The lead story last week in the syndicated column News of the Weird was about how “Great Britain’s premiere art award, the Turner Prize, was won in December by painter Chris Ofili, whose signature finishing touch on his work is a few blotches of elephant manure. Ofili’s centerpiece…bears the title…
So it takes a big holiday to lure the Old 97’s onto a Dallas stage. See, Rhett don’t live here anymore. Even after he sang (with great conviction, we might add) about Los Angeles: “I might’ve wound up in L.A. pannin’ for gold/Found me a woman to warm up with…
It’s a new year. Time to stop asking the question: “How does the Dallas art scene compare to other cities?” Replacement query: How is the Dallas art scene doing, period? I won’t pretend that I’m intimate with every dent and cranny of the local artistic community. For various reasons, from…
Guess it’s not too often that a group exhibition in this town includes such luminaries as Jonathan Borofsky, Francesco Clemente, David Salle, and Eric Fischl (sounds like class reunion of Art Stars ’86). Leave it to Turner and Runyon, the one contemporary space in these parts that fairly ignores local…
Michael Corcoran Makes Stuff Up As a critic gets older — and this one is 43 — certain tasks become more difficult, like trying to show any interest whatsoever in the latest R.E.M. release. But other activities become a breeze, such as making a year-end list of the 10 best…
Turns us on Floor 13 Floor 13 Self-released Overlooked and underrated are two apt descriptions surrounding Floor 13. Too bad, then, since these boys’ powerhouse live show and new-wave-meets-glam tunes could easily be pulling in some of the city’s biggest audiences. Surely all those displaced tomorrowpeople and Tripping Daisy fans…
There are only a handful of rock critics whose careers have made them as much pop stars as the pop stars they write about: Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Legs McNeil, Robert Palmer, Jon Savage. Robert Christgau’s there too, but he’s the hey-I’m-just-a-fan-like-you of the bunch, a writer who doses his…
Nazis, a suicide attempt, a brutal kidnapping, death by heart attack, a villain named Burgermeister Meisterburger. What do these have in common? They’re all elements in some of the best Christmas movies ever. Most of ’em you won’t catch on TV, though. Obvious favorites are just that: too damn obvious…
Something makes me suspicious of these paintings, though at first glance I like them. At last glance I like them also–swoon over them, in fact, for at least a moment. But somewhere in between the initial and parting glances, I feel uneasy, disconcerted by their unquestioning confidence, as though what…
Sidneys unite! Sniffing Glue The Visitors Mind Control The Visitors ride (too?) hard on vocalist Benjie Bollox’s brief stint with the London-based U.K. Subs, a veteran punk band that outlived its purpose by 1981 yet refuses to lie down. Bollox spent about a year abroad drumming for the Subs before…
It’s rock! No, it’s art! It rocks! But it’s art! Ah. Must be the Good/Bad Art Collective up to its shenanigans again. Who better to yank the area’s music contingent out of complacency than the Denton tricksters-cum-artists, who for the third time in as many years will stage their(in)famous Rock…
About the closest most of us will ever come to the backwoods of Appalachia is watching Deliverance, and the harrowing misadventure upon which its plot hinges pretty much ensures that we won’t want to visit the backwoods of Appalachia. That the entire region and its natives have been defined for…
So many people rant on about the evils of the holiday season: “It’s hypocritical. Everyone acts selfish and lazy all year, then suddenly November rolls around, and they start donating to charity and going to church and caring about humankind. Then by New Year’s, they’re back to their old ways…
The Dallas Museum of Art couldn’t have chosen a better savior–and it’s not a new director but an artist–than Bill Viola. It’s not news that the museum has been trapped in an identity crisis for years now. Antiquity or modernity? Conservatism or gambles? Big-money exhibitions or small, pioneering ones? The…
Modest Mouse is like three smart, attention-deficit-disorder kids running roughshod over a romper room. The Seattle band’s music–small cacophonies of melody and turmoil–ricochets off the ceiling, punches holes in walls, then meets square in the middle of the room for a polite race of Hot Wheels. Then the boys get…
Somewhere in the Midwest, 1998. In a cold, dim basement, three university students sit among stacks of blank CD cases, a few guitars, a four-track recorder, and an ambitious plan. They will record and release an album all by themselves, thereby sidestepping the cruel and carnivorous music industry. Hell or…
Then I woke up, and it was all a dream. My back was aching from resting against the knobbly tree trunk, my tongue was sweating it was so damn hot–107 degrees on the bank’s digital thermometer–and if it hadn’t been for my Onion Fest baseball cap, the shifting sun would’ve…
Jumpin’ jive Big Night in Cowtown Cowboys and Indians Self-released The very first bars of Cowboys and Indians’ second album are enough to convert even the most dubious listener. Lean in. Must be the way the sliding horns slap their way over the spare landscape of playful gee-tar strum. Then…
One of the weirdest things about the huge self-taught art retrospective going on in Fort Worth right now is its dearth of Texas artists. Not that this region has the monopoly on outsider and naive art, but it is rife with it. Texas has really, in its own unruly way,…
Two guesses as to how Robyn Hitchcock might describe meeting Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme, just after Hitchcock’s 1995 concert in upstate New York. 1. “So then he came backstage after the show to shake my hand, and he was just a really nice guy. We talked about getting together for…
Standard evening question: Should we eat first, and then see the movie, or should we catch the early movie and then eat? For years now, the Granada Cinema and Drafthouse has solved that problem with a left-right combo: Wash down that pizza with a pitcher of Bud while you watch…
Even for staunch flesh eaters, which I am, a meat-packing plant carries all the charm of the sixth level of hell. Doesn’t matter how spotless, how ventilated, how safe for the workers, it’s just one step removed from the actual slaughterhouse–all those disembodied slabs of meat a jarring reminder of…
