In the past 10 years there has not been a network television series as moving, as funny or as honest as Freaks and Geeks, which debuted on NBC in September 1999 and ran for a mere 18 episodes, not even an entire season’s worth of shows. Set in a Michigan…
The actors in Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes or The Green Pill, now playing at The MAC, are made up to look like human marionettes. They move with deliberate, jerky gestures, as if their limbs are manipulated by invisible strings. Their faces are painted chalky white, cheeks circled with bright…
It’s truly amazing what casting sculpture in video rather than the traditional media can do. Materials such as bronze, wood and stone just seem so clunky in comparison to video’s lightweight incandescence. Whether analogue or digital, the result of emulsification processes on paper or a pixelation on a screen, video…
Concentrations 44: Matthew Buckingham, A Man of the Crowd Installed deep within the recesses of the Museums contemporary art galleries, Matthew Buckinghams video piece is an exercise in refracted perception. The piece consists of photographs and video in two adjacent rooms. The juxtaposing of somber black-and-white photographs and the pyrotechnics…
An Inspector Calls The old J.B. Priestley ghost story finds an upper-crust British family interrupted in the celebration of their daughters engagement by a mysterious Inspector Goole (Neil Carpenter). A poor young woman has committed suicide. The inspector questions each member of the family and makes connections between the dead…
We’re not really superstitious. Anyone of intelligence understands a rabbit’s foot won’t bring you good luck. Nor will a four-leaf clover or an upturned horseshoe. Who could believe in that junk? We know the real ways to ensure good luck–we won’t pick up a coin that’s facedown or open an…
Thursday, April 8 Star-crossed lovers. Feuding families. It’s obvious: Romeo and Juliet. But what if it weren’t presented in the tired format we always see, with a longhaired waif, attractive punk and over-the-top rivalries (and settings) that aren’t ever really founded or explained. The Plano Repertory Theatre said “nay” to…
Doonesbury gets the letters of complaint and the threats to cancel newspaper subscriptions. But Bizarro hits its mark faster and more stealthily. Instead of four panels, the nationally syndicated newspaper cartoon Bizarro takes just one frame to lambaste those who oppose gay marriage but don’t apply the same standards to…
4/11 Forget about the Easter Bunny. For the past 18 years Easter has gone to the dogs in Lee Park as the Turtle Creek Association presents its annual Easter in the Park celebration featuring the infamous Pooch Parade and a performance by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Each year a colorful…
4/10 Not many tools are needed for this hunt: a keen eye, a quick hand, a basket and the chutzpah to shove scabby brats out of your way. When you spy a brightly colored egg nestled in a tuft of grass, those other snotty-nosed rugrats had better look out. OK,…
4/14 For Suzanne Weaver, keeping an ear to the ground for some earth-shaking rumble in the world of contemporary art isn’t enough. She palpates the inner wrist of the great body of art with her two longest fingers, feeling for the most energetic life force before enticing it to the…
Ongoing “When he smiles that smile, flashes those eyes and does those dimples, the house is his and he knows it.” So says The Washington Post about Ken Prymus’ turn in the Tony-winning musical revue Ain’t Misbehavin’. Sounds like a winner, right? One problem: How did the D.C. paper review…
She’s a pre-med farm girl intent on administering to the world’s suffering children. He’s a car-racing Danish prince looking to shed the burdens of royal duty. They’re both in America’s heartland, where they share a chem lab, an employer and a penchant for driving fast. What, pray tell, is going…
The Golden Age of the Comic Book Movie has turned the color of tarnished copper. But there is no going back, not when comic shops have become movie studios’ research and development labs. But no moving forward, either; the comic-book movie has become a cinematic smudge once more, one blurring…
Full disclosure: I like precisely one and a half Kevin Smith movies. There’s the one everyone else hates, the John Hughes homage Mallrats, and the first hour of the one everyone else loves, Chasing Amy, which dries up around the time Ben Affleck dumps Jason Lee for Joey Lauren Adams…
When Sheran Goodspeed-Keyton sings, the little hairs on the backs of your wrists start to quiver. Her magnificent voice can split the heavens and move an audience to tears. In Bessie Smith: Empress of the Blues, now onstage at Fort Worth’s Jubilee Theatre, her performance in the starring role seems…
Just as you found yourself comfortably attuned to painting as a two-dimensional medium, along comes an elaborate exhibition of work by the 19th-century English painter J.M.W. Turner to tell you otherwise. You find yourself asking, “Height and width, right?” That’s all there is to this timeworn window into the world–those…
Bessie Smith: Empress of the Blues When Smith, a superstar on the vaudeville circuits of the 1920s, died in a car accident in 1937, rumors started that she bled to death after being refused treatment at a whites-only hospital. Edward Albee picked up on the tale for his controversial 1960…
Jesús Moroles: Rock, Roll, and Play Its confusing to enter a gallery space that invites you to touch the art. It is even more so when the space beckons you to make and destroy pieces as part of the show. The current installation at the Dallas Museum of Art created…
Once a year, millions crowd in front of televisions to watch the year’s greatest commercials wrapped around some football championship game. And just as football is evenly divided between offense and defense, Super Bowl commercials also split into two camps: funny and serious. The zany side is generally predictable, led…
Thursday, April 1 We’ve been told that to appreciate NASCAR and not see it as cars driving in circles, we must attend a race. Only then, schooled by a fan of the sport, will we fully understand the skill behind pit strategy, the technology of cars going really fast for…
Bathroom humor is common at most food-eating contests or cookoffs. Contest foods run the gamut from wings to sausage to pie, and all have a certain level of disgusting magnetism that makes people line up either to watch or join in on stuffing their gullets. But what of the event…
