Texas Monthly articles from June 2004

Texas Monthly archives from June 2004

Media culpa: should a few slipshod, unethical, biased journalists cause you to distrust the whole lot of us? Yes. And that's probably a good thing for democracy.(Behind the Lines)
June 1, 2004... If you believe what you read and hear these days, we are living through a sort of journalistic Dark Ages, an era of fabrication, plagiarism, and bias on an epic scale. Examples are everywhere but most prominently in the nation's leading...

The hits keep coming.(Roar of the Crowd)
June 1, 2004... I didn't know your top song survey was sent out only to people that remember what driving a Model-T was like ["The 100 Best Texas Songs," April 2004]. This was the geriatric all-star list of Texas songs, with the average song being released...

06.04.04.(June: people, places, events, attrations)
June 1, 2004... Dallas in the summertime has been called a lot of things--"heaven" has never been one of them. Of course, what isn't written in stone may be disproved this month when guitar enthusiasts flock to Fair Park for the CROSSROAD'S GUITAR FESTIVAL....

Around the state: wheelchair accessibility key.
June 1, 2004... (W) The place is accessible to wheelchairs. The main entrance is at least 32 inches wide and there are no steps; restrooms, however, are not accessible. (W+) The place and its restrooms are accessible. No symbol: This piece is not...

Animal magnetism.(Play dates/ for kids and the kid in you.)(Fossil Rim Wildlife Center)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... When was the last time the kids got to feed a giraffe? See a wildebeest? These are just a few of our favorite things to do at the Fossil Rim Wildlife Center, in Glen Rose. Explore at your own pace along the ten-mile scenic drive (don't be...

Taste test.(Play dates/ for kids and the kid in you.)(MRS. BAIRD'S BAKERY)(DUBLIN DR PEPPER BOTTLING COMPANY)(BLUE BELL CREAMERIES)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... Visit the state's famous food facilities for some edible education. No matter how you slice it, summertime in Texas gets toasty: Butter up your kids with a morning trip to MRS. BAIRD'S BAKERY, in Fort World and view the original hand-twisting...

The buzz.(Play dates/ for kids and the kid in you.)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... THE BUZZ Let's face it: Summer pests can be a pain in your grass. Your children return from the playground with annoying little friends, and soon your home is crawling with (uninvited) company. Don't let the kids bring the bugs to you--take...

Greatest Hits.(Coming attractions/ the month in art.)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... On June 27 the line to get in the Kimbell Art Museum, in Fort Worth, will probably resemble more closely that of a megaplex theater, and for good reason. It's the opening day of the summer blockbuster exhibit, "CARAVAGGIO TO DALI: ONE HUNDRED...

Moving pictures.(Coming attractions/ the month in art.)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... Though Diane Arbus was already a superstar in art circles by the time of her suicide, in 1971, she didn't get a major museum retrospective until 1972, when the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, organized a show in her honor. Her famous...

Portrait studio.(Coming attractions/ the month in art.)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... If you've ever watched an episode of Little House on the Prairie (your secret is safe with us), then you have some visual cue of what frontier life was like. Laura Ingalls' story was set in Kansas, but truth be told, things here in Texas...

Class warfare: last winter Sul Ross State professor Larry Sechrest publicly blasted his students and neighbors in Alpine as "just plain stupid." The town's reaction hasn't exactly changed his mind.(Reporter)
June 1, 2004... In 1888 the voters of Murphyville, in an early display of Texans' tendency to exaggerate the size of their natural endowments, changed the name of their town, which sat at 4,481 feet above sea level, to Alpine. Now in Switzerland, home of the...

Red Cashion is all maroon, all the time.(domain)(Biography)
June 1, 2004... Even though he retired as a National Football League referee in 1997, Cashion still travels worldwide as an NFL trainer for new refs. But he always comes back to Bryan-College Station, where he was born, went to school, and has lived all his...

Queen high: as a woman on the World Poker Tour, I've discovered the best way to gain a man's respect: walk away with his money.(As told to/ stories from Texans in their own words.)
June 1, 2004... I started playing poker when I was about fifteen years old. I dated a boy in high school, and we would go to his house and play Texas hold 'em and seven-card stud with his parents. We played every weekend, and his parents expected us to make...

The Cold Hard Truth.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... He may not write the finest songs, have the best looks, or even have the richest voice, but no one gets Texas honky-tonk like ED BURLESON. More than just another revivalist, his deep Texas roots (a relative of Burleson's was a Battle of San...

Dancing With Lyndon.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 1, 2004... In DANCING WITH LYNDON (TCU Press), San Antonio novelist DONLEY WATT treats us to 24 hours of Cottonwood in 1948, a place and time when white pharmacy customers could peruse postcards of bloody lynchings while shopping for health remedies....

In All Their Splendor.(music)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... LI'L CAP'N TRAVIS began like so many Austin bands, playing sloppy but earnest alt-country with semi-sober apathy, and their first two albums betrayed a band that had a lot more going for it. Their third,... IN ALL THEIR SPLENDOR (Glurp), might...

Cronies.(journals)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... With CRONIES (public Affairs), Texas journalist ROBERT BRYCE explores the perception that the interests of big business and the ruling Republicans have become one and the same. Bryce catalogs Texas politicos" long history of cozying up with...

Keep Your Wig On.(FASTBALL releases its third music album)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... Don't pity the one-hit wonders--so they get wildly rich and famous only once. If they're smart, they've still got a career, even if it's one that ends in a Fargo dinner theater. Maybe Austin rockers FASTBALL understand this. After topping...

