When I was in college, you weren’t supposed to keep pets in on-campus housing, though lots of students had fish, and a couple even got away with kittens for a while. We had a snake. A 3-foot-long black corn snake. Shadow, as she was called, preferred not to remain in…
There’s been a lot of talk about stand-up around these parts lately. As someone who has attended a couple of open mikes recently, I’m gonna have to give it to you straight: Only about a third of the people out there who think they’re funny can actually elicit a laugh…
Cue the scary, ominous echoing music. Dum-dum-dum-dum. Chssh-chssh-chssh-chssh. Nowhere is safe. No one is protected from…the page turner! You can read, but you can’t move forward until…dum-dum-dum-dum, chssh-chssh-chssh-chssh…the page turner says so! Cower in fear of the hand that rocks the novel. No? Not scared? We didn’t think so. But…
It’s clear that the dawning of digital cameras has led to a new phenomenon–the self-portrait. Pose and delete. Pose and delete. It’s an endless cycle for those who search for the perfect photo to place online or send to a long-distance love. But long before cameras of any kind, people…
There’s no better way to get the family together on a summer night than bringing a picnic basket to the park, spreading out and watching some carefully choreographed gang warfare—gang warfare set to rousing music, no less. No, the Crips and the Bloods aren’t throwing down over that Lil Jon…
Doc Watson, who was raised in the woods of North Carolina and lost his vision before his first birthday, grew up around music. While doing chores, his mother would often sing old-time ballads, and at night, when his father came home from the fields, the family would often read from…
Sometimes, I think the vast majority of us forget about culture. In between Heroes episodes and multiple readings of Perez Hilton, it’s easy to forget that pop culture and culture culture are really two separate things. I’m just as concerned about the fate of Peter Petrelli as anyone else, but…
When I worked at the SPCA in college, I cared for a puppy that looked exactly like Falkor, that flying dog-dragon thing from The NeverEnding Story. And at first I was scared, because although this puppy was incredibly cute and went by the name of Snowball, I was absolutely terrified…
Lowest Common Denominator-ism writ large and engraved in stone like the Ten Commandments according to Cecil B. DeMille, the Hollywood blockbuster is often an allegory for itself. Walt Disney, the notoriously litigious studio that successfully changed the nation’s copyright laws to protect its trademark Mickey Mouse but more recently declared,…
Night Watch, you may recall, told of an ancient feud waged between the forces of Light and Dark. In the interest of maintaining a fragile détente, they organized themselves, as Russian super-combatants are wont to do, into complex bureaucracies, with the Night Watch heroes monitoring the vampiric shenanigans of the…
There is a moment early on in “Dead Dogs and Gym Teachers,” the 14th episode of the brilliant but canceled television series Freaks and Geeks, in which gangly, bespectacled, picked-last-in-gym-class high school freshman Bill Haverchuck (Martin Starr) arrives home from school, makes himself a grilled cheese sandwich, and sits down…
“I think the public doesn’t care about reviews,” says Eli Roth, writer-director of Hostel Part II, which — surprise! — isn’t being shown to the press before it opens Friday on more than 2,500 screens. Still, the 35-year-old perpetrator of high-grossing “torture porn” does appreciate critical kindness when he sees…
Reality TV has left little to fear about Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee’s once-shocking and still unsettling 1962 drama. The play is now getting a strongly acted, if technically uneven, production directed by René Moreno at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre. Imagine three and a half hours of out-of-control Real…
The Sergio Leone Anthology (MGM) Sergio Leone made westerns like Wagner made ditties. This essential boxed set–four films with four discs of supplemental material, much of it scholarly and insightful–shows the Italian director supplanting the elegiac Monument Valley iconography of John Ford with a darker, ruder, more bleak-humored brand of…
Bold proclamation time: There wouldn’t even be an Xbox 360 without Halo. Microsoft lost billions on the original Xbox even with its mega-successful sci-fi games, so it’s hard to imagine the red ink that would have spilled without them; even suggesting a second go at the console business would’ve had…
The Abyss: Special Edition (Fox) The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: Extra Frills Edition (MGM) Bruce Springsteen With the Sessions Band: Live in Dublin (Sony) The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: A Re-Imagining of the 1919 Masterpiece of Horror (Image) CHiPs: The Complete First Season (Turner) Coming to America:…
Imagine your husband goes on a fishing trip with some friends and comes upon a dead body in the river. Rather than interrupt their male-bonding fun, they figure they’ll just forget about it until they get back a few days later. Perfectly acceptable decision, right? The girl will still be…
I would have made a better Italian. No doubt about it. I have total appreciation for my Hispanic culture and live safely distant from Farmers Branch, but the bottom line is Italians have better food. Despite the similarities between Mexican and Italian cuisine—lots of carbs, cheeses and fatty meats—I think…
Playwright Tony Kushner is perhaps best known for his epic Angels in America, which illuminated the AIDS crisis. Now, that vision is applied to the civil rights movement in Caroline, or Change, an award-winning musical that chronicles the life of Caroline, a black maid in 1960s Louisiana. The “change” refers…
Ever feel like you just can’t seem to get it together? That everyone around you knows what they’re doing with their lives and you don’t? That someone your age should have a career, a family and a plan? Yeah, I wouldn’t know about that either. But playwright Jonathan Larson does,…
Just in case you haven’t read John Steinbeck or listened to Woody Guthrie lately, here’s a news flash: living in the Dust Bowl sucked. How else could you explain thousands of Texans wanting to move to California? Playwright Allison Moore, a Texas expat living in Minneapolis, has brought the story…
While it might sound like a real go-getter’s guide to the art of self-love, the book Do You! is actually a how-to for something much more valuable: how to, paraphrasing the press materials from Barnes & Noble, realize your dreams and achieve personal success. That may sound pretty dang geeky…
