The last time Grimes came to Dallas, she pranced across the Granada stage at Gorilla vs. Bear fest, essentially giving the middle finger to anyone who wouldn’t get on board.

I was skeptical then (Mosley said it would be worth it for all of us to get there early to see her), but my opinion’s turned the corner. And just in time for a free in-store at Good Records March 1. Show starts at 4 p.m., though I’d probably arrive around 3 p.m. to get in the door.

Gorilla vs. Bear is (again) putting on the show. For (a little) more info, head here. She’ll also play at Dan’s Silverleaf later in the evening.

When Brandon Oldenburg, co-founder of Deep Ellum-based Reel FX studios, and author and illustrator William Joyce opened their new Moonbot Studios, they knew they needed to launch the creative company with a short film. It would be a calling card, a way of illustrating just what the business partners and friends wanted to do with their new company. And they knew to get the attention they wanted, their short would have to be good enough to win an Oscar.

Sound presumptuous? ..read more

Suspending blue netting and burlap from the walls and ceiling, Eric Eley has created a transitional ocean or aerial landscape. Structurally, the installation was derived from early 1900’s wartime camouflage: this kind of  netting was historically part of a tenting system that disguised ground-based activities from aerial bombers. In Coincident Disruption the relationship has been reversed: the mottled netting obscures the sky from the ground dwellers.

During Eley’s artist talk about his show at the McKinney Ave. Contemporary, he spoke of ..read more

The first review I ever had posted online was a recap of Pavement’s 1997 appearance at Trees on their Brighten The Corners tour. I was seventeen years old, and quite proud of this achievement. To people of a certain age and lifestyle, the band was an almost unavoidable fact of life during that time. So, of course, when a singer of an iconic band releases enough records that he or she threatens to equal, better, or do worse by the ..read more

“Shen Wei is a visual artist as well as a choreographer, and all his dances take moving design as their subject” –Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice, September 2006

Early on a Thursday evening New York-based choreographer Shen Wei, winner of this year’s Southern Methodist University Meadows Prize, met with a small group of local dance critics to discuss the three week residency he has just completed at the university. We gathered around a table in a large conference room just outside the ..read more

Question: What do Sting, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, and The Rolling Stones all have in common?

Answer: They’ve all worked with legendary Irish band The Chieftains, who will return to Bass Hall on February 28th as part of their 40th anniversary tour — and we’ve got tickets. As usual, The Chieftains are bringing guest musicians with them to the stage, and though we can’t promise that Sting will be among those guests, here’s hoping.

To win a pair of tickets, all you ..read more

Back in October we told you about local DJ Prince William aka Will Boston selling out a show in Los Angeles, which coincided with his bass-heavy, Brooklyn/Dallas-based label venture Fade To Mind. That’s the attention-garnering imprint he started with Fool’s Gold recording artist, Kingdom that has had a respectable share Well, unsurprisingly, that will soon be a Brooklyn/Los Angeles-based label, since the Prince will soon make LA his home.

Dallas will certainly miss him, and it was an honor to have him at our “High Brow/Low ..read more

Style Network, having already proven their inability to recruit reps from Dallas’ elite social circles, has added a new mother/daughter trio to the lineup. I had hoped one of them would be ballsy enough to shove the season one ladies aside and finally knock Pamela Martin Duarte off her yoga matt.

But after watching the premiere, I have little faith that party planner DeAynni can get the job done.  And it’s not because she lives in Colleyville, spells her name really weird and ..read more

Larry Herold’s new play, The Sports Page, receiving its world premiere at Stage West, takes us back to the declining days of the almighty sportswriter. It’s about football, it’s chock full of crowd-pleasing Dallas vs. Fort Worth jokes, and there are plenty of witty one-liners. The trouble is the play, like many of us writers, loves the clack of its own keys. It’s like music, the click and return, the composition of a symphony one deadline after another.

Put aside the ..read more

There’s no mystery to supply suspense in Matthew Posey’s messy new musical, Mean, a highly fictionalized, metaphysical account of how Charles Manson, Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, and Lynnette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, now integral characters in the annals of American crime, met. Reading the synopsis, a musical comedy about a murderous cult leader might seem like another one of Posey’s weird trips. But despite the production’s more outlandish elements, it’s more of an exercise in entirely normal psychological curiosity.

Posey gives us a paean ..read more

Come back tomorrow for my Big Rich Texas season 2 premiere recap.

9:00 Season 2 previews. It looks as if Whitney kicks Kalyn’s crown-wearin’ butt. And Heidi Dillon hits the set.

8:58 pm. Bonnie storms out to the fields and confronts Leslie about the Tyler thing. Screaming. More screaming. Cussing. Whitney gives Leslie a double-handed birdie and they take off in a pickup truck.

It seems that the big hunting gala is being held in Mesquite. Better than Fort Worth I guess.

8:56 pm. ..read more

This is worth watching just to hear Tweedy say “let’s do it, let’s do it, let’s do it, let’s do it.” Kudos to TimeOut Chicago for capturing this gem to taunt Tweedy with throughout eternity.

Lost in the hubbub of all the 35 Denton acts announced in the past month are (is?) The Mountain Goats, one of the first acts to sign on for the March 8-11 fest.

The festival folks remedied that this week with the concluding video of their cover series, asking Jessie Frye to put her spin on The Mountain Goats’ “Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton.” The haunting, eerie cover wraps up an eclectic series in a NSFW kinda way. So if you’re the kind of person who works in an office that frowns upon topless women (professionally, not personally), maybe save this one for home.

