To grill or not to grill 6/25 This Bud’s on Bobby–or at least that’s how it was when my significant other interned with Bobby Flay at the chef’s Mesa Grill restaurant in New York. Flay ended each night with a round of complimentary cocktails for his staff (which almost made…
A wild and crazy ride 6/25 Cowboys are known for understatement. Take the Professional Bull Riders’ “common injuries” page, for example. It notes: “Virtually every bull rider will suffer from groin injury at least some point in his career.” You don’t say? The usual similes for describing bull riding–tornadoes, jackhammers,…
UTD/South Side’s artist exchange program 6/25 Few would call spilled wine a work of art. Most of us would spend a lot of time grumbling obscenities under our breath while cleaning up the red spilled mess left over from an all-night shindig. But Ryan Fitzer sees it differently. He is…
Some new Shoes 6/26 It took me a while to find the blues. Before my sophomore year in college–a year that, not coincidentally, marked my discovery of dark bars, Tom Waits and bourbon–the blues was a mere historical curiosity. Not something to listen to so much as a thing to…
If she weren’t so stinkin’ crazy, Annie Wilkes would be a writer’s best friend. In Misery, the highly enjoyable stage play of the Stephen King novel now eliciting laughs and screams at Richardson Theatre Centre, Annie (played with slow-building furor by Rachael Lindley) cajoles and coddles the author whose books…
David LaChapelle David LaChapelle imbues his photographs with a sense of good taste based on culture’s lowest common denominator. Theirs is a beauty based on kitsch run amok. LaChapelle’s photographs are a combination of surrealist celebrity and homages to Andy Warhol. Riffing on Warhol’s silkscreen images of electric chairs, LaChapelle’s…
The Hypochondriac Molière’s 350-year-old comedy about a man who imagines he’s at death’s door closes out the second season for Classical Acting Company. The wickedly spindly Chamblee Ferguson plays Argan, the wealthy tightwad obsessed with loosening his bowels and tightening his control on a lovesick daughter. He wants her to…
DC Comics has kept its superheroes locked in a fortress of solitude for almost a decade, forcing the likes of Superman and Batman to warm the bench while longtime rival Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man and the Hulk and the X-Men and Blade galloped up and down the playing field. Not counting…
For all their exceptionality, there is also a numbing sameness to the movies of Hayao Miyazaki, the revered animator who has bewitched Japanese audiences since the late 1970s and bewildered American ones since 1999, when Princess Mononoke was among the first of his movies to receive significant Stateside release. There…
Mel Brooks’ The Producers is the gift that keeps on giving. First there’s the original 1968 film, a nearly perfect 88 minutes of comedy. Its two leads, Zero Mostel, as slimy Broadway impresario Max Bialystock, and Gene Wilder, as wobbly-kneed accountant Leo Bloom, never did better work. It’s not a…
Betrayal Harold Pinter’s drama about the ins and outs of one middle-aged London couple’s adulterous affair takes a zig-zaggy route to storytelling. Scenes jump back and forth in time, moving backward gradually to the moment when Emma (Sue Birch) and Jerry (Steven Pounders) decide to cheat on their spouses and…
There’s an amazing amount of possibility in one letter. Change the “o” in Goss, as in Goss Gallery, to an “a” and you have a slightly altered form of flatulence–“gass.” Drop the “g” and you have “ass.” Bring them together, and what do you have? A lot of hot air,…
David LaChapelle David LaChapelle imbues his photographs with a sense of good taste based on culture’s lowest common denominator. Theirs is a beauty based on kitsch run amok. LaChapelle’s photographs are a combination of surrealist celebrity and homages to Andy Warhol. Riffing on Warhol’s silkscreen images of electric chairs, LaChapelle’s…
The title Long Dark Road works on so many levels, it almost feels like a cliché. Seven years ago this month, three white men in East Texas chained James Byrd Jr., a black man, to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him to his death. The case, of…
Thursday, June 16 People say the moral of Pinocchio is that honesty is always the best policy. We disagree. How about: Never look a gift horse in the mouth. Hey, Pinocchio, Geppetto carves you out of wood, doesn’t kill you in fear when you come alive and gives you a…
Get to the roots 6/18 Why celebrate your roots only one month out of a year? And by roots, I mean everyone’s roots. Yes, even that guy behind you who always honks the second a light turns green. (You know who you are. I am never amused.) If you haven’t…
Invite Mother Nature in 6/18 So, you think you’re all fancy with your fancy diving board and your fancy swimming pool. That’s OK, city slicker, but we’ll stick with our swimmin’ hole–that mucky pond we share with the bullfrogs, the box turtles and the minnows. You can’t convince us that…
A decade has been shot 6/17 It’s strange when people give you small tokens and later you realize what a huge impact that item had on you. Years ago, a date gave us a Joel-Peter Witkin postcard with a love note on the back. If you’re familiar with Witkin, you…
Live from South Park 6/17 The pitch about Isaac Hayes comes with the subject line “Black Moses,” and part of the text reads, “How many times does a person get a chance to go to a free concert by a Grammy-winning, Oscar-winning, gold record-selling, cookbook-writing, barbecue sauce aficionado who also…
I could never be David Sedaris’ sister. It’s not because he would tell embarrassing anecdotes about me in his books–look in any of them and there is an abundance of familial tales. It’s not because having such a brother would incite getting phone numbers unpublished, and the telling last name…
Robert Rodriguez just keeps cranking ’em out. This hasn’t always been a good thing–Spy Kids 2 and 3 felt rushed in a way that the first one didn’t, and Once Upon a Time in Mexico looked cheap compared with its cinematic predecessor, Desperado. But the more Rodriguez keeps at it,…
The consequences of marital discord in Mr. & Mrs. Smith go way beyond sleeping on the couch or maintaining icy silence at the breakfast table. Thanks to a cartoonish premise by British screenwriter Simon Kinberg–and the dictates of the summer-movie marketplace–the battling Smiths of the title go at each other…
