Advertising would lead you to believe that Americans are living in a fat-free zone. Everything that can be is touted as less fat, low-fat, no fat. Even products that never did have fat in them have "No Fat" blaring from the bag. Tortilla chips are misguidedly baked, not fried, in...
What a prix fixe! For $35 (half of which is tax-deductible), you can sample food and wine from Star Canyon, Mediterraneo, Gaspar's, Parigi, Dakota's, Cafe Margaux, The French Room, Blue Mesa Grill, Laurels, and dozens more of Dallas' best restaurants. Plus--the reason food industry events are such profitable charity--you'll be...
Joe Ely has left Texas many times, spent many years busking in New York City subway stations and the Paris Metro. He traveled throughout Europe and the United States as a young man, even ran away with the circus for a little while to tend the llamas and a pony...
Cake check: A good cake, as I point out frequently, is hard to find. Celebrity makes a decent divinity icing; Highland Park Cafeteria makes good chocolate cake. But Sweet Endings in Deep Ellum (or Plano) takes the cake. Their whole cakes start at $25 and they recently came up with...
Get a load of this: Antonio Banderas, all decked out in bandit black, scampering across the bar in a dingy cantina, a blazing gun in either hand, mowing down bad guys as he twirls his arm this way, that way, any way, like a flamboyant bullfighter facing death in the...
Prominent movie critics across the country have joined hands in ritual public display of their admiration for Oklahoma-born photographer Larry Clark's unrated feature debut Kids. This, after all, is the film that Mickey The Mouse refused to release under His newly acquired Miramax label, forcing the filmmakers to form their...
Jimmy Lewis White ran a red Volkswagen Beetle off the side of Highway 820 on Jan-uary 15, 1995. The Bug apparently flipped and rolled, killing driver John Marcellus, an off-duty Fort Worth police officer. Tests after the accident pegged White's blood alcohol level at .25--more than double what the law...
You can skedaddle, but you can't hide Keeping up with Dallas' Jet Set can be a chore. Take the Crow family. When its members aren't smuggling the treasury minister for a murderous dictator into town [see "The Crow-Qadhafi Connection," December 1994], they're cavorting with the uncreme de la creme of...
Arlington businessmen Charles Biney and Eric Owusu disagreed mightily about what to name their magazine. Both natives of Ghana, the men had worked hard to put together a distinct, informative publication about the African continent for readers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. They began bouncing around a title. Biney came...
Mad as hell--we think Wonder why you haven't seen much investigative reporting in Dallas' Only Daily lately? Why Dallas Life shut down? Why the "Today" section is crammed with wire-service copy? It's because The Dallas Morning News is devoting its energy, staff, and millions to really important stories--like this week's...
When you're right, you're right As the old saying goes, "Two out of three ain't bad." Ann Zimmerman's article in the August 3-9 issue is headlined "Angry Right Men." I agree that from the perspective furnished by the Observer, I am to the political right and I am a man...
Last week I told Star-Telegram columnist Bud Kennedy that my Uncle Dick's funeral was at the same time as Mickey Mantle's, and, by gosh, there was no question what I had to do. "Yeah," said Bud, "Uncle Dick, a fine ol' boy--but he couldn't switch hit." Hundreds of others placed...
Rhymes with 'bored' Now that Jerry Garcia has switched bands, gone to join that extended jam session in the sky, it looks like the Dead are just that. But what luck: Just as the Grateful have decided to bow out gracefully (for the fall tour, at least, though once the...
Ty Macklin stands in front of his Ensoniq Advanced Sampling Recorder, holding a computer disc that contains samples from six different songs from such artists as Al Green, Dexter Gordon, and Wes Montgomery. He slides the disc into the keyboard and, as he touches the keys, each piece of music...
Fretful, chain-smoking fashion wunderkind Isaac Mizrahi--the subject of Douglas Keeve's wildly kinetic, hysterically funny documentary Unzipped--is a slightly more butch Yiddish version of Alicia Silverstone, and sort of like Harvey Fierstein without the mileage. During this documentary, which details the New York fashion designer preparing for his fall 1994 show,...
Have you ever heard this? "Best movie I ever saw in my life! It's about this guy, and he goes to this place, and then a bunch of funny things happen to him, and then he escapes--but he doesn't really escape--and then this really goofy old friend of his whom...
thursday august 24 Radiothon: Sadly, it often takes one tragedy to prevent others from happening. This is what the Dallas-based Mothers Against Teen Violence, Inc. hoped to do when they formed two years ago after the brutal murders of Charles Christopher Lewis and Kendrick Demon Lott - both of whom...
And another nostalgic note: I went back to Los Vaqueros recently, Pete Dominguez' retrenchment restaurant in Snider Plaza. Pete Dominguez has been serving "Austin-style" Mexican food in Dallas for over 30 years, the 30 years that Dallas grew from an ambitious town on the prairie to the mess it is...
Window-shopping for trouble Neiman Marcus, Dallas' proverbial arbiter of taste, likes to make fashion statements. But last week the upscale retailer inadvertently produced a political statement--and a messy one at that. Who'd have thought a department-store window display could be a hotbed of agitprop? Neiman's blames it all on a...
Fired News sports staffer entangled in federal kiddie-porn sting A fired editor in The Dallas Morning News sports department is at the center of an interstate child-pornography sting operation, BeloWatch has learned. The former editor is George Woods, 41. Woods lost his job in early July, BeloWatch has been told,...
Scandal academy I'm sincerely hoping the Dallas Observer becomes accustomed to covering positive topics, like we saw in the article by Julie Lyons ["Virgin Academy," July 20-26]. Though it was evident that Ms. Lyons was mocking the idea of teenage girls attempting to maintain some honorable values in this screwed-up...
AUSTIN--I could be wrong, but I think the Bob Packwood problem is actually simple. Suppose--just suppose--that Bob Packwood was a predatory homosexual. Normally a decent enough guy after having a few drinks, but suppose he was given to grabbing men a lot smaller than he is, kissing them and sticking...
