The only man who knows the answers to the story below is dead--has been for six years, though even before that, he may not have been able to provide any cogent response to the questions raised and accusations made by those who now fight over the corpse. He was a...
There are, to be honest, several reasons why Eric Michener might not be taken seriously, the most pressing of which we will outline briefly. 1. His first Dallas gig found him opening for Jon "Corn Mo" Cunningham, a somewhat like-minded singer-songwriter who is often not taken very seriously himself, as...
The throng of teens mills around "the loft," a youth-group meeting area sparsely furnished with plastic chairs. They're preparing for an icebreaker game, a prelude to their Wednesday-night Bible class. Some kids watch dismissively from the sidelines as their classmates grip lollipop sticks between their teeth and race to pass...
He can't be more than 18 or 19, brown hair, tight T-shirt, tighter jeans, light blue eyes that have yet to be deadened by the street. It's obvious what he wants: a quick hustle, sex for money, drugs, his next meal. Yet he approaches Neal Shaffer with some caution. Maybe...
9/5 The Pan American Art Gallery opens another season Friday with a reception for new show Landscapes of the Americas. The gallery, which carries one of the world's largest collections of Cuban, Haitian and Jamaican art, is expanding, with the goal of eventually including artists from all across the Americas,...
When Nicolas Cage plays still and sullen--a man possessed by self-loathing and melancholy in Adaptation, say, or the landlocked angel in City of Angels--he comes off as drowsy. He disappears into those roles like a head plopped in a fluffy pillow, and it doesn't quite suit him. Cage has excelled...
Ah, fall. The season of gallery walks, museum shows, dealer openings and party pics. Of hype and anxious activity, all aimed at luring that rare but highly prized specimen, Homo sapiens collectoricus. This season, especially, the quarry is as interesting as most of the bait. Over the past decade, art...
Before he even had any kind of legacy, Mark "Gator" Rogowski was imagining, in on-camera interviews, what it might someday be. "When fear is gone," the 18-year-old skater opined, "nothing will remain. Only I will be here." A few years later, when a drunken binge in Germany led him to...
Mo Funny Among Simpsons scholars, it's known that America's first family is quite versatile--from meeting the first President Bush to doing a rendition of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven." Rick Miller has taken the family's artistic achievements one step further. About 10 years ago, Miller, a Toronto-based actor, wrote MacHomer,...
This is when all struggling artists wish they were on the staff at Monica Greene's Ciudad. Of all the population who has ever been a waiter, a bartender, a busboy or a cook, chances are it's a rarity that any one has ever had the restaurant he works for showcase...
Thursday, September 18 We like to think of Would I Lie to You? as the Jewish version of Tootsie. But instead of learning how to walk in heels and pluck eyebrows, the protagonist has to learn how to wear a yarmulke and find out what happens at a bris. In...
Here's one way to tell if a production is good. Say the curtain goes up at 8 p.m. If the first time you check your watch the little hand is near the 9, you're in luck. You've been swept into the acting and the story of the play and everything's...
The Summer of Crime Mayor Miller, please help us: Your article put into words what my family and I have personally experienced ("No. 1 With a Bullet," by Jim Schutze, July 31). In the three years that we have lived in Dallas (a city that I dearly love), we have...
8/21 Hollywood wasn't the first to be fascinated with the American West. Decades before moviemakers began cranking out westerns in the 1930s, artists ventured beyond the Mississippi River to document the landscape and native peoples of the frontier's prairies. Swiss artist Karl Bodmer made some of the first paintings of...
This was a crazy place, the wild frontier of the gangsta life. You'd never know it now, staring at this empty slab of weathered concrete, overgrown with grass and barely visible from the street. A few people can still tell you what happened here; the rest would probably just as...
Hedwig and the Angry Inch is every inch the rock musical Rent tried to be and wasn't. That Hedwig also is a campy drag act, a subversive sex comedy, a witty philosophical allegory based on Plato's Symposium and a nostalgic tribute to feathery Farrah hair of the 1970s makes it...
When Jay Winborn lived in Miami, no nightclub closed before 5 a.m. Most places, the night was just getting started around then. Some clubs didn't shut down until noon the next day. This is just how things were. Not only in Miami, where he lived for five years, but pretty...
When Citizen opened roughly four years ago, its mix of neo-Asian fusion with a traditional sushi bar threw off so much heat that it was nearly impossible to get near it on a weekend night. The bar area, with banks of white televisions (now converted to plasma screens) bolted onto...
Neil Gaiman, father of a dysfunctional family of seven immortals known as The Endless, never had any intentions of abandoning his children in 1996, when he stopped telling their tales in the pages of the most celebrated and deified comic book of the past 20 years. He merely needed to...
Dallas restaurant legend Gene Street, chairman of Consolidated Restaurant Operations, confirms he's set to gobble the servings of another Dallas magnate: Scott Ginsburg. According to Street, Consolidated is close to sewing up a deal to pick up Ginsburg's recently shuttered Bamboo Bamboo on the corner of Keller Springs and the...
Ahhhh, yes. The philosophy department of the University of Morning News. The Dallas Morning News editorial page has been weighing in very weightily on the recent outcome of the District 9 Dallas City Council runoff election--a result we here at the Dallas Observer might otherwise have tossed off as a...
Everything's going to be all right. If there's a theme to this year's Deep Ellum Film Festival, perhaps it's that single, simple sentence of reassurance, repeated in a handful of movies screening this week and suggested in several others. A dying artist says it to an immigrant family that's suffered...
