1985 Bum Steer Awards
A year of arousing art, bumbling bush, coerced canines, deranged Dallas, eureka! Eureste, freeway fantasy, groping Germans, hurtling helicopters, idiotic Irving, and jocose jelly beans.
A year of arousing art, bumbling bush, coerced canines, deranged Dallas, eureka! Eureste, freeway fantasy, groping Germans, hurtling helicopters, idiotic Irving, and jocose jelly beans.
Twenty picks for the best classical recording of 1984.
A book on Mexico by New York Times correspondent Alan Riding is a little more than a rehash of recent history.
Arquitectonica is trying to sell Texans on gimmicky forms, bright colors, and high-tech materials in the name of avant-garde.
They told me alligators don’t eat people. But when I found myself face to face with one in a dark East Texas swamp, I hoped they’d told him too.
The inside skinny on the elections.
Three Texas Trivia games separate Lone Star zealots from ordinary believers.
A new law takes the driving out of DWI; a new battle brews on the Texas Supreme Court; Exxon gets rid of an old burden; so does Clinton Manges.
After winning seven straight state basketball championships, the Snook Bluejays are learning that success has a flip side.
The Word Processor reveals the wisdom of the Good Book with a few keystrokes.
Kung’s underground hideaway; Dallas’ Cadillac wars; the Panhandle’s art terrorists; Houston’s poet-laureate; Austin’s airport quandary.
It’s not quite a lie and not quite the truth. It’s a patriotic duty.
Body Double settles for facile thrills; Comfort and Joy offers moments of magical bliss; The Little Drummer Girl is off-pitch.
For a perfectly decorated tree, call Tom Osborn. But only if money is no object.
Holiday clothes go to the Longhorn Ballroom as easily as to charity balls.
Honky-tonks: how to get in, how to get out.
Tales of Houston as it faces life after the boom.
If marriage means commitment and trust, that’s fine. If it means never dancing in front of a Billy Idol video again, that’s no so fine.
I took my son fishing because I wanted him to love the sport—and me.
Selling crime self-help devices has become a booming business. But do any of these gadgets really make us safer?
The Houston premiere of Phillip Glass’ Akhnaten was a grand opera.
Clap, clap, clap, clap.
Frederick Barthelme’s first novel, Second Marriage, is a wondrous tale of love and absurdity set in the Gulf Coast suburbs.
Son of a gun, they've got great food on the bayou.
Shopping from catalogs can keep you in fashion and out of the malls.
No joy in Cubville; deregulation is a gas; two airline wars—one cold, one hot; are the politicians back in control at UT?
And all through the house, every modem was stirring, and so was the mouse.
Life after the oil bust is fair-to-Midland; bad News, hard Times in Laredo; I hear a timpani; a coach who believes winning is everything.
What is it that makes them dance across the desert night? A trick of physics—or something stranger?
Brave Combo’s World Dance Music brings wit and verve to an unlikely mix of sounds; the Sir Douglas Quartet is still recording after all these years.
Country and Places in the Heart both heap on down-home moral uplift; Stop Making Sense is a joyous rockumentary; Amadeus spouts dingdong conceits.
Why did I trade in my trouble-free condo for an aging country home with decrepit plumbing? I’m trying to figure that out myself.
Tribute to Teagarden captures the fullness and humanity of the late Texas trombonist’s art; plus a roundup of recent jazz releases.
When Houston’s rich and powerful join forces with environmentalists to battle big corporations, they can be fighting over only one thing. Garbage.
What astronaut Alan Bean saw on the moon changed his life. Now, with paint and canvas, he’s trying to let the rest of us see it too.
These fourteen Texas sheriffs are everything you thought a sheriff ought to be. But look quick; the old-time county lawman is riding off into the sunset.
The proud and promising Froggies.
Dan Jenkins’ new football novel, Life Its Ownself, picks up where Semi-Tough left off; Heat from Another Sun, a dark detective novel, turns on the gore.
Whistler had nothing on the 22 artists represented in a survey of Hispanic art.
From lacquered debutante to fossilized ol’ gal, her greatest virtue is endurance.
W. A. Criswell has spent forty years convincing his huge flock at Dallas’ First Baptist Church that the end of the world is near. He hopes you’ll believe it too.
So you think that OPEC controls the price of oil and that the glut is hurting everybody in the oil business? Wrong. Traders on the international spot market are pulling the strings and getting rich in the process.
Hunting gear that even Natty Bumppo would approve of.
Bullock brings a touch of Las Vegas to Texas; two Texas congressmen covet the same plum; an oil company sends a signal to Wall Street; a court fight could cost UT and A&M $20 million; a big man belongs in Houston.