Gerard Dirkx fidgets in his chair, dancing around any questions about his age. Obviously annoyed, he finally declares, "I'm 35 but extremely dyslexic." Despite his receding hairline and gray beard, his edginess is nearly the same as when he fronted Dallas' first--and best--new wave band, the Telefones, more than two...
The literary critic Walter Benjamin once said "to live means to leave traces." Life is messy and, like the droppings of a scurrying rodent, we leave behind the pellets of life: evidence of our metabolism, of body and breath. The photographs of the young Italian artist Francesco Patriarca are confirmation...
Van Morrison has been called many things: mystical poet, New Age guru, reclusive genius. Above all those, he's a guy who doesn't bother with the formalities of promotion or touring, making his March 6 concert at Nokia Theater quite special--it will be his first metroplex stop in more than two...
It has become a pattern: Fail in Iraq, write a book. Bush, the commander-in-chief, had Bob Woodward do it for him. Janice Karpinsky, the Abu Ghraib commander, did it. Judy Miller, the WMD cheerleader, is doing it. Now comes Paul Bremer's entry. Under Bremer's leadership, the post-invasion government of Iraq,...
It has become a pattern: Fail in Iraq, write a book. Bush, the commander-in-chief, had Bob Woodward do it for him. Janice Karpinsky, the Abu Ghraib commander, did it. Judy Miller, the WMD cheerleader, is doing it. Now comes Paul Bremer's entry. Under Bremer's leadership, the post-invasion government of Iraq,...
Days after the release of a scalding report from the Texas Legislature on corruption and misfeasance at Dallas City Hall, one of its main authors, an Austin Republican, was wondering if the reporters' are awake up in Dallas. "The Dallas Morning News put it on page one, but they sure...
Officer Allen Hill was on motorcycle patrol writing traffic tickets on the suburban streets of North Richland Hills, just northeast of Fort Worth, when a call came over his radio: Available SWAT team members were to report to the station immediately. It was an answer to his prayers. Brawny and...
At six stories high and with just more than 95,000 square feet, the beige box of a building that houses the Dallas Central Appraisal District on Stemmons Freeway is, at best, uninspiring. You get the impression that what goes on inside isn't unlike certain scenes in Mike Judge's film Office...
Testy: The 5th District Court of Appeals last week sided with the Dallas Observer and rejected a civil suit filed by a man who claimed we violated state law by revealing that he is HIV-positive. Roger Stanley, a worker at the Cathedral of Hope, had sought in excess of--get this--$1...
The most significant challenge in restaurateuring has little to do with fortunes big or small, lost or stolen. That comes later, maybe after décor. Café San Miguel has a deep blue marine bar with a porthole housing a metal star. Christmas lights are strung from the ceiling. The barstools look...
If all goes according to plan, next year will herald the release of about a dozen never-before-heard songs from the songwriting team that all but created rock 'n' roll. And even though Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the men behind hundreds of R&B "race records" and early rock hits including...
In the 17 months that Susana Loera worked at the Mexican Consulate in Dallas, she was horrified by what she saw. She and others at the diplomatic mission say that her boss, Mexican Vice Consul Luis Lara, regularly advised his compatriots charged with crimes in the United States to flee...
The unlikely fusion of rockabilly and gothic punk has produced some freakish results (Dallas' own Ghoultown comes to mind), but Austin's Hotrod Hillbillies only nibble at the nether regions of the mascara and tombstone crowd. The trio's debut Under the Texas Sky is country punk saturated in Budweiser and infused...
If beauty is a result of tragedy, then Swedish indie whiz kid Dag Rosenqvist has picked the right name for his band. His heavily processed, static-based compositions may have little in common with the site of a Texas racial tragedy, but the pure emotion Jasper TX wrenches in this dense...
Finally, it was over. After seven months of pain and six hours of mediation, they reached an agreement. Documents signed. Sighs exhaled. Farewells exchanged. But wait, Kenny Rogers had one more surprise for Larry Rodriguez. As the former Texas Rangers pitcher, the KDFW-Channel 4 cameraman he assaulted last June and...
This is not George Lazenby making his doomed run at James Bond, or even Mel Gibson presuming to play Hamlet. This is serious heresy, combined with a touch of felonious assault. It has evidently not occurred to Steve Martin that, just as there is only one Eiffel Tower, there is...
Which of the following is an omen of the impending apocalypse? A) The Sex Pistols playing Dallas' Longhorn Ballroom, once the home of Bob Wills, in 1978. B) The re-formed Sex Pistols playing the Trump Marina Casino during their 2003 tour. C) The Sex Pistols Experience-- a tribute band that...
You wouldn't have known it, but I prepared an optimistic look at local music for a January column. Instead of running that, however, I bumped it week after week after week, thanks to a lot of breaking Deep Ellum news--venue closures, an arrest, a crappy music festival--that hinted at nothing...
The Aristocrats (Lions Gate) The single joke around which Paul Provenza's documentary revolves has a standard beginning and ending, like pieces of bread that make a sandwich stuffed with excrement, incest, and whatever other foulness the teller can come up with. Provenza and Penn Jillette recorded more than 100 comedians...
A Good Woman, Mike Barker's adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play Lady Windermere's Fan, has been gathering dust for some time. It played the Toronto Film Festival in the fall of 2004 before opening in 2005 in every country in the world except this one. Such dawdling doesn't bode well...
Want to commemorate Centro-matic's 10-year anniversary? Pick a date, any date. There's the hazy "late April or early May 1995" in which guitarist, singer and songwriter Will Johnson wrote and recorded his first solo song, "My Test." There's also March 22, 1997, when the band's current four-piece incarnation, a lineup...
Deep Ellum in bright sunlight can be a downright alarming sight. There's no hint of lurid, neon-streaked discord. Only silent brick structures, pitted by age, and a few lonely cars headed somewhere else. It looks like a small town in Illinois. Sitting down for lunch at Tarantino's Deep Ellum, my...
