When reading materials on Jeff Abbott’s new thriller Fear we couldn’t help but think of My Blue Heaven, the moderately unsuccessful Steve Martin and Rick Moranis comedy. Try out these parallels: the mob, witness protection program, post-traumatic stress disorder, drug scandals. OK, maybe not so much on those last two,…

Don’t think of this as an anniversary event along the lines of your grandparents’ 50th—you know, the one where the dinner options included your choice of 17 casseroles and your aunt got hammered on frozen Colorado bulldogs before leading a bevy of girdled asses through the rented hall during an…

Obsessed with the secret handshake? Interested in what goes on behind the closed doors of a fraternal lodge meeting? Wanna know what’s under those robes? We’re not sure that Ritual, the new exhibition at the Webb Gallery, will offer many concrete answers, but viewers can have a look at the…

Any kid who took Film 101 thinking they could sleep through feature films for an easy A knew they were done for when they hit Eisenstein, Bergman, Kurosawa and Fellini. These directors created meaty, inspired (and inspiring) films—dramatic and sometimes bizarre, but not entirely lacking humor. With help from the…

A certain relative has a video on his cell phone of his dog attacking a raisin. I’m not exaggerating when I say that he shows it to pretty much every animal lover he comes in contact with. And to be honest, it’s safely one of the funniest things I’ve seen…

Any kid who took Film 101 thinking they could sleep through feature films for an easy A knew they were done for when they hit Eisenstein, Bergman, Kurosawa and Fellini. These directors created meaty, inspired (and inspiring) films—dramatic and sometimes bizarre, but not entirely lacking humor. With help from the…

In fifth grade, the guy next to us showed off what he called his “pink alien” and got two weeks detention and what I’m sure was a rather traumatic sit-down at home. I was sufficiently horrified. Odd then, that Katherine Baronet’s series of paintings, Pink Alien, doesn’t frighten us one…

Curry is just a term for a blend of spices, rather than any one ingredient or flavor. My cat is 2 feet long and weighs 18.7 pounds. Six Flags Over Texas is 21 miles from Dallas. The average life expectancy of a spider monkey is 20 to 27 years. Dig…

Inspirational art doesn’t get a lot of rave reviews these days. Somehow, cool points go to artists that use dark, creepy and lurid topics, not the hope-filled ones. But that’s so not fair. Take into consideration Snapshots of Survival. This is an art exhibition presented by Gilda’s Club Worldwide and…

Raise your hand if you know that Duncan Sheik had an album after 1996’s self-titled release that included the seemingly triple-tracked vocal wonder of “Barely Breathing.” Keep them up if you know that Sheik actually has five albums to his credit, and four of them are far superior to that…

In Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, evil is warded off by a prince with said magic flute. Hmm, that’s interesting. Momma always said that “magic flutes” brought nothing but evil and the boys attached to them were far from princes. Guess we’ll see who’s right when the University of North…

Oh, hell yeah! Didn’t get enough art/spy/Vatican craziness with the media frenzy surrounding the accusations of plagiarism against Dan Brown and his bestseller The DaVinci Code or the release of the feature film starring the oddly cast Tom Hanks and the subsequent über-coverage of all things Opus Dei on CNN’s…

I have an issue with Dane Cook’s Tourgasm. I find the show, HBO’s documentary series following four comedians—Dane Cook, Gary Gulman, Jay Davis and Robert Kelly—on tour to be a completely unsuccessful rip-off of Comedy Central’s Comedians of Comedy. Why? Well, hmm. Maybe because Comedians was a documentary series following…

You don’t need Lindsay Wagner telling you that getting enough good, restful sleep is important. Duh, Sleep Number Queen, we know that. We know that to rejuvenate the cells, the mind and spirit, a person needs a certain amount of sleep. And comfortable, uninterrupted sleep is best, of course. Now,…

Singer-songwriter AJ Croce is damn good. And why shouldn’t he be? This guy has enough inspiration to propel him through decades of song. The son of the affable songster Jim Croce (“Time in a Bottle” and “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”) endured his father’s death and his own sudden blindness as…

Dallas becomes more and more bleak as the summer days wear on. Vibrant gardens fade to crispy brown hay, and those little wiggly lines coming up from the road just magnify the uninviting cement all around. Even people change from pink-cheeked to toast-like. Perfect timing for a blast of color…

The only Peruvian songstress we’re familiar with is the four-octave legend Yma Sumac. Her mambo/tiki/Les Baxter fare laced with the legend of her royal Incan heritage rotated on Mom’s record player most weekend mornings. Peruvian singer Eva Ayllón, however, was also influenced by an elder’s musical tastes at a young…

Flowers: beautiful, delicate embodiments of youth. Some gardeners even consider fragile blooms to be their children. Such flowers are the subject of watercolor artist Soon Y Warren. Now, let’s not get her confused with Soon-Yi Previn, Woody Allen’s wife who, oddly, at the start of their romance, was also a…

At first glance, we got really excited, assuming that Alloy would be an exhibition of affordable, trendy clothing from alloy.com that would propel our status from scenester to hipster in no time. But the show is actually a collection of works by several artists showcasing various materials that can be…

When it comes to summertime, the words “unleashed” and “unhinged” don’t sound so good. I immediately think of mangy, dehydrated dogs roaming hot streets. Then my thought process goes something like this: “Unhinged, eh? Off the hinges. Door off hinges, open. Air conditioning is getting out. Too hot outside. Must…

In kindergarten, it never occurred to many of us tykes that in between lying on fold-out mats and playing with four-square balls, we could find our artistic voice. Many of us were more concerned with the taste of Elmer’s than with what we were applying with it. Evita Tezeno, however,…