About a decade ago, Kaleta Doolin took a women’s studies course at SMU. While doing research for a paper on women in the arts, she came across a quote from the author of a book she studied for the very first art history course she took in the 1970s. In…
The success of Jean-Jacques Annaud’s handsome lupine adventure Wolf Totem relies in large part on the ratio between wolf and totem. There are wolves — those howling, majestic hunters of the Mongolian grasslands — and then there are the many things they stand for: freedom, teamwork, the delicate harmony of…
In 2012, documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer made a splash with The Act of Killing, in which he sought out members of Indonesian killing squads, individuals who murdered thousands of innocent citizens accused of being communists after a military takeover in 1965, and invited them to re-enact their crimes in the…
In a bright, open space inside Dallas’ downtown library, about 50 women and men stand alert at a table with their hands tied behind their backs. “3-2-1, go!” someone counts down, and they begin to change diapers on children’s dolls. Their hands bound, the competitors fumble with the stand-in babies…
The American Dream killed Jay Gatsby and Willy Loman, but their TV counterparts have mostly fared better. Sure, Walter White ends up in a metaphorical ditch and Tony Soprano may too. But the serialization of TV storytelling largely means that characters on shows like Roseanne, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,…
One of the first things anyone asked during Sunday afternoon’s inaugural Dallas Zine Party was, “Who are all of these people?” That same question was why the event’s founder, Randy Guthmiller, planned this afternoon in the first place. Who were the people in and around Dallas making zines? What did…
Welcome to 10 Brilliant Dallas Women, a pop-up online series about ten awesome women making Dallas a better place to live. Anne Marie Weiss is technically an American, but her life is more like an exotic tale from Arabian Nights. She radiates courtliness, carrying the folklore and wisdom of each…
Here’s how Digifest works: A bunch of kids (teenagers, mainly), who are social media celebrities, gather to showcase their talents (?). Their fans are typically 13-year-old girls, who are too old for toys but too young for boys. The social media stars that are singers sing. The rappers rap. And…
A twenty year veteran educator, Dr. Rose Brock has dedicated her career to turning teens into lovers of the written word. Building relationships with readers through books is her superpower. Here’s the Reader’s Digest version of Brock’s work: She is a professor but has a healthy list of literary accomplishments outside…
Complaining that you’re bored is, well, boring. In all likelihood, your boredom is more related to the fact that you’re not reading and enriching your booze-rotted brain than any real lack of arts and culture in Dallas. There is plenty to do, even if sometimes you do have to look…
Adam Sandler’s latest movie Pixels didn’t just feel like what we’ve come to expect from the mediocre movie star who churns out comedies the way that Hostess spits out Twinkies. Pixels felt like something that we as a society allowed to happen. Sandler didn’t do this to us. We did…
Summer’s fading, and fall’s creeping around the corner. Which means the classical season is underway––almost. While in many ways the season proper won’t hit its stride until October, there’s plenty of performances to make this a month to look forward to. What follows are the events we’re most excited about…
Yeah, you think you’re a hot shot all right. Someone once in the 11th grade called you funny and just like a bad STD, it stuck with you forever. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler and Kirsten Wiig are so funny and you’re just like them, a drunk guy at a…
Favorite Five is a new series where we’ll go into the homes of some of Dallas’ coolest kids and document their five favorite things. Know someone worthy of a nom? Type it in the comments below. Favorite Five: Cara Crossley, Instagram @unclecarl13 When you walk into Cara Crossley’s house, your…
Thursday, September 3North Texas Masters of Light The American Society of Media Photographers is home to some pretty talented storytellers. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Especially if the media outlet is paying pennies per word. This weekend the wide array of talent in the ASMP’s…
The upcoming Steve Jobs documentary from Alex Gibney (Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine) is worth seeing even if you’re tired of Apple fanboys — if only for the curious parallels between Apple worshippers and the members of the Church of Scientology, the subject of Gibney’s other recent doc…
Every artist struggles to reach certain milestones, but viewers aren’t always offered a glimpse of the journey. Neither of the two upcoming solo exhibitions at Kirk Hopper Fine Art have a unified or cohesive look. With a sample of drawings and paintings from two different projects, one focuses on the…
For much of her career, Lucia Simek’s work revolved around what she describes as, “the grand adventure of domesticity.” Her exhibition at the Dallas Contemporary (a collaboration with Kristen Cochran) was made from marble, which she describes as an aspirational stone, a material that represents or projects a certain image…
North Texas Masters of Light The American Society of Media Photographers is home to some pretty talented storytellers. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Especially if the media outlet is paying pennies per word. This weekend the wide array of talent in the ASMP’s Dallas branch…
Whether or not you’re a socially inept introvert, alone time is necessary for the maintenance of anyone’s sanity. If you are, in fact, a socially inept introvert, you know that the struggle of doing something more than watching Netflix documentaries when you need your precious alone time is very, very…
In a once-in-a-year event, dancers from Dallas and surrounding cities and states will showcase their talents to an amazed audience at the Dallas City Performance Hall for Dallas DanceFest. Throughout Labor Day weekend, more than 150 dancers will perform a wide array of styles of dance, including ballet, hip-hop, theatrical,…
There’s a knot of tough, tender, persuasive scenes near the end of Isabel Coixet’s life-advice drama Learning to Drive. These are muscular enough that, had they come earlier, they might have powered the movie — the filmmakers’ hearts might be in the right place, but the film’s doesn’t kick in…
