After School’s in session 5/6 When ABC’s After School Specials went off the air in 1988, I was crushed. The shows were riveting: What calamitous, life-shattering disaster would bend the plot this time? And which celebrity would I see pulling bong hits or snorting angel dust and leaping out a…
But watch out for trees, Charlie Brown 5/8 Ah, kites, such a simple way to fly. A little string, some paper and sticks–put them all together with a breeze and a blue sky, and suddenly the earthbound can reach out and touch the heavens. Or, this being Dallas, where more…
Author Douglas Adams died at age 49 on May 11, 2001, of a heart attack suffered during a workout at a Santa Barbara, California, gym. His biographer, M.J. Simpson, blamed Adams’ demise in part on his unending battle to get The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on a big screen,…
Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a thoroughly professional, frequently spectacular piece of muckraking. But any American who hopes to watch this portrait of unfettered corporate greed, cynical power-lust and outrageous deception without going postal about an hour into the thing would do well to bring…
VaVa Veronica blows a mean saxophone. But not with her mouth. As one of a handful of ragged “disappointment players,” Veronica, a would-be strip woman played by voluptuous Lydia Mackay, bumps and grinds and warms up her mouthpiece behind the stage door of an old Dallas vaudeville palace, waiting to…
The Last One-Nighter on the Death Trail If you like Cabaret, Gypsy, Follies and other backstage musicals, this new one from Our Endeavors Theater Collective will tickle your funny stick and make you tap a toe. The cast of eight wrote the tunes themselves (along with other collaborators), and director…
William Eggleston: The Los Alamos Project We live in a Technicolor world of cherry-red hot dog stands, pearly gray back-combed beehive hairdos and zapping-blue skies, or so William Eggleston’s photographs tell us. The banal yet brash photographs of this Mississippi-born photographer capture a world that seemed to be turning slower…
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…
Dancin’ in the streets 4/30 As if East Dallas residents don’t have enough block parties already, the Lakewood Street Fair & Dance promises to give locals another excuse to get drunk in the streets, or rather, the parking lots around the Lakewood shopping center. But seeing how it’s a street…
Jacket not required for polo 5/1 It’s a long time until the next Cowboys game, and serious fans of the tailgate party must be suffering. No foam rubber fingers or air horns. No drunken parties at the butt-end of an F150. Take heart, tailgaters, we have a deal for you…
A different kind of mystery machine 5/1 Arriving in a limo just doesn’t have the prestige it used to. A simple car won’t do it, not when dateless, horny wannabe TV stars get stretch limos–with hot tubs–on elimiDATE, and every prom attendee, not just the rich kids, carts his pimply…
It’s not a police siren; it’s just Michael Winslow 4/28 Isaac Newton was hit by a falling apple. Ben Franklin suffered a lightning strike while holding a kite. I saw Michael Winslow on Sally Jessy Raphael. As a young’un, I’d heard Winslow’s zillions of sound effects as Larvell Jones in…
Thursday, April 28 It’s a damn good thing that Dave & Buster’s hosts Karaoke Idol on Thursdays from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m., because no self-respecting Idol (that’s right, we mean American Idol) fan would leave the house on Tuesday or Wednesday before the performances are over and the unlucky…
Long before teen-angst films such as She’s All That and 10 Things I Hate About You showed us that true love is often right before our eyes (and only needs highlights, contacts and a bitchin’ new outfit for us to see it), there was Norman Juster’s 1964 classic picture book,…
Among the many mysteries surrounding The Interpreter is the one that finds Sydney Pollack heralded as a major American director, a maker of Serious and Important Movies. His filmography, marked by mawkish mediocrities (Out of Africa, as vibrant as a coffee-table book; The Way We Were, its romance as plausible…
“No more soccer!” declares small-time thug Sing (writer-director-star Stephen Chow) as he vigorously stomps on a child’s ball. In the context of Kung Fu Hustle, it’s a pathetic attempt by Sing to make himself look tough. The larger signal, however, is to followers of Chow’s work–it’s a direct reference to…
Of the 30 or so films playing the USA Film Festival, now celebrating its 35th anniversary, only one has never been shown to an audience before: former D magazine contributor Jeff Bowden’s directorial debut, Dirt, which documents a season of dirt-track racing at the Devil’s Bowl Speedway in Mesquite. Shot…
Andrea Dworkin is dead. Not a lot of laughs, Ms. Dworkin. She was the most radical of her generation of radical feminists. In lectures, articles and books–her first in the 1970s was titled Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality–Dworkin defined men as little more than moral cretins. She equated…
Parallel Lives The old Kathy & Mo Show is reborn in this Contemporary Theatre of Dallas production starring powerhouse talents Marisa Diotalevi and Jody Rudman. In a dozen sketches originally written and performed by feminists Kathy Najimy and Mo Gaffney, we see a sort of seven ages of womanhood, from…
Con.TEXT.ual More winning than the linguistic theme of Oh6’s latest one-nighter on April 16 was the group’s ability to create an event. The artists seemed to be working at odds rather than as a group this time. Yet it wasn’t so much that the individual works hanging on the burnished…
In a social group of cinephiles, music snobs and general arty folk, I was lacking something. My friends just assumed I’d seen all of those talked-about films. The ones everyone is supposed to see. The ones that if you haven’t, well, you just fall below the cool mark. The truth?…
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…
