long and hard to write, print and distribute her sex manual, Will the Real Women...Please Stand Up. The former Dallas schoolteacher immersed herself in her project, running her business from an upstairs guest room in her DeSoto home. Between the book and about four hours of sleep...
Lookin' for love Last week on a KLIF talk show, former Mayor Steve Bartlett tore into Observer columnist Laura Miller. Of course, Miller hadn't been invited to defend herself, but why quibble? What Buzz found interesting was Bart-lett's parting shot--that the personal ads in the Observer were more accurate than...
