All right, here it comes. This is former Dallas police Chief Terrell Bolton coming straight at you with a Molotov cocktail in one hand and the other one out for money. So what's it gonna be? You tell me. You might call it political extortion. I say it just might...
Imagine Richard Surrell's astonishment when he learned that he owned a house he didn't buy, a Dallas house 1,400 miles away from his Southern California home. Someone with a detailed knowledge of Surrell's credit history and a fake Texas drivers license stole his identity and used it to buy a...
The wine is flowing, the chips are dipping and the conversation is turning brazenly partisan. And why shouldn't it? This is not some effete soiree that hopes to nudge funds out of its guests for an inoffensive but deserving charity. It's not some wild frat party meant to raise blood-alcohol...
Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but there appears to be a gradual rock migration. A glacier-like shift toward harmony and melody. An opportunity for popular music to embrace art over gimmicks--musicianship over parent-hating rhetoric and latex masks from Spencer's Gifts. The success of the Strokes, Wilco and even Weezer demonstrates what's...
Late last summer, a pale, willowy young man walked into the vinyl section of a Denver-area record store. He seemed nervous. His glossy black hair fell like ink across his eyes, and he glanced around the relatively empty shop as if someone were about to run up and hit him...
Used to be 33 bands (by my count, anyway, but I was told there would be little math in this course) would play over two, maybe three days; used to call 'em "festivals" back in my day, the late '80s. Now it's 25 minutes by one-and-done bands that sound gassed...
There's no sushi bar here. (But there is sushi.) There's counter seating equipped with an expansive view of the square open kitchen. It's like watching ballet, the daredevil kind with knives and flames. Orders come in, and chef-owner Seiji Wakabayashi ladles orange fluid into a saucepan. Another pan gets a...
Dallas is Number One. We have the worst crime rate of America's major cities, based on the most recent set of FBI crime statistics. And guess what? It's getting way worse even as you read this. Murders in Dallas in June were up 300 percent over the same period in...
You would never know Robert Benton had been here. A minute ago, he was sitting in this chair in this hotel restaurant, drinking a Shiner, nibbling at fried squid, chewing over the past. His chair is still warm. But now he is gone, and it's as though he had never...
It's not much of a place, really: a bland, one-story yellow brick building hoping to remain innocuous to the small-town traffic that drives by. Its sign--Corsicana Health Services--also doesn't arouse much curiosity. It's better to remain low-key, to blend in rather than let everyone in town know the clinic is...
Let us admit something right off: As kids, we hated equations of any kind. We barely passed "math for athletes" in high school and found a loophole in college that allowed us to slide through four years...well, technically six...with nary a course involving numbers. At least our school featured a...
So much for those crackpot theories about flighty teen-agers and their short attention spans. For four long years now the bland pop star Mandy Moore has stuck in the brainpan of white adolescent America like a wad of bubblegum, and there's no sign she will loosen her grip anytime soon...
Tracy Miller and Alice Cottrell believe their restaurant is haunted. They've heard stories from construction workers, toiling well into the wee hours, telling of eerie sounds humming through the spaces in the historic Boyd Hotel where their restaurant took shape after the pair operated a catering company for six years...
If, in keeping with current fads, you seek movies featuring females kicking a bunch of ass, your appetite will be tended (and cultivated) at the multiplex all summer long. Wander into your local art-house, however, and you may find a fine, if somewhat challenging, import called The Legend of Suriyothai--billed...
Thursday, July 24 We actually like it when people from other countries think Texans all ride horses, own ranches and wear cowboy hats. It's more intriguing than saying one lives in an apartment, drives an economy car and wears Gap khakis. But for a real glimpse at a Texas that...
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison sure sounded like a Democrat last week when she bitch-slapped the boys at Belo. In the wake of the FCC's ruling that a media conglomerate can own enough TV stations to reach 45 percent of the U.S. market (it used to be 35 percent), the Texas...
For a moment in The Hollow, a toothsome Agatha Christie murder mystery now onstage at Theatre Three, it looks as if the butler did it. And what a butler. Played by the towering Chris Messersmith, this majordomo skulks around corners and looms like an ancient Lurch over his household of...
Though her enthusiastic manner does not suggest it, Margaret Collins, when pressed, admits to a growing frustration. Still, as she sits in her Stemmons high-rise office, the executive director of the Dallas-area chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD) dutifully goes about her passion, ticking off her statistical talking points:...
Our range guide was a veteran of the first Gulf War, so it wasn't hard to steer the conversation to the lingering mysteries of the sequel. Saddam? "Dead," he said tersely. WMD's? "Buried deep in the desert," came his reply. The paltry resistance of the vaunted Republican Guard? Only a...
5/9 The idea is brilliant: Give aspiring and professional video-makers a prop, a location, a theme and 24 hours to produce an original five-minute video. Make it a race to the finish line. The results? Ahem...well...judging by last year's entrants in the Dallas Video Festival's 24 Hour Video Race, "brilliant"...
"I just got done frying up some bacon and eggs," Summer Hymns leader Zachary Gresham says with a lazy, Jimmy Carter drawl. "Now I just have to wash the pot." Cleaning up after breakfast at 2 in the afternoon, Gresham is living the life most would-be rock stars dream about...
Shelley King is onstage at a smoky punk dive on an oppressively humid summer night, hundreds of miles from home, in the middle of the Midwest. It's close to 100 degrees in the bar, and as she plays guitar and sings, even her knuckles are sweating. Her eclectic country songs...
