Back From the Dead Rigor Mortis were once "Condemned to Hell"--and irrelevance--but the Dallas metal legends have risen By 1991, Rigor Mortis was through. The Dallas band didn't just part ways--after signing with Capitol Records only five years before, they were booted off the popular music radar, along with most...
When they come down to City Hall for council meetings, why don't the white people know how to behave? As a white person myself, I find it very embarrassing. I'm not talking about people getting mad and acting up over an issue. Everybody does that. Human nature. I've tossed off...
It's hard to fault a hastily organized benefit for a good cause, and really, no cause was better (and no concert more slapped together) than Sunday's Deep Relief. Though Dallas has already seen its fair share of Katrina benefit concerts, DR was easily the most ambitious local one to date,...
Ashok Padmanabahn is nobody's fool. He's a computer engineer, working on the next generation of display technology at the large Texas Instruments campus off of Forest Lane. He owned his own technology company in India before he signed a two-year contract to come to the United States in 2004, and...
There is a reason why Paul Pepe became a doctor, and not in some relatively tame specialty such as dermatology. Or radiology. But the high-stress field of emergency medicine--where he is an innovator, a pioneer, one of the nation's foremost experts. At 55, he is chairman of emergency medical services...
Ties were created for Troy Dungan, calf ropin' and Anna Kournikova's brother. So by replacing overtime draws with sudden-death shootouts, the NHL got one right. One down, infinity to go. In case you're one of the oblivious millions, the Dallas Stars are back in business and desperately searching for fans...
Supergrass no longer sounds like a hyperactive younger brother jumping up and down, clamoring for attention. After releasing last year's retrospective, Supergrass is 10, perhaps the band decided that year 11--and the album that goes with it, Road to Rouen--marked the time to grow up and mellow out. With help...
Quite frankly, the Polyphonic Spree is supposed to be famous. David Bowie and Brian Wilson would agree--they've championed the band's pop symphonies and given Dallas' robed warriors lucrative festival and concert gigs. After iPod commercials got the single "Light and Day" stuck in America's head, NBC's Scrubs and MTV's Video...
God's TeamThe Dallas Cowboys’ All-Pro carouser, Michael Irvin, tries to walk the straight and narrow Number 88 is slashing through a Green Bay Packers secondary, evading hapless defenders who fall headlong just as he slips from their grasp. Someone snags a tiny piece of jersey, and soon his shoulder pads are out and flapping as he […]
It's Saturday night in Eden, and the gods are angry. We're sitting inside the small converted ranch house watching a restaurant in the midst of a serious meltdown. The air conditioning unit malfunctions. Butter melts on the plate, and our waitress, already frazzled, wipes damp wilting hair from her glistening...
UTD reverses course, announces improvements at its Waterview dorm In April, officials at the University of Texas at Dallas said conditions at the Waterview Park Apartments, the nation's largest private dorm, couldn't be better. Robert Lovitt, then the top university official over Waterview, called it "one of the best success...
After 30 years, you'd think that fans of John Prine would have gotten the hint. After all, this is the guy who wrote 1971's Vietnam war protest "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore," in which St. Peter tells the deceased narrator that Heaven is crowded with casualties...
Two years ago, Ronnie Crayton believed his restaurant, located just across the street from Fair Park, would succeed for myriad reasons--chief among them, its proximity to Deep Ellum and downtown plus an "elegant atmosphere" that would allow its patrons to "unwind after work with specialty cocktails and a happy hour...
Tommy, we can't hear you. And it's a shame. He still plays a mean pinball, that deaf, dumb and blind kid, but once he snaps out of his self-induced catatonic state, the young pinball wizard can't make any points with the accursed acoustical problems in the Uptown Players' production of...
The Store of RecordThe beat goes on. Can Bill’s Records and Tapes? Bill Wisener does not know this story, because I’ve never told it to him; to others, meaning his friends and customers, I’ve repeated it often. It takes place not long after Wisener opened his eponymous record store on Spring Valley Road 25 years ago, which, as […]
One of the best pound-for-pound live rock n roll bands today has committed a cardinal sin: Kinski have gone and played too much rock. The Seattle quartet managed to please pretty much everybody with their 2003 Sub Pop bow, Airs Above Your Station, which fused their proclivity for minimalist psychedelia...
Pass the milk and dab your doilies; the Cowboys media is suddenly softer than Tony Siragusa's third chin. Coach Bill Parcells exhibited all the killer instinct of the Dalai Lama in the catastrophic collapse against the Redskins. His Cowboys ran when they should've passed, passed when they should've run and...
Still DeliveringEdie Brickell is still shooting at the stars She was just 14 years old when the very first issues of the Dallas Observer showed up in the lobby of her favorite movie theater. Back then, Edie Brickell was still a couple of years away from enrolling at the Booker T. Washington School for Performing and […]
Shop in the name of love 8/27 Garages are where useless crap goes to die. Board games with missing pieces. Mismatched coffee mugs. Children's toys that have long since stopped working. So what, we wonder, spends its golden years in a "gayrage"? Old Cher cassettes? Glow sticks that don't glow?...
In the five year gap since MP4: Days Since a Lost Time Accident, Michael Penn has kept busy producing albums for Liz Phair and wife Aimee Mann and scoring a movie or two. He's also apparently reminisced about the decade before his birth, as the setting of his awkwardly titled...
Some time back in the '80s, college baseball players began donning "rally caps" late in losing games. Nothing magical, really, just regular ball caps twisted into bizarre shapes. We doubt there's a statistical correlation between manhandled hats and come-from-behind victories. In fact, deep down most of us know spells designed...
Who dat? Back in 1987 it was the catchy Cajun battle cry of the NFL's New Orleans Saints. But last week outside Reunion Arena it was just one of the hundreds of questions from the thousands of evacuees. Is my family alive? How do I get food? Where am I...
