I have seen prog metal band King’s X in concert. I’m not saying I enjoyed it, but I am saying I sat on a barstool in leather pants with a freshly applied tramp stamp on my lower back in that smoky club that used to be attached to the Bronco…
Art can be found anywhere. Art is on museum walls and bathroom stalls, displayed in bars and on subway cars. Art is in the earth, in the clouds, in a flower and crap like that. And sometimes “rare and affordable prints” of modern art juggernauts are available at the Saks…
Think of it as a cross between a certain movie about gay cowboys and an extraordinarily talented baseball player. Brokeback Natural, perhaps. Take Me Out is the Tony Award-winning play about star slugger Darren Lemming who has a different version of “making it to third base” than most of his…
Robert Dean Stockwell might be most recognizable as an actor (“that Quantum Leap guy!”), but he has another career as a collage artist. It’s often difficult to get past the idea that collage art feels more like a grade-school cut-and-paste project than actual art. But Stockwell has impressed some—his work…
Chris Rock once said, “If a homeless person has a funny sign, he hasn’t been homeless that long.” Some may find that humor to be in bad taste, but he’s got a point. If you don’t have any nourishment, free time should be spent obtaining food, not funny. So the…
In 1989, President George H. W. Bush managed to unite Republicans and Democrats under one banner on one of the most divisive issues of the day: tap-dancing. Rivals John Conyers Jr. (D-MI) and Alfonso D’Amato (R-NY) put aside their differences in joint resolutions honoring tap-dancing, which Bush signed into law…
Lisa Lampanelli wants you to know she’s mean—the Queen of Mean is how she describes herself. She considers her act “bawdy” and has been compared to “a cross between Archie Bunker and Don Rickles.” According to Friars Club dean Freddie Roman, she’s able to “get away with saying anything.” And…
When Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark came out in 1981, Harrison Ford was already a star, thanks to the first two installments of Star Wars. But the role of Indiana Jones made Ford an action movie icon. Perfectly cast as the whip-lashing archaeologist with brains and balls, Ford…
This year’s Austin City Limits music festival lineup was announced last week, but it’s a bit underwhelming compared to last year’s and full of repeat offenders from previous editions. The general consensus for ACL 2006 thus far: “Nah, let’s skip it.”Now that you’re dead-set against Austin City Limits: “the festival,”…
Maggie Cheung is a gorgeous Asian superstar. She’s earned it, doing 82 films and TV shows since 1984—quadruple the work of film “sisters” Zhang Ziyi and Michelle Yeoh. She’s worked alongside Jackie Chan and, more recently, Jet Li (Hero, 2002), but her work in Wayne Wang’s Chinese Box (1997) and…
In the winter of 1949, B.B. King was playing guitar at a dance hall in Arkansas when a fight broke out. Two men were battling over a woman named Lucille and during the commotion knocked over a barrel half-full of kerosene that had been heating the room. Flames ignited, the…
Fusion is a concept I’ve never been comfortable with. No one can deny the greatness that is the spork, but the skort? Come on. The problem with fusion is that in order to achieve a good end result, you would have to take two beloved things and combine to produce…
Even though I don’t get into high school football, there was something to be said when the Highland Park Scots took the state championship last year. Those local-kids-do-good stories always choke me up. But then I started thinking, well, if these kids lost then their parents probably would have bought…
What would John N. Bucher think about our endless fascination with Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker? Never heard of him? That’s probably because the Hillsboro store owner wasn’t depicted in the movie Bonnie and Clyde. Bucher opened his shop one night in 1932 to two men who said they needed…
IMAX movies look a little too realistic, if you ask us. We once attended an IMAX movie with our elementary school class, only to flip out and run away crying while the opening “helicopter” sequence played before the feature. Hey, as 7-year-olds, we weren’t down with the illusion of hovering…
IMAX movies look a little too realistic, if you ask us. We once attended an IMAX movie with our elementary school class, only to flip out and run away crying while the opening “helicopter” sequence played before the feature. Hey, as 7-year-olds, we weren’t down with the illusion of hovering…
It’s never too early to learn to properly schmooze with the overpriced, crusty elite of America. But the first lesson doesn’t revolve around manners, business ethics or even the school of hard knocks—the key lies in a firm, solid grip on the shaft, and luckily, kids as young as 4…
The Green Mountain Energy Parade of Homes at the Bluffs at Winding Creek in McKinney made us feel like the biggest idiots on the face of the planet. The event’s name prompted us to wonder aloud, albeit for only 1.57 seconds, “They seriously plan to drive a bunch of model…
It’s easy to feed a shark. Take him out for the best Peking duck in town, follow with a trip to a strip joint where you buy him two lap dances and five shots and end with his favorite flavor of gelato and an earnest promise that you’ll have the…
Ejiofor plays Simon, aka Lola, a flamboyant drag queen who gets to sing show tunes, issue snappy putdowns, and look fabulous. (He is not, he explains, a transvestite, because while drag queens look good in a dress, trannies “look like Boris Yeltsin in lipstick.”) Lola is also nursing some deep…
If some religious extremists in India had gotten their way, the gorgeous fury of Deepa Mehta’s Water never would have reached the screen. As it is, these self-appointed censors shut down the production for years by staging demonstrations, torching Mehta’s sets and threatening her life. Eventually, the filmmaker moved her…
Ever sat through a show thinking you’ve seen and heard it all before? The derivative tunes, the hackneyed lyrics. The creative duo Eric Rockwell and Joanne Bogart had–too many times–before deciding a few years ago to take out some comic revenge by writing the four-actor off-Broadway hit The Musical of…
