Just as you found yourself comfortably attuned to painting as a two-dimensional medium, along comes an elaborate exhibition of work by the 19th-century English painter J.M.W. Turner to tell you otherwise. You find yourself asking, “Height and width, right?” That’s all there is to this timeworn window into the world–those…
Bessie Smith: Empress of the Blues When Smith, a superstar on the vaudeville circuits of the 1920s, died in a car accident in 1937, rumors started that she bled to death after being refused treatment at a whites-only hospital. Edward Albee picked up on the tale for his controversial 1960…
Jesús Moroles: Rock, Roll, and Play Its confusing to enter a gallery space that invites you to touch the art. It is even more so when the space beckons you to make and destroy pieces as part of the show. The current installation at the Dallas Museum of Art created…
Once a year, millions crowd in front of televisions to watch the year’s greatest commercials wrapped around some football championship game. And just as football is evenly divided between offense and defense, Super Bowl commercials also split into two camps: funny and serious. The zany side is generally predictable, led…
Thursday, April 1 We’ve been told that to appreciate NASCAR and not see it as cars driving in circles, we must attend a race. Only then, schooled by a fan of the sport, will we fully understand the skill behind pit strategy, the technology of cars going really fast for…
Bathroom humor is common at most food-eating contests or cookoffs. Contest foods run the gamut from wings to sausage to pie, and all have a certain level of disgusting magnetism that makes people line up either to watch or join in on stuffing their gullets. But what of the event…
4/2 It was the weekend my friends met the ever-soulful Erykah Badu in all of her effortless elegance. I couldn’t be there with them because of work, but, of course, the one day I didn’t go, something extra-special happened. That was a couple of years ago, and now I try…
4/1 You can feel it. Its arrival is inevitable; its excitement unparalleled. It’s the type of happening that reignites friendships and sparks creative impulses. It’s a public statement, a mission affirmation with a triple-edged meaning. Is it accusatory, rhetorical or self-referential? Yes, making your very own “WHO FARTED?” sign for…
4/2 Confession may be good for the soul, but the handful of practicing Roman Catholics we know have an increasingly cynical take on it. “It’s gotten so bad,” one says of her weekly trek to the confessional and the recent troubles in the priesthood, “I feel like saying, ‘You first.'”…
4/2 Wynton Marsalis knows his jam from his jelly roll. Out promoting his new CD, The Magic Hour, the Juilliard-trained trumpeter says a jazz jam session doesn’t necessarily produce the best music. “All the guys get so competitive,” Marsalis told an interviewer. “It’s a top this, top that kind of…
As a proud sponsor of the Colin Farrell media blitz, Intermission opens on the lad’s salable mug, basically sporting the same buzz-cut ‘n’ tats look from his punky cameo in Veronica Guerin. It’s a cunning editorial move, pushing the product from the get-go, yet it gets interesting as Farrell’s dumb…
Those of us who grew up in the United States may be weary of our country’s claims of freedom and opportunity. Faced with a wobbly quote from our leader attributing terrorism to envy, we might roll our eyes, aware of a reality far darker and more complex. But there are…
Jersey Girl, the sixth film by writer-director Kevin Smith, is the least Kevin Smith-y film he’s ever made, which will be welcome news to those exhausted by Smith’s everlasting obsession with his dick, fart jokes and stack of comic books and bad news to those enamored of Smith’s everlasting obsession…
The Ladykillers is the second film in as many years made by Joel and Ethan Coen to fill space between pet projects that seem to run off leash; it’s their time-killer, if you will. But even their recent paychecks reflect the brothers’ restlessness: Their movies have grown more manic and…
Viewers rightfully marvel at the colorful CG seascapes of Finding Nemo and the unique drawing style of The Triplets of Belleville, but when it comes to the actual stories told in contemporary animated films, no one’s pushing the boundaries quite like anime auteur Satoshi Kon. Having taken a page from…
Tom Hanks is who Tom Hanks is today because of something he did about 14 years ago. One afternoon, Hanks walked into his agent’s office and told the man who takes 10 percent, “I don’t want to play pussies anymore.” He had spent the better part of the 1980s being…
“Do you have any idea what it’s like being English?” John Cleese asked in A Fish Called Wanda. “Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of doing the wrong thing…We’re all terrified of embarrassment.” Understanding that particularly English phobia regarding public humiliation helps explain why…
The Genius of the French Rococo: The Drawings of Franois Boucher (1703-1770) and Bouchers Mythological Paintings The unfortunate thing about the beautiful is that it is all too often intellectually bereft, shorn of historical specificity and just plain lacking in seriousness. To call something beautiful is a more elevated but…
The Lion in Winter King Henry II of England has plans for sons Richard, Geoffrey and John. But Henrys long-imprisoned wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, has other ideas about succession to the throne. In James Goldmans talky, sexy two-act drama, the Plantagenets go at each other hammer and tongs on a…
Doing the marathon of Dallas and Fort Worth’s seasonal gallery events is like eating at a buffet restaurant. You scoop up a smidgen, walk a bit, spoon over some more, round the corner, grab something else. But we have some advice: Just because it’s a buffet doesn’t mean you can’t…
Thursday, March 25 We had no idea that opiates, smuggling and white slavery are the three pillars of comedy. Playwright Charles Busch and the Pocket Sandwich Theatre apparently have the inside track, though, since the theater’s production of Busch’s Shanghai Moon involves all three. Oh, right, it’s a spoof. Now…
We witnessed the arc of a real-life character over the past two decades. We first met Lady Diana Spencer in the media when she was a 19-year-old kindergarten teacher’s aide in 1980 and followed her life to its ultimate conclusion some 17 years later, in August 1997, in a car…
