Arts & Culture

Becoming a bride in Plano may seem like a good idea, but then it’s 20 years later, your kids are on drugs and you’re stumbling home drunk from TGI Friday’s with a belly full of Ultimate Strawberry Daiquiris, looking for your townhome on a street where they all look exactly…

As an artistic medium, photography excels at capturing the intensity of a moment in time. For instance, Lindsay Lohan’s umpteenth nipple slip last week is now light suspended in gelatin, a moment of solemnity preserved for the ages. But the sentiment is not always so portentous. Uptown gallery Photographs Do…

That J.K. Rowling hussy has nothing on bad-ass mofo Arthur Miller, who understands what it’s like to be a witch from the wrong side of the tracks. All Harry, Ron, Hermione and the Hogwarts crew do is flit around on their little brooms with their little house elves and silly…

Yours truly will be one of the “celebrity judges” judging this year’s 27th Annual Greenville Avenue St. Patrick’s Day Parade. That means either the bar for celebrity here has fallen way, way below the low bar set by the likes of Judge Judy, or the press release announcing “Dallas’ version…

Used to be if you wanted a public head-shaving, you’d go see The Banes. But since the sad demise of that band, one has few opportunities to “bald it up” onstage. Fortunately, St. Baldrick’s, the patron saint of “what seems like a drunken frat prank but actually helps kids,” has…

Hmm, books on our shelves that have the author’s autograph in them: Sarah Vowell’s Take the Cannoli, Augusten Burrough’s Dry, Robert M. Quackenbush’s Detective Mole and the Tip-Top Mystery (thank you Scholastic Book Fair). Hell, we might even possess a signed hardback copy of Jackie Collins’ Lovers & Players (we…

Dudes need dude-time, much in the same way flowers need sunlight or drama students need to quote Rent every four minutes. Otherwise, they wither up and die, and you don’t want that for your favorite little dude, do ya? That’s why you should send him to the Kramer Games, an…

If Neil Strauss ever planned to pen a sequel to The Game, the “pick up girls’ manifesto, he’d probably suggest a floral show as a wonderful place to sweet-talk (read: lie) your way into a woman’s heart. Do a little Googling beforehand (you can appear knowledgeable about tulips, daisies and…

Some things the Dallas office of the International Rescue Committee has down pat. In 2005, for example, the refugee assistance agency locally resettled 457 victims of persecution or torture from countries including Liberia, Somalia and Sudan. Some other things, however, they’re still working on—like fund-raisers. “We’ve kind of had some…

Chicago poster artist Jay Ryan has honed his quirky hand-drawn style for more than a decade, making crudely elegant album art and posters for a diverse roster of clients including Andrew Bird, Built to Spill and the Decemberists. His imaginative drawings feature such scenes as turtles raising a flag Iwo…

Chicago poster artist Jay Ryan has honed his quirky hand-drawn style for more than a decade, making crudely elegant album art and posters for a diverse roster of clients including Andrew Bird, Built to Spill and the Decemberists. His imaginative drawings feature such scenes as turtles raising a flag Iwo…

The dating scene can be a real swamp. At every watering hole, endless numbers of snakes and rats lie in wait for their prey, and a girl can only fend off so many orange-toothed nutrias and scaly crocs before she’s ready to call it quits. But, ladies, just remember that…

The ’70s had disco, the ’80s had Madonna, the ’90s had grunge…but what about the ’00s? Far be it from us to predict the future, but we think people will label this decade as “the years that more blades were added to razors.” Cuttin’ wars continue to this very day,…

Being that my father is a chef and my sister and her husband are caterers, I’ve had the privilege of being exposed to some really good food throughout the years. Unfortunately, it shows—imagine the desperation on my face during frantic workouts at the gym. But I guess that’s another story…

“Hell is other people.” When Jean Paul Sartre coined that phrase in his play No Exit, he must have been anticipating Paris Hilton, Dr. Phil and everyone on American Idol. The play revolves around three characters trapped for eternity in a drawing room in hell, where they chatter on about…

Art is all about coming up with something new with which to excite the imagination of one’s audience. Thus, you’ll have to forgive me if my mind is less than stimulated by an art exhibit titled New Paintings. I guess it’s better than Paintings, Slightly Worn, but in VG Condition…

The first time this Southern Baptist white boy from the outskirts of Dallas heard the live version of “King Without a Crown” pounding from his car stereo, he said to himself, “Wow! This Modest Yahoo guy is great! I’m going to look him up on iTunes and see if he’s…

All humans cry tears, but how many can effectively cry pixels? Very few individuals are able to take a universal display of emotion and digitize it without losing something in the process. Artist John Pomara is one of those few. In 96-tears, he effectively and eloquently allows “qualities of static…

What would Chappelle’s Show have been without straitlaced white actors for Dave to act off of? Of course, it’s hard for comedians like Bill Burr to stand out when Chappelle gets the biggest laughs in sketches like “The Racial Draft,” but when solo, he pulls his weight. Hell, Burr’s a…

Raise your hand if you’ve actually seen the last half of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Seriously people. Unless you are in the theater, with an exceptional supporting live cast, the film just doesn’t hold up past the dinner party/people turning to stone portion. Don’t get me wrong, there are…

Spoken in the voice of movie-trailer guy: “In a world…where evil dwells and bad deeds are rewarded…one man…”—cue an image of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson walking with a torn, bloody shirt and two oversized pistols—”must muster the courage to protect one Jew”—and here’s the shot of Mel Brooks gasping as…