Dallas Christmas Festival Everything about Prestonwood Baptist Church and its Dallas Christmas Festival is big and broad, from the cast (more than 1,000) and running time (three hours-plus) to the humor. Being all things to all people, as the Apostle Paul advised, Prestonwood divides the show into distinct parts: a...
Café Pacific is a cliché. This is heresy. Shuffle into this bosom of Highland Park culture (Highland Park Village) and blurt such a thing, and you'll quickly be felled by a 2-carat marquise bullet right between the eyes. But look at the place. Your feet are surrounded by black and...
The most shocking thing about Kinsey, the first film from writer-director Bill Condon since 1998's Gods and Monsters, is how shocking it actually is. Within the confines of a standard biopic (A Beautiful Dirty Mind, you might call it), Condon refuses to play it straight--which is only appropriate, since his...
Most film festivals--at least ones not in Toronto, Manhattan, Cannes or Park City, Utah--have no rhyme or reason to their schedules, no more than a street-corner proselytizer does to his ramblings. They're subject to the fancies of a small group of programmers and the whims of distributors pushing new product;...
Dallas has contributed more than its fair share of reality television stars. There's American Idol's Nikki McKibben, of course, and Survivor's Colby Davidson. Every season of The Bachelor, or The Fake Bachelor, or The Littlest and Most Ridiculous Bachelor features some blonde from Dallas--pretty but plasticky, with big gloopy lipstick...
The voice and vintage-R&B vibe of Joss Stone's 2003 debut, The Soul Sessions, were so at odds with reality--how could the second coming of Aretha be a lily-white British teen?--that it's still hard to believe. But not only does Mind, Body & Soul repeat the trick, it betters it: Substituting...
The Gypsy Tea Room opted out of Friday night's New Music Festival, choosing instead to feature three non-Dallas acts, and the gamble mostly paid off. Then again, a lineup this good isn't exactly a "gamble." North Carolina's Rosebuds opened with an unexpected indie-rock recipe: three parts Britt Daniel and two...
Taverna is ear-piercing. This is odd, because thought has been given to sound. While Taverna has a concrete floor, it has cloth-covered baffles in the ceiling to minimize sonic glare. Still noise sneaks through, leaving one to wonder what the roar would be if the ceiling were baffle-less. There would...
Esteban Pastorino Diaz The photographs of this young Argentinean artist succeed as form and product--both compositionally and conceptually. Currently showing are three different types of photographs by Diaz, the panoramica, aerial views and night shots of architecture. Originally schooled in engineering, Diaz is a photographer most interested in process. For...
I want to tell you, this town is a gypsy fortuneteller's paradise. Give me a turban and a blue bathrobe, and I could make a million bucks here as "The Great Schutzkin." It's sooo easy. Two weeks ago I put the envelope to my forehead, concentrated real, real hard, and...
All the Best Beauty and the beast: While I know all of us at CBS 11 are pleased that you named our 10 p.m. newscast Best TV News Show (Best of Dallas, October 14), I'd just like to mention a couple of things important to what you see on the...
Midlake is a talkative group. The guys in this Denton band answer questions at length, cut up at all times and sound like the oldest gang of friends in the world. But there's one exception: Their songwriter, lead singer Tim Smith, is glaringly quiet. For the short time he actually...
For those of you who secretly find comfort in alien postures--who find yourself always the observer rather than the participant, forever the wallflower and never the butterfly--you'll be happy to know that evidence shows this to be normal. We are alien by nature. Our collective provenance as humans may not...
Idol Records' latest split EP joins two of Dallas' polar opposites to cover each other's songs. The results? Well, for some reason, the pAper chAse hid its guitars while recording Will Johnson's "The Riot Jack," leaving the usually beastly band with only piano, synthesized strings and a processed drum loop...
CONFIDENTIAL COMMUNIQUE TO: Stent Industry Shareholders and Venture Capitalists FROM: Stent Manufacturers Association of America President Arturo E. Bloc RE: Meat First let me congratulate you on our bold investments. Your significant funding has driven one of the most innovative medical devices ever devised: the stent, that expensive (yeah!) wire...
Here's an odd phenomenon: When musicians try their hand at acting, they often do a damn fine job. Al Jolson, Frank Sinatra, Kris Kristofferson, Barbra Streisand, Cher, Will Smith, Mark Wahlberg--they may not have changed the art form, but they've had careers. Pretty good ones, in fact. But turn the...
Still Hopeful It's called life: Someone recently brought me the October 14 issue of the Dallas Observer for a specific reason. That reason is my son Ray Johnston. The sports section on page 94 was of particular interest to me since there was a small item about him. When I...
The unjustly neglected titan of Accessible Pop has returned for a second round of family creation with his notoriously volatile brother. New Zealands beloved Neil and Tim Finn first tried being a duo on 1995s Finn, producing two singles, with the rest of the album quickly forgotten by all but...
Woot, There It Is From fancy watches to the Bag O Crap, woot.com sells itself to rabid consumersone item a day Every night, one minute before midnight, they hunch over their computers, this crazed lot of 10,000 from across the world, hoping to be the first to buy the next...
With its nine-minute songs and indulgent feedback, Wilco's A Ghost Is Born is better seen as a concert album, full of the screaming musical tangents you expect from a live show. There's a reason for that: Before laying down tracks, the band played the songs on tour, cracking them open...
When Robert Smith commissioned his nieces and nephews to scribble the artwork for the Cure's new self-titled album, he had three simple requests for them: Draw a good dream, draw a bad dream and make sure to include the words "the Cure." The results resemble the scrawled refrigerator art parents...
Thursday, October 28 Want to see Dallas, we brag, then rent Office Space. From the stop-and-go traffic to the rows of chain restaurants offering "American food" to blocks and blocks of identical beige apartments, there Dallas is. That's probably most cities, but, hey, Office Space was inspired by Dallas and...
