Africa Screams (Image) April’s Shower (Liberation) Back Door to Hell (Fox) Bloodrayne (Uwe Boll Productions) The Closer: The Complete First Season (Warner Bros.) Deadwood: The Complete Second Season (HBO) The Devil’s Miner (First Run) The Dirty Dozen: Two-Disc Special Edition (Warner Bros.) The 4400: The Complete Second Season (Paramount) Game…
Like many of my generation, my first exposure to the Monkees was through Nick at Nite reruns of their television show, certainly the best program about a surprisingly talented Beatles rip-off band ever to hit the airwaves. Everyone has their favorite Monkee, and personally, mine have always been Michael Nesmith…
If you’re from Texas, chances are you took Texas history in junior high school. And if you took Texas history, you might have learned about Bill Pickett, the famous black cowboy from Taylor, Texas. Pickett’s claim to cowboy fame was his “bulldogging.” After twisting the steer’s head upward, he’d bite…
Somewhere along the line, someone decided that many of Agatha Christie’s British novel titles were “inappropriate” for American audiences. Thus, for example, 4.50 From Paddington became What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!, Lord Edgware Dies became Thirteen at Dinner and Murder in the Mews became Dead Man’s Mirror. And though it may…
Brownian motion? Pshaw, that’s easy. Massive bodies warp space? Tell us something we don’t know, pal. The passage of time is relative to speed? Umm…okaaaay. E=MC2? Look, can’t we go back to talking about Brownian motion? That one we have nailed.More than a century after Albert Einstein’s 1905 “miracle year,”…
One might think that the title of Plush’s latest exhibit, Gunslingers and Slayers, is a misnomer as there are no six-shooters, no dusty duels depicted outside a velvet-curtained cathouse and certainly no tin stars. Likewise, there are no sword-wielding warriors of evil or guitar-ravaging tunes. However, Teresa O’Connor, Eric Pearce…
Polka has taken over. Just turn on the radio. Open a magazine. It’s everywhere. The worldwide polka explosion is about to reach critical mass, and the good people of Ennis, Texas are firmly planted in its nexus, ready to withstand the massive aftershocks. I’m not sure if that last sentence…
I have seen prog metal band King’s X in concert. I’m not saying I enjoyed it, but I am saying I sat on a barstool in leather pants with a freshly applied tramp stamp on my lower back in that smoky club that used to be attached to the Bronco…
Art can be found anywhere. Art is on museum walls and bathroom stalls, displayed in bars and on subway cars. Art is in the earth, in the clouds, in a flower and crap like that. And sometimes “rare and affordable prints” of modern art juggernauts are available at the Saks…
Think of it as a cross between a certain movie about gay cowboys and an extraordinarily talented baseball player. Brokeback Natural, perhaps. Take Me Out is the Tony Award-winning play about star slugger Darren Lemming who has a different version of “making it to third base” than most of his…
Robert Dean Stockwell might be most recognizable as an actor (“that Quantum Leap guy!”), but he has another career as a collage artist. It’s often difficult to get past the idea that collage art feels more like a grade-school cut-and-paste project than actual art. But Stockwell has impressed some—his work…
Chris Rock once said, “If a homeless person has a funny sign, he hasn’t been homeless that long.” Some may find that humor to be in bad taste, but he’s got a point. If you don’t have any nourishment, free time should be spent obtaining food, not funny. So the…
In 1989, President George H. W. Bush managed to unite Republicans and Democrats under one banner on one of the most divisive issues of the day: tap-dancing. Rivals John Conyers Jr. (D-MI) and Alfonso D’Amato (R-NY) put aside their differences in joint resolutions honoring tap-dancing, which Bush signed into law…
Lisa Lampanelli wants you to know she’s mean—the Queen of Mean is how she describes herself. She considers her act “bawdy” and has been compared to “a cross between Archie Bunker and Don Rickles.” According to Friars Club dean Freddie Roman, she’s able to “get away with saying anything.” And…
When Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark came out in 1981, Harrison Ford was already a star, thanks to the first two installments of Star Wars. But the role of Indiana Jones made Ford an action movie icon. Perfectly cast as the whip-lashing archaeologist with brains and balls, Ford…
This year’s Austin City Limits music festival lineup was announced last week, but it’s a bit underwhelming compared to last year’s and full of repeat offenders from previous editions. The general consensus for ACL 2006 thus far: “Nah, let’s skip it.”Now that you’re dead-set against Austin City Limits: “the festival,”…
Maggie Cheung is a gorgeous Asian superstar. She’s earned it, doing 82 films and TV shows since 1984—quadruple the work of film “sisters” Zhang Ziyi and Michelle Yeoh. She’s worked alongside Jackie Chan and, more recently, Jet Li (Hero, 2002), but her work in Wayne Wang’s Chinese Box (1997) and…
In the winter of 1949, B.B. King was playing guitar at a dance hall in Arkansas when a fight broke out. Two men were battling over a woman named Lucille and during the commotion knocked over a barrel half-full of kerosene that had been heating the room. Flames ignited, the…
Fusion is a concept I’ve never been comfortable with. No one can deny the greatness that is the spork, but the skort? Come on. The problem with fusion is that in order to achieve a good end result, you would have to take two beloved things and combine to produce…
Even though I don’t get into high school football, there was something to be said when the Highland Park Scots took the state championship last year. Those local-kids-do-good stories always choke me up. But then I started thinking, well, if these kids lost then their parents probably would have bought…
What would John N. Bucher think about our endless fascination with Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker? Never heard of him? That’s probably because the Hillsboro store owner wasn’t depicted in the movie Bonnie and Clyde. Bucher opened his shop one night in 1932 to two men who said they needed…
IMAX movies look a little too realistic, if you ask us. We once attended an IMAX movie with our elementary school class, only to flip out and run away crying while the opening “helicopter” sequence played before the feature. Hey, as 7-year-olds, we weren’t down with the illusion of hovering…
