Lucas on Love Luke, you insult me: Hey, Luke Y. Thompson, if you're going to review a movie, i.e., the new Star Wars episode ("Sith Is It," May 19), then stick to reviewing movies, not making judgment calls about adopted people and their families. You pointed out that George Lucas...
Dinos are close to home 5/28 Twelve years ago, Dallas was home to the most visceral dinosaur experience in the country. Many would say Jurassic Park was just a movie--certainly not the leading authority on the subject (even its title was misleading, since few Jurassic-era dinos were in the flick)--but...
A white heron pops forth from an opalescent blue sky. The bird's head, long, curving gullet and lithe body create a moving ergonomic display that is in stark contrast to the ramshackle, ground-hugging landscape of Industrial Boulevard below. Tension heightens as the two travel at once, a diesel semi bustling...
Mostly Air Self-defense training for U.S. airline flight attendants is lax, despite 9-11 Our first-class galley flight attendant and our purser have been stabbed. And we can't get into the cockpit. The door won't open." American Airlines flight attendant Betty Ong's recorded phone call from aboard American Airlines Flight 11...
Siblings always have the best harmony--in music, at least. Cruiserweight is made up of three siblings and a friend, and the band tackles the peppy, ultra-harmonic genre of pop/punk with better-than-average results. After moving from Terrell and Dallas to Austin, the band found a larger fan base and followed up...
There was one peculiar thing about Kathleen's Art Café, the Plano outpost of the original Lovers Lane installment. It wasn't the legendary desserts. It wasn't the famous grilled meat loaf sandwich. It wasn't the art, framed and dangling from straps, prices neatly posted in lower corners. It was on the...
It took the jury less than three hours to deliberate, and that included lunch. Defendant Jesse Chaddock, 28, was declared guilty of engaging in organized criminal activity for his part in a July 26 beating at the Gypsy Tea Room. It came as no surprise. That morning, during closing arguments,...
Thursday, May 26 If the Van Cliburn Foundation really wanted people to care about the 12th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, they'd steal some tips from American Idol. They'd start by showing the embarrassing auditions (people playing "Chopsticks" or "Heart and Soul"), the Daron Beck-like avant-garde audition (surely someone would...
Extremely Right "The Truth" will not set you free: Robert Wilonsky's "Right Hand of God" report (February 17) is a reminder that political action committees--whether liberal or conservative--have achieved one result: The public should be wary of any group with freedom, free or liberty in its name. As a 47-year-old,...
Voices From Hell It's all true: I have lived at Waterview Park ("The Dorm From Hell," by an investigative reporting class at SMU, April 28) for about two years, and I am counting the days until my lease is up. The apartment is expensive, and it takes them sometimes months...
Pick A Number as the best new short play about a provocative subject. The writing sends off sparks of genius, the plot twists shock. More happens in the scant 65 minutes of British playwright Caryl Churchill's one-act gem, now onstage in a Southwest premiere at Undermain Theatre, than other plays...
Stairway to Heaven For high-tech designers, all that glitters is carbon It was a given that when Brad Edwards got up to speak that day in March 2002, the crowd would be skeptical. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is home to many of the country's most distinguished physicists and chemists,...
In this day of media overload, it's astonishing that vital music still remains unrecorded and largely unheard. But Matthew Johnson, a skinny white boy from Mississippi, found a heap in his own back yard. Turned on to blues by a University of Mississippi class taught in the late '90s by...
Recently, Ben Caudle, bartender at Hibiscus, challenged the Burning Question crew to shatter centuries of cultural indoctrination, shred the very ideals that define our country and ignore billions in advertising dollars. Well, actually he mentioned something about inexpensive liquors comparing favorably to more popular and costly bottles, but we recognized...
Exploring the optical unconscious 4/22 There's something undeniably haunting about Kimberly Gremillion's photographs. Her shadowy depictions of circus performers, ballroom dancers, boxers and actors are exhilarating bursts of energy caught in a kind of disturbing freeze-frame. And it's in these fanciful still-life photos that we're forced to re-examine the world...
"No more soccer!" declares small-time thug Sing (writer-director-star Stephen Chow) as he vigorously stomps on a child's ball. In the context of Kung Fu Hustle, it's a pathetic attempt by Sing to make himself look tough. The larger signal, however, is to followers of Chow's work--it's a direct reference to...
Fair warning: On Friday and Saturday, Fry Street Fair finally returns to Denton...we think. The Denton music festival, whose attendance peaked at 20,000 in 2002, was booted out of its hometown two years ago when city officials protested rising costs, crowds and security concerns. Rather than cancel, Fair organizers at...
Narrow EscapeAsylum seekers find the door to the U.S. is closing With a sly smile, Daniel Komayombi shows off his drawings of Texas cowboys and snow-covered African volcanoes. Some of his pictures are remarkably complex for a second-grader. All six Komayombi children--Nadia, 18; Rosine, 17; Jean Yves, 15; Grace, 12;...
One Tree Hill is not a show I've ever seen. I know it's on the WB and it's popular with preteens and it stars some dudes named James Lafferty and Chad Michael Murray, who is, according to one particularly breathless posting, "like the hottest guy on t.v., movies, anywhere!" I...
Frank Stella: Painting in Three Dimensions For what Frank Stella's large and raucous sculpture from the 1980s lacks in formal triumph, it makes up for in revealing the complexity of the artist's rocky road of development. Having made seminal paintings in the late '50s and an array of more successfully...
Mario Torres doesn't look like a publicity stunt. With unruly, spiky hair, a crooked grin and freckles, he doesn't come off as a role model, either. In fact, the 23-year-old's wiry frame hardly seems sturdy enough to support his own dreams, let alone those of Dallas' Hispanic community and its...
On Wednesday, Ashlee Simpson's Autobiography tour ends in Dallas and, coincidentally, so will her career. For many Americans, the end will be welcome. But for the thousands of people gullible enough to fall for her (including me), the farewell is bittersweet. Let me explain. According to common wisdom, Ashlee's career...
