Endure a few run-throughs of Pomp and Circumstance, make sure your tassel is on the correct side of your cap and ready your flask for the after-party at the rich kids lake house. Its a graduation, baby. Most years, the theme of the Dallas Observer Music Awards is an afterthought,...
"Do you think Dallas is ready for this?" Imagine Dallas' most successful chef--an icon firmly embedded in television, cookbookery and Dallas cultural history--mulling such a question. But Stephan Pyles looks worried. His ceviche is languishing. It's hard to discern the reasons, except that perhaps culinary adventurism hibernates during the holidays,...
Culinary terminology has slipped through the looking glass into that ambiguous place where a word means just what someone intends it to mean. For instance, some restaurants advertise "new American" cuisine, an imprecise catchall phrase referring to menus featuring, oh, French, Italian, Southwestern and whatever else the chef wishes to...
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...
Last September 1, an armada of water taxis left the Hotel Cipriani bearing America's royalty. Movie stars attending the International Venice Film Festival were staying at the luxury island inn, and the small boats were the only way to get to the theater. Everyone was dressed for the black-tie premiere...
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...
Annette Lawrence: Edge Annette Lawrence makes flat striations of color that sit against the wall, what some might call "painting," from stacked two-inch strips of hand-torn paper. Ultimately, though, the pieces that make up this work, July-October 2005, are more sculpture than painting. Nevertheless their color palette and relationship to...
When we first see the protagonist of North Country, a working-class heroine portrayed by a deglamorized Charlize Theron, she's sporting a black eye and a slight limp, the results of an encounter with her abusive husband. We soon learn that Josey Aimes is only now beginning to take her lumps...
In 1968 it was a movie. In 2001 it became a musical. Now it's a movie again? Yep, and there's actually pretty good reason to return The Producers to the screen. The original film, though intermittently inspired, was slow and often boring, and its homophobic, misogynistic humor no longer plays...
Visiting Mr. Green A young man visits an old Jewish widower every week for six months. They talk, they eat kosher chicken soup, they sip tea. Wisdom is shared, secrets revealed. Sound like Tuesdays with Morrie? Well, kinda. Actually Jeff Baron's play is more like a very special episode of...
One girl was called Jane Marie Another little girl was called Felicity Another little girl was Sally Joy The other was me, and I'm a boy --The Who Everything was fine until George Jorgensen Jr. came along. In 1951, surgeons in Copenhagen turned the Bronx-born George into Christine, and a...
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 demands of life force little trade-offs every day. Burgers and fries are far more appealing than a simple green salad, for example, but a constant diet of the all-American combo may transform those once-healthy arteries into grease traps. Even worse, it could turn you into a documentary film director...
Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth Anselm Kiefer is one of the few artists in the world who knows how to make the same old thing interesting. Though he's been making monumental, craggy-surfaced and quasi-spiritual paintings for 30 years, they continue to succeed in disarming the viewer, making her feel just...
Conspiracy theorists, ready your blogs: I believe the government has unleashed this week's Hurricane Relief: Come Together Now on the American public to convince us to stop sending aid to Louisiana. This two-disc benefit album is the musical equivalent of 9/11, each disc an unforgivable falling tower of smoldering wreckage...
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...
Elected officials, as a rule, should not call a detractor, no matter how vicious, a "jailhouse bitch," but the typically profane and intermittently profound John Wiley Price had his reasons. The object of his anger, Darryl Blair, had torn the longtime Dallas County commissioner into a million little pieces in...
Of course, its the producer who gets the performer into these pages; this look like People magazine to you, hunh? Fact is, anybody other than Rick Rubin produces this thing (and Heartbreaker Mike Campbell, Tom Waits-Beck guitarist Smokey Hormel and ex-wunderkind Jonny Polonsky play on it) and its forgotten day...
If you're looking for proof that electronica can result in more than sterile, repetitive loops, then consider driving to Denton to see British producer Kieran Hedben in concert. When he's not playing as part of post-rock band Fridge, the Brit earns critical praise with ambitious solo albums as alter ego...
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...
2005 was a year of exploration and expansion in urban music. Against a Matrix-like background of corporate-controlled radio and TV, iPod-enabled consumers demanded more musical choices and were rewarded by indie labels and an alternative to mainstream mediocrity. For every lackluster commercial effort (like 50 Cent's The Massacre), 10 superior...
I must have a reputation in the local radio community. This week, I wanted to have a talk--a simple, harmless, non-accusatory chat--with the program directors at 97.9 The Beat and K104.5 FM, Dallas' highest-rated hip-hop radio stations. Unfortunately, neither Jon Candeleria nor Skip Cheatham, respectively, returned my numerous calls, which...
