SURPRISE, Arizona--Across the way, just beyond the cart path and behind the cheap rope that separates royalty from the serfs--that is, players and personnel from fans and media--former Rangers great Jim Sundberg stands on the calisthenics field and smiles broadly. Both arms are outstretched, as though he's being measured by...
11/20 No one looks particularly glamorous in Richard Avedon's portraits. There's the white background, set up wherever it's convenient, on a wall or hanging from a trailer. There's natural light with the shade creating lines and contours. Then there's Avedon, his camera and his subject. That's all. There are no...
Bill Gallo: Even dedicated art-house regulars missed Pavel Lounguine's Tycoon: A New Russian when it was released this fall, but this intrigue-spiced tale of a ruthless yet surprisingly sympathetic Russian oligarch worked equally well as a crime thriller and a course in Russian fiscal policy (or the lack of it)...
Another year has passed, leaving me older but certainly not smarter. Which is why I acquiesced in our staff meeting when told we were once again putting out a blanket year-end issue, adored by lazy, slow-witted journos everywhere. I figured I fit pretty safely into that category, and besides that,...
Think Tiki music, and you'll think young. You'll think hip. You'll think 20-something guy who buys his vintage flower-print shirts at Ahab Bowen and classic brushed-steel cocktail shaker at Metro Retro. You don't think 60-something, balding, trumpet-playing, Shriner-pledging grandfather. But we first heard of Tiki from our Poppy, who played...
It was a year when even the ups left us feeling down. In 2003 Americans heard phrases like "jobless recovery," splurged on duct tape and plastic sheeting and dutifully scorned French foods. It took a bloody occupation of Iraq to finally dislodge Ben and Jen from headline news. We toppled...
How one feels about Diamanda Galas depends largely on how one feels about the term "serious art." We Americans don't have much use for the stuff usually, nor does anyone else, really, though college students who spend a semester in continental Europe tend to return with the idea that everyone...
Here is something I bet you did not know, because I did not know it until a month ago, and people who should have known long before me didn't even know until I told them. There is a record label in Los Angeles called CMH that, through a subsidiary called...
What is hip? Like a cube of lime Jell-O, hipness is hard to grasp without making a mess. Yet everybody craves this elusiveness, so much so they want to eat it, thinking it will impart some sort of penetrating insights. We all know where to get it, too: New York,...
The year was 1925, and wealthy white men ruled the South. In South Carolina, a handsome young schoolteacher, the son of prominent white citizens, sired a daughter by his family's 16-year-old black maid. The teacher, of course, was Strom Thurmond, who rose politically to become one of the South's most...
In sports, particularly among the media, rumors are like venereal diseases: There are a lot of them out there, and they're quickly and easily passed around. Who's a nice guy, who's a dick, who's not talking to his coach, who slept with this actress or that celebrity--there's never a shortage...
It sounds easy, but operating a successful neighborhood restaurant is tough: ingratiating yourself with a cadre of regulars, serving decent food, enticing nomads from foreign neighborhoods and protecting the comfort zone you've created (never invite assassination attempts by pulling a menu staple after it's become an icon). To understand the...
Of all the things Timothy Leary was famous for--experimenting with LSD, being asked to leave his professorship at Harvard, getting arrested for pot possession, breaking out of prison, getting sent back to prison, experimenting with LSD, running with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, promoting...
Every weekday morning beginning at 7 o'clock, the gate of Huntsville's Walls Unit opens, just slightly. Returned to society are a dozen or so prisoners who have completely discharged their sentences. As a parting gift, the state provides them with $50, the clothes on their backs and bus tickets. Those...
The power has been off for five minutes, maybe more. It feels like it's been off forever, like it's never coming back. At least not during this show. The amps sit useless at the back of the stage, little more than furniture. The crowd is getting restless. So is the...
Very rarely does a rock band release a "remix album," and that's fine by us. In most cases, producers just strip the most identifiable vocals from a song and plop them down over cookie-cutter club beats. So why bother? It makes more sense in the case of the Dismemberment Plan,...
The other day we stumbled across a truly bizarre line penned by essayist G.K. Chesterton. Now, we've read a number of strange and disturbing things in our time: Vanna White's account of her success and career, John Lydon's retelling of his impecunious boyhood, anything written by William Murchison in The...
It was one of those cool-breeze, sunny mornings in Thousand Oaks, California, and before the Dallas Cowboys were to begin another preseason practice, a tennis match was under way on the Cal Lutheran campus. On one side of the net was coach Tom Landry and his assistant Dan Reeves. Opposing...
Russell Crowe to his agent: "More Oscar-bait. Now." Agent, considering his cut of Crowe's $20 million payday: "Yes, sir." A possible scenario, anyway. Thus, Crowe is back in another iconic, self-serious performance, and his beefy mug will stare down upon us from this season's heroic movie posters until Tom Cruise...
When we first see Fanda, the craggy, octogenarian hero of a sublime Czech tragicomedy called Autumn Spring, he alights from a sleek black limousine under a rich canopy of trees and begins looking at a luxurious country mansion with obvious distaste. "Quite shabby," he says to the obsequious sales agent...
Beneath the jagged scars on the heaving chest of Dr. Frankenstein's scary monster beats the heart of a true romantic. Just whose heart it is--or used to be--we can't be sure. The giant creature is a crazy quilt of random body parts stitched together by a mad scientist and brought...
I'm sitting at a makeshift work table in a down-at-the-heels apartment complex in Richardson, staring at a table of numbers on a page. These figures, grainy and warped from too many generations of photocopying, are a parade of hieroglyphic epitaphs scrolling before my eyes like war dead, whispering the answer...
