For many Dallas listeners, April’s been a month long anticipated: the month that brings Mozart’s Requiem. You could almost be forgiven for blowing off the rest of the month, were it not for a series of unexpectedly brilliant programs peppering the calendar in Requiem’s wake. Courtesy some of the smaller,…
The Pin Show This year’s iteration of The Pin Show has us on pins and needles for all the right reasons. The much-buzzed-about local fashion event is a must-see for trendsetters and followers alike, seamlessly mixing well-heeled debutantes with edgy artistic types for a show that would be right at…
You may, like me, have seen all of the Fast and Furious movies, and you may, like me, have enjoyed most or many of them. You may also, like me, have a hard time remembering exactly what happened in each film. You needn’t worry. The franchise’s Wikipedia page is filled…
In 1848 Euphemia Gray, a bright and pretty young girl from a family of modest means, left her home in Scotland to marry her era’s equivalent of an art-world rock star, the imposingly erudite critic John Ruskin. Perhaps as early as her wedding night, Effie knew she’d made a mistake:…
In modern American history, few tragedies have tied together human suffering with societal ills in the way that Hurricane Katrina did. It was an epic, heartbreaking shitshow of everything that was, and still is, wrong with our government, our infrastructure and our culture. The shockwaves continue to reverberate a decade…
There are three simple rules for keeping a gremlin: Don’t expose it to sunlight, never let it touch water, and never, under any circumstances, feed it after midnight. In Joe Dante’s Gremlins, Gizmo, the main gremlin, proves to be a difficult responsibility when it keeps spawning little equally terrifying destructive…
A recent New Yorker review of a contemporary painting show at the MoMA posed the question, “Is There Anything Left to Paint?” In some ways rhetorical, in others sobering. A painter working today wrestles with a medium centuries old, struggling to say something new. Something that Cydonia Gallery’s next exhibiting…
Circuit 12 Contemporary isn’t throwing stones or killing birds, but they are introducing you to a bunch of new artists in just a few exhibits. Human Occult Powers explores the mystical thing we call human existence and the magical process of creation. It’s an eight-person exhibition featuring paintings, sculpture, sound…
“Drone” is a new, hot-button word in the vein of “selfie,” “poke” and “truthiness.” Thanks to their military use, drones have a negative connotation, but hobbyists are starting to reclaim the term and use it to evoke fun and skill rather than a talking point for TV pundits. It requires…
This year’s iteration of The Pin Show has us on pins and needles for all the right reasons. The much-buzzed-about local fashion event is a must-see for trendsetters and followers alike, seamlessly mixing well-heeled debutantes with edgy artistic types for a show that would be right at home in NYC’s…
“Chic-ag-o with murder and dance and tip tappity tap JAZZ HANDS.” If I’m not mistaken, those are the opening lyrics to the musical Chicago, made famous by the movie that bears the same name. I kid. Chicago was a massive hit long before Queen Latifah ever set foot on the…
The best part of school was always recess. The playground. The swings and the monkey bars and the time to play with other rascals. But with adulthood comes taxes and boring dinner parties and no more recess. And it sucks. But luckily for you, there’s an adult version of recess…
Road comics have the best stories. When they start out, they have to play pretty much anywhere with a microphone and a stage that’s willing to barter jokes for actual money, food or a night of sleep in the barn. Austin’s Matt Sadler has a ton of those stories. He…
The Little Prince isn’t just the story of that baby Michael Jackson had with his nurse. It’s a real live story. Like a book an’ shit. It also happens to be Jeff Swearingen’s favorite story ever. Seriously. We have a picture of his high school notebook and it’s covered in…
Think of Who’s Afraid of Chuck and George as a roast on canvas, where — rather than having insults hurled at them — two artists will be lovingly caricatured by friends and fellow artists. In fact, nearly a hundred contributions will line the walls of CentralTrak, the UT Dallas Artists…
Possibly, some adult somewhere in America doesn’t know the mystery of Citizen Kane – why newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane whispers the word “rosebud” on his deathbed. Who hasn’t seen the groundbreaking 1941 masterpiece by Orson Welles, a thinly biography of William Randolph Hearst that’s widely hailed the greatest movie…
These days, we can send random thoughts, meaningless musings and politically charged invective to countless people with just a couple of clicks on our phones. But there was a time when the tales, thoughts and wishes that made their way from generation to generation had to have some serious meat…
The world of Rodgers and Hammerstein is not a complicated one: it’s a place where Nazi aggression can be defeated by song; where love conquers all, even in death; and where manslaughter trials can be folded into wedding receptions, no prob. It’s all so laughably improbable that you have to…
The story behind Hot Mikado is, appropriately, an outlandish one — it’s a piece of musical theatre based on a jazz adaption of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, which was itself one of the more over-the-top theatrical collaborations between the famed librettist and composer. The opera, The Mikado, was a…
Film adaptations of books have long been the saving grace of lazy students tasked with book reports — the old watch-the-movie-instead trick has exposed many a high schooler, and even George Constanza, as a non-reading fraud. Big D Reads, a partnership between D Magazine and Half-Price Books, has been aiming…
There’s a push these days in the arts to be multi-genre, or to be experimental in venue, at the very least. Which is to say that concert venues host art exhibitions, and sometimes movie theaters host classical music events. Sometimes this doesn’t make sense; sometimes it’s incredibly apropos. Like with…
Mad Men has always been, among many other things, about the exit of the old guard and the entrance of the new — and the acceleration of that transition by the mood and the movements of the ’60s. The pilot, set in 1960, finds the Sterling Cooper higher-ups scrambling to…
