Thursday, June 16 People say the moral of Pinocchio is that honesty is always the best policy. We disagree. How about: Never look a gift horse in the mouth. Hey, Pinocchio, Geppetto carves you out of wood, doesn’t kill you in fear when you come alive and gives you a…
“Summer and baseball go hand in hand.” That’s Barbara Kovacevich’s simple explanation for the baseball theme during this year’s Addison Lone Star Drive-In, where families walk in (sorry, cars must stay in the lot) and sit in with blankets, lawn chairs and picnics at Addison Circle Park, where a movie…
Thursday, June 2 Surely, we cannot be the only people who didn’t love Sideways. It was good, but we’re still buying Boone’s Farm, and we don’t get what’s the big deal about merlot. Shared Housing Center hops on the Sideways bandwagon for its fifth annual Wine Tasting and Treasure Hunt,…
Thursday, May 26 If the Van Cliburn Foundation really wanted people to care about the 12th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, they’d steal some tips from American Idol. They’d start by showing the embarrassing auditions (people playing “Chopsticks” or “Heart and Soul”), the Daron Beck-like avant-garde audition (surely someone would…
My mom is such a trendsetter. Before fancy upscale boutiques were selling wallets and purses covered in it, she was using duct tape to fix everything. Hem of your skirt coming loose? Add some duct tape; it’s adhesive and flexible. Don’t have a lint roller handy? A loop of duct…
Communism and feminism went hand in hand, like, say, George W. Bush and porn star-turned-sexual activist Annie Sprinkle frolicking, hands clasped, through a meadow of wild flowers–but with fewer phony, for-the-television-cameras smiles and a lot more bloodshed. Despite that, author Anchee Min has made a career of looking back on…
Que Sara, Sara: Sara Radle lost this year’s Dallas Observer Music Award for best female vocalist to Stacy and Sherri Dupree from Eisley, so she’s packing her bags and moving to L.A. OK, so that’s not why, but Radle is relocating to the West Coast on June 6 to work…
Thursday, May 5 We’re certain this week will be the best one of the entire season of the Dallas Arboretum’s summer concert series by the lake called Cool Thursdays. We’re not saying Naked Lunch: A Steely Dan Tribute Band is better than Vince Vance and the Valiants or Voodoo Blue:…
As a prospective student at the University of North Texas, I thought of Denton as a college kid’s paradise, a Lord of the Flies-like place where tattooed and spiky-haired musicians and their art school girlfriends ran free–no parents, no curfew, no one to set rules or enforce them. Boy, was…
Thursday, April 21 Anyone who’s been to an import store or visited Target’s short-lived Global Market collection is familiar with Muslim art, whether they know it or not. But that’s not the surprising part of Palace and Mosque: Islamic Art From the Victoria and Albert Museum. It’s that this exhibit…
“Was I supposed to wear white socks?” Shane Culp is concerned because he is wearing black socks. So is Aaron Graves. That puts the sock ratio of Mission Giant at five white, two black. “You guys are out,” says a band member who calls himself simply M. They take their…
Most people realize that tabloid photos aren’t real. There is no Bat Boy, and World’s Largest Cat is not riding shotgun in an RV with Elvis Presley. They’re familiar with the wonders that Adobe Photoshop can create, even if they don’t know what the program is called. But there was…
Pasquale Scaturro says this is the most dangerous thing he’s ever done–and the closest he’s come to dying. For most people, that could describe an unsettling car accident, seeing a bear on a camping trip, a grease fire at home or simply getting tangled in the entertainment center’s power cords…
ZZZZ describes itself as a Tim Burton soundtrack on speed. Thats fitting; the Eastern European rhythms, sax riffs and hushed, conspiratorial vocals of this four-piece Chicago band are a Molotov cocktail of punk, folk and lounge that builds a story with a decadent cast of characters: In a speakeasy inhabited…
The questions of the night: “Is Pilotdrift as amazing as Good Records says?” and “How did they get to tour with the Polyphonic Spree?” Everyone, it seemed, had seen the store’s gushing newsletter about the Texarkana band and was there to confirm or debunk the hype. The bar had been…
Thursday, March 3 Anyone could take the photos that A.B. Wishart does–because he just shoots the world around him, showing details, light, shadow and tiny moments that other people don’t notice. From Dallas highway scenes, shot from a car window, of clouds drawing the eyes up from the ugly skyline,…
“Don’t give up on me,” sings Bettie Serveert’s Carol van Dyk on the first song of Attagirl, the Holland band’s latest release. The vague lyrics may be about a relationship, but they also apply to Bettie Serveert, which had a few hits on college radio with the 1992 album Palomine…
Cavedweller is the brother of Denton art-rocker Fishboy. But musically Cavedweller is the Sentridoh to Fishboy’s Folk Implosion, the introspective four-tracker to the symphonic popper. Cavedweller even sounds like Lou Barlow, with a deep voice and slow, spoken delivery. Sugary Glue crams 21 tracks into 37 minutes, and it would…
Aqueduct is where indie rock meets mainstream pop. The band (in the studio, it’s mainly Tulsa jack-of-all-trades David Terry, although other players join live) takes the now-revered sounds of ’80s synth bands and combines those with the guilty pleasures of MTV-friendly heavy metal. These songs are so catchy they make…
Thursday, February 10 We never meant for it to happen. It just did. One week, we were flipping the channels. The next we were rushing home to catch Antiques Roadshow. It’s not about the price of Grandma’s lampshade. It’s the human drama: the thrill of a historic Persian rug or…
For less than $15, anybody can buy a disposable camera, take 24 shots and pay someone to develop them in an hour. Instant art. It’s understandable why some people refuse to consider color photography as a serious art form. It’s the “works on paper” version of marking a piece of…
Andy Bothwell looks like just another tow-headed, vintage-T-shirt-wearing college guy you might see weaving through Deep Ellum, looking to score another round. As Astronautalis, one of the growing breed of hip-hop performers who dress more like indie rockers, Bothwell has been called a cross between Eminem and Atom and His…
