Starr Struck

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…

Holiday Help

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…

Before the Fourth

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…

Before the Fourth

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…

Before the Fourth

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…

Texas Flood

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…

Hot Dogs and Hooves

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…

Tattoo You

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…

PraiseFest

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…

Caged Manimals

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…

Dead Fun

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…

Specter-culous

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…

Heavenly Seven

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…

Shine Like They Do

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…

Monkeyin’ Around

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…

Step Right Up

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…

Orange You Glad

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…

No, the Other Barney

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,…

Pause and Effect

Click may be the first Adam Sandler movie in which the high concept isn’t dependent upon the star. Sandler comedies tend to take his standard character of the petulant man-child with anger-management issues and place him in different wacky situations: elementary school (Billy Madison), the golf course (Happy Gilmore), the…

Letter-Box Edition

It may not be an “iconic manifestation of civilization,” as documentarian Ken Burns proclaims, but The New York Times crossword puzzle is undoubtedly an institution. Printed every day for the past 64 years, in weekly cycles of increasing difficulty, the puzzle draws politicians, working stiffs, comedians, musicians, coders and homemakers…

Le Bon Pain

Less is more entertaining in the perversely spare little oddity called Thom Pain (based on nothing), playing in the intimate Bryant Hall at Dallas Theater Center. Clocking in under an hour, Will Eno’s one-man one-act unfolds in a nearly bare space (just a red chair nobody sits in and a…

Vampires of Moscow

Night Watch (Fox Searchlight) Every once in a while, Hollywood needs somebody else to steal a genre and totally reimagine it; it keeps old ideas young, like celluloid Botox. Well, Hollywood’s gonna need one big needle to absorb Night Watch, an insane, insanely cool Russian action/horror/sci-fi brew that’s like nothing…