In 2013, Sergio Garcia was curating a group show of photorealistic paintings at Kirk Hopper Fine Art when he was inspired to create something totally outside of his typical media of painting and street art: a series of little red tricycles sculpted into impractical shapes. By the time of the…
Dr. Susan Harper isn’t the first woman to be called a “feminist witch.” She’s just one of the few who don’t mind. Why should she? She has traveled far, spiritually and geographically, to earn the title. Professionally, Harper is the graduate reader at Texas Woman’s University, editing and offering guidance…
If you’re feeling anxious and you’re in the vicinity of Preston Center, you could take a place in line for Carlo’s Bakery and shove down the existential dread with Italian pastries, or you could spare your arteries and try the business next door. There, Adrift Float Spa sells hour-long sensory…
Jenny Block is a Dallas-based author of three books about sex. She released her latest, The Ultimate Guide to Solo Sex, this year. Evaluating the state of sex in the city of Dallas is a tough job. Last summer the city became synonymous with “sexually repressed” when the mayor and…
You’re gonna want to coast through this week as quickly as possible. Pack your nights with fun diversions and interesting conversations so that the days go by fast and that three-day weekend gets here before you know it. Dallas has plenty of spark and sizzle in the nights leading up…
Since 1989, TVs across the world have been illuminated with the yellow-skinned Springfieldians and cutting satire of The Simpsons. Series creator Matt Groening can’t even recall off the top of his head how many episodes have aired. “It’s all a blur,” Groening says. “[Recently] we had our table read for…
Do This! Little D Markets is back with another shopping experience packed with unique, artisan and local goods. The Commerce Street Night Market will bring over 20 vendors selling jewelry, paper, custom growlers and more to the Alta West Commerce Pavilion, 444 West Commerce St., from 6 to 10 p.m…
According to IMDb, Jaume Collet-Serra’s over-before-you-know-it The Shallows runs for one hour and 27 minutes — a number that produces a reaction something like when an NBA roster lists a short-looking player at five-foot-nine and you marvel, Really? Nate Robinson is that tall? The shark thriller has only three or…
At last, a Hollywood reimagining with a point. David Yates’ two-fisted pulp-studies spree The Legend of Tarzan doesn’t just update Edgar Rice Burroughs’ white-boy jungle-bro for our age of heightened sensitivities and bit rates. It interrogates the very idea of Tarzan, signing the old sport up for the good fight…
A movie like Hello Gangster shouldn’t have turned out well. If you ask director Richard Krause, who co-wrote and helmed the local indie comedy, he seems a little incredulous that he and his team were actually able to finish it. “It’s kind of an impossible film that shouldn’t exist, but…
The Sun Shines Blue and Backyard Daoism at Galleri Urbane 2277 Monitor St. 6 p.m. Saturday For The Sun Shines Blue, painter Danny Rose studied natural landscapes and rock formations. These works are rooted in observation, awareness of time and appreciation of the surrounding world. Reflecting both the external and…
As a painter, Izk Davies has mainly passed on the gallery scene in favor of making a living with public murals. Now Davies is taking his preference for public art even further by painting realistic animal portraits on plastic wrapped around trees. A longtime muralist, Davies is always looking for…
Let me tell you all the good things about Nicolas Winding Refn’s high-art, lowbrow horror film The Neon Demon before I tell you what I will not tolerate. After Drive, Refn seems obsessed with his idea of Los Angeles, one where there’s always a full moon, no traffic and everyone…
This sadistic pulp-revisionist Western starts so well that you might feel something like loss as it ends: The Duel could have been something. The opening is all evocative mud and blood as a pair of knife-fighters, their left arms tied together, stab in a downpour. Cut to two decades later,…
People made a stink about the walkouts during the Sundance premiere of music-video-and-advertising geniuses the Daniels’ first feature film, Swiss Army Man. It stars Daniel Radcliffe (Manny) as a farting, rotting corpse with superpowers and Paul Dano (Hank) as a sad-sack suicidal stalker trying to get home through a forest…
Has Paul Rudd become Hollywood’s idea of the face of economic insecurity? There his handsome mug was, in Ant-Man, beneath a Baskin-Robbins ball cap, his character making do behind an ice-cream counter while Marvel made bank in promotional tie-ins. And now, in The Fundamentals of Caring, Rob Burnett’s alternately winning/cloying…
Woodrow Wilson described D.W. Griffith’s notorious Civil War epic Birth of a Nation as “writing history with lightning.” Gary Ross’ Free State of Jones, which covers roughly the same period as Griffith’s film, is more like writing history with index cards. Diligent and informative but also fragmented and inert, it…
So you took out student loans for a liberal arts degree and ended up selling life insurance. You could let your sharp writing skills and instinct for a good story atrophy, but why don’t you keep them in tip-top shape writing for the Dallas Observer’s arts and culture section in your…
In case you missed the memo sent in the form of a sauna-like climate, summer is here. But we only get to complain about the heat for so long before it’s time to change tack and complain about even more heat instead, so let’s all agree to buck up and…
Between the hours of 6 p.m. Friday, June 17, and 8:30 p.m. Saturday, June 18, two goats were shot and killed on the property of Magnolia Silos, the Magnolia Market in Waco featured on Fixer Upper, an HGTV show starring Chip and Joanna Gaines. Waco police Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton…
Donning a dark jean jacket and a New Zealand windswept beard, filmmaker David Lowery returned to Dallas and the Oak Cliff Film Festival Saturday to present a free outdoor screening of Disney’s Flight of the Navigator on Bishop Avenue in front of Eno’s Pizza. The screening also included a sneak peek at…
A wiener dog is the perfect mascot for Todd Solondz’s films. Dachshunds are ridiculous, funny without trying, but that zero-dignity waddle belies a much fiercer purpose: to hunt and kill small prey. Solondz’s body of work, stretching from coming-of-age cringefest Welcome to the Dollhouse to his newest, Wiener-Dog, has the…
