Dead Again

Dead Again Looking forward to a resurrection: Come on. Just because two beloved Deep Ellum nightclubs recently bit it doesn’t mean an entire entertainment district is going down the tubes (“Deep Sixed,” by Robert Wilonsky, January 12). Times are changing, the money people have to burn is far more scarce…

Still Crazy

Forget Bill Parcells. What would the Cowboys do without Wilford Jones? Considering the glaucoma and the strokes have left him blind, he’s probably not going to replace Drew Bledsoe. He’ll have a hard time upgrading the pass rush with an amputated right leg and that clunky wheelchair. And his Social…

Artless

On a recent Friday evening, a small group of artists gathered in the bowels of a hulking industrial building overlooking the Trinity River. Called Southside on Lamar, the nine-story brick building sits at the end of a row of rusting warehouses not far from downtown Dallas. Once a Sears distribution…

Ballot Boxed

Forney residents began early voting on Monday after a judge ordered a new election for mayor following a highly charged eight-day trial that saw more than 170 witnesses take the stand. In his order, visiting District Judge Andrew Kupper cited “clear and convincing evidence” that last May’s city elections were…

Pickup tricks

Pickup tricks: Spotted on the tailgate of a tricked-out Ford dually pickup: “This vehicle used to belong to a drug dealer. It was forfeited and he went to jail.” On the doors: the seal of Mesquite police. Sounds like the Mesquite police are thumbing their noses at the hapless cocaine…

Borderline Justice | Straight Poop | Loony Tuna | Swilly Reception | Zing

Borderline Justice That giant sucking sound: You are beginning to get on the right track with one of the biggest problems in this country–illegal immigration (“Run for the Border,” by Rick Kennedy, January 5). The fact of the matter is the Mexican government has no respect for the United States…

Oldies but goodies?

Oldies but goodies?: Just when Buzz thought listening to Bill Parcells and the Cowboys would no longer mean enduring Bill Haley and the Comets, Dallas’ football squad is set to sign a radio extension with Dallas’ oldies station. The Cowboys’ four-year contract with Infinity-owned KLUV 98.7 FM expires at the…

Air Apparent?

For enduring this hell on earth, dedicated soldiers of God are rumored to be rewarded with the splendors of heaven. Eternal life. Vanishing love handles. Endless plasma TVs. Angels with big wings and bigger breasts pouring free beer into the biggest mugs. And for suffering this painfully unsuccessful era, devoted…

The 2,000-Year-Old Virgin | Pain in the Ash

The 2,000-Year-Old Virgin She gets around: I enjoyed the latest sighting of the Virgin Mary; it was an interesting article (“Do You See What I See?” by Jesse Hyde, December 29). She really gets around. My own spiritual journey started off with the myths and superstitions of Christianity and later…

Run for the Border

Susana Loera remembers the first time she heard her boss tell somebody to break the law. It was in early 2004, and the parents of a Mexican man arrested in Dallas had come to the consulate seeking advice. Luis Lara, Mexican vice consul for protection, found out that U.S. immigration…

Dead Air

Kevyn Matthew Williams has been a lot of things. Pro football player. UPS guy. Self-published poet. Host of Dallas’ top-rated nighttime radio show for adults. But right now he says he’s just confused–and unemployed. And confused about being unemployed. Better known to North Texans as “Rudy V,” Williams was the…

Do You See What I See?

“Can you see her?” he whispered. We were standing about six feet away from the tree, which was surrounded by a chicken-wire fence. Pink plastic flowers and burnt-out candles circled the trunk. He introduced himself as Martin Espinoza of Oak Cliff. He wore gray sweats, leather sandals and a hat…

Tooling Around

When the inspector showed up to make sure Harrold Andresen’s new enterprise complied with the Americans with Disabilities Act, he learned one of Andresen’s clients–a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic–wanted to learn to weld with his mouth. “Impossible,” most people would say. He’d be incinerated. “No problem,” Andresen says. In a large metal…

Grinched

Grinched: We’ll be honest. Christmastime isn’t exactly Buzz’s season. We prefer caustic sarcasm to the mawkish sentimentality, and it’s not often when we can combine both in one tidy package. But it happens. Like now, for instance. See, we received an e-mail from “Two Guys from Dallas, Texas” asking us…

Trailer-Park Blues | Treed by the Old Farts

Trailer-Park Blues Out of sight, out of mind: There’s a deeper issue behind the East Dallas campaign to drive out the “trailer trash” (“Board of Scrooges,” by Jim Schutze, December 21), and it’s one that exposes what is probably capitalism’s most grievous flaw and one that may ultimately prove fatal…

The Reel Truth

If you go to Rotten Tomatoes, the Web site that compiles more than 100 film critics’ reviews each week, you will find at the top of the “Certified Fresh” list a single movie that was the very best-reviewed of 2005. It was not a remake or a sequel, nor did…

Swearing In

It’s an unavoidable trend–if two movies make a trend, that is–so much so that if you Google the phrase “return of the R-rated movie,” the first hit takes you to the tsk-tsking Family Media Guide’s article on the very topic, along with its list of some 3,000 titles touted as…

Rogues’ Gallery

When your movie critics’ tastes range from Jane Austen to Rob Zombie, there’s bound to be some turbulence come award time. Perhaps not surprisingly, determining the year’s best films is something of an imprecise science here: Our top movie was anything but a unanimous pick among the five critics–Luke Y…

The War on Film

War is hell, but it can also be high drama. In boots-on-the-ground documentaries like Gunner Palace and Occupation: Dreamland, we got a discomfiting look at the brutal realities and moral ambiguities of America’s war in Iraq, where the death toll rises along with the administration’s rhetoric. “I want some answers,”…

Art Imitates Strife

What a difference a year makes. In 2004, Michael Moore’s Bush-bashing Fahrenheit 9/11 was not only the most-watched and most-debated doc in release, but also among the highest-grossing movies of the year. This year’s most-watched and highest-grossing documentary was, of course, March of the Penguins, which was about as contentious…

They’ve Got Game

This year may be the last hurrah for this generation’s aging consoles, but sugar, they’re going down swingin’. The PlayStation 2, Xbox and Game Cube age gracefully, pushing their hardware to the limit one last time and developing some brilliant games in the process–from tear-jerking, giant-slaying adventure to piss-in-your-pants zombie…

Old Meets New

The sky outside is cloudy over the old Parkland Hospital building at Oak Lawn and Maple avenues. A chilly wind sends dry, dead leaves skittering across the pavement of the basketball court once used when the building was a low-security jail. The gray side door set into the building’s stately…