Remember how Deep Ellum is dead? You wouldn’t have known it a few weeks ago during the Deep Ellum Arts Festival. Streets were blocked off, pedestrian traffic was heavy, and it almost looked like the days before it became a cliche to decry the death of the district. And it’s…

Today, HBO is a venerable cable institution–a go-to for quality, almost literate programming that has somehow managed to vault TV into cultural and intellectual realms where books and art films once reigned supreme. But in the early days of cable television, HBO was the channel that played Porky’s and Caddyshack…

The last time a PG-rated movie won the Best Picture Oscar was almost 20 years ago. Really, it’s difficult to imagine that Driving Miss Daisy could charm Oscar voters in the same way today that it did in 1990, given the Academy’s fondness for tales of twisted sexuality and redemption…

Ron White, the hard-drinkin’, hard-livin’, foul-mouthed comedian, is the highlight of the Blue Collar Comedy collaboration, making it (almost) worth your time to sit through a Jeff Foxworthy routine. White, also known as Tater Salad, saunters into the spotlight with a scotch in one hand and a cigar in the…

Three is a magic number in popular culture. Trilogies abound in literature (Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy), film (The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, etc.) and television (CSIs Miami, New York and Las Vegas). Joseph Campbell would probably say that the trilogy is a productive way to expose layers and…

There has been much talk in the months since Barack Obama’s election about what that historic event means for “the black experience” in the United States. While a sign that black Americans have indeed overcome a number of obstacles in the past century, it remains to be seen whether Obama’s…

Memory is a strange thing. Somewhere in the tangled neurons of our brains lies our ability to make sense out of the things that have happened to us in our lifetime, and the way that the brain stores certain memories seems almost random. Some memories are strongly tied to smell;…

The use of the side of an 18-wheeler or bus as a message medium has generally been limited in this country to “Show Me Your Hooters”-type sentiments or bland advertising. There’s probably a reason for this. While I’m sure there are plenty of deep-thinking long-haulers out there, for the most…

Gustavo Arellano spends his days as a writer, merrily answering questions asked by ignorant white folks and introspective Latinos in his renowned weekly column “Ask a Mexican.” While Arellano spends a fair amount of time responding to harmless (if sometimes politically incorrect) queries such as why Mexicans have green thumbs…

There was a period in my life in which the majority of my interests at any given time were dictated by the pudgy, wild-haired lead singer of The Cure. If Robert Smith sang about it, I was bound to spend some time researching it. Ultimately, Cure lyrics aren’t all that…

Cedric the Entertainer is a veritable Everyman, a baby-faced comedian who lacks the physical restlessness of Eddie Murphy or the sleazy apathy of Dane Cook. The star whose character made controversial remarks about Martin Luther King Jr. in Barbershop (thereby giving Jesse Jackson an excuse to put on his suit…

The next few months are ripe with possibilities for mustached, Converse-clad, Brit-pop loving men in the Dallas area. Zooey Deschanel is rumored to be making an appearance at AFI. South by Southwest is creeping up, promising potential hook-ups with Zooey Deschanel wannabes. Morrissey is coming to town. How much better…

Western swing is forever the music associated with dark dives and greasy diners on the outposts of dusty Texas towns from Pasadena to Archer City to Dallas. It’s what makes you feel at home underneath the neon lights at Sons of Hermann Hall or amongst all the graffiti at Adair’s…

Sometimes, when reading a piece by an art critic, I get the impression it’s less about describing the art and more of a global conspiracy to win at art critic bingo. That’s right, if you can use the words “subsume,” “metaphysical,” “fetishistic,” “disaffection” and “melancholic” in one paragraph…bingo. Understandably, it’s…

For years I’ve told people about the time that I went to a restaurant in San Marcos that only served hobbit food and was staffed by a barefoot waitress. That story has been pretty universally dismissed, and now I’m not sure if it really happened. Maybe it was a dream…

For a lot of people, pinball defines the ’70s the way that Atari will always be tied to the ’80s. And while videogames got their own definitive place in pop culture history (what with War Games and other countless feature film adaptations), nothing has ever been immortalized to the same…

When you start talking about going to the fair in Dallas, what you generally mean is that you’re about to spend six hours walking around, drinking beer, eating fried bacon concoctions and risking your life on large metal contraptions supervised by ex-cons. And though this is charming in its own…

The landscape of children’s literature is a varied and sometimes treacherous terrain. For every light-hearted, sugar-coated read by Beverly Cleary, there’s a Where the Red Fern Grows, a lovely story about a boy and his dogs…that ends in nightmare-inducing tragedy. I remember my heartbreak as I finished that book, and…

The local art scene this year has been nearly dominated by traveling exhibits. There is no escaping the DMA’s Tut and his accompanying entourage of nested coffins and gold bling, all advertised from every DART bus and lamp-post in Dallas proper. The Kimbell celebrated an Impressionist coup in 2008, with…

The world of animated film is in the midst of a paradigm change. Once the domain of kiddie movies, the art form that makes candlesticks sing and seafood swagger has now taken up residence in the world of art-house flicks. And while most of us assume that animated movies feature…

If the only purpose of art was to give you the warm fuzzies, the world would be a frightening visual hodgepodge of Anne Geddes photographs and IKEA prints. And while this would likely be a welcome aesthetic among the denizens of SMU sorority houses, the rest of us would ache…