Springtime in Deep Ellum, on a Friday night in 1998. An otherwise average night except for the noise coming from the street--a heavy machine-operated clamor that pounds its way into the loft above the art deco store at 2825 Commerce St. Justin Burgess is in that loft, waiting for sleep...
G.F. Prime Steakhouse is excited about prime. A quick perusal of the menu confirms this. G.F. Prime has prime starters. G.F. Prime has prime salads. G.F. Prime has prime soups and sandwiches. G.F. Prime has prime entrées, prime "additions" and "The Prime Finish." Are you primed yet? G.F. Prime is...
No one's really sure how Bobby Weaver got in or what, exactly, he's doing on the couch. Well, besides sleeping. But here he is, sprawled out in the living room of John Congleton's house just off Northwest Highway, 6-foot-something of beard, boots and black clothing. The three other members of...
Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas This show should be called "Dallas Collects Ellsworth Kelly." It would be more honest, not to mention more intriguing. This dainty collection of top-quality painting and sculpture by the mid-20th-century artist does little service to the importance of Kelly. Kelly's brightly colored and experimentally shaped opaque...
It's charming. It's hilarious. It is perhaps the most beautifully crafted, lovingly rendered portrait of extreme geekitude ever to grace the screen. It's Napoleon Dynamite--the first feature film from 24-year-old Brigham Young University student Jared Hess--and, if there is any justice, it's going to be huge. Remember that kid who...
Thursday, July 8 Cafe Izmir's hummus is a work of art. This perfect chickpea creation is deserving of sonnets, gallery exhibits and Kennedy Center honors. But mostly, it should just be eaten. The cafe's downtown restaurant, Izmir Mediterranean Tapas in the Stone Street Gardens, takes the hummus one step further,...
The aroma of wood burning grills. The light bouncing from brightly colored glass. An atmosphere that's both warm and sleek. A memorable experience, from A to Z. Zolon. This is the promo prose about Zolon, "an everyday bistro," posted on the restaurant's Web site. The words are crisp and snappy,...
If Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) sounded an early salvo of the feminist movement, the photographs of Jin-Ya Huang dance a worldly jig of the feminine in-between. The masterful blur of Huang's images give form to the shuffle and swing of a woman-girl acting in between East and West,...
Restart the Insanity Remember Susan Powter--the brash, blond, buzz-cut Dallas soccer mom who was screaming "Stop the insanity!" on her weight-loss infomercials in the '90s, like some sorta inverse Richard Simmons? Well, she lives in Seattle now, has grown her hair long, has converted to lesbianism and is making a...
Riding Coattails Friends of Bill take his case to the cineplex Usually, the films produced and released by Regent Entertainment go straight to cable, then to the video-store discount racks; such is the inevitable fate of fare starring Jack Wagner, Lorenzo Lamas, Adrienne Barbeau, Bruce Boxleitner and other Love Boat...
It's truly amazing what casting sculpture in video rather than the traditional media can do. Materials such as bronze, wood and stone just seem so clunky in comparison to video's lightweight incandescence. Whether analogue or digital, the result of emulsification processes on paper or a pixelation on a screen, video...
When Tommy McHenry steps onto his porch, it's obvious what the problem is. Or part of it, anyway. To the elderly ladies who've lived here in Casa View for three and four decades, the retired homemakers and widows of war veterans who get together and play bridge, McHenry probably looks...
On the day his name first appeared in the news, Father Justin Lucio had no reason to believe that it would be there at all. He was sitting at his desk, completing paperwork that would help an undocumented immigrant become legal. This was in 1984, when one afternoon a 30-year-old...
What becomes of Morgan Spurlock's body after a month of eating and drinking nothing but McDonald's assembly-line foodstuffs is not surprising. He bloats up, gaining nearly 30 pounds in 30 days. His sex drive peters out, among myriad disappointments visited upon Spurlock's vegan-chef girlfriend, who's only too happy to discuss...
"Do I need earplugs?" my friend asked, half-joking. I was taking him to his first Riverboat Gamblers show. I wondered: If I told him he needed a hard hat, would he back out? That night the Gamblers played to a packed room at the Cavern. Outside, the air was chilly,...
6/9 You've watched way too much Friends if you can name which stage performance freaks the pants off Chandler. (Zero points if you answered the naked Kathleen Turner in The Graduate.) The correct answer is Michael Flatley's Lord of the Dance, since, as Chandler frighteningly explains, it seems that "his...
The first words the audience hears in the Richardson Theatre Centre production of the thriller Wait Until Dark come from President Gerald R. Ford, grimly granting Richard M. Nixon a full pardon for involvement in Watergate crimes. It's a brief audio flashback to 1974, a dark period in American history,...
Scare Tactics Chicken Littles: I must say I was sadly disappointed by your lame article on amusement rides ("Scream Machines," by Josh Harkinson, June 3). John Stossel, the famous reporter from ABC's 20/20, refers to such reporting as "scare stories." People take rare isolated incidents and make them bigger than...
Hardly anyone writes love letters anymore. Sigh. Real billets-doux, the kind penned in inky swirls on creamy paper, have given way to the crude shorthand of instant messages and the tinny squawk of disembodied voicemail. Try wrapping a satin ribbon around those. Back in the dark ages, B.AOL., as it...
Nancy Nichols, D magazine's restaurant critic, despises the use of stars to rate restaurants. "There's too much time between reviews, and it's too hard to keep consistency," she explains. "Not the restaurant's consistency, but the entity handing out the stars. " The rest of us depend on a symbol of...
Alex de Leon The question begs: What to do with art that makes avid if not heavy-handed political statements in an era so eager to wrest itself from the rant, screed and morality inherently connected with political art? Is it the responsibility of art to engender social revolution, much less...
The Devil Comes to Town Polygamy's victims: I read your piece on the polygamists in Eldorado, Texas ("The Polygamists Are Coming," by John MacCormack, May 20). I found it interesting and right on the money. I am one of the apostates from the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints Church. I left...
