It is true that those who despise Mark Morris' dancemaking do so for the same reasons many of us find him the most innovative choreographer of his generation. In some eyes, Morris has brought a fine-tuned and sensitive musicality formerly missing from postmodern dance, while his gender-bending style helped liberate...
Rock-a-silly Without the Cramps, Jim Heath might still be playing in blues bands, and without the Cramps, Ronnie Dawson might still be languishing in unwarranted obscurity. Yes, the Cramps, the band that has managed to exist for more than 16 years on a steady diet of trash, novelty, and rockabilly...
Since the dawn of time--or at least since Pat Boone took the tutti out of Little Richard's frutti and went to the top of the pops--white musicians have gotten rich and famous off the innovation of their black counterparts. No startling revelation here: the whiter the musician, the brighter the...
AUSTIN--The Trance Syndicate office--if one can call a tiny room in a wretched little business park no bigger than its neighboring car wash an office--is a wreck. Random sheets of paper, discarded memos, old copies of the Austin Chronicle, publicity photos, and other pieces of errata and dumped trash cover...
This could be it, folks. Of course, low-fat sounds great, we all want to eat healthy, low-fat food, but not if it means no Mexican food, and until now, that's pretty much what it meant. But last week, Martin's Cocina premiered its new low-fat menu. Martin's offers about a dozen...
We started the evening at a pitch-black bar in Deep Ellum--where we parked down an alley, where the bartender sighed "red or white" when we asked about wine, where the waitress answered our queries over her shoulder as she walked away from the table, where the chef shouted from the...
AUSTIN--Early into Before Sunrise, as Jesse (the traveling American played by Ethan Hawke) and Celine (the French student, portrayed by Julie Delpy) share their first moments on Eurail bound for Vienna, Hawke's character explains an idea for a cable access program that would run 24 hours a day for an...
All movie fans have a filmmaker they latch onto, take to heart, and enthusiastically root for. Their triumphs make you euphoric and their failures make you surly and sad, and once you're plugged into the thrill of following their careers, the emergence of each new work is simultaneously thrilling and...
thursday january 26 Friends of the Major: Major Theatre co-owners Rob Clements and Bryce Gonzalez present the debut screening and reception for what they plan to be a regular series of special events. Friends of the Major is what they call it, and it's a combination fund-raiser and meeting-of-the-minds. For...
Dirty old high-tech men A survey conducted by the Dallas-Fort Worth edition of Computer Currents magazine finds that the local byways of the information superhighway are dominated by men (89 percent). No surprise here. But one of the reasons women aren't out there, writes associate publisher Cade Herzog in the...
On a rainy evening a few days after Christmas, Linda Koop and her friend Rip Parker were handing out food to homeless people near Dallas City Hall. Koop, a 31-year-old single woman who sells multi-million homes in the Park Cities for Ebby Halliday, was tugged by an urge to help...
A state hearings examiner has recommended that a permit to expand Ferris' landfill be denied because it constitutes an "incompatible land use" with an adjacent black neighborhood, as well as Lancaster's city airport. The Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission's Office of Hearings Examiners issued the long-awaited "proposal for decision" last...
Salute to General Kael In his review of Pauline Kael's latest collection of criticism ["Love Letters," January 5], Matt Zoller Seitz takes the opportunity to deliver a stirring defense of Ms. Kael. But it's a defense that mostly involves marching out a lot of flags and huffily pummeling a few...
Ave atque vale, Miz Ann. Hail and farewell, Governor Richards. Adios, Annie. Keep your wagon between the ditches. May your days be full of laughter. Good on ya. Ann Richards' electoral loss to George Dubya Bush will keep political scientists studying for years. By all the conventional measures, she should...
News turns on departed It's remarkable how irresponsible a good journalist can become when she leaves the Dallas Morning News. Especially if she ends up at the Wall Street Journal. That was certainly the case with Karen Blumenthal, who quit her job as business editor at Dallas' Only Daily to...
It was three NFC championship games ago. I was standing in the driveway of the Cowboys' San Francisco hotel--one day before Dallas beat the 49ers. Charles Haley was standing nearby, waiting for cough medicine. None that tastes bad, he told his wife, in a fine rendition of the man-who-has-a-cold whine...
When the song comes out of the speakers, for the first time or the 500th, it seems almost too perfect: Johnny Cash, his voice a beautifully rotten croak that falls somewhere between singing and speaking, tells of the monster trapped within him--the monster that makes him who he is, a...
Music does not, of course, mean the same thing to all people. To some, it implies the sweet sounds of acoustic guitars and confessional lyrics or the strains of violins or the foreign rhythms of Africa or the Middle East; to others, the term conjures the blaring catharsis of amplified...
No practice makes perfect As far as big-name lineups go, Buccinator is a little like going to the NBA All-Star Game and finding CBA players on the floor. Drummer Avery Smith doubles as the Beastie Boys' touring percussionist; Dave Gomez used to play bass in Oiler (with Buccinator "noise guitarist"...
Heavy metal, its proponents and detractors have long maintained, is a music created by and for an audience of disenfranchised young white boys. They are the long-haired, ripped-jean, Ozzy-loving, pot-smoking, Camaro-driving kids who hang out on the smoking porch after lunch; the frustrated 13-year-old who stands in front of his...
Sometimes, old lines are the best lines. So this week, I have to ask: What's a chef like you doin' in a joint like this? When I told friends I was going to review the food at what used to be known as the State Bar, they were skeptical. At...
Paul Newman is our most complex living movie icon. The man and his image are loaded with contradictions--he is an actor of fairly limited abilities, but at least a dozen of his performances from a 41-year career have been burned into our consciousness with the force of genius. Newman's appearances...
