It’s our job to get excited about famous events with local ties. Sports teams winning championships, TV shows based on our city, JFK’s death–good or bad, we love it. That’s why we have a special fondness for former Poison lead singer Bret Michaels. Did you know he wrote “Every Rose…
The best NBA team that plays in a city you’d actually want to live in (yeah, Detroit, that was for you), the Dallas Mavericks, convene Saturday to take on the underachieving Minnesota Timberwolves, who may or may not have retained the services of disgruntled Pacer All-Star Ron Artest by then…
A Closer Walk with Patsy Cline Nobody can sing Patsy Cline the way Jenny Thurman can, and she gets to do it again in this two-hour musical tribute. All the hit songs are here: “Crazy,” “Walkin’ after Midnight,” “Leavin’ on Your Mind,” “Back in Baby’s Arms.” It’s like a living…
Back when women were dames and men were gents, people knew how to do New Year’s Eve right. Watch the black and white movies, and you’ll see what I mean: women in circle skirts poofy with crinoline, men in tuxedos with cummerbunds and matching bow ties, flutes of champagne, a…
Thursday 30 How thoughtful. You’ve decided to have your mates ’round your place for a little New Year’s Eve shindig. Be honest: It’s so you don’t have to drive anywhere, right? Whatever the motive, you gotta have some grub on hand to soak up the liters of libations that will…
New Year’s Eve is one of those holidays–all romanticized in legend, lore and on the big screen–that never pans out in real life. Think back on your past celebrations. Anything like a sublime, dressy affair where the love of your life swoops in, gets down on one knee and, well,…
SUN 1/2 The many violent and complex conflicts of the three major Middle Eastern religions regularly make banner headlines in the world’s major newspapers and create seemingly insurmountable tensions. But rather than focusing on who killed whom, who is occupying whose holy land and whose founding son was really chosen…
SAT 1/1 Used to be the Cotton Bowl Classic was a big deal and a hot draw–Fair Park on New Year’s Day with nationally broadcast football being played in The House Doak Built, always sold out and occasionally with national-title implications. Didn’t matter whether it was warm and sunny or…
THU 12/30 A clothing line needs your wisdom. The Engines of Elk will release its first line December 30 at the Whisky Bar and, not only are you invited, but in addition to paying five bucks you’re asked to bring your ideas to improve the clothes. Seems E of E–we…
WED 1/5 As much as we’re sure she’d like to distance herself from the sitcom Grace Under Fire, it was our first exposure to Julie White, who played supporting character Nadine. We like to think of her as “the cute one,” in our weird habit of comparing everything to the…
Our best movies of the year actually may have been anything but the best to a few of our critics–such is the dilemma of offering employment to writers of dissenting opinion. In other words, the No. 1 film of 2004 wasn’t universally heralded by our team. The Dallas Observer top…
To understand this most tumultuous year in film, over which loomed the ghost of a blessed messiah and the shadow of an accursed pariah, turn your eyes from the movie screen and look to the bookshelf. There you will find a copy of Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures, which…
Texas Vision: The Barrett Collection, the Art of Texas and Switzerland Why is it that regional art, from Texas to inner Pennsylvania, upstate New York to the hills of Tennessee, looks the same–all of it showing naturalistic panoramas of tumbling hills, arabesque trees and tumbledown, homey architecture? Perhaps this has…
There’s just nothing like a good old-fashioned virgin. It’s appalling that in this day and time, when in many ways we have come so far, we have abandoned the notion of sexual virtue. All anybody wants to do anymore is roll in the hay. Who likes hay, anyway? It gets…
You may recognize the star and writer of the comedy mockumentary Shtickmen, Dean Lewis, as the co-host of 102.1 The Edge’s morning show. Or you could have seen him in Vegas, winning his weight in hamburgers at the Wendy’s “Stand Up For Good Taste” Comedy Challenge. Now you can see…
The critic who takes notes during The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou will ultimately fill a notepad only with scribbled details: “All the crewmen wear red stocking caps with their tuxedos,” “some names of Zissou’s movies: The Battling Eels of Antibes, Shadow Creatures of the Lurisia Archipelago, Island Cats!,” “one…
The parade of real-life figures strolling into the googolplex has been endless this year: There’s Jamie Foxx as musical Mount Rushmore Ray Charles, Johnny Depp as Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie, Kevin Spacey as forgotten teeny-popper Bobby Darin, Liam Neeson as sexologist Alfred Kinsey, Kevin Kline as standards composer Cole…
When your movie gets riotous laughter out of endless utterances of the word “Focker,” it doesn’t have to try very hard. So it’s no surprise that much of Meet the Fockers, the inevitable sequel to the 2000 hit Meet the Parents, barely breaks a sweat. When in doubt, after all,…
With all the rhetoric of globalization, any public discussion of localism in the arts would seem to be déclassé. Somehow localism appears to run in direct opposition to the forward march of progress supposedly borne by the forces of globalization. In our area of the world, however, localism in the…
Super 8 The kids were at it again. For one night only, the art collective Oh6 exhibited their work in the gallery at South Side on Lamar. Yet far different from your usual pristine and ruminative gallery space, the setting was more a fusion of Warhol’s Factory and the Dollar…
The Gift of the Magi Feeling a little anemic Christmas spiritwise? This production by the Classical Acting Company is just the tonic for the holiday-weary. Dallas actor-writer Lee Trull blends two O. Henry stories–Magi and Compliments of the Season–into a seamless one-act that loses not a morsel of the writer’s…
“When we dance together, my world’s in disguise/It’s a fairy-tale land that’s come true/And when you look at me with those stars in your eyes/I could waltz across Texas with you.” When Ernest Tubb wrote these words in 1967, he captured in song the feeling of being lost in a…
