While you probably haven’t heard of Lynn Goldsmith or Janet Macoska before, any rock fan worth their Bowie T-shirt has seen their photographs of the tribe of gifted misfit wanderers gracing the pages of Time, Life and Rolling Stone among others. Back when Tom Waits still looked like someone who…
The Tarahumara, an intensely private people, live deep within the canyons of the Sierra Madre Occidental in northern Mexico. Not much has changed since the Tarahumara moved to the remote area in the 16th century to escape the Spaniards. One thing that did change disturbed ethnologist Santiago James Barnaby. He…
Who doesn’t like the combination of rice, veggies, beans, various seasonings, meat or seafood cooked over an open wood fire? Or we could just call it paella. Café Madrid will be celebrating Spain’s National Day and Columbus Day by having the famous rice dish for a special price of $14.92…
I’m worried about Kevin Nealon. Not because he smokes too much pot–I mean, Weeds is just a TV show, and there’s no way a cool, smart, hilarious, handsome famous person would ever do something heinous and illegal like smoke pot in real life, right? Right. No, my concern is this:…
If you’re a fan of the books The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Who’s in Rabbit’s House, then you’ll probably enjoy the new exhibit at the Irving Arts Center. On loan from the National Center for Children’s Illustrated Literature in Abilene are the original works of cultural tales from the merry (and…
Many people mistakenly think of Alice Cooper as a one-trick-pony. Far from it. He is not without tricks, of course, but he has plenty of them. And a lot of them were mistakes. Like the undying rumor that he bit the head off of a live chicken onstage and drank…
Going by the title of Candace Briceno’s new exhibit, All I Ever Wanted Was Everything, I’’m guessing the artist has never heard The Rolling Stones’ classic “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Or perhaps she has, and just thinks Mick Jagger was too much of a pessimist. Using the…
The Bride of Frankenstein is a demented classic of horror and camp and quite a pleasant surprise. Its interesting prologue–where Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley (the author of the original Frankenstein novel) are discussing the merits of Shelley’s book–segues nicely into the final scene of the original Frankenstein…
I’ve been really impressed the couple of times I’ve seen DJ Sober spin before shows. His song selection is impeccable and he reads the crowd really well. Newcomers and the people out on the patio made their way inside as The Party’s DJ Sober was spinning a nice mix of…
“Everything I write ends up being about loneliness,” said the late writer David Foster Wallace in a 1999 interview on the radio show Bookworm. In that conversation, Wallace was trying to get at the core of his Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, a four-part short story he wrote as a…
Amreeka The thriving subgenre of immigrant displacement dramedy gets a confident new spin from Cherien Dabis, a Palestinian-Jordanian raised in the United States. Divorced, demoralized and struggling with her weight, Palestinian bank employee Muna (a very good Nisreen Faour) leaves the occupied West Bank with her teenage son, Fadi (Melkar…
Paris Paris, as overdocumented as any great city, still has new facets to reflect. For proof, see Claire Denis’ idiosyncratically observed 35 Shots of Rum—a contrast to Cedric Klapisch’s Paris panorama, an encyclopedia of “types” and banal C’est la vie lessons. When an ensemble film works, you welcome the shifts…
Enjoy a tasty plot twist in your drama? With Mauritius, running one more weekend in a crisp little production by Echo Theatre at the Bath House, playwright Theresa Rebeck serves up a two-act mystery so yummy you could eat it for dinner. Check out her recipe for suspense: Problem: Jackie…
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell Tucker Max got famous through a Web site detailing how being an asshole to women constantly got him laid, making him a hero to frat boys and a demon to everyone else who noticed. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, adapted from…
The Other Man Whatever initial life there might have been in a story by German writer Bernhard Schlink (The Reader) has been crushed to a pulp by writer-director Richard Eyre (Notes on a Scandal) in this flat thriller about a software executive (Liam Neeson) hunting down the lover of his…
I don’t tell a lot of people this, but paddling is a secret desire of mine. I fantasize about it quite often–the broad, flat paddle finding its mark over and over again, swiftly propelling me through a sweaty but satisfying adventure. Yes, a good canoe outing is an absolute pleasure…
At first glance, a spelling bee doesn’t seem like the sort of setting that inspires great musicals (or even good ones). But if you’ve ever teetered on that precipice of hope in that half second before the judge says your spelling of mendacity (m-e-n-d-a-c-e-t-y) is incorrect, you’ll know the possibilities…
So everyone loves free stuff, right? Taking a day to hang out somewhere besides your house doesn’t have to mean emptying your pockets–well, at least not for this festival. The Uptown community is celebrating its second All About Uptown Festival: A Celebration of Art and Living. Attendees can enjoy music,…
Being a kid isn’t as easy as it looks. Sure, they still get to wear onesies, play with high-tech toys on Christmas morning and have the luxury of naptime, but hey, being a little one isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. For example, look at Mowgli from Rudyard Kipling’s…
Fried butter seems to be weighing heavily on the minds of all of my Facebook friends. Ever since the State Fair of Texas announced their annual “Food That Will Kill You” lineup featuring the aforementioned fried dairy abomination, I’ve seen something about it every day via status update or wall…
The Internet has brought us so many good things since it became widely available in the 1990s. News is available as it happens. Online learning has made education a possibility for many who only dreamed of it before. And social networking sites have given us all the ability to reconnect…
Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado or, The Town of Titipu, is the pair’s most frequently performed operetta. It’s hard to imagine why. The plot weaves a complicated love story, an element that is all but required for any kind of theatrical production. But the main purpose of the play is…
