thursday november 10 John Wayne Bobbitt and the Bobbitt Girls: C'mon, you know you want to. Cast aside, for a moment, all those tiresome warnings from the cultural elite on both the left and the right--I mean journalists, scholars, and others who control the information flow--about America careening into moral...
Rabbi David Shawel is not an imposing figure. Standing only five feet and four inches, he talks fast and rarely stands or sits in one place for long. But lately it is Shawel who has had powerful grocery chains hopping. Shawel is The Man--that's The Macher in Yiddish--in Dallas when...
Beyond the beach Director Quentin Tarantino explains that he opened his paean-to-afros-and-junkies-and-sodomizers, Pulp Fiction, with Dick Dale's 1962 surf-rock classic "Miserlou" (derived from a 1940s-era Greek pop hit, actually) because "it sounds like the beginning of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly with those trumpets, that almost Spanish sound...
Talk to me a minute about this term "home cooking." When is the last time you had this kind of food at home? Fried chicken, wilted greens, chicken-fried steak with cream gravy, chocolate pie, sweet biscuits, mashed potatoes? I don't think so. Even if you allow yourself a thousand fat...
The FBI is investigating allegations of public corruption in Ferris involving Waste Management and its consultant, former Ferris mayor Billy Don Dunn. In a nine-page affidavit filed in federal court to establish probable cause to obtain a search warrant for Dunn's home, Dallas FBI agent James Kendall states that he's...
By 1989, Earline Jackson recalls, the convoys were rumbling down old highway 75, trailing behind them that awful smell. They'd line up at the gate to Skyline Landfill--dozens of trucks from God knows where--dumping ton after ton of trash in the tiny burg of Ferris. Residents of the little town...
The San Francisco publishers of STEAM magazine are in an uproar over a waggish letter from Fort Worth police Chief Thomas Windham. The national gay and bisexual-oriented publication, which reaches about 45,000 readers each month, prints a directory of the best places around the country for public sex. A copy...
Clueless Your recent two-part series on the construction of Reunion Arena ["Arena wars," October 13 and October 20] confirms my worst fears about the city of Dallas. Our city managers who presided over this fiasco were either too behind to see the obvious or crooked. They should be sued for...
There are, of course, two Dallases. There's slick, soulless, sprawling, sterile Dallas, the one that all right-thinking boulevardiers disdain. And then there's quirky, progressive, funky, interesting, artistic Dallas, its wee heart beating like a field mouse in its hole, which is all the more cherished by the cognoscenti (you and...
Four years ago, Madonna sat in her lush Beverly Hills hotel suite holding court with a handful of reporters who drooled into their microphones as they surrounded "the world's most famous woman," as one writer said upon introduction. They came to ask her questions about Truth or Dare, the documentary...
The walls of Tony Zoppi's North Dallas townhouse apartment keep track of history better than any journal or book of newspaper clippings. It's as if the past 40 years have been preserved in this place--a shrine to celebrities and presidents and infamous figures who, even in death or old age,...
Ted Hawkins was born in 1936 to a father he never knew and an alcoholic mother in Lakeshore, Mississippi, a speck of a town defined by its desolation and poverty. He spent most of his teens bouncing in and out of reform schools, then jails, and on chain gangs picking...
Real ice cream, the kind with lots of butterfat, seems to be nearly extinct. Culinary Darwinism truly favors survival of the fittest these days, so natural selection is in favor of frozen yogurt. Only a few places, most of them the remnants of chains, still serve real ice cream, scooped...
Although playwright David Mamet swears he wrote Oleanna before the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, you can't help but feel the same bitter resentments and frustrated rage drifting out of Mamet's two-character drama that turned Hill's testimony into a kind of national catharsis. Mamet is aiming to achieve that same kind...
Except for hardcore porn, no movie genre is as disreputable as horror. It is inherently, and proudly, visceral--a severed finger in the champagne flute of cinema history. Even when a highbrow auteur like David Cronenberg or Stanley Kubrick comes along and tries to swathe the genre's bleeding, ripped-up heart with...
We're in the movies! The Dallas Observer's downtown digs will become a makeshift film set courtesy of the crew of Tornado, a new noirish thriller starring James Spader, Eric Stoltz, Peter Strauss, and toothy '70s macho icon James Coburn. "It's a blackmail mystery that takes place amongst a group of...
Ever once in a while some photographer or hiker or anthropologist or somebody finds a new "Stone Age tribe" living in Papua, New Guinea or Borneo or the Congo or the Amazon River Basin. A big article comes out in Time magazine, and somebody writes a book about how "gentle"...
Bangkok for your buck, that's what some people look for in Thai food. For instance, my husband is mostly a sensitive, new age guy, but when it comes to Thai chili, a macho streak emerges in Michael. He orders everything full strength. ("I want something hot," he'll muse as he...
Editor's note: Nora FitzGerald, Dallas Observer's stage columnist, is on maternity leave. Longtime Observer contributor P.B. Miller is filling in during her absence. Theatrical comedy is a tough sell these days--not that it was ever easy. Finding an audience for comedic theater is even harder now, though, because there's a...
Knowing when to fold 'em Texas first husband Ray Hutchison, spouse of U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, must be counting his blessings these days. Last year, the former legislator and hotshot bond attorney uncharacteristically rolled over when a group of bondholders sued him and his Dallas firm, along with former...
The last time Richard Sledge Harvey ran for office, his defeat was sealed when opponent Ted Lyon pointed out Harvey's unfortunate tendency to land his private airplane with the landing gear up. After licking his wounds for six years, Harvey is back, making another pass at the District 2 seat...
A real killer Thanks to Laura Miller for her splendid though distressing "Arena Wars," parts one and two [October 13 and October 20]. Her concluding paragraphs regarding old-style standards vs. new-style private profit explain a lot. Some of us moved here from the East, 30 to 35 years ago, with...
