Definitely not resting in peace D Magazine writer Jim Schutze sheepishly phoned former city councilman Max Goldblatt last week to ask his forgiveness. In Schutze's April cover story on the Dallas mayor's race, he had mistakenly referred to the retired Pleasant Grove hardware store owner as the "late Mr. Goldblatt."...
Aging with grace In regard to the "Yippie traitor" story ["Confessions of a Yippie spy," March 16]: it's not the missteps we make, but the grace with which we recover from them. Michael Helsem Dallas Even if I did not personally know George de Merle to be a gentle, compassionate,...
Worsening storm If you don't like the News' coverage of the Texas weather, just wait a minute--it'll change. The Monday, March 27 story on the previous Saturday night's bad weather put the price tag for damaged roofs and cratered cars at $15 million. "Storm damage in area could hit $15...
For complicated reasons, Cincinnati is sensitive about sin. The city is graced with militant antipornography brigades, somewhat reminiscent of the Smut-Snatchers in Greater Tuna. It turns out that this is one of the more peculiar legacies of Charles Keating, who later went on to become famous in the savings-and-loan debacle...
Last Thursday, there were guys in tears, literally kneeling to kiss the infield dirt at the Ballpark. On Friday, those same guys hit singles and almost beat the Astros in an exhibition--their only exhibition--on this field. And by Sunday, their replacement butts were out the door quicker than a drunk...
Russian writers get a bad rap. Far from being suicide and samovar-obsessed weird-beards, they are actually rather jolly fellows. Examples? you ask. Well, take Dostoevsky and that funny scene in Crime and Punishment where Razumikhin cracks the old lady's skull open with an axe and "the blood gushed as from...
Exile on vain street Like critic Chuck Eddy once said of Pussy Galore, with whom Trux singer Jennifer Herrema once performed, "Maybe you gotta live in Manhattan to understand this sort of thing." And like a local rock-crit colleague points out, Yankees go for deconstructed, dissonant, ugly rock and roll--anti-rock,...
On a gorgeous spring day, a man known by the name J. Bone Cro sits on the front porch of a house on Lower Greenville Avenue--the home and studio of a seminal experimental music collective called the Vas Deferens Organization. The 27-year-old musician's spirits are high, fueled by the sunshine...
On my restaurant critics' top 10 list of most-often-asked questions--along with "What's your favorite place to eat?" (home) and "Why aren't you really fat?" (stress)--is, "What's a good place to go for seafood?" Until now, I haven't had a really good answer. Cafe Pacific is good, Newport's is fine, there...
There's a reason why you'll rarely read about music videos in this space: most of them are so unimaginative and dull that I can barely stand to look at them. Having said that, I'll now violate my own pronouncement and tell you about a video promoting "Possum Kingdom," a single...
How come cops always stomp all over the crime scene? How come, every time you watch a criminal trial, there's some cop who drops a glob of potato salad on the bloody footprint, or leaves the fingerprint cards on the dashboard of his Chevy Nova and burns 'em up, or...
Because I usually enjoy David Letterman's nightly talk show, I wish I could say he did a great job hosting the 67th Annual Academy Awards. I'll admit I enjoyed some of his jokes and all of his filmed segments, particularly the "Would you like to buy a monkey" bit; between...
thursday april 6 Fred Curchack: Texas-based performance artist Fred Curchack has traveled the world collecting awards and stunning non-English-speaking audiences with his one-man "revisionings" of some of William Shakespeare's most elaborate multicharacter fantasies. Curchack accomplishes this through a carefully synchronized combination of masks, light, shadow, sound effect, and, of course,...
Rufus Thomas is not certain of the year--he figures it was 1943, though it might have been 1950--but he recalls the moment with astounding clarity. He was performing in Currie's Club Tropicana, a nightclub on the north side of Memphis, Tennessee, when a man walked through the door carrying a...
You may or may not remember that a few weeks ago I went off on a tangent about the State of the Cocktail. I received a little mail from that tirade, and I'll be reporting on the results over the next few weeks--that is, at the slow pace of my...
Bitter, Sweet Matthew Sweet may well be an influence on the likes of someone like Freedy Johnston, who began making records six years after Sweet's debut, but the similarities between the two men extend only to the music--a rich, well-constructed, indestructible sound. With ex-Television guitarist Richard Lloyd and former Lou...
The Metroplex is a myth. D-FW is actually and appropriately more like a big mall than a single metropolitan area, a messy conglomerate of distinct communities with two main "anchor stores," linked only by geography and a highway. Everyone knows how different Fort Worth and Dallas are: Fort Worth is...
Before the Rain, a three-part anthology of stories from the war-torn Balkan nation of Macedonia, is as powerful and passionate an examination of war as Schindler's List. And although there isn't a single dull or unoriginal shot anywhere in the picture, and the film is eloquently performed by an international...
Only a sliver of the new moon shone through the overcast evening sky. It was humid and felt like rain. Ho'opuka E-ka-la Ma Ka-hikina. Ho'opuka E-ka-la Ma Kahikina. On the second floor of an old Oak Lawn house, a primal chant resonated through a room where 35 women and men...
Randall Dale Adams is married and living a quiet life in Columbus, Ohio, near his mother and family. Clarence Brandley has turned to preaching, opening his own church in Houston. What the two men have in common, of course, is that each--after years in prison and torturous legal appeals--managed to...
Bullish on Cow Town Is there no stopping them? First they revitalize their downtown--while ours begins to look like Robocop's New Detroit. Then they capture the preeminent arts event of last year--the Barnes Collection--for their already thriving arts district. Then, their ballet company renames itself and pirouettes all over our...
I notice we're having one of those spates of national concern about how dumb we are. "Nation of Nitwits," "Pervasive Ignorance," fret the pundits. The latest survey of how dumb we are shows that 60 percent of Americans can't name the president who ordered the first atomic bomb to be...
