In late January, University of Oklahoma President David L. Boren crossed the Red River to steal some of the best and brightest students in Dallas from under the noses of college recruiters at the University of Texas and Texas A&M. The method was impressive--and expensive. OU recruiters filled a banquet...
When you think of Robert Ryman's work, you think white. Ryman has made square paintings in various alabaster hues--waxen, pearly, gray--for the last 50 years. They are carefully wrought surfaces without the avant-garde hullabaloo. His work brings to mind the Soviet painter Kasimir Malevich's vaporous "White on White" (1918), a...
The only time I wear a suit is to attend a wedding or funeral. I suppose, then, my arrival at the Chapter 11 bankruptcy hearing on Wednesday, December 28, didn't bode well for the Entertainment Collaborative, the then-owners of Trees; the federal court has a dress code, and there I...
Movie-based videogames have a well-deserved reputation for sucking. Ever since Atari's E.T. -- a game so ill-conceived that thousands of unsold cartridges were dumped en masse in the desert, creating the crappiest buried treasure of all time -- Hollywood tie-ins have bombed big-time. Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game...
"Just a little touch of star quality" is how the chorus of peasants describes the title character in Evita, just opened by Lyric Stage at the Irving Arts Center. It's one of the slyest jokes in the 1975 Webber-Rice rock opera, which depicts the rise of Eva Duarte Peron, young...
A pair of major-label misfires confused longtime fans and turned this bone-crunching Massachusetts quartet into so much pop pabulum, but Cave In has righted their thunderous course with the recent Perfect Pitch Black. Never content to simply play along with the often-generic metal genre, Cave In mixes progressive touches a...
By now, the sad story of Walter Mann is well-known. The 69-year-old, schizophrenic and homeless, was held in a Dallas County jail for more than a year for not paying a $50 fine. During his 15 months behind bars, he never saw a lawyer or had a visitor. Each time...
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...
It was a stunning triumph. Lupe Valdez, a Latina lesbian who had toiled for decades as an obscure federal agent, won election in 2004 as the sheriff of Dallas County after a series of scandals dogged the incumbent Jim Bowles. Sprung from a family of migrant workers, the diminutive Democratic...
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,"...
As Mayor Mackie Choice sits with friends on his front porch on a warm March afternoon, he periodically surveys the horizon for danger. The bulldozers could come at any moment, from any direction, to level the entire town. Already they have razed a nearby settlement, and nobody knows what their...
By Monday, you couldn't turn on a computer in Dallas without seeing Michelle Metzinger's bloody face. The 25-year-old member of local roller derby league Assassination City Roller Derby found herself at the center of an Internet publicity firestorm. Blogs, message boards and MySpace posts made their way to the farthest...
The opening act was almost comic. The setup: waiting at the sparsely attended bar for a dinner companion to arrive, ordering vodka martini up with a twist, "a martini, please." The improv take: After searching for a couple minutes the bartender decides they've run out of Monopolowa. How 'bout Stoli?...
For the first time in years, Angela Shaw feels more secure living at the Waterview Park Apartments at the University of Texas at Dallas. But Shaw says poor maintenance remains a major problem at Waterview, the nation's largest private dorm. "They always try fixing things, but you can't fix it...
Kinky love: He ain't governor--yet--but that doesn't stop a certain Texas Jewboy from leaving voice mail messages in which he identifies himself as "Governor Friedman." Then again, maybe Richard "Kinky" Friedman ain't that off-base: On Tuesday, Zogby International released the results of its "Battleground '06" survey and revealed that among...
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...
With a Blade TV show in the works from Spike TV and powder-faced My Chemical Romance fans carrying the goth torch at Hot Topic, this would seem the perfect time to resurrect the Castlevania franchise. Castlevania debuted 20 years ago on the Nintendo Entertainment System and was an instant classic,...
Dip into any scuzzy indie-punk dive right now, and you're bound to bump into a noise-rock two-piece. They seem to spawn out of beer-stained floors all over the place these days, so it's only a matter of time until the scene belches forth a duo with the potential to break...
Last May, the city of Forney, a tiny but growing bedroom community 20 miles east of Dallas, played host to a election for mayor that featured switched ballots, confounding results and the undue influence of a crony of the incumbent. If not that, then challenger and self-made millionaire Rick Wilson...
Say you get some fine pâté de foie gras. You spread a big dollop of it on a thick, crusty slice of warm French baguette along with generous slivers of rare black truffle. First-class ingredients all the way around. Gourmet grub. But when you think about it, when you break...
GlobalTec doesn't want you to read this, so you probably should. The Dallas company peddles investment software on infomercials, luring naïve customers to seminars in hotel rooms throughout the country, where evangelistic salespeople preach the gospel of get-rich-quick. GlobalTec's flagship software, Wizetrade, purports to make users rich by telling them...
Late in the first half of the April 8 game against Real Salt Lake, Dallas native Kenny Cooper uses every inch of his 6-foot-3 frame to get his head on a long ball and flick it up the field toward a sprinting Carlos Ruiz. The Guatemalan star known as El...
