Few people who have walked this earth are more deserving of annual celebrations, tributes, parades and concert extravaganzas than civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. After featuring American Idol veterans Fantasia Barrino and Ruben Studdard in recent years, the planners behind The Black Academy of Arts and Letter’s 28th…
If y’all are ready to laugh your dicks off, let me hear you say YEAH! If that offends you, read no further. That said, Aziz Ansari should need no introduction to comedy fans. The enduring popularity of Randy (“Raaaaaaaaandy!”), the boorish character in Judd Apatow’s Funny People, has outlived the…
When I was a kid, my best friend Allie’s father was in an Irish folk band. That is what he did for a living, so music was ever present in their household. And, although we were forbidden from touching most of the instruments, they became a source of comfort and…
While the TV show Entourage is actually loosely based on the life of Mark Wahlberg, it could definitely moonlight as a show based upon the life of Adam Sandler. The only people on this earth luckier than E, Turtle, and Johnny Drama are probably Peter Dante, Allen Covert and Rob…
The female buddy story is a virtual treasure trove of plot devices: heartwarming friendships, feminine empowerment, heartbreaking melodrama–you name it, it can be mined from the premise of ladies getting together to chat, bitch and bond. Shining examples from the genre include the film and stage versions of Steel Magnolias,…
Midnight movies are frequented by two types of people: the die-hard fans of a movie who know it, word for word, like the back of their hand, and said fans’ uneducated friends who have never seen the greatest movie of all time and are inevitably dragged along for a special…
It’s hard to imagine being a woman in the workforce a few decades ago, when we were seen as sexual objects and not as intellectual equals. Sure, we could keep a home spotless and cook a mean meatloaf, but when it came to complex things like problem solving and conflict…
For those who want to give up on the Dallas Stars now that beloved stars Mike Modano and Marty Turco have left, you have more than enough reason to give them another chance. They started the season 4-0-0 and beat Modano and his new team, the Detroit Red Wings, in…
When we’re not hating the Spurs, Dallas Mavericks fans are generally fuming about the Los Angeles Lakers, the last in the triumvirate of Western Conference teams that have reached the NBA Finals in the past twelve seasons. The checkered past of Kobe Bryant, the shady, lopsided Pau Gasol deal, the…
What does a sparkling, high-fashion display window have in common with a well-known collegiate art gallery? Artistic merit, of course! The Neiman Marcus Art Collection originated in 1951 when Stanley Marcus, son of Neiman’s founder Herbert Marcus, purchased a mobile by Alexander Calder. Ever since then the famous department store…
Remember those grainy photographs of the Loch Ness monster gliding through the waters of the famous Scottish lake? Though many of those images were proven to be staged, they still fascinate viewers. Since gaining notoriety in the 1970s, staged photography has challenged the notion that photographs must capture history and…
If there’s any hope that civilization will continue to create art and literature more worthy of preservation than a passing Photoshop meme or blog post, it lies with the teenagers still developing their talents. Recognition of their hard work is the best way to ensure they stick with it, rather…
When technology fails, just about everything else does too. At least, that’s what most of us seem to think these days. As soon as the computer crashes or the satellite shorts out, it’s pretty tough to go through the day with just the bare essentials. Consider this strange new reality…
If everything is as it should be, a child believes that anything is possible–that his towel cape can save him from a bed-to-floor fall, and that his drawing of a man with one arm four sizes bigger than the other is the start of artistic greatness. And if the child…
When two planes slammed into the World Trade Center almost 10 years ago, sending the buildings tumbling to the ground, it didn’t seem possible that there would ever be anything to replace the New York City landmark. But life goes on, and as the country began to heal artist Manuel…
By this point we shouldn’t need highway road signs, a “Crying Indian” or revamped Los Lonely Boys songs to remind us not to litter. It should be common sense. And yet last year, photographer Dylan Hollingsworth captured on film an area of White Rock Lake that had essentially been turned…
Only inertia will bring people to Michel Gondry’s 3-D spectacle, The Green Hornet. Opening amid persistent negative buzz in the mid-January dead zone, this long-germinating prospective franchise, based on a character that first saturated the nation’s radio waves in 1939, seems pretty much DOA. Rather than a $90 million Gondry…
Dissolute action-movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), first seen doing laps in his black Ferrari, has no destination in Somewhere, Sofia Coppola’s mood ring of celebrity lassitude. Coppola’s fourth feature is, at times, similarly aimless and empty. But those who groan that the writer-director has made another indulgent film about…
When the MPAA handed Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine an NC-17 rating this fall, cynics suggested that the so-called “kiss of death” was better publicity for the gently experimental marriage drama than anything famously crafty distributor Harvey Weinstein could buy. When the rating was reversed this month—downgraded to an R without…
Feels good to start the theater year with some laughs. First show of 2011, Death Is No Small Change!, is right on the money. It’s the new comedy from Pegasus Theatre, now performing its yearly three-week run at the Eisemann Center in Richardson. There’s nothing like a Pegasus show and…
Now that the new year is underway, it is time for you to really start working on all of those resolutions. Yes, that’s right, the smoke has cleared, the confetti has been swept up and you may have even kicked that colossal hangover by now. Get to work! Get out…
Photography is a particularly challenging art form because it serves not only as a vehicle to stimulate our senses, but as a way to document the world around us. So a photographer doesn’t just have to possess an artistic flair–an ability to frame shapes and colors to make a visual…
