What happened to Stephen Wade should happen to everyone. The young Chicagoan was having a perfectly average early '60s American childhood until the night he saw the Beatles on the "Ed Sullivan Show." From that point forward, the Creepy Crawlers set began to gather loam in the closet as Wade...
I was just saying that what Deep Ellum needs is some basic businesses, like grocery stores, when I hear that the G-spot has opened on Main Street. That's "G" for groceries, mostly, although you can rent X-rated videos from Jules Armstrong while you're picking up a box of mac and...
For some reason I wasn't getting any action on my new, improved personal ad for the '90s. "Chain-Smoking Couch Potato, 35 (but looks 55), card-carrying NRA member. Hates to laugh but loves to drink pina coladas on a bass boat while watching you scuba dive. Seeking morose, big-breasted, bisexual lesbian...
Paul Rudnick's Jeffrey, directed by award-winning New York stage director Christopher Ashley in his feature film debut, is something of a mess. Ashley has no sense of how to build momentum within the camera's frame, so he relies on stock TV effects--slow motion, crane shots, first-person addresses by the lead...
A glance at the names associated with Like Water For Chocolate's Alfonso Arau's new filmic fable A Walk in the Clouds is enough to strike terror in the heart of any Like Water cultist. Can the Mexican director's pulsing, sexy vision survive the Zucker brothers production team, who have individually...
Upon greeting the photographer assigned to take his portrait for a newspaper profile, Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Arau immediately turns his Crescent Court hotel suite into a set. "Do you like this light?" he asks, gesturing toward delicate sun rays that shimmer through a window and rest upon a fawn-colored chair...
Going into it, I never would have imagined that Operation Dumbo Drop would provoke any thought whatsoever; it is, after all, just another predictably heartwarming human-animal bonding story, about a bunch of tough American servicemen charged with procuring a baby elephant to please the inhabitants of a strategically important South...
thursday august 17 The Women in Theatre Festival: It's easy to fear that a series of short plays performed under the title "The Women in Theatre Festival," presented by the New Horizons Theatre Company and the Bath House Cultural Center, will spend most of their time scoring the obvious political...
Interpreting is a dangerous business. My trusted friend Hisashi (whom you've met before in this column) recently spent a lot of time following the baseball wonder boy Nomo around for Japanese television. He endured the day-from-hell at Arlington Stadium and he says it's absolutely true that Nomo's interpreter either didn't...
Preston Road North is the unlikeliest new dining strip. It's totally not fashionable, totally not a place to hang out, but evidently the neighborhood is totally filled with hungry diners. Have they just been discovered or was everyone between LBJ and Oak Lawn on a diet until recently? Lately I...
I love it when a movie leaves me feeling wrung out and exhausted--as if I've been on a tortuous journey I didn't expect to take, but one that showed me things I never would have dreamed I'd see. Belle de Jour, surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel's 1967 film about a repressed...
thursday august 10 Surfabilly roundup: You say you don't have 50 bucks to blow for the privilege of sweating your eyeballs out at Starplex, standing among zoned-out stoners and hopped-up acid freaks, and watching Courtney Love's eyeliner roll in rivers down her cheeks? Well, join the rest of the city...
Throw the book at 'em It had to happen. The information revolution has collided with the last bastion of the printed word. Fed up with the disturbance to its more literate patrons, the Renner-Frankford branch of the Dallas Public Library has expelled cellular telephones. The Far North Dallas library has...
BeloWatch and Tatum The most recent BeloWatch, which reported the public lewdness arrest of Henry Tatum, associate editor of The Dallas Morning News editorial page, drew a number of angry letters--and at least one threatening phone call. Several letters came from people who know and respect Tatum, who has worked...
Steve Salazar had a birthday last week. Salazar is a freshly minted Dallas city councilman. This means that he's still scoping out men's room locations, never mind figuring out where all the political land- mines are buried at Dallas City Hall. Which is precisely why he never would have expected...
Who's indecent? I was very surprised and disappointed when I read your BeloWatch column of July 27 ["Editorial error"]. I expected better of the Observer. Since when is an editorial writer at the News such a high-profile person that he deserves to have his personal problems--his arrest for public lewdness--publicized...
Imagine for a moment that the good citizens of Austin have Dallas surrounded and are lobbing mortar shells into the streets, gang-raping women, and "cleansing" the Metroplex of its men. Now imagine that you are a playwright who wishes to comment on these events, but in order to reach the...
Only in California. People keep getting kicked off the O.J. jury for "planning to write a book." First of all, what difference does it make? Nine million people a day decide their life is so danged fascinating they'll write a book about it, but none of them ever actually do...
It's a small world after all--oppressively small, in fact. The announcement that the Magic Kingdom would be purchasing Capital Cities/ABC for an estimated $19 billion, instantly transforming the Magic Kingdom into the largest media conglomerate on the planet, shook the entertainment industry last week in ways that Westinghouse's purchase of...
As of this writing, there are only three American actresses who've proven to Hollywood they can attract big audiences by name alone--Demi Moore, Meg Ryan, and Julia Roberts. Moore is by far the worst of the three, a relentless publicity machine whose presence in wretched box-office triumphs like Disclosure proves...
Menu writing should be taught (or maybe it is) in those culinary academies that turn out all our chefs. Or perhaps, along with the health inspection, a spelling and grammar test should be required. To read the menus in many restaurants, you'd think there were no rules of writing, in...
One of my favorite food memories is eating a cucumber on the street in Istanbul. It was hot, we were tired out by haggling in the Grand Bazaar, discouraged by the experience of being blonde in Turkey, and tired of avoiding fresh fruit for the sake of our guts. A...
