Athens, Georgia’s Drive-By Truckers formed in 1996 and spent a good five years paying their dues before they broke through with 2001’s Southern Rock Opera, a double-LP concept record about Lynyrd Skynyrd and “the duality of the Southern thing” that they self-financed with the help of their fans. Since then,…
Jake Johannsen has an awkward but endearing hesitant delivery that makes him sound more like a neurotic friend telling a funny story full of spontaneous asides than a pro reciting a practiced stand-up routine. But to be invited to perform on The Late Show With David Letterman a record 35…
Do a Marty McFly and travel back in time to the 19th century during Candlelight at Old City Park in Dallas. The two-day weekend festival conjures up ye olde holiday experience for the family: carriage rides courtesy of half-brother donkeys Nip and Tuck, storytelling, photos with St. Nick, crafts, entertainment…
Holiday travel conjures up a level of dedication in people that few situations do. For example, last Christmas Eve I left Dallas at 10 a.m. and arrived at my destination 140 miles away nearly 30 hours later, after spending a night on an icy rural highway with the cheerful members…
This holiday season, let’s harken back to a simpler time. A time without iPads, GPS systems, 3-D movies or Facebook obsessions. A time when folklore was mighty interesting and groups of eager ranch hands would sit around a blazing fire and share tall tales late into the night. If this…
Lines, circles, squares, cubes and cylinders jump, jet, pop and plow their way on stage. Pinks, reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues and violets expand and shrink, expand and shrink, swirling together as one artistic vision. A balloon swallows a young woman and takes her away. You blink your eyes and…
Holiday films such as Home Alone, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and my personal favorite, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (Squirrreel!), have become as stereotypical to the holiday season as Christmas trees and cheesy holiday music specials. However, one of the more timeless entertainment traditions of the Christmas season is The…
Face it, if you’re the parent of a preschooler, your car is probably littered with Cheerios and your home covered in tiny, sticky fingerprints. During a hectic day, it’s nice to park the kid by the television so you can enjoy a glass of mommy’s special grape juice. But with…
No matter what Texas bumper stickers say, it’s clear that bigger is not always better. Puppy dogs, hair barrettes, petit fours, buttons: People like some things downsized. That’s the idea behind Small Works: Art + Object, an exhibition of small sculptures by 16 artists on display at the Marty Walker…
Whether or not there is still any dispute about the skin color of Jesus, it would be harder to answer why it matters; hence the apt and none-too-subtle title of the new TeCo theater production of Langston Hughes’ Black Nativity. The show, originally written in 1961, traditionally features an all…
The Herdman children are probably the worst children ever. Not only does the Herdman clan steal, lie and cuss, but those little monsters even smoke cigars–the girls too! Undoubtedly, casting them in the best Christmas pageant ever stands to be more horrifying than heartwarming. But wouldn’t you know, sometimes compassion…
Born into a prominent family as the grandson of the founder of what would become the Burroughs Corporation, William S. Burroughs was educated at Harvard University. Yet despite his privileged upbringing, he worked as an exterminator, developed a lifelong opiate addiction and chronicled the lowest of lowlifes in novels populated…
Although it’s only been around since 2004, The Polar Express is already a seasonal classic. Based on the 1986 award-winning book of the same name, the movie centers on the night journey of a steam train full of pajama-clad children headed for the North Pole. The book is visually unique,…
Born with dyslexia, artist Todd Camplin has always had to read things over and over to make them make sense. Some people would be all whiny about having a learning difference like dyslexia, wherein the words and letters don’t seem to hold still, but Camplin has turned his difference into…
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to snap a few quick photos, but it does take some pretty sweet skills to take capture the perfect picture. I mean, come on, it’s tough finding that perfect angle and the perfect background to go along with it. But Dornith Doherty seems to…
Perhaps the first real impression you gather from Dan Phillips’ drawings is that this guy loves curls. An artist with a flair for drawing freckled Betty Boop-like girls with curls up to here, and a graduate student from North Bennett Street School specializing in carving furniture in a way that’s…
The parties I attend don’t usually come with MPAA ratings, but maybe they should. I feel like it might be useful to know ahead of time what you can expect from a night out, in terms of the number of occurrences of strong adult language and/or brief nudity. Unfortunately, most…
Just three years ago, George Michael and Kenny Goss founded the Goss-Michael Foundation. The exhibitions they have shown (including works from their private collection as well as works from various other art institutions) have challenged boundaries and broadened mindsets on what constitutes new, exciting contemporary art (especially that of the…
However you cut it, Alexander Calder and his works are true awesomeness. Though he is recognized as the inventor of the mobile (as in, twirling suspended attention-getters), Calder’s done more than just kinetic work, as his massive sculptures have graced the world over, including iconic pieces such as “Flamingo” in…
Humans worry a lot about the big world around us–birth, death, sex, power, war. And in the much smaller world around us–the world of insects–things aren’t much different. Bugs are constantly struggling to find a mate, fight battles, locate food and avoid being brutally killed by other insects; compared to…
A near-irresistible exercise in bravura absurdity, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan deserves to become a minor classic of heterosexual camp—at the very least, it’s the most risible and riotous backstage movie since Showgirls. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake has had a spooky quality at least since Tod Browning appropriated a few bars of…
A big thanks to all the schools out there–where else can a bunch of adolescents get together to plot random acts of deviance? To be fair, youngsters aren’t always up to no good–in fact, sometimes their planning begets a life-changing occurrence. (And we’re not talking about the popular girls’ decision…
