Browsing: Arts and Entertainment

Baylor Artist-in-Residence, Krassimira Jordan, will perform a faculty recital at 7 p.m. Monday in Roxy Grove Hall.

Jordan will open the program with three of Franz Liszt’s piano transcriptions of Franz Schubert songs, including “Du bist di Ruh,” “Auf dem Wasser zu Singen” and “Gretchen am Spinnrade.” Another Liszt transcription will follow.

How much reality does a vague childhood memory retain, and how much is fabricated over time? In their exhibition, photographers Leah Gose and Mary Kathryn Wimberly seek to capture the fragments of our memories as we remember them.

When Bob Dylan, the Dave Matthews Band, Nelly Furtado, the Avett Brothers, David Byrne with St. Vincent, the Chris Robinson Brotherhood, the xx and the Raveonettes all have albums — and they’re all coming out today — you know you’ve got a busy music season ahead.

Students at Baylor are more than likely to see at least one Baylor Mainstage production in the four or more years while they are enrolled.

The Hooper-Schaefer Fine Arts Center, between North Village and the Baylor Sciences Building, almost always has banners hanging from it that advertise the newest big musical or theater production.

The Jazz Age is still alive and swinging thanks to the Baylor Jazz Ensemble.

Directed by Alex Parker, a senior lecturer in jazz studies, the band’s season begins Saturday with “A Moonlight Serenade,” an all Swing Era concert that features a “re-creation of what folks in the 1940s heard on radios, in nightclubs, on 78-rpm records and from the hotel ballrooms of their day,” according to a brochure published by the Baylor School of Music.

Wacoans by day and stars of the stage by night — the members of the Waco Civic Theatre are gearing up for their season opener this weekend with a trilogy of one-act plays in Neil Simon’s comedy “Plaza Suite.”

St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church will provide Waco with a taste of Greece this Saturday at the annual Greek Food Festival.

The festival will be held at the Extraco Events Center in Waco from 5 to 9 p.m. as a fundraiser for both the church and the National Orthodox Autism fund.

Texas’ independent film industry is getting a boost from the Texas Independent Film Network, which devotes its services to promoting Texas made films, bringing them to small towns, college campuses and museums for exhibition.

I had never heard of “Lawless” until a few days before I saw it.

It didn’t seem like a movie I would jump at the chance to go and see, but those sneaky Hollywood producers managed to credit an all-star cast that deemed this movie as a “must-see.” Tom Hardy, Jason Clarke, Shia Labeouf, Dane Dehaan Pane, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce and Jessica Chastain star in this film.

After reading about Jake’s Texas Tea House in our Welcome Back issue, I was excited to try it out. This weekend I did just that.

I walked in and loved the ambiance. It had a ’50s feel to it with aqua and red and white booths, vintage Americana décor and the catchy old music everyone loves at a sock hop.

I have a terrible habit of falling asleep during movies, in particular, action movies. It’s a terrible affliction, considering the fact that I’m a film major with a mean case of attention deficit disorder.

Warning: This is a story about online cat videos. If you’re among the seemingly tiny minority of the general population not interested in watching a one-minute clip of a cat in a T-shirt pounding on a keyboard, then move along.

For everyone else, a new measure of respectability is looming for an Internet pleasure that is both massively popular and, for some people, a bit embarrassing. The Walker Art Center, a well-regarded museum of modern art in Minneapolis, is presenting its first “Internet Cat Video Film Festival” to showcase the best in filmed feline hijinks.

What better way to spend your Labor Day weekend than dancing with friends to the sounds of conjunto music and enjoying great food?

Waco Missions Club brings San Antonio’s Los Hermanos Farias to Waco for its pre-Labor Day event this Sunday.

Waco Missions Club member Frank DeLeon said the club began with mostly charity work.

ABC has acquired the television rights to Spike Lee’s upcoming Michael Jackson documentary, the network announced Tuesday.

The acclaimed filmmaker, who had previously collaborated with Jackson, has been prepping “Bad 25,” a documentary tracing the late king of pop’s creative vision during the making of “Bad,” the follow-up to his groundbreaking “Thriller.” It is one of two major projects pegged to the 25th anniversary of the 1987 hit-filled album.

China is rolling up the red carpet for Hollywood.

Just six months after Chinese and American leaders reached a new agreement allowing more foreign movies into the world’s most populous nation, officials there are trying to torpedo the box office returns of some of Hollywood’s biggest summer films.

Not so fast, Mr. Candidate!

Silversun Pickups is the latest band to take issue with politicos in this election year. The alt-rock band from L.A. recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to presidential candidate Mitt Romney to stop using the group’s 2009 song “Panic Switch” at campaign functions. The Romney campaign said it won’t play the song again.

What has Michael Moore and digital technology wrought?

Now anyone with a political agenda and low-cost digital camera can make a movie and call it a documentary. Even enterprises that at best are vanity projects and at worst badly disguised and overly long attack ads are taken seriously by audiences— and box-office observers.

When Creedence Clearwater Revival called it quits in 1972, that looked like the end for the rock band that gave us “Proud Mary,” “Bad Moon Rising,” “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” and “Susie Q.” And if lead singer-songwriter John Fogerty had his way, the end might have been more permanent.

The smooth tunes of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald were revived and celebrated Sunday night at the Waco Swing Dance Society meeting as a multi-generational community gathered in the spirit of swing dancing.

The Baylor theatre will be presenting a new line up of five plays for the Fall 2012 semester, giving students and faculty something to look forward to later in the year.
The students of the Baylor theatre department put on seven to eight productions each school year. The department will show two productions during the fall semester and three productions in the spring.

A rusted BF Goodrich sign, the front-end of a ’56 Ford Fairlane and an old-fashioned Texaco gas pump. To anyone who hasn’t eaten at Jake’s Texas Tea House on Sixth St. and Austin Ave., you would think the downtown restaurant is a stand-in for a mid-century filling station.

Austin Avenue is known to many Baylor students as home to various art galleries, cafés, and restaurants. Hidden among all the shops lies The Legacy Café and Art Gallery.
The Legacy Café and Art Gallery is owned by Waco local James LaFayette.
“Basically we call it a kind of own home feeling,” LaFayette said.

here was bloodshed on the battlefields of the Civil War and there was bloodshed on the homefront of two families: the Hatfields and the McCoys.
The epic feud, which began in 1865 and was filled with murder, theft, and deceit, not only made for an Emmy nominated miniseries, but it’s also historically true.
Baylor alumnus Kevin Reynolds directed the Hatfields & the McCoys miniseries, which aired May 28-30. He graduated from Baylor with a law degree in 1976.
In 1978, Reynolds decided to attend the University of Southern California after practicing law in Austin for two years.

When I was a little girl, I was always astounded when someone made the prediction that a movie would have a sequel, having no understanding whatsoever of the way the minds of studio executives worked. Could I have foreseen the “Little Mermaid 2?” Or 3? No, but someone more savvy could smell a string of bad Disney sequels a mile off. These add-ons, which I invariably found disappointing, served only to cash in on the good name of a better movie. Money could be made from unnaturally extending a story which had reached a satisfying conclusion–and it was.

As far back as I can remember I’ve been enamored with the George Washington Bridge. There’s a certain je ne sais quoi about it that boggles my mind and sends my heart aflutter. Truth be told, I’ve wanted to write a piece about this man-made wonder for a while, but I was worried I couldn’t do it justice.