There's been an interesting drama developing in the pages of SMU's The Daily Campus this week involving the university's Spanish lecturer George Henson. It began when the student paper reported that Henson showed up to work Monday to find that someone had scrawled the word "FAGGOT" across his office door...
The votes have been cast. It's over. For good or bad, Gene Robinson, son of a Kentucky tenant farmer, has made history--and captured the world's attention. The Episcopal Church has its first openly gay bishop. It is August 5, 2003, and Robinson is to appear before the House of Deputies,...
Hipsters looking for disagreeable, hard-to-digest music will presumably turn toward the new Liars record, Drum's Not Dead, for a hearty dose of parent-scaring noise. It's a reasonable assumption, as their last album, in spite of its weirdness and witch-loving themes, won out amongst the noise-rock crowd by pulling off near-poppy...
That Curious George existed at all--much less as a franchise, an icon enduring some 65 years--was a result of "happy circumstance," wrote Houghton Mifflin publisher Anita Silvey with some understatement in 1991, upon the 50th anniversary publication of The Complete Adventures of Curious George. Silvey and critic Leonard Marcus recall...
Despite the atmospheric experimentation and dark lyrics that dominate much of their work, Skeletons and the Girl-Faced Boys are really a pop band underneath the layers of noise and blips built around their otherwise sunny, R&B-influenced synth-pop. Taking cues from the Sea and Cake, Arthur Russell and Silver Apples, the...
On paper, Black sounds like a sure hit: Criterion Studios (the developer behind the spectacular Burnout games) designs a first-person shooter that does away with all that boring sneaking and instead focuses on the pure pyrotechnic appeal of a Hollywood-style gun battle. The game promised sub-woofer-rattling explosions, frantic gunfire in...
One presumes this is not what Woodlawn will look like as a boutique hotel, if and when that ever happens. Unlike so many of my unhealthy obsessions, my fascination with the old Woodlawn Hospital building held such promise. Day after day, I gazed out at the abandoned former home of...
Video News Releases, TV ads disguised as news reports, have been around for decades. Only in March 2004, however, did debate about the use of VNRs break out of journalism circles. That's when D.C. publicist Karen Ryan's wildly successful spot pushing the Bush Administration's Medicare drug bill aired as news...
On Monday, The Dallas Morning News reported how school board candidate Adam Medrano evaded arrest after the Dallas police conducted a sting of homosexual activity in a Dillard's men's room...six years ago. Medrano's estimable political consultant Anna Casey was fuming. She felt that DMN reporter Kent Fischer misled her about...
Evan Daniel Lintermans' Mountain Paintings Lintermans' space-age paintings of Mount McKinley augur a nimble and brainy future for the new gallery Road Agent. If small quantities are a mark of high quality, then this show receives high marks for good stuff. Six acrylic-on-Plexiglas paintings hang on the walls of Road...
Last year's return of Dinosaur Jr.'s classic lineup was one of the least expected reunions since John Lydon reanimated the Sex Pistols. After hitting bandmate Lou Barlow with a guitar as a prelude to dumping his ass in the late '80s, temperamental frontman J. Mascis (sometimes with drummer Murph) carried...
Well, the blogster microscope has really drilled down into the cellular structure of the story involving Mayor Laura Miller, her AMR Corp. stock and alleged conflict of interest, and Dallas Morning News reporter Dave Levinthal. Now we've got detailed accounts, via e-mail, from everyone involved--including Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport VP...
Dune: Extended Edition (Universal) On paper it sounds insane: A mammoth sci-fi epic directed by David Lynch, based on an intensely weird Frank Herbert novel about ecology and giant worms. What resulted was a flop that has yet to be remedied by multiple edits through the years. This disc includes...
The first time this Southern Baptist white boy from the outskirts of Dallas heard the live version of "King Without a Crown" pounding from his car stereo, he said to himself, "Wow! This Modest Yahoo guy is great! I'm going to look him up on iTunes and see if he's...
Evan Daniel Lintermans' Mountain Paintings Lintermans' space-age paintings of Mount McKinley augur a nimble and brainy future for the new gallery Road Agent. If small quantities are a mark of high quality, then this show receives high marks for good stuff. Six acrylic-on-Plexiglas paintings hang on the walls of Road...
Thirty-three hours after the Wall of Sound Festival 2006 kicked off, I was worn down to a nub. I'd seen roughly 44 acts by Sunday evening. Some were full sets, while others were just one song, but still. A similar sense of fatigue and exhaustion was evident on the faces...
The Undoing of David Wright wears one of its first-ever reviews proudly on its Web site. The quote is taken from a post on a local Christian music message board, calling the Denton band's live performance "everything that is contrary to peace, a sound mind, God's order, and love. It...
Drumroll, please: Flip to page 80 to take a gander at the official list of nominees for the 2006 Dallas Observer Music Awards. Starting right now, you have four weeks to cast your vote, so either fill out the attached ballot and mail it in or log on to dallasobserver.com...
It's not the Paris Hilton sex tape, but if you're sitting on a jury, you can't exactly complain. On June 7, an otherwise mundane prostitution trial will be spiced up by the likely introduction of raw footage featuring a naked Dallas police officer receiving a rather expansive massage from a...
One sentence in this Dallas Morning News story about the redo of 20-year-old Plaza at Bachman Creek shopping center on Northwest Highway caught my eye: "'We are going to try and create a European town square feeling,'" Archstone-Smith's Tom Scaling said Monday." It's notable mostly to those of who grew...
Five years after the publication (well, self-publication) of his book O.J. Is Guilty, but Not of Murder, local private detective Bill Dear is moving his search for Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman's killers to the big screen. On March 27 at the Angelika Film Center, 275 locals handpicked by Dear...
Miss Great Plains, Bonnie Louise Cutlett, looks as shaky as a lamb headed for slaughter. She steps forward during the "talent" round of the make-believe beauty competition called Pageant, now onstage at the Uptown Players, and shyly declaims her painfully original poem: "I am a handful of dirt! When you...
