Thursday, October 30 To us, Halloween's scare factor has nothing on El Da de los Muertos celebrations. While All Hallow's Eve offers the chance to scream and run from fake ghosts in haunted houses, the Day of the Dead is asking real ghosts--the souls of departed loved ones--to return home...
In the beginning, there was rhythm. Hairy hominids banging bones. Then, pokey Neanderthals touched the monolith and discovered the handclap--they grunted with glee--then konked on a coconut, thumped on a stump. "Mmmm. Good...beat. Dance...to...it." Eventually, the bones morphed in a flash into microphones. Early rappers rhymed about meat, arrows and--some...
Super Furry Animals' 2002 album, Rings Around the World, was very loosely a concept album about telecommunication. Or, more specifically, the vagaries of telecommunication--how, in a world filled with the low-grade buzz of infinite, free-floating conversations, enabled by a chain of fiber-optic links that no one save a few specialist...
Thursday, October 23 No television; no frozen dinners. Home entertainment in 1938 America came from a radio's speakers, and dinner prep began in the house early in the day. As the kids come in from dusky games of stickball, the knob flips and the living room fills with booming voices...
Even a 14-year-old can appreciate a swank dressing room: fruit basket, vase of flowers, even his own shower. Not to mention the sumptuous buffet in the "green room," where guests cool their heels. Corbin Corona and his parents, Gary and Detta Corona, attacked it with gusto. "They treated us like...
The people who live here call it their "pier-and-beam house." They've lost a lot--all of their security, most of their sobriety, some of their sanity--but they still have a sense of humor. Or irony, at least. The "house" is the underbelly of a bridge on Northwest Highway, a slab of...
It's January again, time for us to take one last gratuitous unkind swipe at the various adults who spent the past 12 months doing the grown-up stuff that keeps Dallas a functioning city, such as it is. Maybe it's because we're getting older, but Buzz is feeling kind of bad...
The recent economic downturn's been good to no one; musically speaking, it's been a particularly rude awakening for dozens of sound-alike indie bands spoiled by the booming late 1990s, when any dot-commer with a Pavement collection could start up a label and issue records by his friends' crappy bands (or...
Watching Hollywood's endless stream of John Grisham adaptations--The Firm, The Chamber, A Time to Kill, etc. --it would be easy to assume that Grisham is the worst sort of hack writer, with simplistic morals that usually overwhelm logic and come close to contravening the very law the author is supposed...
Man in Black Lasting gift: Those of us who have been in and around Nashville the last decade saw recently departed country music legend Johnny Cash (Scene, Heard, by Zac Crain, September 18) deteriorate physically. It was the same kind of deterioration on display at the '96 BMI awards, where...
Preparation for Sunday-morning services at the Cathedral of Hope resembles backstage on opening night of a Broadway production. The halls bustle with activity as volunteer coordinators and staff tick off their to-do lists. Everything must be perfect, from preparing urns of coffee to ushering in latecomers to ordering multimedia presentations...
You want to understand what's wrong with Dallas City Hall, to say nothing of the police department? Think about this: A year ago Dallas police were caught making cases against more than 70 defendants based on fake drug evidence. Now the city manager and the police chief are moving toward...
She could have escaped this city the moment the ink dried on the recording contract that became her ticket outta here. No one stays here too long, not when theres a glam town like New York City or Los Angeles gleaming like a pile of gold at the end of...
Ever since a dead bird in Dallas tested positive for West Nile virus in the early summer of 2002, local animal control offices and health departments have been in bird-call hell, especially during the warmer, mosquito-breeding months. Residents all over the place apparently have been calling their respective dead-animal handlers...
Philanthropist, n. A rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket. --Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary Ray Nasher isn't a man given to grinning. At 82, he is a diminutive man, stern of countenance and bald of pate, with...
Swizzle Shtick Recently, Reggie Swinton, wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys, was traded to the Green Bay Packers. It was a sad day for us. Not so much because Swinton was a good player, because he wasn't. No, we were sad to see him go because Swinton provided us with...
There's a virus infecting Deep Ellum. Not the mosquito-borne kind--this is a restaurant virus, one of temperance, sobriety and restraint. Symptoms range, but they all generate the same basic characteristics: dull names; utilitarian menus; simple furnishings; lousy ambience; street fronts inhospitable to lines of cars from Stuttgart and Bavaria; resourceful...
Recently, ornithologists in Antarctica made a startling discovery: Female emperor penguins, being forced against their wills to endure stern patriarchal societal norms, tend to practice iffy mating habits. Close scrutiny revealed that most adult females go bonkers struggling to choose between an exciting-but-destructive "bad boy" penguin and a dependable-but-boring "good...
10/2 If one were to meet a man named Chester Nurdiger, would it be a huge surprise that his wife is sexually frustrated? ("She was like a motor so wound up it might just combust." Pardon our inner-noir-monologue.) With no offense to the Chesters and Nurdigers of the world, the...
A reporter's little notebook is everything. Etched inside are scribbled records of events and the words of people great and unknown. Without a notation in some worn tablet, the world would never remember such lines as Patrick Henry's "give me liberty or give me death"...Um, wait. Bad example. Someone added...
This is a story without beginning or end, only a middle where there is horror and confusion, tragedy and a haunting evil that cries out for understanding. Stephen King, not I, should be telling it. It takes place in the shadows of rural church spires, in an isolated part of...
On the back cover of the CD booklet that accompanies Richard X's first full-length is an anti-piracy statement from EMI Music (Astralwerks' parent), a polite but strongly worded missive reminding listeners about the danger of the Internet, CD burners and the like. Bit strange, really, since that's pretty much how...
