Dallas’ favorite alternative holiday lights display is still glowing strong. A 120-foot-long Imperial Dragon Boat anchors the Chinese Lantern Festival’s lagoon-rich magic, and it’s surrounded by dozens of complicated, illuminated vignettes. Take a stroll through the flamingo pond or photobomb the dinosaurs. It’s up to you: This is your adventure…
It’s time to ditch that Hampton Inn. How many times are you going to let yourself get roped in with the promise of a continental breakfast? Business travelers, and the rare species known as tourists, pour into Dallas because “Big Things Happen Here.” Whichever big part of Dallas you’re coming…
“My Dallas Cowboys Christmas tree!!” Usually for our #Dallas Instagram weekly recap we feature events, places, food, fashion, even pets. Last week, however, we noticed a trend: dudes with highly stylized hair. So we went with it. We noticed another trend this week while scrolling through your ‘grams: Dallas Cowboys…
Enrollment is open for the Dallas Observer’s Fourth Annual MasterMind Awards and we’d like to hear from you. Submissions close on December 13, so scribble down your favorites and nominate Dallas’ best. We’re looking for innovators. Cultural climate shapers. People making work that pushes our city forward. That can be…
Scenes from the 2013 DOMA Ceremony From music festivals and burlesque shows to NASCAR and exquisite food, last month offered something for every Dallas appetite. Here’s a look at November through our ten favorite photos. Want more? Check out the full slideshow here…
Standing on stage recently at the Amsterdam Comedy Festival at a flat 4 feet tall and only 57 pounds, it’s no wonder this up-and-coming DFW comic is called the “next little thing.” She started her set by letting the audience know that she’s written everything she’s about to say. “If…
A favorite pastime of those who love Asian film is to carp about Hollywood’s annoying tendency to lay claim to and defile their favorites. But Spike Lee’s Oldboy is the remake that came too late, so benign and unmemorable that not even people who loved Park Chan-wook’s 2003 original will…
The great sins of the 20th century are already too many to list, but let us note one more: the abduction of infants from mothers deemed unworthy or undesirable by governments and religious institutions. Thousands of children were kidnapped from leftist parents during Argentina’s and Spain’s respective dictatorships, while children…
For all its nasty twists, the biggest shock in Spike Lee’s remake of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (opening November 27) hits in the movie’s first minutes — during the credits. “A Spike Lee Film,” a title card reads, a first for any of Lee’s features. Jungle Fever, He Got Game, Inside…
Sweet as a bushel of sugar cookies, light as a snowflake, ‘Twas the Night before Christmas is safe family fare on the big stage at Dallas Children’s Theater. The play-with-music pretends to tell the back story of how 19th century American journalist Clement C. Moore came up with that poem,…
Dead White Zombies’ latest, Bull Game, written and directed by Thomas Riccio, promises more than it delivers. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe not. Staged in a drafty warehouse in the new Trinity Groves hipsterhood west of the Trinity River, the show is an overstretched metaphor about the American obsession with…
It’s not unusual to put on extra pounds between the end of October and the start of January. Most people wait until the new year to do something about it, starting gym memberships or loading up on fiber supplements in well-intentioned attempts at resolutions. Why not try a new tactic…
You just got home for Thanksgiving. Your parents embrace you with hugs. Your dog slobbers all over your face. The warm receptions and the awaiting feast erase all the stress from work — until you see that in-law who will not shut up or the nephew who cannot stop asking…
Sure, you live on soup and rice for the other 364 days of the year, but Thursday is Thanksgiving. That means gluttony of vast proportions, hopefully prepared by someone other than you. So splurge, do it right. Feast until you collapse, drooling on a horn of plenty. This is freaking…
Black Friday is going to be exhausting whether you embrace it or run from it. You might spend the whole day ransacking stores for deals, you might try to hit up just one and become trapped for hours in the Walking Dead-esque frenzy, or you can try to avoid it…
Veteran performers are a rarity in striptease. Burlesque too, for that matter, though proponents of burlesque say that it’s less about conventional beauty and sexuality and more about entertainment and provocation. In either case it’s unusual to see someone old enough to be a grandmother take the stage, but that’s…
We’re digging on this comedy series Behind the Screen, organized by local chuckles harvester Elizabeth Howard. It brings you back — or, rather, forward — through Texas Theatre, and plops you down in a makeshift comedy club set in a part of the building you rarely experience. The things are…
Cronenberg apostles, listen up. The Angelika loves and understands your obsession with exploding heads and all things ConSec, because it’s showing Scanners at 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. Weird, dark and riddled with telepathy, this one’s got it all. Governmental ill deeds? Check. Subversive counterculture messages and gruesome theories…
Whether delivering a treehouse harangue as dictator-for-life of G.R.O.S.S. or getting sneak-pounced by his tiger sidekick, Calvin was our kid id. Operating on a combination of misunderstood genius and prankster mischief, he and Hobbes conquered the world, time travel, art, dumb girls and physics, one perfectly drawn frame at a…
When the phrase “national treasure” gets tossed around, it’s usually questionable or an outright joke. For example, “Ted Cruz is a national treasure” is questionable. “Taylor Swift is a national treasure” is clearly a joke. The statement “Tom Hanks is a national treasure” is neither of those things. Tom Hanks…
Tone Bell is from Atlanta, but he started his standup in Dallas, so show him some of that B_G love. Tone was on the now-canceled Whitney, a show in which the parts were greater than the whole. (Individually funny, but put them all together and it was like a one-way…
Comedy may look like it’s all fun and games but it’s actually a very competitive affair. Comics are constantly competing for stage time and the love and affection of a crowd who can’t come up with those nuggets of humor on their own. The competition really heats up toward the…
