In most industries, summer is the time for the sugar-coated, mindless entertainment. There’s the dance party anthems in the music industry; the blockbuster films in film. It’s not that different for books. With the expectation of beach vacations and weekend visits to the pool, you’ll occasionally hear publishers talk about…
At SMU’s Meadows Museum last week, classical music lovers gathered for the first annual gala for Open Classical, an organization that’s been putting on inventive and inexpensive classical music events around Dallas since 2011. The gala showcased a sampling of their events, and some aspects of the evening —…
Located in the gallery known as The Safe Room upstairs at Texas Theatre, The Glacier Project is an endeavor from Amarillo artist Jon Revett, also known as Jon the Lion. The idea is to combine graphic and geometrical designs, mixing pop culture with spirituality. Revett started with album art from…
If any ounce of you, maybe your optimistic, glass-half-full side of you, thought The Bachelor had any string of realness, a new Lifetime scripted series confidently puts that to rest. In the 30 combined seasons of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, there has yet to be a TV show, movie,…
Kathy Griffin will be performing in Dallas at The Majestic June 25th, so we caught up with her to ask her a few questions about her new tour, “Like A Boss.” Griffin says her act is ever-changing, “I still make fun of the celebrities that I’m friends with, and I…
There is no such thing as “too much” culture or art to consume. Even if you’re heading out to a gallery opening or theatre performance a few times a week, you could still be rounding out your cultural experience with events that don’t necessarily fit into your interests. If you…
Every city has its own set of museums. It’s how we document history or call attention to quirky industries. San Antonio, for example, has a museum dedicated to toilet seats. Some of the museums come and go. For years, Plano had a Cockroach Hall of Fame where the owner of…
There will be days this summer when you want to blow your brains out. The kids are going to whine about being bored every few minutes; the temperature will hover in the low 300-degree range, and the biggest movie of the summer will most likely be Mission Impossible 32 with…
When John Cusack was launching his career in the ’80s, Brian Wilson had gone from rock star to living lore — a brilliant Bigfoot. “People would have Brian Wilson encounters,” says Cusack, who plays Wilson in the new biopic Love & Mercy. “In L.A., people would say, ‘Oh, I was…
Have you ever wanted to be in the room with two of the brightest minds in the city so you could eavesdrop on their candid and entirely unscripted conversation? What if those two people were Jim Schutze and Mark Lamster discussing the Trinity River? Well, Mixed Media, the culture podcast…
I’m probably going blind. This sunshine is so damn bright, y’all. I don’t have shades dark enough. Just as soon as we all stop complaining about the rain, it becomes time to complain about the hot, sunny Dallas summer. Nothing will ever be good enough, although thanks to the wet…
Comedians are like rappers: They typically face the crowd alone, use a poetic language, and are worth following on Twitter. Like some rappers, some comedians have ghosts. At least one of the comedians listed here probably wrote material for a comedian with a bit more name recognition. Dallas-Fort Worth has…
If you enjoy ironic consumption, Granada Theater and Dallas Comedy House have joined forces for the Summer Mockbuster Series. Starting with Batman and Robin on Saturday June 6, this exercise in bad taste gives you the chance to sit with others, imbibe, and talk shit about awful movies. Or rather,…
iZombie is about as sunny and optimistic as the zombie genre gets, which of course isn’t all that much. Even by supernatural standards, it’s a bloodthirsty canon, demanding regular sacrifices of innocents and grisly feats of skull splitting and cerebellum cannibalizing. The CW’s Seattle neo-noir boasts plenty of both to…
As a middle-aged woman, I rarely have a conversation with other middle-aged women in which the subject of movies “for us” fails to come up. As a critic, I don’t really think of movies in terms of which ones are “for” me and which are not, but I know what…
“I hate myself.” That’s an unusual statement coming from the hero of an animated film, let alone in the first two minutes. But 12-year-old orphan Anna (Sara Takatsuki), the protagonist of Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s lovely anime When Marnie Was There, has no illusions about her place in the world: There’s an…
The Melissa McCarthy of Spy is different from the one who rose to prominence by shitting in a sink. Bridesmaids scored her an Oscar nomination, and for the ceremony McCarthy donned a glamorous rose gown with a diamond collar and belt. But in the years since, Hollywood continued to see…
What does the world sound like when you’re Brian Wilson? When you’ve made a record that sounds like cirrus clouds look — as Wilson did with the Beach Boys’ small modern miracle of harmony, the 1966 Pet Sounds — all bets are off when it comes to the way ordinary…
The first line in Entourage is a good indication of what the next 104 minutes will bring. Peering through a pair of binoculars while a speedboat carries him toward a yacht in the dazzling waters of Ibiza, Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon), the big brother of megastar Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier),…
Jon Revett: The Glacier Project In a sense, the minute something is declared “art,” it has been elevated. The process of art making is transformative. Whether it’s the whittling down of tree bark, or slathering paint on a canvas, or in the case of Amarillo-based artist Jon Revett, screen printing…
In this industry, I meet a lot of people who talk a lot of shit. “This industry” meaning the film industry. Most heard: “Love your idea, let’s get together and talk about it,” “Send me your script and I’ll pass it to the right people,” “I’d love to be a…
The art world and its stock market unpredictably will quickly make even the most well-intentioned artist cynical. These days the world is filled with aspiring art stars. The lifelong drive to make something valuable is easily diminished by a discussion of finding a gallery, pricing a work of art as…
