Our Ten Favorite Photos from Aurora

We gathered like moths to an LED flame on Friday night as Aurora lit up the Art District. The acreage filled with installations by local and international artists, merging dance, light, sound and video. Watching thousands of people strolling Flora Street in search of art is an interesting phenomenon: As…

Philip Glass Will Perform Dracula in Fort Worth

One of the late 20th century’s most influential composers, Glass has collaborated with everyone from The Talking Heads to Leonard Cohen. His work has ushered contemporary opera and symphony into experimental territories. He’s even found pop-culture fame, thanks to a parody in a South Park holiday special. But when Philip…

Your A-to-Z Guide to Aurora and the Arts District Fall Block Party

We’re a tech hub, an arts destination and a city willing to experiment. Tonight those qualities merge and surface at Aurora: Lights of Convergence, the multi-sensory spectacle set to illuminate the Arts District in a few, quick hours. 87 talents have created new media installations for the event. Some you’ll…

Podcast: Go See 12 Years a Slave, All is Lost, and Avoid CBGB

Photo by Jaap BuitendijkChiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave.On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson disagree on Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave — a beautifully shot film, contrasting the all-too-visible evil of mankind…

13 Awesome Things to Do in Dallas this Weekend, October 17 to 20

Aurora lights up the Arts District on Friday and Nasher Xchange puts the city on display Saturday, but beginning Thursday night the above-shown collection of house cats perform circus tricks in Fort Worth. There really is something for everyone. There’s more. Lot’s more. Like TEDxSMU, our local thinker salon; an…

The Fifth Estate Never Puts Julian Assange into Focus

Being a sensible person, you’ve probably taken a liking to Benedict Cumberbatch, the actor, Dickensian beanpole and banana-fana name-game destroyer who has lately played everyone literate geeks adore: Sherlock, Smaug, Khan. And, as a sensible person, you probably were curious — even heartened — to hear that Cumberbatch would be…

Dunnam Makes a Winsome Winnie in Wingspan’s Happy Days

Long regarded as a commentary on the nuclear panic of the Cold War, Samuel Beckett’s 1961 absurdist comedy Happy Days now seems more like a cartoon of a long, rotten marriage. Wingspan Theatre Company is doing the play right now at the Bath House. Director Susan Sargeant amps up the…

DTC’s Clybourne Park Fast-forwards Past A Raisin in the Sun

Clybourne Park is the second great major American drama about the hell of dealing with a homeowners’ association. The first was Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Clybourne’s source material from half a century ago. Both shows are running at Dallas Theater Center (at the Wyly Theatre), sharing cast…

That Carrie Remake is Surprisingly Good

Kimberly Peirce changes almost nothing in her rallying remake of Brian De Palma’s classic about a troubled telekinetic teenager. She doesn’t have to. Yes, now the mean girls who pelt Carrie with tampons upload a cell phone video of the attack, and the well-meaning jock who squires the school outcast…

Another Excuse For Meat Chucking

Few things can cause rifts in friendships like disagreements over what is and isn’t OK to eat. But fad diets and molecular gastronomy are rarely the source of contention as much as meat-eating is. Many a dinner party of barbecue has fallen apart once some unwitting attendee realizes there’s no…

I Vant To Suck Your Flood

There’s a vampire for everyone. Sulky teens, poor decision-makers, fashionable dames … there’s a fictional vamp to suck it up for you. And if you’re a citizen of Louisiana, then you got the neck biters in spades. Legend (and premium cable) would have us believe that in all that swampy,…

The Aurora Dallealas

When night falls on the Dallas Arts District tonight, expect the whole area to come to life, like when forests of mushrooms crop up after a rainstorm. The Aurora Project, presented by The Dallas Morning News, is a massive open-air exhibition that allows artists to turn the nearly 70-acre district…

Vitamin TED, Now A Chewable

Gen X peeps know that back in the day, when you got called to a conference in middle school, it meant sitting through an hour of videos about the evils of drug use and how best to narc on your partying parents. Plus, there was that one video with projectile…