Arts & Culture

During a routine visit to the Fort Worth Zoo several weeks ago, a few odd creatures in particular caught my eye. One was a man tossing Cheetos to the orangutans, right in front of the “Don’t feed the animals” sign. Another was a little boy hanging out in the “Parrot…

Kids in rock bands these days can’t play guitar worth shit. It was bad enough in the nineties, when they started covering their guitars with bumper stickers and duct-taping the straps on, like they didn’t care about the finish. But now they don’t even learn how to play. I saw…

Things might have changed, but midnight movies used to mean such subversive fare as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Pink Floyd The Wall. But stretch your imagination a bit and maybe it’s not that far off that the Inwood Theatre is showing West Side Story as a midnight movie…

It’s exciting when the seasons change, the days get longer and spending time out of the house seems like a good idea again. Even if the Dallas Art Dealers Association’s (DADA) Spring Gallery Walk was just an excuse to emerge from hibernation, we’d think it was a great idea. But,…

In the world of the swinging pendulum, there are two kinds of practitioners: therapeutic hypnotists and their cheesy ass you’re-getting-very-sleepy now-wake-up-and-act-like-a-monkey counterparts. Gary Conrad happens to fit both bills. The self-described “master” hypnotist started his career practicing on stressed out Wall Street execs who wanted to relax. He later switched…

Dear whomever scheduled live music at the Fort Worth Main Street Arts Festival: You are a moron. You managed to book two great acts, Dr. John and Son Volt, and filled out the rest of the lineup with a bunch of spares. If you had any sense, you would have…

To be imprisoned by Buddha, one must have done something fairly heinous. or at least somehow interpreted as malicious. I’d think that making war with heaven would be on the top of the heap of disdainable actions…probably second, however, to making love with hell, though, I’m not really sure how…

I miss my summer sand volleyball on Saturdays at Buddies but when one of my buds stepped on a big rusty nail that was it—Tetanus is so not a good look for me. Instead I play vicariously through tourneys on television, my old Power Spike: Pro Beach Volleyball video game…

Glass: brittle, transparent substance made by fusing sand over 70 years with offbeat Western classical, mathematics, philosophy and Ravi Shankar. The rare Philip Glass, that is. America’s influential composer of “sonic weather” will perform at the Musician and Composer series meet-and-greet at the Nasher Sculpture Center this Thursday, but tickets…

When the Bush administration and much of the rest of the world was still ignoring the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, Nicholas Kristof was avidly reporting about the horrors of the Janjaweed, the Arab, government-sponsored death squads that have killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions. Even when the…

You know you’re timeless when you’re a professed and proven favorite of both Frank Sinatra and the (often fickle) MTV generation. And, if you’ve been singing long enough to catch Sinatra’s ear and are still belting the hits and selling out concert halls, you know you have some music magic…

Simulated bowling on a videogame console strikes us as something similar to drinking non-alcoholic beer. What’s the point? You’re still bowling, only you don’t get any exercise (at least you don’t have to wear rented shoes ). At the Tipperary Inn’s Wii Bowling Leagues you can get plenty of Guinness,…

I admit that golf on television is a super, super drag. But have you ever actually been to a live golf tournament? Even if you don’t know your Tiger from your Lion-O, you can still enjoy yourself as you stroll through a perfectly manicured garden (really, that’s all a golf…

Robert Pausch’s The Last Lecture: A Love Story for Your Life is currently taking the publishing world by storm. But before Robert there was Morrie. Tuesdays With Morrie to be precise. Remember the story? Mitch Albom discovers that his favorite professor and mentor, Morrie Schwartz, has been diagnosed with Lou…

We thrive off the raw, nourishing underbelly of this huge concrete mother of a city. Don’t let flash and glitter fool you—the real proof of our survival is the enduring hunger to examine our inner nature. To toast awakening talents, boast of independent voices and post diverse visions that raise…

I’m all for weird, unofficial holidays. Forget about Halloween and Valentine’s Day and all that kids’ stuff. We should really be celebrating gems like “Draw a Picture of a Bird Day” and “Hollerin’ Contest Day.” The Dance Council is having a big festival to celebrate “National Dance Week,” which is…

I have said before that hating Journey is one of the things that definitively made me who I am today. The same could easily be said about Asia. They had less presence in my consciousness, but they were still really sucky in the same way: big, soulless, rockless rock that…

Go green. Be good to the earth. The message is everywhere but, aside from recycling, it’s often associated with cleaning products, architectural or utility choices and other adult stuff that the whole family can’t really get excited about. The Heard Natural Science Museum and Wildlife Conservatory decided to make “green”…

Since the beginning of the month, the Inwood Theater, 5458 W. Lovers Lane, has been hosting a limited-run film festival courtesy of United Artists, which celebrates its 90th birthday this annum; Annie Hall marks the closing-night offering, after a midnight run of such pristinely polished crown jewels as Midnight Cowboy,…

It’s nice when a game comes along that pleasantly surprises you. I admit, I judged Viking: Battle for Asgard by the screenshots, writing it off as yet another one of those grimy, violent games so plentiful that they’re almost their own category: the “Bloodletting in Brown Clothes on a Cloudy…