I'm really sick of talkin' about sperm. I don't wanna hear about it. I don't wanna hear about people freezin' sperm, savin' sperm, bankin' sperm, borrowin' sperm, gettin' sperm from their brother, donatin' sperm, fightin' custody battles over sperm, buyin' sperm, sellin' sperm, or otherwise doing anything with sperm except...
thursday february 9 Deborah Mathis: As strange as it seems, the normally indefatigable national press has been cowed by House blowhard Newt Gingrich's claims that they are "a tool of the Democratic Party" (a charge leveled at professionals who, over the past two years, nailed Bill Clinton--sometimes fairly, sometimes hysterically--to...
It was a quiet night at the Champps Americana sports bar the Monday night after the NFC Championship game. After all, Dallas had just proved to the world that we weren't champs. And that's almost a quote from Troy Almighty's mouth. Mudville had nothing on us. But the big screens...
Each year, the Texas branch of the American Cancer Society receives $21 million and change in donations from the state's good citizens--individual and corporate--to fund the fight against one of the nation's leading killers. Who, after all, can turn their back on cancer victims? But after the society's expenses are...
University of Texas System Chancellor Bill Cunningham announced last week that system officials will audit University of Texas at Arlington's finances and management policies. The audit began this week, after publication of an Observer cover story (see "Fast Times at UTA," January 12) containing allegations against UTA President Ryan Amacher...
Briggs blew it, not Barry In her article "Barry Blew it" [January 19], Jennifer Briggs took every opportunity to take pot-shots at Barry Switzer. C'mon, Jennifer, are you going to blame only the coach because, in your words, "The Amazing Cowboy Reign is Over?" Were we watching the same game?...
SWEETWATER--The retiree from Alvin, Texas, turns off I-20 and maneuvers the gray Ford pickup down the gravel road toward the private hunting club. His door opens to reveal a shopping bag, a cowboy hat, and Styrofoam coffee cups with cold, wet grounds still in the bottom. There are guns and...
When I first noted that Kitchen Dog Theater's current production, composed of two one-acts and called Women's Voices, included the work of a man, I was a little baffled. I mean, if Kitchen Dog wanted to give the evening that kind of feminist--or at least feminine--weight, couldn't it have found...
AUSTIN--The man standing at the counter waiting to order his food is disheveled, slumped, looking slightly deranged. His beard chopped and trimmed in odd proportions, his matted and tangled and unwashed hair sticking up in various spots, his voice an uncomfortably loud squawk, Roky Erickson looks and sounds like any...
Take out the trash, Pantera Almost since its inception, the Basement was known as the home to Pantera: the band members hung out there as though it was a second home, and the hard-rock club was used as a backdrop in three videos. So as the Basement (and On the...
In the end, the members of the Nightcaps weren't just seeking money when they picked their legal fight with ZZ Top. They wanted some respect, some credit--someone to acknowledge that 20 years ago, ZZ Top stole their one small claim to Texas music fame. But on January 12, the Texas...
News organs from New York magazine to Food & Wine have noted the resurgent popularity of strong, old-fashioned spirits (oddly coinciding with the new puritanism, MADD's crusade, and the ascendancy of the 12-step program). There's even a lush gift book glorifying the American cocktail. But the truth is that the...
Talk about timing: Pablo and Olga Esparza opened Amaya's Grill in Lancaster just five weeks before the tornado hit. Undaunted by the disaster, the family rebuilt their south-of-the-Trinity location and then expanded north to a second restaurant across from Love Field. The night we ate there, our party included two...
To Live, the latest historical melodrama from Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou, isn't anything like the film I'd been led to anticipate--and that's good. The trailers playing in art houses across the United States position it as a traditionally sentimental epic about a poor family buffeted by the winds of history;...
There's nobody in American movies like Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat. Best known stateside as the stoic center of John Woo's most dizzying action maelstroms (including The Killer and Hard-Boiled), Chow's antiheroic presence is so alluring that he seems born to play such parts. (It's been argued that Chow's good...
Raucous, bawdy, sexy, and violent, Queen Margot is history as feverishly overwrought soap opera--history painted in tears, sweat, blood, and semen, with a very broad brush. In telling the tale of the title character, who survived a ghastly royal power struggle that pitted Catholic against Protestant and royal against royal...
I think I'm the last person in America who doesn't give one flyin' flip about what he eats. "Why are you drownin' those pancakes in syrup?" Is this a question? This is not a question. Do I have to answer this? "I can't believe you're puttin' butter on that." Why...
thursday february 2 Video Art: The First 25 Years: Ever since portable video equipment became an affordable technology in the late '60s, a growing number of artists have employed the medium to make personal statements in a way film had never been used. The key words for the first generation...
Patrick Esquerre's new cookbook, written in collaboration with his mother, Monique, is a collection of the recipes behind La Madeleine's bakery and cafe. When Patrick Esquerre started serving food at La Madeleine, he used his mother's expertise (she had written a successful French cookbook) as the basis for a lot...
The work is painstaking, but Bettie Beets says she likes it. Certainly it beats doing nothing. Every morning at 7, she and three other women settle down in a big room cozily decorated with craft projects they have completed--doilies, afghans, lap quilts. For years, Bettie made toddler-sized dolls, with painted...
A match made in paste-up It gives us a warm feeling when someone actually takes our advice. Two years ago in the Observer's "Best Of Dallas" issue, we begged Dallas Morning News columnist John Anders to cease using his column to share his mid-life crisis with the world. "John," we...
Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former Speaker Jim Wright have more in common than the office and a couple of embarrassing book deals. They've got a taxpayer-funded, solid-gold retirement plan that could prove to be a public-relations time bomb for the Georgia budget chopper. Democrats lambasted House Speaker...
