More than a year after Dallas County debuted a disastrous criminal justice computer system that kept inmates locked up long after they were supposed to go free, defense attorney Deandra Grant tells her clients to expect the worst. "I tell them, 'Even if your sentence is up today, it's very...
Jessi Klein's "Walk of Shame Shopping" article in Paper this month tells the women of New York City where to buy last-minute pre-work clothes after a night of shacking up. Why should the sexually satisfied ladies of Dallas not have a similar guide? First, for the unititiated: Shacking up: (n)...
Yesterday, we told you how Dallas county officials are beginning to expect (fear?) that the Department of Justice is going to propose a staggering series of costly recommendations on how to fix the long-beleaguered jail once and for all. Well, now we're hearing reports that the feds are going to...
IN THE MOVIES, Hogwarts castle is a towering Gothic monument to magical education, with Harry Potter and the rest of J.K. Rowling's young wizards traipsing across the expansive school grounds. Set against the foggy, mountainous backdrop of Scotland, the boarding school features secret passageways that contain dangerous monsters, moving staircases...
In case you haven't noticed--and if you haven't, you either ride your bike to work, office out of the house and never leave or are a 2-year-old mooching rides off your folks--gas prices have risen dramatically in recent weeks; according to the most recent AAA gas price survey, released March...
Mission: Impossible III finds Tom Cruise downplaying the world's single greatest piece of action music in deference to an Age of Fear vibe that's a lot more grueling than rousing. Seems Lalo Schifrin's adrenaline-pumping "dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum" is now as dated as the Cold War from which it sprang; maybe the star-producer...
Guess you had to be there, at Town Hall in New York City last July, though from the sounds of it, not so much. Thomas Bartlett, writing last summer on Salon, sent his own postcard lamenting how his beloved band went "all chamber/acoustic refined/ wimpy," resulting in music that came...
It shouldn't come as a surprise that Sara Beck isn't an easy read. After all, the Wichita, Kansas-born singer, now living in Austin, mixes the dark and the sweet from the very first strum of her guitar. "BTK Blues," from her forthcoming record Mold the Gold, devolves rapidly from a...
So the Wall of Sound Festival is finally gonna happen; in roughly 18 hours, the doors to Fort Worth's Ridglea Theatre will open to throngs of people hungry for local music greatness. Dallas Observer staffers and contributors will be there in droves (no name tags, sorry, but you can find...
Robert Greenwald's best known as the agit-doc filmmaker behind such fists-in-yer-face as Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism and Uncovered: The War on Iraq. But as we reported last week, Greenwald, through his Brave New Films production and distribution company, is also releasing...
If it really is better to burn out than fade away, then Last Beat Studios certainly took the low road. For months, rumors have spread about the slow, quiet death of the huge Deep Ellum recording studio and rehearsal space, and people thought its demise would come in the form...
If you happen to find yourself in Vermont any time soon--and especially the lovely town of Barnard--whatever you do, do not tell the townspeople up there you're from Dallas. You can thank Herbert Hall McAdams III and his wife Letty for that. According to two stories that have appeared in...
At its peak, Stereolab was among the most distinctive combos on the planet. Throughout a succession of discs capped by 1996's unimpeachable Emperor Tomato Ketchup, the act, led by multi-instrumentalist Tim Gane and beguiling French-born singer Laetitia Sadier, offered up an irresistible blend of electro-dabblings, twisted kitsch and left-wing ideology...
"The point of this blog isn't just to be an asshole, although that is a big part of it. I'm going to go to some local shows, listen to local CDs and write about them...Sometimes I will be mean to the bands that annoy me. Sometimes I will be nice...
I know the image of Terrell Owens celebrating in the middle of Texas Stadium in 2000 sickens most Dallas Cowboys fans. Well, hate to break it to you, but that star ain't all that sacred. Want proof? We've all heard the suburban legends about kids sneaking into the stadium and...
I don't write a weekly music column, which has two advantages. One, I probably haven't insulted your band. Two, I probably haven't insulted your friend's band. As such, you can approach this entry with little to no prejudice against my opinions and decide only after you've read this that I...
According to this Associated Press story, coming out of Harlingen (got me), Dallas is among a handful of cities about to receive some $250,000 for a pilot program geared toward bringing the arts into the public school classroom. This money's coming from the New York-based Ford Foundation, which makes sense:...
The Theater Fire doesn't have a single timely quality. That's not just a cop-out to describe the septet's sound, though the Fort Worth band is first to admit that its acoustic arrangements are rooted in the oldest days of Americana; co-songwriter Don Feagin can't even pay tribute to music as...
As the NCAA men's basketball tournament grips Dallas today at the American Airlines Center, its fun to ponder all of the money and cheating that will be following the bouncing ball. Cheating? According to economist Justin Wolfers assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School of the...
Fighting back after his ouster for sexual harassment, former assistant fire Chief Roland Gamez has filed a federal lawsuit that depicts him as the victim of an elaborate plot while portraying the department's communications division that he once led as a bizarre outpost of Machiavellian plotting and odd sexual innuendos...
Lesley Dill Dill combines a variety of material--horsehair, wire, thread, tea, glue, ribbon, paper, felt, organza--to create work that is at once precious and weird. The wall-scaled "Blonde Push" brings to mind the enormous fringy brushes of a car wash without the whim and froth of suds. Long strands of...
Fort Worth hosts two exhibitions spotlighting the "grid" as a bearer of structural order in painting and the city. The shows feature work from the '80s--the 1880s and the 1980s, that is. And no two exhibitions could be so different. If the panoramas of Texas cities in Patterns of Progress...