Never The Same Again (A Rock N' Roll Gothic).(Brief Article)(Biography)
June 1, 2004... On August 16, 1976, JESSE SUBLETT was a fledgling bass player riding high on the afterglow of his rock band's first San Antonio gig. Then he returned to his South Austin rent house and discovered his girlfriend, Dianne Roberts, murdered. In his...

Another round? Critics believe George Foreman is a fool to get back in the ring. I say the champ is no chump.(Not that you asked/ but here's my opinion anyway.)
June 1, 2004... When I read late last winter that George Foreman, at age 55, wanted to fight again, my first thought was "Here's a reality show that I might actually watch." Put Foreman, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, and oh, I don't know, maybe Cedric the...

Viva la diferencia: a Harvard egghead sees a grim future in Texas's projected Hispanic majority. Maybe he should spend some time in San Antonio.
June 1, 2004... "My clients from Mexico are very sophisticated," said realtor Connie Ramirez as she wheeled her four-door gray Mercedes to the front gate of Sonterra, a plush gated community thirteen miles north of downtown San Antonio that is known as...

Going for the jiggler: when I was growing up in the Panhandle, Jell-O played a part in my family's life, and it still does. It's fun, versatile, and always topped with a comforting dollop of nostalgia.
June 1, 2004... The rainbow table was always the best part of the Dingus family reunion. In the big park at little Buffalo Gap, where the clan gathered annually in the fifties and sixties, there were plenty of entertainments for my siblings and me: a swimming...

Lost in translation: whatever happened to men behaving badly and the agony of defeat? When Hollywood makes movies about sports in Texas, suspense and real-life drama often get left on the cutting-room floor.
June 1, 2004... Late in North Dallas Forty, the 1979 film adapt ation of former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Peter Gent's roman a clef, actor Mac Davis is washing down unprescribed painkillers with Budweiser while recounting a community-service visit with a...

Bill Moyers: the seventy-year-old journalist--whose new collection of speeches and essays arrives in bookstores this month--on why he's parting ways with PBS, what it was like to work for LBJ, and whether objectivity is all it's cracked up to be.(Talks)(Interview)
June 1, 2004... Why, at this time in your life, have you decided to call it quits at PBS? I sensed the light at the end of the tunnel. I've been producing television for 32 years. I started in the fall of '71, and while I feel in one sense that I'm at the top...

Coasting: ride a wave, hunt for shells, build a sand castle, spy on wildlife, eat the catch of the day, watch the sun set: now is the perfect time to rediscover the endlessly surprising swath of sand where Texas meets the Gulf.
June 1, 2004... >> I was a lucky kid. I lived on Galveston Bay, where I could ride my horse in the surf and watch the moon pop out of the water from my bedroom window. But my luck didn't last. The industrial pollution finally got so thick that my family fled,...

The rehabilitation of Charlie Wilson: from booze-guzzling, skirt-chasing, check-kiting congressman to American hero in--you guessed it--twelve steps.
June 1, 2004... A LOT OF TERMS WERE USED to describe seventy-one-year-old former U.S. congressman Charlie Wilson when he represented deep East Texas on Capitol Hill from 1973 to 1996, and "hero" was not typically among them. "Hopeless alcoholic" was. So too...

Life and meth: since the arrival of cheap, homemade speed in East Texas five years ago, the drug has torn apart countless families and turned kids into addicts--and there's no end in sight.
June 1, 2004... UNTIL FIVE OR SIX YEARS AGO, Kent Graham, a narcotics investigator from Nacogdoches County, could count on finding one or two methamphetamine labs a year. Now, strangers stop Graham at the grocery store or take him aside at Wal-Mart--one man...

An F for effort: too much finance, not enough school: that was one of the problems with the special session called for the purpose of eliminating Robin Hood in favor of--what? Nobody seemed to have a workable alternative. Regardless, the Speaker and the governor bumbled along, and all signs point to the people of Texas paying dearly.
June 1, 2004... I wish the Texas House of Representatives would install suites in the gallery. They'd make a fortune: comfortable chairs, leg room, food and drink, no DPS officers to admonish you for chortling with your neighbor at the antics on the House...

His Mickey Mouse ways: an appreciation of Waylon Jennings.
June 1, 2004... SO HOW WOULD YOU FEEL? It's 1958. You're 21-years old, spinning wax at a two-bit radio station in the middle of West Texas, just happy to be out of the cotton patch and not knowing nothing about nothing but Ernest Tubb, Pepsi-Colas, drive-in...

Pat's pick: Cebu.(June: restaurants, cafes, bistros, joints)
June 1, 2004... San Antonio's most exotic new dining venue, Cebu looks utterly American, with sponge-painted walls and Ella and Louis on the sound system. But open the menu, and you're in a whole other country: the Philippines, to be precise. Are you ready for...

The Dining Guide: policies and definitions.
June 1, 2004... The Dining Guide is a service to our readers. The magazine accepts no advertising or other consideration in exchange for a listing. Reviews are written by resident critics in the cities that we list. The reviewers' identities are kept anonymous...

Drink, eat and be merry.(Eating around/ gastronomic getaways in Texas--and beyond.)
June 1, 2004... Wanted: Earthy, complex, full-bodied dinner companion with good legs and a long finish. Does that describe what you've been seeking in a wine? Then you should find plenty to interest you on the upcoming California junket of Foodtravels.com....

Ardor in the court: I love Racehorse Haynes for the same reason his clients do: he's one of the most colorful silver-tongued devils to grace Texas since God made trial lawyers.
June 1, 2004... At a recent book signing of mine at Murder by the Book, in Houston, I was pleased to see the legendary defense lawyer Racehorse Haynes making his way through the crowd. Little Jewford, the last surviving member of the Texas Jewboys, had just...