Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth Anselm Kiefer is one of the few artists in the world who knows how to make the same old thing interesting. Though he’s been making monumental, craggy-surfaced and quasi-spiritual paintings for 30 years, they continue to succeed in disarming the viewer, making her feel just…
Visiting Mr. Green A young man visits an old Jewish widower every week for six months. They talk, they eat kosher chicken soup, they sip tea. Wisdom is shared, secrets revealed. Sound like Tuesdays with Morrie? Well, kinda. Actually Jeff Baron’s play is more like a very special episode of…
It’s not easy being German after World War II. Born in 1945, the German conceptualist and painter Anselm Kiefer has spent most of his time as an artist directly or indirectly confronting the matter of national identity. Confrontation began more as silent collision in his earliest work, with Kiefer posed…
Yes, Virginia, there really is a Santa Claus, but instead of flying eight tiny reindeer, Mr. Ho Ho Ho tools around the world in a Global Express jet. Where once he ran an elfin toy shop, he now swipes his Visa Platinum and receives Free Cash Rewards. Yes, Virginia, that’s…
Thursday, November 17 I can’t deny it. I love board games. Nothing gets my heart pumping like a hotly contested game of Trivial Pursuit, especially when fatigue sets in and saying something as innocuous as “We’ll take Science and Nature for the piece” leaves you sweating like a sailor on…
The 7th Annual Deep Ellum Film Festival, which no longer happens anywhere near Deep Ellum, officially got under way on Sunday, when Brad Bird flew into Dallas for a quickie visit–to pick up the fest’s newly minted Texas Avery Animation Award, so named for the maker of Bugs Bunny funnies…
Bass Hall welcomes the bubbas of opera 11/23 Luciano Pavarotti rakes in the cash selling out stadiums. Larry the Cable Guy comes close to filling arenas but makes up for empty seats with beer sales. So it was only a matter of time before some synergy-obsessed marketing dynamo came up…
The Southwest is exposed in infrared 11/17 I’m suspicious of people who would choose invisibility for their superpower. Everyone knows the real reason they want it is to sit undetected in dressing rooms and be pervy. I want a superpower–such as flying or a heightened sense–that opens up unavailable worlds…
Motocross gets woodsy 11/18 You’ve scrounged around in barns and garages until you’ve found a vintage motocross motorcycle badly in need of repair. You’ve sweated, toiled and spent thousands restoring your historic beauty to pristine condition. Now what do you do–stick it in a climate-controlled garage and spend your weekends…
A living guide to music greets fans 11/17 Considering how fractured popular music has become (don’t mix your BET with my FUSE), it’s a wonder to find a talented writer exploring how vastly different artists can share a romantic yearning for something more. In his well-received book I’ll Take You…
Putting together a sequel to a hit videogame is tricky business. Play it safe and give people more of the same, and it ends up feeling stale. But try to innovate too much, and you dilute what made the game great to begin with. Soul Calibur III somehow manages to…
Keira Knightley, who is all of 20 but has the grace and gravitas of someone a good decade older, probably considers herself the luckiest lass in all the world at present. Just as Pride & Prejudice begins filling the cineplex with dewy, hopeless romantics who can’t get enough of Jane…
As a screenwriter, Shane Black has built a reputation on action movies featuring mismatched partners. Crazy Mel Gibson and aging Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon; sassy Samuel L. Jackson and amnesiac hit-woman-housewife Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight; burnout detective Bruce Willis and football player Damon Wayans in The…
Pay attention, Disney: This is how you do a family film right. Neither pandering nor dull, Zathura plays exactly like a no-limits replica of the kind of space adventure that imaginative kids left to their own devices might enact. Assuming there’s no Xbox to distract them, naturally. Loosely based on…
Moviegoers with a taste for nasty villains will get all they can handle from the heavy in Swedish director Mikael Håfstrom’s Derailed. Philippe LaRoche–played with obvious relish by a craggy-faced Vincent Cassel–is not the kind of effete Frenchman you find reading poetry in the corner bistro while he sips a…
Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art Before you stammer in disbelief, yes, Iraqi artists are making contemporary art. And, yes, it’s good. This show educates and enthralls through form, disabusing you of any misconceptions you might have had about Iraqi culture while indulging your eyes and emotions. The book art showing…
BEEM! So far it’s definitely low-BEEM! But if writer-actor John S. Davies pares down his autobiographical one-man comedy, he might have something with higher wattage here. Presented in a Sunday night showcase format, the one-act switches among three characters: Davies, the actor; Bill Beem, an egotistical Kansas City chef who…
They talk, we listen. Stripped down to basics, that’s live theater. And in two new productions–the warm and funny Visiting Mr. Green at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas and the eerily prescient Humpty Dumpty at Second Thought Theatre (relocated to Addison)–the actors do the talking part so well that we in…
Fashion. Style. Emotion. Female empowerment? That’s right. Move over, Steinem, Sex and the City mastermind Candace Bushnell has re-charted the women’s movement, and we’re taking our Manolos and flat irons along for the ride. And thank goodness for the shift–repressed femininity is a witch. Bushnell’s latest work, Lipstick Jungle, is…
Thursday, November 10 Perhaps you’ve just read the two novels (Since You’re Leaving Anyway, Take Out the Trash and new release My Heart May Be Broken, But My Hair Still Looks Great) by Dixie Cash, never having bothered to read the flap about the author or look at www.dixie-cash.com. If…
Discover Davy Rothbart 11/11 Columbus found America. Magellan found the Philippines. Missy Elliott found Ciara. And Davy Rothbart found a bunch of crap that he compiled into a best-selling book. Random pieces of rubbish, such as love letters, kiss-off letters, doodles and other detritus, populate the pages of Rothbart’s FOUND,…
The MLS Cup gets fans to show up 11/13 Pizza Hut Park, the new home of FC Dallas, should be filled to its capacity of 21,000-plus for the 2005 MLS Cup. Too bad FC Dallas won’t be playing–it would have been a nice change for a team that finished the…
