Thursday, May 26 If the Van Cliburn Foundation really wanted people to care about the 12th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, they’d steal some tips from American Idol. They’d start by showing the embarrassing auditions (people playing “Chopsticks” or “Heart and Soul”), the Daron Beck-like avant-garde audition (surely someone would…
Sisters are doin’ it for themselves, standin’ on their own two feet and ringin’ on their own bells. Or, in this case, playing their own vihuelas and violins. Since the dawn of modern mariachi music in 19th-century Jalisco, Mexico, mariachi has been the domain of men. Men have played the…
A cure for the summertime blues 5/28 I do not qualify as one of the girls of summer. Because I, in summer, hibernate indoors, window blinds drawn, trying to perfect a way to spin straw into gold in order to pay for my astronomical electricity bill that my little air-conditioning…
Dinos are close to home 5/28 Twelve years ago, Dallas was home to the most visceral dinosaur experience in the country. Many would say Jurassic Park was just a movie–certainly not the leading authority on the subject (even its title was misleading, since few Jurassic-era dinos were in the flick)–but…
Rodeo honors black athletes 5/28 So, when you think of tough cowboys, who comes to mind? John Wayne? Please. He was an actor. When it comes to out-and-out toughness, we nominate Bill Pickett, a Texan born in 1870 who is sometimes credited as the father of “bulldogging,” or wrestling a…
WaterTower puts Mom on stage 5/26 Dallas Observer Pop Culture Quiz #213, this time in fun-size multiple-choice form! Tonight heralds the premiere of Living Out, which is: A) The blockbusting new Jennifer Lopez vehicle, in which lovable “Lo” is a plucky Latin American mom who takes the job of caretaker…
Robert Dale Anderson Robert Dale Anderson makes small graphite-on-paper images of organic, tumorous landscapes. Showing in the front-room gallery at Conduit, “Hide Out,” for example, is an intimate study of an imaginary tree stump sprouting an elephant-trunk-shaped branch. Anderson’s drawings are exercises in chiaroscuro in minutiae. The shifts from light…
It’s a question to which the response should be more than a shrug, but it’s the only thing I can offer anyone who asks, “So, how was it?” The final installment in the mostly irrelevant second Star Wars trilogy is far superior to its immediate two predecessors, The Phantom Menace…
“Somewhere, this could all be happening right now,” spoke the narrator in the trailer for the first Star Wars movie (thereafter known as Episode IV: A New Hope), and to those who were small children then, it rang true. For an entire generation, the Star Wars trilogy could never be…
Dan Flavin: A Retrospective Known as a Minimalist artist and a purveyor of its aesthetic of economy and industry, Dan Flavin shows himself to be something different in this retrospective. He is a master of drawing, though not in the conventional sense of the term. Instead of delineating lines on…
A Number Son of a gun, the clones have arrived. Right now they’re only in the living room of a middle-aged dad named Salter (Bruce DuBose). He thought he had one son–maybe two (he’d ordered up a clone of a dead kid decades ago). But suddenly there are three, four,…
Pick A Number as the best new short play about a provocative subject. The writing sends off sparks of genius, the plot twists shock. More happens in the scant 65 minutes of British playwright Caryl Churchill’s one-act gem, now onstage in a Southwest premiere at Undermain Theatre, than other plays…
This art show is the cat’s meow 5/21 A confession: I sing to the cat. The songs are simple but catchy numbers–“You Are My Kitty (My Only Kitty),” “Have I Told You Lately You’re a Kitty?,” etc. etc. Not exactly Billboard material, but from the way the cat reacts to…
Rigby’s off to Neverland 5/24 “Cathy Rigby is Peter Pan,” the promotional materials proclaim. Not “as” or “plays” but “is.” Which really makes us wonder if Rigby, former Olympic gymnast, lives the existence of Peter Pan in which she rolls out of her hammock every morning, crows loudly and puts…
Pixies and plants enchant 5/21 Irish poet W.B. Yeats had a total thing for the supernatural. He wrote boatloads of poetry with fairy-centric themes like “Come away, O human child!/To the waters and the wild/With a faery, hand in hand/For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”…
Wildflower! is big on entertainment 5/20 A very tall statue of Sam Houston. The Mavs dancers. More than one American president. Ridiculously oversized food portions in restaurants. What do all of these have in common? Like it or not, they are all part of a civilization produced by the state…
My mom is such a trendsetter. Before fancy upscale boutiques were selling wallets and purses covered in it, she was using duct tape to fix everything. Hem of your skirt coming loose? Add some duct tape; it’s adhesive and flexible. Don’t have a lint roller handy? A loop of duct…
Thursday, May 19 White wines are great and all–perfect for spritzers, great with salads–but like spritzers and salads, white wines seem a little lacking in muscle. Now don’t get us wrong. We like a good chardonnay, Riesling and pinot gris/grigio, but rarely do we take a sip of those varieties…
Oh, My Goss Let’s address one thing right now. The odds of British pop star George Michael holding your cocktail while you admire a photo in his boyfriend’s new Dallas art gallery are, shall we say, slim. (And yes, that “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” T-shirt is a bit…
The mockumentary is a tricky thing and not to be attempted by amateurs, many of whom treat the form like a joke without need of a punch line; damn the filmmaker who thinks it clever and ironic enough to “interview” “real people” “talking” about other “real people” who, of course,…
It won’t ruin anyone’s experience of 3-Iron, the new film by Korean writer-director Kim Ki-duk, to reveal that it closes with a single epigraph: “It’s hard to tell that the world we live in is either reality or a dream.” Presumably, the correct translation would replace “that” with “whether”; even…
Jane Fonda comes from a good Hollywood family and used to be a pretty fair actress herself. Klute, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Coming Home were three of the better films of their time. So, after getting a look at herself in her first movie in 15 years, La…
