For years, we’ve brought you an extensive, all-encompassing list of weekend events. These long, unwieldy documents were beginning to feel passé. No one knows the high and low brow of Dallas culture, dining and music better than we do, so we decided to pare down these guides to just the…
So you’re alive and in Dallas during the release of Star Wars: Force Awakens. You know there’s no escaping the power. It’s everywhere: Star Wars is on your jewelry, in your food, on emblazoned on your buildings. It’s roving your house with gleeful boops and beeps. Many of you have…
RE Gallery Closing Party Wanda Dye’s sharp eye for emerging talent, and endless taste for the perfectly eccentric turned RE Gallery into one of the can’t miss spaces in Dallas. Since opening a gallery in her shotgun shack in The Cedars three years ago, she’s exhibited some of the most…
Years after Moby-Dick was a flop, Herman Melville visited an old ship’s captain named George Pollard. Both men had seen better days. In their youth, both had sailed the seas with some success. Melville had written novels about his adventures with island girls, and Pollard had once helmed one of…
Justin Kurzel’s is a Macbeth stripped of lit-class ponderousness, stage-bound declaiming, Ren Fest cosplay and prestige-film pomposity. It is the essence of this cruelest of plays, the blade unsheathed — and, as a blade would be after hacking through all these Scottish wars, its edge is blunt, rough, a thing…
Opening night of Le Sacre du printemps, better known to English speakers as The Rite of Spring, created one of dance history’s most infamous stories. With music by Igor Stravinsky and choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, this ballet concert opened in 1913 with the subtitle, “Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts.” Both the…
Any way you slice it, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is as classic a holiday offering as fruitcake. And like that redoubtable dessert, it’s best served fresh, a little nutty and with extra dollops of sweetness. Three DFW theaters are ending the year with productions of A Christmas Carol. They’re…
There’s a new “fun” business on your radar — one your mom will for sure bring up the next time you call her. Like the great Gwen Stefani once said, “This shit is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S,” and boy, this shit really is bananas! You remember that potato business we reported on…
PICTURE OLIVER Welcome to the home of Larry Oliver and Jamie Laubhan-Oliver, two graphic designing badasses that dabble in home design, greenhouse building and concrete-picnic-table making. Basically, they have more talents than they have last names and chief among them is making the rest of us hobos jealous. But don’t…
Christmas tunes are already on loop in every store and restaurant, the gift lists are getting decidedly more expensive, you’re probably already tired of Christmas, and it’s not even here yet. This time of year can be a real bitch, especially if you’re a responsible grown-up with Christmas parties to…
If you’re hunting for real, down-and-dirty fantasy football tips, and the Dallas Observer arts and culture blog doesn’t strike you as the best possible place to find them, you’re onto us. We don’t have any of those for you. Please stop caring about sports so much and put that brain…
There’s a certain kind of madness to the holidays —- a kind of sugar rush, glassy-eyed fervor that’s somehow completely lovely and totally overwhelming. I think this is particularly true for the men and women out there who put a soul-crushing pressure on themselves to find the perfect gift. You’ll…
If you haven’t already started your holiday shopping, you’re going to want to get on that pronto. December 25 will be upon us before you know it, and unless you’ve decided to forgo the exchange of material possessions on the holiday as some kind of anti-capitalist protest, you’d better get…
Desmond Blair didn’t put “born without hands” on his resume back in 2010. On paper, he met the qualifications for the jobs he applied for after earning his degrees in Art and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas. But people acted strange when he showed up to job…
Thursday, December 3 Holiday Presence 11 If you’re the kind of person who prides themselves on buying the perfect gift for the people in your life, or if you’d like to be that kind of person, you really can’t go wrong with a work of art. Especially one by a…
SOFT4SOFT Housed in a storefront in Expostion Park, Beefhaus is one of the city’s few artist-run spaces keeping things fresh. Recently re-invigorated with a swath of new artists at the helm, the space is off to roaring start. This weekend, Pierre Krause curates SOFT4SOFT a group show featuring artists, Kyle…
Cynthia Nixon is such a terrific actress that she can steady even the wobbliest material. In writer-director Josh Mond’s modestly scaled family drama James White, she plays Gail, the mother of twentysomething underachiever James (Christopher Abbott, of Girls), a guy who can never seem to lay hands on a clean…
There is no better season for reading a book than winter. The cold chases you inside to the respite of a warm coffee, the licks of a freshly lit fire in the fireplace. In your hand? A new book you’ll devour to keep your mind occupied. But in this winter…
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin is the Taiwanese director’s first foray into the martial-arts genre. It may also be his most resplendent film yet: Watching it is like floating along on a sumptuous gold-and-lacquer cloud. Hou favorite Shu Qi (who also starred in Millennium Mambo and Three Times) plays Nie Yinniang,…
Oh Zeus, hear my lament that I was not present when Spike Lee imagined updating Lysistrata to present-day Chicago. I bet he burst himself cackling. Aristophanes’ 411 B.C. comedy, written during the three-decade Peloponnesian War, concocts a crazy scheme: Women refuse sex until their blue-balled men give in and declare…
Rule No. 1 of British “panto”: Be ready to play and sing along. No, go ahead. You’ll enjoy it. The panto is a traditional form of British children’s theater that pops up at the holidays. A little naughty, a whole lot nice, pantos are typically based on familiar fairytales and…
Sometimes, you just find yourself with this impossible urge to have your tarot read. Or, hell, learn how to read the tarot yourself. Maybe you want to figure out palmistry so that you can finally learn when Mr. Right is going to wander into your life. You start to research…
