Toward the end of Born Into Brothels, a superb and piercing documentary by directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, a 12-year-old child examines a photograph. It's beautiful, he says, because it shows us how its subjects live. Yes, they're very poor, and the shot is hard to look at, because...
Congratulations to Brave Combo, who won Grammy No. 2 on Sunday night for Let's Kiss, their 25th anniversary album, thus answering the question "How do you follow up a cameo on The Simpsons?" This calls for ein chicken dance! Drum machine, please: It's time to announce the top five finalists...
For less than $15, anybody can buy a disposable camera, take 24 shots and pay someone to develop them in an hour. Instant art. It's understandable why some people refuse to consider color photography as a serious art form. It's the "works on paper" version of marking a piece of...
Thursday, February 17 Make a reference to the coast in Texas and it's assumed said coast is lapped by "waves" from the Gulf of Mexico. Texans can be slightly too "We have everything you'd wanna see here in the Lone Star State!" But Barry Whistler and his gallery are reminding...
It's been a banner year for Sam Beam, thanks largely to his band Iron & Wine's touching musical cameo in Garden State. The attention resulted in serious sales for his latest album, Our Endless Numbered Days, which proves fans can never get too much of a sensitive singer and his...
Know the Score Some people don't want restaurant inspection scores posted. Here's why. Sometime this spring, the city council may or may not adopt a new health inspection system for restaurants. It's based on a program adopted by the state, which in turn is derived from federal standards. Under the...
The Greater Dallas Restaurant Association has released the results of the study it commissioned to examine the impact of the March 1, 2003, smoking ban in restaurants. And like a day-old Pall Mall butt dangling from the bright red lips of a hardened professional, the findings aren't pretty. Drafted by...
SURPRISE, Arizona--The morning Arizona sun beams down and lets its presence be felt. It needs no help on that score--it's powerful enough to warm everyone below and tan the backs of their necks--but it's magnified nonetheless, made ever brighter as it bounces off the ridiculously large ring adorning John Hart's...
2/18 City worker types, mostly from the Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau--people in the business of selling our city--were rounded up to devise a plan on how to bring people here. So they thought for a while until...Ah ha! Of course! That's brilliant! They decided on gluttony. Gluttony is the...
If you've already decided to see Ocean's Twelve, it's probably best not to read much about it. Unlike its predecessor, a remake that clung to a hoary heist formula, the sequel contains ample pleasures, most of which amuse as the result of surprises both great and small. There's no one...
Reality Check Judge not: David Morr (Letters, February 3), please be advised that I can only wish upon you that when you are driving your prestigious car to your prestigious job with a full tummy and a healthy family that all of you suffer the same inhumanity that has made...
This is Jason Terry--everything you need to know about his personality encapsulated in one brief moment. Practice has just ended, and he walks off the court, leaving the free-throw line and a good sweat behind him. He could shoot past the gathered media, brush off the pack the way other...
"Twenty-four hours. 350 miles. His girlfriend's kids. What could possibly go wrong?" In the case of Are We There Yet?, here's the short answer: a flaccid screenplay, bratty kids stripped of depth and personality, a single joke replayed in every scene, unearned attempts at sentiment and a bizarrely whitened backdrop,...
The sight of six makeup-clad Norwegian satanists on the Ozzfest main stage this summer was a great sign for metal, if not the makers of Max Factor. During recent outings, metal's biggest event of the year has been plagued by rote rap-rockers like Crazy Town, Papa Roach and Linkin Park,...
An Open Appeal to Dr. Robert Rey: You may find this hard to believe, but before last week I had never heard of you. I had no idea you were one of the pioneers of the transumbilical procedure, which sounds suspiciously like a financial instrument designed to skirt Securities and...
The poetry in sports is rooted in its symmetry, or so I'm told. For every star there's a role player. For every champion, a chump. There is a flip side to each situation, and therein lies the beauty, right? There is a reason the thrill of victory has long partnered...
The tsunami reports were overwhelming--an endless wash of carnage and devastation--and in the days following the disaster, Jayme Nourallah had no idea what to do. "I just kept crying about it," says Nourallah, a freelance photographer who had visited Indonesia a month before the disaster. She couldn't stop looking at...
Mighty and Young No More Five years ago, the Casa Linda Theatre's marquee became a tombstone, memorializing the movies that made one last stand before the theater closed in January 1999. Those films--A Bug's Life, Prince of Egypt, You've Got Mail and Mighty Joe Young--were forgettable then and notable now...
The season has been over for a while, and we still don't know any more about the Dallas Cowboys than we did before their season-ending loss to the Giants. The 'Boys and head coach Bill Parcells disintegrated in that final game, and now it's almost as though their remains have...
Nobody in Dallas had heard of Stuart Sikes. It was 2002, and the unemployed recording engineer walked into Bass Propulsion Laboratories and introduced himself. "Someone told me I should come by here," he said vaguely. The owners, Todd and Toby Pipes, gave him a nod and the standard spiel. The...
Here's a twist: accidentally stumbling into the restaurant business and finding love. Usually the love comes first, spawned by the illusion of glamour inherent in the prospect of running your own canteen. A short time after the buzz wears off, these once spellbound operators start tearing their hair out by...
For banana growers, the pesticide DBCP seemed like a godsend when it came on the market in the 1960s. The chemical has no equal for killing parasites that can devastate a banana crop. But DBCP proved to be uniquely effective for another purpose as well: sterilizing the men who worked...
