Opening a gallery in Dallas is just this side of nuts. Even established spaces in our so-called “gallery district” play Russian roulette with nearly every show; rosters of regular clients are no guarantee of a sale. But opening a gallery here and showing works by a “never-heard-of-‘im” German painter is…
“One of the criteria of casting was that we couldn’t afford to have a prick in the company,” said director Milos Forman on the making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. (Jack Nicholson, we can only assume, hadn’t achieved official prickdom at that point in his career.) The 1975…
Harp music wafting across thick red carpet, a few hundred well-dressed people sipping cool white Chardonnay and murmuring something about “legs” and “HDL levels.” What a perfect illusion of Dallas sophistication, of Texas savvy: Hang out at the Meyerson in your coolest duds and sip the most acclaimed regional wine…
A colleague and I were sitting in a Fort Worth diner just after walking through a certain exhibit at the Kimbell Museum. We were pondering the question If you could steal any object from that show, what would you nab? An enameled caviar server. A curvaceous, trippy mantel clock. A…
If two trees embraced in a snowy, isolated forest, would the affection make a noise? Zhang Jingru saw it, was moved, and even figured out a way to paint the scene. Employing meticulous brushwork on both sides of hair-thin paper, voodoo somehow arises from the surface–serene, chilly, and eerily breathtaking…
The Inwood Theater continues its Midnight Madness series this weekend with what it calls the “Fun-loving Losers” double-header: Clerks and Slacker, already slump-shouldered classics in their own right; their creators, Kevin Smith and Richard Linklater, respectively, are the prime purveyors of this decade’s new generation of fringe filmmaking. Slacker, in…
Somewhere high in the Rocky Mountains, 1863: “Wait 20 minutes while I sketch this storm.” “Yeah, right Mr. Bierstadt. We’ll just stand here with the pack mules while the wind freezes our butts off and you indulge yourself. Again.” Granted, conjuring up a mental picture of an impulsive, self-centered artist…
Just after we all thought indie rock had saved the planet from overt guitar posturing, leave it to MARS, the super-slick chain of “music and recording superstores” to launch a contest for would-be rock stars. Seems the equipment-shop-cum-amusement-park knows its patronage well: money-spending lawyers and CPAs who still dream in…
In David Lean’s 1957 film Bridge on the River Kwai, British World War II soldiers held hostage in a Japanese POW camp are forced to build a bridge across a jungle river. If they refuse, their captors will kill them. If they try to escape, the surrounding flora and fauna…
Not even the most diligent red ants can stop culture hounds from descending on Samuell-Grand Park with wine coolers and baked chicken: It’s Bard time again, kids! And while we all nobly extol the timeless wisdom of history’s most famous playwright, it seems the real draw of the Shakespeare Festival…
Hollywood’s been threatening to remake The Women, a 1939 razor of a film, for years now, with the likes of Julia Roberts and Demi Moore taking keen interest in the potential project. No surprise here; to resurrect Joan Crawford’s conniving vamp, Rosalind Russell’s catty blue blood, and Norma Shearer’s martyred…
The artist has something to tell us about how we process information, and Trenton Hancock uses the digestive tract to do it: teeth, throats, intestines, rectums–his as well as others’. Oddly enough, art hounds are eating it up. To kick off his one-man, five-week exhibition at the Gerald Peters Gallery…
That Nick Lowe has ducked the big, bright spotlight of Rock Stardom is a longstanding mystery of pop music. That he’s also managed to enter his fourth decade as one of rock’s most respected songwriter-producers with so much grace and wisdom is no mystery at all; he’s a clever one,…
Celtic pride Broken with a Word The Killdares Self-released The bumbling weight of hard rock and heavy metal has dropped like a barbell on nearly every other genre of pop music, with mixed results. When it happily collided with punk in the ’80s and early ’90s, it conceived grunge; when…
What happened to car design? Seems as though the architects of the machines we practically live in have grown complacent lately. They’ve rolled out legions of cookie-cutter sport utility vehicles (what’s the difference, really, between a Range Rover and a Land Cruiser, besides ethnicity?) and look-alike econo-mobiles (the new Civics…
The gender thing again? C’mon. Less than a year ago, the usually adventurous Arlington Museum of Art ran an exhibit titled Women’s Work, showcasing the female-tinged artwork of a dozen or so emerging women artists. Back then, I was both bemused and irritated with the gender angle; the individual works…
We were walking along Cedar Springs–my mother and I–when it happened. A few weekends back, while hitting the so-called “gallery district,” we passed a crowd filtering into the Florence Art Gallery. Curious, we peered into the window before a helpful bystander filled us in: “It’s that child prodigy, you know…
Compare these two sets of prose. Amo amat amass; Amonk amink a minibus Amarmyladie Moon, Amikky mendip multiplus Amighty midgey spoon. She loves you–yeah, yeah, yeah She loves you–yeah, yeah, yeah. With a love like that, you know you should be glad. Both were penned in late 1963 and unleashed…
On a balmy late night in a historic town square, the welcoming glow of a pizza parlor beckons the hungry and the bored. Inside, a tidy row of tables, a soda fountain, and polished wood paneling reflect the smooth operation of a modest business; the guy working behind the counter…
Two artists glancing through the same window may see the same hills, the same river, the same trees–but they damn sure won’t paint them all the same way. Two Texas painters, Julie Lazarus and Bruno Andrade, both concern themselves with landscape. Though their takes on flora and fauna come from…
Crock rock Loveswing Loveswing Last Beat Records While Darlington reaps local praise for upholding a music tradition with its 1977 punk brattiness, or Cowboys & Indians are beloved for its too-good-to-be-true old-school Western swing, why can’t Loveswing be keepers of a flame, too? Because the grass fire of grunge still…
Sharp edge meets mass appeal–not a common feat, especially by such a young ‘un. Heather Gorham, an emerging Dallas artist, somehow finds that rare space between abrasion and whimsy, the ominous and the welcoming. Her larger acrylic paintings and her minuscule bronze sculptures star a strangely cohesive stable of creatures–sideshow…
