2/27 Fashion faux pas. Fake smiles. Unwarranted political platforms. Inflated egos. The culmination of all these things can mean only one thing: It’s Oscar time again! Oh, yeah, and some of the year’s top films will be honored and immortalized as well, but who has time to keep track of…
2/26 How can you tell the difference between your common everyday rain cloud and the storm that’s going to produce a tornado? Guy Webster, my elementary school classmate, knew. Walking home from school one day after classes had been let out early because of threatening weather, Guy pointed to two…
2/25 Aside from having a last name that evokes childish playground humor, Joey Seeman is a nationally and locally acclaimed artist (just look at the work he does for this paper) with an art style that broils in its expressionism. The main thing to remember is that Seeman’s paintings are…
2/24 I always said I’d never be one of those writers who has a kid and suddenly starts writing about, you know, being a daddy, unless there was a lot of money in it. Turns out there isn’t; about all I can get out of this particular chore are three…
Lewis Black owes his career to Texas twice over. Texas’ favorite son, George W. Bush, is an inviting target for the apoplectic political humor Black delivers on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. But it is to Texas that Black also owes his late-’80s decision to become a comic. Black was…
Thursday, February 17 Make a reference to the coast in Texas and it’s assumed said coast is lapped by “waves” from the Gulf of Mexico. Texans can be slightly too “We have everything you’d wanna see here in the Lone Star State!” But Barry Whistler and his gallery are reminding…
More than 20 years ago, Henry Su turned his head at a stoplight on Kings Highway in Shreveport. He heard a familiar sound coming from a strip mall: numbers shouted in Cantonese. The sound pulled him into a small kung fu school, and what he saw would change his life…
2/18 City worker types, mostly from the Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau–people in the business of selling our city–were rounded up to devise a plan on how to bring people here. So they thought for a while until…Ah ha! Of course! That’s brilliant! They decided on gluttony. Gluttony is the…
2/18 Interior designers know the difference between decorating schemes that are in for the kitchen and which ones should be tossed out the kitchen window. For reality-television interior designers, the first toss out the window is often logic. Discovery Channel’s Monster House is no exception. Past projects for the show…
2/19 Onlookers from galaxies far, far away could easily dub our Mother Earth the “Land of Accessibility.” No, that’s not some title of a moral-inducing realm buried within the pits of Dante’s Inferno. It’s our reality. With a flip of a mobile phone stuffed with a cornucopia of ring tones…
2/22 We could give two flips whether people choose the word “purple” over “violet.” It’s the same color, right? Well, not according to our old art teacher. After submitting a still-life sketch of some grapes and a chair that we had scribbled in the cafeteria minutes earlier, we started bullshitting…
It’s hard to know what to expect from Wayne Wang. The Hong Kong-raised director has made one gorgeous mood movie (Chinese Box) and two intelligent literary adaptations (Smoke and Anywhere But Here); he was also responsible, in his early days, for the overwrought sobfest Joy Luck Club. Then, in 2002,…
At first (and second and maybe even third) glance, it’s all so familiar: Keanu Reeves shrouded in a black trench coat that flaps behind him like a superhero’s wings, moving between netherworlds and a real world used as a battleground, breeding ground and playground for higher beings amused and appalled…
The small Appalachian community of Whitwell, Tennessee, boasts two traffic lights and a population of 1,600, nearly all of them white and Christian. Lying just 100 miles from Pulaski, where the Ku Klux Klan was founded, this town would seem an unlikely place to find a memorial to the 6…
In the classic “actor’s nightmare,” you’re standing center stage in the spotlight. The audience stares, waiting for your next line. Behind you, costumed performers fidget, wondering why you haven’t picked up your cue. You have no idea what play you’re in, why you never rehearsed or what you’re supposed to…
Jesse Meraz Wonderland and Jason Villegas: Growth Hormone Mutation Makeover Meraz and Villegas are archaeologists of the present. They disinter pretty plastic detritus from the morass of American popular culture–those objects that defy willy-nilly the laws of entropy. Meraz leaves one paradigm of representation in the wake of another: painting…
The Dead Monkey That says it all. Nick Darke’s two-act drama arrives as dead as King Kong’s hairy corpse. Hank and Dolores (Wm. Paul Williams, Tina Parker) watch their 15-year marriage unravel after the death of their beloved chimp, a son substitute that’s supposed to remind us of the invisible…
If you want to know what Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior is all about, it’s pretty easy to sum up. It starts with a big fight, as a group of local villagers plays capture the flag in the branches of a large tree. Then there’s a brief stretch of plot, as…
Writing the little play about big ideas is playwright Lee Blessing’s specialty. He did it with A Walk in the Woods–one Russian diplomat, one American (both male) take a stroll and decide the future of nuclear arms–and he does it with Going to St. Ives, now playing in its local…
Concentrations 46: Zones of Dissolution Escapism can often provide the most direct path to reality. In his three-room installation, Daniel Roth pops the escape hatch, leading us to a reality that is bifurcated–equal parts fantasy and factuality. Roth works in a variety of media, including drawing, photography, sculpture and architecture,…
A Country Life David Mamet updated and rewrote Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya a decade ago. So did British theater great Brian Friel and others. But now Terry Martin, producing artistic director at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre, tries his hand at it, and by golly, he’s come up with a fine adaptation,…
Thursday, February 10 We never meant for it to happen. It just did. One week, we were flipping the channels. The next we were rushing home to catch Antiques Roadshow. It’s not about the price of Grandma’s lampshade. It’s the human drama: the thrill of a historic Persian rug or…
