Arts & Culture

Once a year, we’re allowed to celebrate our country’s history by eating hot dogs and exploding things. On July Fourth, get the lakeside view, watching the fireworks display at Lake Grapevine, (grapevinetexasusa.com). Or choose the Lakewood view; the Lakewood Theater (1825 Abrams Parkway) claims to have the best seat in…

Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band isn’t hip. But it’s a show that’s totally worth seeing. I saw them in Atlantic City in 2001, when Howard Jones was part of the lineup and an impatient Ringo had to bully the casino audience into giving Jones the requisite sing-along “whoa”s. It…

Planning on celebrating your Fourth of July weekend with some, uh, garage sale hunting? Well, it makes sense on some level—holiday weekends are a buyer’s market when it comes to rummaging through stacks of clothes, records and furniture on people’s front lawns, so if you’re stuck in the city, you…

You’re off on Tuesday, which means you’re probably not going to be partyin’ into the wee hours when you have to get up for work Wednesday. No, a logical person would take a vacation day Monday (having done the responsible family picnic-type stuff over the weekend), use said vacation day…

You’re off on Tuesday, which means you’re probably not going to be partyin’ into the wee hours when you have to get up for work Wednesday. No, a logical person would take a vacation day Monday (having done the responsible family picnic-type stuff over the weekend), use said vacation day…

You’re off on Tuesday, which means you’re probably not going to be partyin’ into the wee hours when you have to get up for work Wednesday. No, a logical person would take a vacation day Monday (having done the responsible family picnic-type stuff over the weekend), use said vacation day…

Stevie Ray Vaughan is assured a place on lists of important guitarists because he executes each note with a muscular confidence that convinces a listener that Vaughan believes what he is playing. The uniqueness of this quality in popular music is a shame, but the impact is all the more…

You can pretend all you want that you’re still a kid—wear that messenger bag and pair of Chucks, keep the Mats cassette in the Honda Accord and say things like, “I’m only 27, man”—but adulthood officially begins when you rearrange your schedule to enjoy midweek holidays. Sure, you might get…

Nine Eyes Studio is a dangerous place. One minute you’re drinking with friends and enjoying an exhibit in the gallery, the next minute you’re sitting in a chair in the adjoining tattoo studio with a Chinese dragon on your arm. Sure, it may have seemed like a good idea when…

What better way to celebrate freedom than by gathering in a field with thousands of the very people that are helping to ruin it for the rest of us?! This Saturday, KLTY presents Celebrate Freedom 2006, billed as “the largest free outdoor concert in America” and featuring a slew of…

Mavs fans shouldn’t worry: The Diesel Fighting Championship doesn’t have anything to do with Shaquille O’Neal. Fans of the Ultimate Fighter series on Spike TV can go ahead and worry, though; it remains to be seen whether the local cage-fighting event has anything to do with the high-level martial arts…

There’s nothing better than a Hollywood homicide, even if it’s only pretend. But then really, isn’t everything in Hollywood pretend anyway? With people selling pictures of their newborns (with “dare to be different” names) to the highest bidder and crazy couch-jumping scenes galore, some of these celebrities are more entertaining…

While I dare not deny its fab quotient, I have serious doubts about the new W Hotel. There’s something about that indention (aka half a missing floor) that terrifies me. Someone assure me, and assure me quick, that it’s not just gonna fall down and go boom. I had mixed…

The number seven has long been representative of perfection and godliness. Whether it’s Proverbs 9:1 (“Wisdom has built her house, she has hewn her seven pillars.”) or the Pixies’ “Monkey Gone to Heaven,” (“…then God is seven”) evidence of seven’s numerological purity is well-documented. Angelbert Metoyer was born on the…

I love INXS. (Yeah, yeah, shut up already.) They can go all adult contemporary and produce a musical, I really don’t care. More than a decade of their music, ranging from ska and punk to Top 40, provided a soundtrack to my life, and for that they get my loyalty…

Every young reader needs an adventurous heroine. For those of a certain age, it was Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby. But if we’re of “a certain age,” then Ramona is too. Enter Junie B. Jones, a 6-year-old girl whose adventures inspire readers to keep the pages (and the wheels in their…

At my place, the “Four Steps to Lasting Happiness and Bliss” are the distance between the couch and a fridge full of cold Stella Artois. But if you’re interested in four alternate steps to lasting happiness and bliss, Sandi Smith’s got ’em. The pilot, CPA and pro traveler has developed…

Iowa native Eric Tosten has been carving out his place in the Dallas art scene with fluid plastic and acrylic shapes that bend and swirl against medium-density fiberboard and paper like magnified blood samples from one of Keith Haring’s stick figures. Tosten’s more recent pieces seem to shed some of…

What one considers to be art is subjective. Great art, however, leans on this principle to the point of breaking it, becoming a subversive force that tears through quiet salons and galleries with its raw attitude and unprincipled demands. Matthew Barney has the soul of great revolutionaries such as Dali,…