THE MOUNTAIN GOATS, Confirmed Artist 35 DENTON 2012 from 35 Denton on Vimeo.

No word on whether Satan’s Fingers and The Hospital Bombers will make a surprise appearance at the festival.

Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde poses more than the usual challenges of opera presentation. The new production by the Dallas Opera, which opened Thursday night at Winspear Opera House, answers all of those challenges, rendering that masterpiece from the 19th century as meaningful as ever in the 21st.

Based on a medieval romance, Tristan und Isolde is essentially a four-hour rumination on the nature of romantic love. Traditional staging of Wagner can be tricky at best: neither quasi-realism nor fantastical backdrops are ..read more

At first glance, Bring It On: The Musical is practically begging to be mocked. It’s a musical about cheerleaders, based on a trifling 2000 Kirsten Dunst film about cheerleaders, and did I mention it’s a musical about cheerleaders? With the swift rise of Give It Up! and the even swifter demise of its Broadway incarnation Lysistrata Jones, a musical about cheerleaders should have seemed like an obviously unwise theatrical gamble.

Yet…somehow…this show works.

At its helm is a quintet of Broadway vets ..read more

Which of these weekend’s movies are worth your time. Check out our movies section to find out.

“Hit ‘Em in the Head” is a track that was brought to my attention via Twitter by Leon The Professional recently, and it’s featured on the local rapper’s new mixtape, entitled (B)EAST, which is available today. Following a classic spliced-sample intro, it’s the first actual song on the release. I was immediately reminded of an old Big L track (“All Black”) the moment I heard the opening horn bleats. I was also reminded of East Coast hip hop in general.

Trying to confirm these theories, I emailed ..read more

I’ve never given much thought to the domestic life of a corrupt cop before. He spends his days unnecessarily roughing up punks or shaking down local business owners, but at night he might return to a warm, beautiful home and be most concerned that he’s losing his connection to his young daughters. Can a person be a nasty human being and a good father?

Los Angeles Police Officer Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson) likes to think so. Actually, strike that: the question ..read more

Both in visual style and locale, Thin Ice sets itself somewhere in between the worlds of Fargo (1996) and Cedar Rapids (2011), a snowed-over Midwestern America that is populated by corny white men, at home in the banal, post-auto landscape. They walk in brown leather shoes across frozen parking lots outside of chain hotels, drop twenty dollar bills on worn out berber carpet, and shuffle papers in and out briefcases to make a living. There was a time when the puny ..read more

It’s been 12 years since McG (Charlie’s Angels, We Are Marshall) switched from directing four-minute music videos to two-hour feature films. It wouldn’t be a stretch, though, to say he never made the transition.

McG’s latest film, This Means War, is a flashy, colorful two-hour romp, one that could easily be deduced to a four-minute spot on whatever channel still plays music videos.

Here’s the gist. Hot woman can’t find love, so her friend signs her up for online dating. Two best ..read more

Animator Hiromasa Yonebayashi has worked with Hayao Miyazaki (Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away) since the great Japanese filmmaker’s Princess Mononoke, and it takes only a glance at Yoneayashi’s first directorial project, The Secret World of Arrietty, to see the continuity of Studio Ghibli’s appealing and unmistakable visual style.

Arrietty (Bridgit Mendler) is a spirited 14-year old girl who lives with her father and mother in the floorboards of a house outsideTokyo. They are “borrowers,” and for generations, their kind have lived ..read more

Israel Luna’s IMDB biography says that the first film he ever saw was The Exorcist, at age five. Poor guy. I don’t think he’s recovered. The former Dallas-residing writer/director’s latest movie – the follow-up to the fantastically titled Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives – is The Ouija Experiment, a low-budget, hack-snore, that takes a half-ass swipe at the Paranormal Activity formula and delivers a nearly unwatchable, dull, and senseless succession of jump-out scares drowning in YouTube banality.

Set in a depressingly under-furnished ..read more

Here are this weekend’s gallery openings and events.

Image: Ludwig Schwarz, Untitled, 2008-2009 (detail). Oil on canvas, 72×72” (Image courtesy of Conduit Gallery)

“Illuminations” by Bruce Brainard at Gremillion & Co. Fine Art – February 16 : 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM; 2251 Vantage Street, Dallas, Tx 75207.

“Good Memories: An Exhibit of Photography by Michael Blackwell and His Students from Creative Arts Center of Dallas” at the Art Gallery in the Point, Center for Arts and Education, on the campus of C.C. ..read more

THURSDAY

Big Eyes/War Party/Rocket for Ethiopia/The Half Truths (Center House): A recent show at the DIY venue, Center House, resulted in an early shutdown and intervention from The Fort Worth Arlington Police Department. I’ve been waiting for a reason to share a little summary of that night’s events from someone who was arrested in the incident. Tonight’s performance at the spot by Seattle’s Big Eyes is the perfect excuse, since they describe themselves as pop and punk and are somehow much less ..read more

Don Hertzfeldt is one of those rare artists that, from the moment he put pen to paper, seemed to have fully realized a mature voice and visual style. His very first movie, a short he made for a freshman year college film class, is remarkable not only because it won the HBO Comedy Arts Festival Grand Prize for “World’s Funniest Cartoon” in 1998, but because it already embodies Hertzfeldt’s characteristic wry, sick sense of humor and his keen insight into ..read more