Dallas native Lawrence Lee has more to worry about than creating captivating works of art from graphite, ink and tea stains. He’s got the good people of his created world to save. According to Lee, “seven immortal defenders” (the stars of his pieces) are responsible for protecting the less brave…
All you ladies out there can keep your Edward Cullen obsession and King Leonidas fascination. I’d rather have a middle-aged, slightly overweight oceanographer running through my dreams at night. Bill Murray’s Life Aquatic character, Steve Zissou, might be suffering from a midlife crisis, but there is something about that tight…
More than a decade since his debut with the late Matchbox Twenty, Rob Thomas is still hitting the charts with his second solo album, Cradlesong, though he’s still probably best known for his collaboration with Carlos Santana for the 1999 single “Smooth,” as well as singing for Matchbox Twenty. After…
What do you get if you take Twelve Monkeys, subtract Brad Pitt and nine of the monkeys, and substitute Turkish for the English? Three Monkeys, of course, the latest film by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. And where can you see this picture, which involves a love triangle and won…
Bruce Bruce is one of those “Oh yeah, THAT guy” comics. His hefty frame and finger-length dreads are familiar from a stint as host of BET’s Comic View and appearances in rap videos, while his jokes–mostly about race (“I like going to white churches, because they start on time”) and…
Stop watching the Discovery Channel and experience dinosaurs in real life! Well, at least what look like real dinosaurs. The fourth annual Dinosaurs Alive! exhibit is back with a few new friends this year to help approximate a real-life Jurassic Park. The 46-foot T. rex and eight new life-size animatronic…
They’re the kings of the barnyard, rulers of the roosts, clarions of dawn and a mighty fine artistic metaphor in virtually any medium. Just don’t try to raise any roosters in Dallas. That’s against the law, thanks to former Mayor Laura Miller. So, if you’re missing the old family farm…
How many funny people can come from one family? Dane Cook’s family is 0-for-1, but if you’re a Sedaris, there’s more than enough hilarity to go around. Only siblings Amy and David Sedaris could pull off a play about cheese balls, a llama, a Pilgrim-themed restaurant and an Amish-like religious…
It was a far cry from her cousin Jacqueline’s Oscar de la Renta outfits and pillbox hats, but Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale had a style all her own. If by “style” you mean haphazard turbans and layers of clothing in various stages of disrepair. We have to admit that…
Mark Twain may be rolling over in his grave, but it’s not the kind of rolling that most would assume is because of insult–he’s busting out his dance moves for the opening of Big River at Theatre Arlington. A Tony award-winning musical based on Twain’s classic The Adventures of Huckleberry…
You have two basic transportation options in Dallas: rails and roads. Take a bus or car and you get to experience road-rage-inducing traffic. Take a train and you get to stop every 30 seconds–and still end up using roads for the final leg of your journey anyway. Find out why…
Brace yourself–there’s been another British invasion. Norman Foster and his merry band of architects were imported from London to Texas to design the Winspear Opera House at the Dallas Center for Performing Arts. The horseshoe-shaped building anchors a long list of modernist architecture dreamed up over the last four decades…
With the rising trend of community gardens and locavore food movements, DyAnne DiSalvo was really onto something when she wrote children’s book City Green. In it, a little girl turns the destruction of a home on her street into the salvation of her community by inspiring everyone to volunteer time…
Remember when it was an insult to be called a redneck? Now, “his ‘n’ hers” camouflage, dirt track dates, and truck stop tchotchkes are ironically hip. (And, if you don’t believe us, then you’ve obviously never been to the Double-Wide.) We think the trend was helped by Jeff Foxworthy, the…
As evidenced by The Informant!, it’s a hell of a tricky thing turning real-life pulp into floss sugar. The story of Archer Daniels Midland biochemist-exec-turned-crooked-federal-snitch Mark Whitacre is a tragicomedy. Journalist Kurt Eichenwald spent five years trailing the bipolar fuck-up, and his 2000 book, The Informant, is so densely, richly…
Set in the bucolic suburbs of early 19th-century London, as fresh and dewy as a newly mowed lawn, Jane Campion’s Bright Star recounts the love affair between a tubercular young poet and the fashionable teenager next door. It’s more conventionally romantic than wildly Romantic—but no less touching for that. Fanny…
Funny Girl, now running at Irving’s Lyric Stage, is Broadway’s great musical comedy Cinderella story. Up from the ash heap of cheap vaudeville arises a gawky nobody, comedian Fanny Brice. She sings and clowns her way into the glossy Ziegfeld Follies, marries a charming prince of a fella and reigns…
Playwright Theresa Rebeck loves a neat plot gimmick. Her plays (among the best known are Bad Dates and Omnium Gatherum) have a ripped-from-the-headlines quality and usually present a problem, a solution and a tidy conclusion. She’s polished that formula and found a fascinating subject to envelope it in this 2007…
Sure, sure, the theme of this year’s Best of Dallas issue is “We Can Do It” and it features hundreds of winning shops, services, restaurants, scenes, cultural elements and even athletes. But everyone knows we have a true can-do attitude about throwing one helluva shindig. To celebrate the release of…
I don’t want to feed you a line or anything, but simply speaking, much of art is rooted in that little straight (or curvy) path from one point to another. Even a painting that is nothing but the color blue relates to the linear relationship it has with its canvas…
Art can be made as easily as folding a piece of paper into some sort of origami-type shape or coloring a page in a coloring book and hanging it on a wall or fridge for your mom to see. Basically, an artist doesn’t have to be a well-known painter or…
Author Rick Bass’ works are so intellectual that their overriding theme is a homonym. Nature, as in “the nature of the human heart” and environmental nature. The point where nature and nature intersect is where Bass’ stories lie. Blending detailed accounts of his natural surroundings with rich, informative narratives, Bass’…
