On these would-be millennial times, the claim that “God is in the details” might easily be mistaken for another plug for spiritual shysters on the make–one more slogan for the verbal arsenal of God-hucksters so ready to link faith and fortune. Let us not forget that it has long been…
Robert Bechtle: A Retrospective Just as Freud’s rejoinder that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” was deceptively simple, so too are Robert Bechtle’s paintings of shiny jalopies, suburban tract housing and ground-hugging strip-mall architecture. Bechtle treats these dumb objects as chunks, wedges and slivers of flat-image composition. The pink…
With cinematic role models such as Napoleon Dynamite, we wonder if any of today’s teenagers will ever be lucky in love or anything else. When we were their age, movies helped us navigate the minefields of high school, the mall and our friend’s backyards. Take Fast Times at Ridgemont High,…
Thursday, August 11 Those old, heavy cast-iron skillets are good for more than smacking animated critters in cartoons. While Mom only hauls hers out for fried chicken, a new cast-iron craze advocates using those weighty skillets for more than home and campfire cooking. They’re gourmet now. Sure, the bible of…
Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back were both page-turning bestsellers and entertaining box-office sweethearts. The Interruption of Everything, however–and don’t we know we’ll get some disagreement on this–should probably just head directly over to Lifetime for the movie option. The latest release from the otherwise strong,…
Dinner fit for The King 8/16 Being dead creates a few hurdles for celebrity image management. Take, for example, the king of rock ‘n’ roll. I can’t imagine that it would make Elvis happy to see that the most impersonated, celebrated version of him is the fat-ass Vegas act with…
A walk on the wildlife side 8/12 There used to be this furry creature in my backyard sometimes. It would dig through my trash, scratch at my window screens and once I even caught it cowering in a dark corner of my garage. After the fourth or fifth incident, I…
Kelly Berry does the locomotives 8/12 It’s all about trains. Trains and their parts. And if I had been more like my brother, totally interested in anything mechanical and anything with motion, then I might be a ton more psyched about Kelly Berry’s upcoming exhibit at the Magnolia Bar Gallery…
From the small screen to the big stage 8/13 Early reviews of the latest American Idols Live tour report that Carrie Underwood isn’t singing her bone-chilling rendition of Heart’s “Alone.” Of course she’s doing that awful “Inside Your Heaven” song. And for that I advise anybody thinking of attending the…
The contentedly independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch has brought his restless energy to a series of surreal road movies that move nicely along on the strength of rare characters, quirky humor and a willing embrace of chance adventure. These quest stories for hipsters have transported Jarmusch’s fiercely loyal audience from New…
There has always been much to love about the Dallas Video Festival: its eclectic scheduling of full-length features alongside experimental shorts that last this long, its awards named for unheralded pioneers and visionaries (Ernie Kovacs, and now Albert Maysles) and the unbridled, contagious enthusiasm of its founder and artistic director…
And so, once more, the googolplex emits the stink of the network rerun, this week offering yet another worthless big-screen take on small-screen detritus. As Hollywood wonders–cries, actually, over spilt spoiled milk–why audiences are staying away from theaters, offering theories ranging from the absence of such phenoms as The Passion…
Kirsten Macy With Kirsten Macy and her work, artist and object create total synergy. Like her paintings, collages and videos, Macy is dissonantly colorful, charmingly brash and on her way to a big and bright future. An artist working in various media, from desktop animation to whole-body performance, Macy approaches…
King Ubu The Festival of Independent Theatres runs one more weekend. Try to see this one, a smart and politically relevant update of Ubu Roi by the Second Thought Theatre company. Steven Walters, one of the area’s finest young leading men, teams with Allison Tolman, the most interesting young actress…
If only Zach could see Southern Baptist Sissies, now running at Uptown Players. All summer dozens of online blogs have bounced stories and comments back and forth about Zach, a 16-year-old Tennessee boy whose own Web journal details his fears of being dispatched by his parents to Love in Action,…
There are some obvious questions you ask when buying a car: What kind of gas mileage does it get, what’s the warranty, how’s the crash test rating, will I hate this color in two months, what will the seats look like covered in cherry Slurpee, no, really, how much do…
Thursday, August 4 Rick O’Hara would never tell you to get your head out of the clouds. He’d commend you on having stars in your eyes. Of course, he is the planetarium creator at the Emily Fowler Central Library in Denton. The library welcomes stargazers ages 7 and older to…
The Susan B. Anthony dollar coins are so sad. I mean, really, who uses them? They’re forever being confused with quarters, jamming soda machines, baffling 7-Eleven clerks and sitting unused in change jars across the country. The Susan B. Anthony coin isn’t even the big cheese anymore now that that…
Meet Daryl Sprout, snake fan 8/6 With the National Geographic Channel, PBS, Discovery, Animal Planet et al regularly airing shows about the beauty, necessity and all-around coolness of snakes, you’d think most of America would have gotten the message by now: Don’t fear the snake; the snake is your friend…
To try a triathlon, go someplace else 8/7 Dallas isn’t the greatest city to live in for a competitive triathlete. Being the landlocked wonder that we are you’d think we’d learn to take better care of our bodies of water. But no, the last person to actually swim in White…
Culture clash at the DMA 8/7 There was a time when “art” was a social touchstone in the way that Star Wars, Desperate Housewives or that new Coldplay album is today. It brought people together regardless of critical consensus and generated thought, conversation and debate. For better or for worse,…
Wiggles aren’t just kids’ play 9/29 Between the White Stripes and Warren Zevon in my iTunes library are some 56 Wiggles songs. What the kiddo wants, the kiddo gets, and what he usually wants are “Wiggles, Daddy, more Wiggles.” He’s 2, by the way, which means there are plenty more…
