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...
Sitting at his modest desk at City Hall last Wednesday, Tracy Pounders couldn't help but smile as he spoke. It wasn't the pictures of his six-year-old daughter and two-month-old son that were making him feel warm all over. It wasn't the compact disc of Vivaldi's Four Seasons that was filling...
Brain drain Dallas' Only Daily has suffered a trio of major-league defections. The first is the departure of business editor Karen Blumenthal for the Dallas bureau of the Wall Street Journal. Blumenthal, 35, became News business editor about two years ago, after a long stint as a reporter at the...
Over the past four decades, a million rock and roll bands have made a hundred million rock and roll records. Some go on to sell millions of copies; some, a few thousand; most, maybe a few dozen cassettes. If, tomorrow, most of the would-be Neil Youngs and Kurt Cobains and...
Joe Butcher, the lead singer and guitar player for UFOFU, leans on the microphone and asks the Club Clearview audience if they would prefer a Gordon Lightfoot or a Buzzcocks cover song. It is close to the end of the night's set, and almost everyone is grinning with something that...
Arresting development Cop Shoot Cop's "Last Legs," off their recently released Release, is probably the best nonhit single of the year. It packs the same wallop as the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage," both songs linked by their similarity to TV cop-show themes of the late '60s and early '70s, but goes...
The end of a local band often comes and goes with little notice or mention; as one implodes, another comes along to take its place, filling a void no one knew was empty. But the passing of Killbilly, which will play the final show of its seven-plus-year career this Saturday...
I'll bet you've heard enough about bagels, already. Coming in on the coattails of the craze for coffee and bread, bagels are especially popular because each one only has about a hundred calories. That's without cream cheese of course, and without cream cheese, a bagel is just another hockey puck...
Except for Nicolas Cage, there's no leading man in movies today who suffers as exquisitely as Matthew Broderick. He's at his best when his characters are at their down-and-out lowest--struggling to hold onto some small shred of dignity while life is gleefully retching on them. He's a versatile actor, but...
It's a rainy Thursday afternoon at the headquarters of DNA Animation, Dallas' seven-year-old hub of gleeful bad taste and excess, and the company's core group of artists--Keith Alcorn, Paul Claerhout, John Davis, and Debbie Dunning--are taking a break. Huddled around a television set in one corner of the cluttered, computer-laden...
