Kettle Art Gallery is going to have to expand its available wall space. Maybe it can take over some of the recently vacated buildings in Deep Ellum. While City Hall cultural fascists battle to remove the personality from our fair city, the Anne (and Deiter) Franks of the local contemporary…
Like Warhol, English graffiti artist Banksy has redefined what is considered art—paving the way for grassroots stencil artists to make their way out of the streets and into galleries. These artists combine traditional graffiti with a unique stenciling technique made from cutout poster board. Unfortunately, Dallas City Hall is waging…
With riots and freedom marches protesting the vulgar imbalance of rights between the bejeweled and the sweaty, the 1789 French Revolution turned some heads (into baskets). The strength in numbers and shared pain spoke to German playwright, scientist and wanted agitator, George Buchner. His 1836 play Woyzeck became an underground…
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…
The end isn’t nigh by a long shot. Not according to the 30-something German graphic artist wunderkind Ralf Ziervogel. He views our modern society—obsessed with sex and violence, bathed in designer labels and incessantly groping each other over invisible airwaves–as evolutionary progress. A sort of medieval hell on earth that…
Bees and black holes. Sounds like a bad summer vacation, but the WaterTower Theatre “shows us the honey” in Charlotte Jones’ award-winning British play Humble Boy. In her “Hamlet Light,” dysfunctional family ties tangle in the string theory following the death of astrophysicist Felix Humble’s bee-keeping father. This smart comedy…
Kelly Price’s mother remembers her baby daughter singing out from her crib in the middle of a quiet night. Not too surprising as the little spiritual diva was raised accompanying her father, the Reverend Joseph Price (as well as her evangelist mother, Claudia, and siblings), to work every day at…
Do you live for the company holiday party? Cozying up next to the spiked punchbowl far away from where the conga line forms and your boss barks the canine “Jingle Bells” into the karaoke mic (Just remember: That new account WILL be yours by New Year’s!)—now that’s our idea of…
The first day of any new year sets the tone for the months to come. For sports fans and college students, that means kick-ass “footbowl” games featuring the best up-and-coming players in the country. An exciting show of talent and testosterone is headed for Dallas’ bowl game this year, where…
Plants have dictated the course of history. Toby and Will Musgrave discuss how trade led by the Western world became the catalyst for addiction, slavery and industrialization in their book An Empire of Plant: People and Plants That Changed the World. Celebrating the power and beauty of the garden, the…
John Lennon’s dream for mankind lies buried in New York City’s Strawberry Fields. Buried, but not dead. The spirit of his campaign for world peace—represented there by the mosaic “Imagine”—has taken root in the hearts of millions of fans who have passed through the 2.5-acre Garden of Peace since its…
It’s an easy groupie costume—just a long brown coat—but the pinyin dialect is tough to master. Want an equal opportunity future? Thousands of avid Browncoats point to Joss Whedon’s Firefly series, where East and West have merged in an interplanetary frontier of renegade capitalists, and the new “family” unit consists…
I couldn’t make this stuff up. Scissors that talk across the room, feathers that cough, colors that teeter…But some people have better imaginations than I do. The difference between writers and other artists is the latter’s ability to turn boring three-dimensional media (or otherwise useful kitchen objects) into an experiential…
We’re all trying to get a mega-theatre experience at home these days. Big screens and surround sound with lots of bass so the couch vibrates when you turn up the speakers. But how about getting that “knock-you-out-of-your-seat” thrill watching a silent film? Eighty years ago, the only sound you heard…
Verdi’s third opera Nabucco put him on the musical map—and brought him scandal—when performed in 1842 Italy. Based on the biblical story of King Nebuchadnezzar’s banishment of the Jews from Babylon in 543 B.C., passionate opera-goers demanded a then-illegal encore. The “Va, pensiero” chorus—when Hebrew slaves cry out for their…
What music lover would miss a chance to hear Beethoven and Mozart play a double bill? On Saturday, a 21st-century version of this once-in-a-lifetime feast of instrumental finesse will take place right here at the Meyerson Symphony Center. For $150 or $250 a ticket, you will hear two of the…
Over 78 million American “boomers” were born after World War II. In their parents’ generation, age 50 meant retirement was around the corner, along with a gold watch, Social Security payouts and a comfortable chair on the porch. Now 50-year-olds are merely entering the second half of an average lifespan…
The haunting sound made famous by Robert Moog, the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” and almost every science fiction movie made in the ’50s and ’60s was a product of Russian physicist and trained cellist, Lev Termen. The theremin was invented in 1919 quite by accident. Termen had created a large…
In the world of art, the term DADA usually conjures up the 1920s anti-art images of Man Ray, Ernst and Duchamp. In Big D, however, it’s the world of art history and media all flourishing under the umbrella of the Dallas Art Dealers Association. Every year DADA offers a feast…
Medusa—that’s a heady name for a winery, but gnarly old grape vines do resemble writhing snakes protruding from a stubborn head. Only the vines have not yet turned into stone, surviving 100 years of dry-farming and hand-picking in the California soil. Several private, small-lot Zinfandel vineyards now yield their magic…
1479 B.C.E.: Cross-dressing female wanted to rule the most powerful nation on earth. Hatshepsut walked in and filled the bill mightily for 19 years. She grew up in the political spotlight—dad Thuthmosis I ruled Egypt for 14 years; Mom’s brother Amenophris had ruled for 21 years. Power in the blood,…
Some films are instant cult classics, quick to rally legions of loyal followers to large conventions, fanzines and Web sites. Unfortunately, embarrassing costumes and makeup are usually involved when conjuring Siths, Wookies, Klingons and Vulcans. But in 1998 the cult scene achieved a new level of cool when Jeff Bridges…
