When Frank Campagna opened Kettle Art in Deep Ellum 10 years ago, it was one of three storefronts on Elm Street. The vision was simple: a gallery dedicated to the art of local artists, no exclusive agreements required. It’s been a rocky road to improvement for the neighborhood, but a…
If you haven’t been to the Animal Inside Out exhibit at the Perot Museum yet, or if you’d like to go see it again, you’re in luck: The Perot Museum has extended the exhibit until February 23rd. Before you go, here’s a reminder of the exhibition rules. I like to…
We’ve entered an age in which people have no idea how old they are. Fifty-year-olds lament, “I still feel 30 in my mind,” and sometimes dress like it. Some 30-year-olds may cling to the destructive habits of their 20s, but plenty more march dutifully into full-on family-and-career-building mode, perhaps acting…
Tom Sawyer was quite the little pickup artist. “D’ya like dead rats?” he says to the new girl in town, Becky Thatcher. She doesn’t, but she does take a shine to Tom, America’s pre-Bart Simpson symbol of boyhood mischief. Be re-introduced to Tom and his dead-rat-and-dead-cat-swinging pals Huck Finn, Joe…
Dallas Theater Center’s artistic director Kevin Moriarty loves big-budget visual gimmickry, but for Oedipus el Rey, playwright Luis Alfaro’s contemporary adaptation of the 2,500-year-old Greek myth, now running in the Studio Theatre at the Wyly, he’s held his usual instincts in check. Instead of tatting things up, Moriarty and his…
Art may not be more important than human lives. But on the list of things that mean something to human lives, across centuries, it ranks pretty high. That’s what’s so compelling about the story of the Monuments Men, a group of people from 13 nations who volunteered to protect cultural…
Consider the Lego, the toy of contradiction. With one — well, with hundreds of them — you can build anything: houses, airplanes, house-airplanes. You can even build something that will change the world, as Larry Page and Sergey Brin did in 1996 when they housed the server for their new…
How retrograde are many of the core tenets of the Disney princess? Consider this: My daughter owns a book called Snow White’s Secret, in which Disney’s royal archetype reveals her devilish hidden life: When the Dwarfs are working at the mine, she sneaks into their cottage and joyfully cleans the…
Greetings from the 64th annual Berlin Film Festival, where it’s a surprisingly balmy 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit). The weather here may not be business as usual, but the festival looks promising — the competition includes films by Alain Resnais, Lou Ye, Yoji Yamada, and Claudia Llosa (whose odd…
“Goodbye Facebook, goodbye iPhone — Hello Saint Vladimir’s,” groans dropout Rose Hathaway (Zoey Deutch) when she and her best friend, Lissa (Lucy Fry), are dragged back to the titular school they ditched when they ran away to live normal-ish lives in Portland. Despite their year outside the gates, human culture…
The big news out of the Berlin Film Festival earlier today was that Shia LaBeouf, here to promote Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Volume 1, behaved like an ass on the red carpet at the movie’s premiere last night. He showed up in a proper tuxedo, but also with a paper…
For Xchange, the Nasher’s citywide public art project, only two locals were selected to create work. One was solo artist, activist and Observer Mastermind winner Vicki Meek. The other was Good/Bad Art Collective, a group of wonderfully peculiar souls. Their work/play attitude and hyperactive creativity led to some of Denton’s…
One of the primary advantages animation has always had over live action film is its ability to depict anything imaginable without concern for budget, temperamental actors or the audience’s capacity to suspend disbelief. Anyone with rudimentary equipment and the patience to sit alone in the dark for weeks on end…
The silly time of year when love goes to our heads is upon us. We exit football season, wipe the wing sauce off our mouths and then ante up for all things romance as that most corporate of holidays bears down upon us, drowning us in artificially preserved candy hearts…
We all have stories about ourselves that we don’t want anyone else to know, for fear of dying of embarrassment. Those are exactly the kind of stories Kevin Allison and company like to tell on the Maximum Fun podcast RISK!: True Tales, Boldly Told. The founding member of the sketch…
Named after a slice of meat found on a cow’s hindquarters, The Tenderloins thrive on self-deprecating punch lines. With sketches like “The Comedy Roast of Jesus Christ” and “The Slutty Mermaid,” this comedy troupe earned viral appeal on Internet sites like YouTube and Myspace. What started as four best friends…
Talking in a movie theater should be a capital crime. We’re so sick of the practice that we still say this knowing full well that we live in a state that uses the death penalty as if we all get a free set of steak knives when we hit the…
Keeping a gallery space alive and vibrant for a decade isn’t a small feat. Doing that as an artist-operated space is nearly unheard of. Kettle Art Gallery (2650-B Main St.) has been an integral piece of the city’s art scene since it was built by hand 10 years ago, operating…
She has won Tony and Grammy awards (plural) and dazzled on both stage and screen for decades. Thursday through Saturday at the Meyerson Symphony Center, you can hear Bernadette Peters’ silky, perfect voice live and watch her iconic red curls bounce as she performs some of Broadway’s biggest hits, all…
It’s a little known fact that before cellphones, vampire slayers relied on pagers. When the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer faced Lothos, she couldn’t text anyone “Help!” with an emoji of a demon. She fought solo. This female independence earned her a huge fan base. What eventually became the quirky…
The Webb Gallery’s latest show is called Big Hair & Sparkly Pants, a survey of what we think about Texas. The show includes intricately carved guns from Campbell Bosworth, retro embroidered pearl snaps from Fort Lonesome, mixed-media prints “rooted in West Texas landscape” from Jeff Wheeler, hand-lettered and -pressed prints…
You’ve spent months knitting the perfect Dr. Who scarf, and this weekend you’ll finally flex your cosplay prowess at Comic Con Sci-fi Expo. Running Saturday and Sunday, the fest returns to the Irving Convention Center (500 W. Las Colinas Blvd.) with a star-studded lineup, headlined by a Saturday visit from…
