More than 20 years ago, Henry Su turned his head at a stoplight on Kings Highway in Shreveport. He heard a familiar sound coming from a strip mall: numbers shouted in Cantonese. The sound pulled him into a small kung fu school, and what he saw would change his life…
2/18 City worker types, mostly from the Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau–people in the business of selling our city–were rounded up to devise a plan on how to bring people here. So they thought for a while until…Ah ha! Of course! That’s brilliant! They decided on gluttony. Gluttony is the…
2/18 Interior designers know the difference between decorating schemes that are in for the kitchen and which ones should be tossed out the kitchen window. For reality-television interior designers, the first toss out the window is often logic. Discovery Channel’s Monster House is no exception. Past projects for the show…
2/19 Onlookers from galaxies far, far away could easily dub our Mother Earth the “Land of Accessibility.” No, that’s not some title of a moral-inducing realm buried within the pits of Dante’s Inferno. It’s our reality. With a flip of a mobile phone stuffed with a cornucopia of ring tones…
2/22 We could give two flips whether people choose the word “purple” over “violet.” It’s the same color, right? Well, not according to our old art teacher. After submitting a still-life sketch of some grapes and a chair that we had scribbled in the cafeteria minutes earlier, we started bullshitting…
It’s hard to know what to expect from Wayne Wang. The Hong Kong-raised director has made one gorgeous mood movie (Chinese Box) and two intelligent literary adaptations (Smoke and Anywhere But Here); he was also responsible, in his early days, for the overwrought sobfest Joy Luck Club. Then, in 2002,…
At first (and second and maybe even third) glance, it’s all so familiar: Keanu Reeves shrouded in a black trench coat that flaps behind him like a superhero’s wings, moving between netherworlds and a real world used as a battleground, breeding ground and playground for higher beings amused and appalled…
The small Appalachian community of Whitwell, Tennessee, boasts two traffic lights and a population of 1,600, nearly all of them white and Christian. Lying just 100 miles from Pulaski, where the Ku Klux Klan was founded, this town would seem an unlikely place to find a memorial to the 6…
In the classic “actor’s nightmare,” you’re standing center stage in the spotlight. The audience stares, waiting for your next line. Behind you, costumed performers fidget, wondering why you haven’t picked up your cue. You have no idea what play you’re in, why you never rehearsed or what you’re supposed to…
Jesse Meraz Wonderland and Jason Villegas: Growth Hormone Mutation Makeover Meraz and Villegas are archaeologists of the present. They disinter pretty plastic detritus from the morass of American popular culture–those objects that defy willy-nilly the laws of entropy. Meraz leaves one paradigm of representation in the wake of another: painting…
The Dead Monkey That says it all. Nick Darke’s two-act drama arrives as dead as King Kong’s hairy corpse. Hank and Dolores (Wm. Paul Williams, Tina Parker) watch their 15-year marriage unravel after the death of their beloved chimp, a son substitute that’s supposed to remind us of the invisible…
If you want to know what Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior is all about, it’s pretty easy to sum up. It starts with a big fight, as a group of local villagers plays capture the flag in the branches of a large tree. Then there’s a brief stretch of plot, as…
Writing the little play about big ideas is playwright Lee Blessing’s specialty. He did it with A Walk in the Woods–one Russian diplomat, one American (both male) take a stroll and decide the future of nuclear arms–and he does it with Going to St. Ives, now playing in its local…
Concentrations 46: Zones of Dissolution Escapism can often provide the most direct path to reality. In his three-room installation, Daniel Roth pops the escape hatch, leading us to a reality that is bifurcated–equal parts fantasy and factuality. Roth works in a variety of media, including drawing, photography, sculpture and architecture,…
A Country Life David Mamet updated and rewrote Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya a decade ago. So did British theater great Brian Friel and others. But now Terry Martin, producing artistic director at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre, tries his hand at it, and by golly, he’s come up with a fine adaptation,…
Thursday, February 10 We never meant for it to happen. It just did. One week, we were flipping the channels. The next we were rushing home to catch Antiques Roadshow. It’s not about the price of Grandma’s lampshade. It’s the human drama: the thrill of a historic Persian rug or…
Could William Shakespeare have had any idea that the suicides of two teens would take over as the standard for romantic sacrifice? Perhaps not, but Franco Zeffirelli certainly did. Especially when he saw the magic that would come from casting two “show business nobodies” in his 1968 version of Romeo…
2/11 Damn Frances Mayes. As if it weren’t enough to move to a farmhouse in Italy. As if it weren’t enough to write a book about it. As if it weren’t enough that the book exploded into a best seller and spawned two follow-ups and a successful film in which…
2/11 The human brain contains about 150 billion neurons. That’s a lot, but it’s still a finite number–that is, there’s only so much brainpower to go around, and most people need all they have and could use a few billion more. So it’s with some small amount of despair I…
2/14 If you’re wondering why your girlfriend has that gleam in her eye, why she’s always talking about how “special” you make her feel, why she left the Tiffany brochure in your briefcase, then you’re stupider than you look. Wake up, buddy, Valentine’s Day is right around the corner. Or…
2/10 As much as we love professional dance, there tends to be a separation between the people onstage and the people in the seats that sometimes feels a bit alienating (and not just distance-wise). Having a background in dance, we realize that’s often the case for the dancer as well…
One should expect little from the man who has directed an Olsen twins movie (It Takes Two, the one with Steve Guttenberg, no less), Matthew Perry’s first Friends-to-film entry (Fools Rush In, its title an apparent nod to audiences that went to see it) and Sweet Home Alabama, one of…
