Never let it be said, concupiscent readers, that we don’t have your best interests at heart. We slog and grind through the week, compiling these pages filled with little trifles for your amusement, as if your very lives depended on it. We want you to have fun, try something new,…

Fair warning: We’re about to burn something into your brain that will stick with you for the rest of the day. First, start humming the Beach Boys’ classic, “California Girls.” You know, “The West Coast has the sunshine, and the girls all look so tan.” Got it? Now try to…

It’s Sunday, Super Bowl Sunday, and Connie Connally’s helpers have deserted her to rush home for the game. The men in her life–husband, Pete Stovall; son, Zach; and friend, Gary Daniel–spent most of the day hanging the panels Connally has labored over for more than a year on the long,…

Before Sesame Street but during the heyday of Captain Kangaroo, legend has it, Dallas-area kiddies got their kicks while they ate their Kix in front of the TV from one of two locally produced morning shows. It was the early 1960s, and television was still creeping out of its primordial…

There are still a handful of dreamers in Dallas, and they’re not all starry-eyed lottery players, or dot.com entrepreneurs, or the founders of Legend Airlines, for whom “a wing and a prayer” proved no match for Southwest Airlines. Dallas isn’t Disneyland, or Camelot, or Oz. Dr. Jacob Kupersztoch found this…

If you didn’t spend the better part of puberty at a performing-arts high school, then any impressions you may have formed about such a creative curriculum are probably based on the idealized experiences depicted in Fame, the movie that chronicled a group of adolescent misfits who were young, gifted, talented,…

The first 15 minutes of our prepared childbirth course last summer was devoted to ice-breaking–that peculiar activity group leaders believe helps a room full of strangers bond. We dutifully stated our names, jobs, due dates, hobbies. One particularly stunning response came out of the bow-shaped mouth of a stay-at-home prego…

You have to wonder what’s going on at Fort Worth’s Yellow House Gallery, a recently expanded art space tucked into the light industrial no-man’s-land between West Lancaster Avenue and West 7th Street. Michaele Ann Harper opened Yellow House in 1996, but before the expansion it was hard to believe she…

We can’t believe it’s about to be 2001, the year immortalized in this and previous generations by Stanley Kubrick’s space odyssey. It’s disheartening to think that Kubrick’s, and Isaac Asimov’s and Frank Herbert’s, for that matter, visions of our enlightened, space-traveling, robot-enslaving, high-tech-infused 21st century haven’t come to pass. Sure,…

My handmade “Exorcism Kit” is still teetering on top of a stack of opened, scanned, mostly yawn-inducing art mail on the left side of my desk as I ponder the past year’s events, shortcomings, highlights, and surprises in Dallas and Fort Worth visual arts as 2000 is about to bite…

Growing up in the middle-class suburbs, we accompanied our parents every Sunday to the Caucasian Methodist Church. Now, “Caucasian Methodist” is not an official designation of the United Methodist Church; in this case, it’s merely an observation. We pre-teen Methodists were lovingly and gently tutored in the liberal leanings of…

Jay Maisel is through the looking glass. What’s black is white; what’s white is black. The native New Yorker came to Dallas for a December weekend opening of an exhibition of his photographs at The Boyd Gallery, and it’s actually colder here than it was in New York. There are…

If we see one more “reason for the season” sweatshirt, we’ll scream. If one more do-gooder rings a bell outside Target, we’ll have to pummel him with one of the “WWJD” paddle-ball games our agnostic father-in-law orders every year–by the dozen–from Oriental Trading Company. When Christmas gets this close, nearly…

You’ve sipped their wine, chugged their beer, and eaten their stale cheese. You’ve achieved opening-night art-lover status, and, as pleased as local gallery owners are to see your face once a month like clockwork when there’s a free art party, it’s time to pay up. The holiday season promises payback…

Don’t look for John Hartley on one of Jerry Springer’s “Are You My Baby’s Daddy?” segments. He doesn’t yet have any actual children; his paternal tendencies wouldn’t show up on a DNA test. The prolific but relatively un-shown painter is best known as the brains, vision, and sweat-investor behind Gallery…

Webb SightsResolve to break free of other tired old holiday traditions. We suggest a mind-numbing, radio-blasting road trip this weekend to Waxahachie. Really. Get the hell out of town and escape to the Webb Gallery’s consistent, artful take on the Twilight Zone. Proprietors Bruce and Julie Webb cultivate quirky, obsessive,…

Art galleries and museums ought to get mad because the Internet isn’t working out so well for them. The Net sucks the life out of art; even high-resolution images look like something you’d see if you were hanging your head out of the window of a speeding car with your…

The reports of Katherine Wagner’s imminent “death” are not greatly exaggerated. On December 15, the executive director of the Dallas Visual Art Center will succumb, after 11 years in one of the hottest seats in the Dallas art scene, to what she calls the “modern woman’s malady.” She won’t literally…

Brute ForceIf we were as smart as writer Dorothy Parker, we’d try to paraphrase her infamous maxim that “you can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think” and poke fun–or a very sharp, pointed stick–at some of the freak shows going on around Dallas that are calling themselves…

Of Mice and MenDon’t look now, but according to the metroplex arts calendars, it’s about time for the holiday hysteria to kick in. My friend, Jeffrey Cranor, puts it best: “You can’t throw a fruitcake around here without hitting an Ebenezer Scrooge or a Mouse King.” And it’s not enough…