Think your kid’s got what it takes to be the next top chef? OK, maybe not right now, but Central Market can help you get a good start. Its cooking school staff has taken on the daunting task of teaching your little cookie monsters (ages 6 to 12) some baking…
I’ll admit that with the passage of time often comes ingenuity and progress. I really like having power steering in my car, and microwaves certainly come in handy sometimes. But when it comes to horror films made in the 1950s, I say there’s little room for improvement. Sure, the special…
The pleasure quarters of ancient Tokyo were legendary for their hedonism, and their activities are immortalized through paintings called ukiyo-e by some of the artists, bohemians and courtesans that frequented these “floating worlds.” The world’s largest collection of these rare customized paintings includes those by artists such as Hokusai, Utamaro…
Now that the snow has gone and the weather is getting better (ahem), it’s time to think about partaking in some outdoor activities. The people at Texas Discovery Gardens have you covered with their new monthly social mixer series, Organic in the City. This first mixer, “Murderous Plants: Love Potions…
Ideally on Valentine’s Day, your lover/spouse/trick will have you seeing stars. In a dark, soothing room dense with the aroma of overflowing and engorged rose blossoms, you will recline and relax waiting for Cupid’s arrow to shoot. Your tongue will delight as the pleasure of chocolate sweetness is inserted into…
Like his father—the legendary Texas singer-songwriter/artist/playwright Terry Allen—artist Bale Creek Allen has dipped his toe in many media, from acting to song to sculpture. He’s even tried his hand at creative taxidermy, forming art with the carcasses of diamondback rattlesnakes. His newest exhibit, Empire, uses sculpture, found objects and said…
Remember when you were in college and you read Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit and it made you want to start chain-smoking? And if you were already a smoker, it made you want to start mainlining equine tranquilizers? Well, imagine a play with a similarly suffocating setup, except instead of…
If you’re any kind of a Willie Nelson fan you’ve probably seen him at honky-tonks or big amphitheaters. If you’re a really big fan you’ve been to at least a couple of his Fourth of July picnics and maybe even a Farm Aid concert or two. Perhaps you even went…
Terms of Endearment was the perfect date movie—romance, humor and death—but it doesn’t hold a candle to the late-life love shared by American poet Joy Gresham and C.S. Lewis, the celebrated Irish writer and theologian. Fifty-year-old “Jack” was a classics professor at Oxford—in the middle of writing Chronicles of Narnia—when…
Melons. Knockers. Cha-chas. Woo-woos. Hoo-hoos. Ta-tas. Roundies. Fun bags. Love bubbles. Honkers. Hooters. Jugs. Naughty pillows. Whoppers. Headlights. Twin peaks. Watermelons. Tig ol’ bitties. Harmonic oscillators. Mammaries. Airbags. Gazongas. Mary Kate and Ashley. Orbs. What-nots. Personalities. Breasteses. Zeppelins. Man boobs (only they’re on women). Babaloos. Umlauts. Twofers. Gajunka-junks. Join the…
I have to admit, I’m a little miffed with the Pawn Gallery in Deep Ellum. The other day I went to check my office mailbox and noticed all these cool, slick postcards (mailed in clear Mylar envelopes) in everyone’s slot. I was excited when I reached into mine but found…
OK, everybody already knows that Cirque du Soleil is not your average circus experience. Sure, there’s a big top, but instead of questionably treated animals doing spirit-destroying stunts beneath it, there’re incredibly talented acrobats, dancers, gymnasts, contortionists and every other sort of body artist doing death-defying feats that more than…
In the summer of 2005, an IMAX film crew descended on southern Louisiana to film a documentary on the state’s rapidly shrinking wetlands. The film was to serve as a warning, depicting the destruction a large hurricane could wreak on New Orleans if something wasn’t done to restore its natural…
Queen of folkabilly. That’s what Rolling Stone has called singer Nanci Griffith, the woman I would want to be in my next life if I believed in reincarnation—I covet her high, clear voice; the steeped-in-Texas songwriting; and the sense of humor, plus she’s darn cute in cowboy boots. If Griffith…
Come see A Dating Game 7:30 p.m. this Friday at Repertory Company Theatre’s new Promenade Theatre, 650 N. Coit Road in Richardson. It’s an original musical show that claims it’s “perfect for a date.” I say it’s only perfect to drag a date to an “original musical” if you’re going…
Though I’m sure it’s purely coincidental, the decision to release the Diane Keaton-Mandy Moore romantic comedy Because I Said So with the scent of this year’s Sundance Film Festival still fresh in the air provides us with an excellent opportunity to review the wayward career of the movie’ s director,…
PARK CITY, UTAH—We all know about the cathartic power of blues music, but until the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, who knew that it could serve as a cure-all for everything from nymphomania to childhood sexual abuse? In Hustle & Flow director Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, whose out-of-competition premiere screening…
PARK CITY, Utah — Ten days of terse texting among professional narcissists working on little or no sleep in one of the last cold spots left on Al Gore’s inconvenient Earth: Welcome to Sundance ’07, where wounding homefront melodrama Grace Is Gone sells and it hardly pays to be nice…
PARK CITY, Utah–Even by the lacerating standards of recent Sundance docs Why We Fight and Iraq in Fragments, the nonfiction at this year’s fest felt, well, real — alarmingly so. Indeed, after doing battle with films about U.S. policies on Iraq, Darfur, and global warming, this critic was nearly moved…
One morning, Gary Walkow was suddenly transformed into a successful Hollywood filmmaker. Gone were the hat-in-hand searches for financing, the deferred salaries, the long shooting days with undermanned crews, and the months upon years spent touring the festival circuit while seeking a distribution deal. For a moment, he was taking…
PARK CITY, Utah –On the first Saturday of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, I rolled out of bed and hustled up Main Street for the 8:30 screening of Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as adult siblings caring for an irascible elderly parent. Only I…
Great casting makes great theater. For The Miracle Worker to work as well as it does in Dallas Children’s Theater’s current production, it’s not enough just to find a young actress who can fling herself into the furniture portraying blind and deaf Helen Keller as a child. The role of…
