Summer's here, and heralding our communal urge to start stripping off stifling layers of clothing is the 2013 Hot Undies Run, where the briefs are briefer. Every body type in any attire — or lack thereof — is welcome to join Brian O'Neill's Traditional Irish Pub's two-mile pub trot... More >>

Texas-based author Joy Preble signs and discusses her newest young-adult title, The Sweet Dead Life. The paranormal story follows Jenna, who is having a really rough time of it. Her father is gone. Her mother is so depressed she can't get out of bed. And her older brother, Casey, is trying to... More >>

Author Ridley Pearson has quite a twisted plot for his latest release, Choke Point. Investigators John Knox and Grace Chu have been hired to locate and shut down an underground sweat shop that uses young girls as slave labor. Knox and Chu know it won't be easy; they expect push-back from the... More >>

Texas's first all-Latina film festival, Señorita Cinema, returns this week with a variety of short and long flicks, all illuminating the female experience. Past installments in the festival have all been short films, founder Stephanie Saint Saenz says, but this year, past SC winners... More >>

Local film curator Peter Lucas has put together Jazz on Film, a month-long series of both famous and little-known movies that examine jazz. One of our favorites is Paris Blues, with Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier as a couple of expat jazz musicians living in France. Things get complicated when... More >>

Vanessa Michael, the woman at the center of Taylor Stevens's new mystery novel The Doll, is unique. Raised by missionaries in Africa, she learned knife and hunting skills and survival techniques not from tribesmen but from the gunrunners who took her in. She's been tortured and beaten and has... More >>

''Say hello to my little friend!'' It's one of the most memorable lines in movie history. And it was uttered by Al Pacino in Brian De Palma's gangster classic Scarface some 30 years ago, a milestone being celebrated by the Alamo Drafthouse Summer of '83 series. Pacino's Tony Montana, a Cuban... More >>

Keith J. Varadi's oil paintings have something you can't quite put your finger on. They seem unexpectedly muted and soft. Even the boldest colors have a quiet quality to them. That's because these oil paintings are copies of oil paintings, the originals discarded in favor of this second life.... More >>

Pat Jasper, a member of the Houston Arts Alliance's Folklife + Traditional Arts Program, plays down her role in putting together ''Anointed and Adorned: Indian Weddings in Houston.'' It wasn't rocket science to figure out that we could do a pretty spectacular exhibition once we got a good look... More >>

The Houston Ballet's latest repertory program, Journey with the Masters, includes works from three acclaimed choreographers; there's the company premieres of George Balanchine's Ballet Imperial and Jiri Kylian's Sinfonietta and the revival of Jerome Robbins's The Concert. Ballet Imperial is the... More >>

Participate in a rescue mission sent in to retrieve survivors of a plane crash in the jungle filled with dinosaurs in ''Dinos Alive!'' (It's all very Jurassic Park 3.) Those who brave the exhibit will be treated to dinosaurs that are life-size, extremely accurate and — best of all —... More >>

Harry Shunk and Janos Kender's Leap into the Void is among the 180 works seen in ''Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop.'' Yasufumi Nakamori, curator for the show, says French artist Yves Klein, seen diving from the second story of a building into an empty street below, is known... More >>

The last time we laughed at Carlos Mencia, we were at his doomed Mexican food restaurant Maggie Rita's. (The menu was truly giggle-worthy.) The eatery quickly went down in flames, but Mencia, who does a good job of dishing out plenty of abuse onstage, didn't shy away from the hoopla. During his... More >>

Actor Philip Lehl says, ''It's one of those challenges that any actor can measure themselves by. It's a great play and if you can do it well, then you've done something.'' What he's talking about is Macbeth, the final offering of this season by Stark Naked Theatre. Theater co-founders Lehl and... More >>

Expect to do some heavy lifting at Suchu Dance's BOSK. No, not the kind where you pick up dancers. (Although choreographer/company artistic director Jennifer Wood tells us one company dancer has the body mass index of Styrofoam and could be easily tossed around.) No, audience members are... More >>

Shirley MacLaine, Jack Black and Matthew McConaughey take Texas eccentricity just about as far as it can go in Bernie, part of the Big Movie Classics series at Market Square. MacLaine is Marjorie, a needy, greedy grump who also happens to be the richest person in town. Black is Bernie, a gentle... More >>

Imagine 40 million of anything. If it’s dollars, that’s a fortune; if people, a nation the size of Argentina. If album sales, that’s how many Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours has racked up since its February 1977 release, a number matched by few in music history apart from... More >>

Although you may not recognize his name, Cody Simpson is a mega-star in the eyes of teenage girls across the globe. The Australian singer, whose journey to fame began with the uploading of some videos of his covers of songs like Jason Mraz's “I'm Yours,” has skyrocketed well past... More >>

Chubby Carrier and his Bayou Swamp bandmates want to show you a "Swamp-Funky Zydeco Good Time" whether you like it or not, but you will. Born into a musical family, the 45-year-old Church Point, Louisiana native apprenticed with Terrence Simien and has been fronting his own band since 1989.... More >>

Best-selling author Jeffery Deaver keeps the surprises coming up to the very last page of his newest Lincoln Rhyme thriller, The Kill Room. Rhyme's been assigned to track down a murderer. Well, two murderers, actually. There's the highly skilled sniper who shot a man from over a mile away. And... More >>

Fall Out Boy, the emo-pop band that took the airwaves by storm in the early '00s, is back and apparently ready to save rock and roll, according to the title of their new album, anyway. They've taken the past few years off to pursue other endeavors, but now that they've hit the touring scene on... More >>

If you've never heard of The Neighbourhood, a nostalgic indie quintet from Los Angeles, California, you're not alone. They Neighbourhood is not only known for their moody, atmospheric alt-indie vibe, but also for the fact that they like to be really, really, ridiculously mysterious. They... More >>

There are a few names that dominated the country music charts during the '90s, and John Michael Montgomery is one of them. He's had more than thirty singles on the Billboard country charts, and he's even responsible for some of those awkward slow dances during your middle-school years, thanks... More >>

An instrumental duo mining the same steady Krautrock pulse of Can in the '70s or Trans Am in the '90s, El Ten Eleven was also obviously paying attention to the more esoteric passages of Radiohead's Amnesiac album. It can be difficult to make subtle electronica ("chillwave," if you must) that... More >>

The Journey Agents have coined a nifty term for their streamlined Space City groove: "Astrofunk," also the title of their album from earlier this year. The Houston seven-piece's second full-length overall, Astrofunk throws in some smooth jazz, a little disco and a touch of Mantronix-style... More >>