Last week’s episode of Girls had a lot of lows, starting with Adam’s sad, shirtless YouTube music video, which Hannah and Elijah watched like a nature documentary while Hannah wondered aloud if Adam loved her enough to murder her. Episode three, however, was concerned with the highs, and opens with…
Last week we introduced our 2013 Masterminds, local artists to whom we awarded $1,000 each for their work making Dallas a stranger, more interesting place to live. And on Saturday night, we honored them at our annual Artopia culture jam, featuring art, fashion, food, music, and some seriously shiny low-riders,…
It’s been a busy week for Eric Steele and Adam Donaghey of Aviation Cinemas. Both have been tackling the snowy hills of Sundance while hyping that little announcement Variety launched last Friday. The e-blast heard ’round the city confirmed that Aviation is taking a cinematic trust fall, landing in the…
Local entrepreneurs Austin Emmert and Caden Stevens are bringing focus to the “making-people-look-cooler-when-they-party” business. Last year, the former fraternity brothers turned business partners founded the eye wear line, Spectified. The attraction lies in the electroluminescent wire (aka EL wire), that’s built into the frames, causing the shades to light up…
Classical music is stuck in the past. Plenty of living composers and musicians argue this statement’s falsehood adamantly. However, it’s true that the bulk of art music played by symphonies, chamber groups and operas hails from hundreds of years ago. Case in point: This weekend the Dallas Symphony Orchestra is…
Audra Cooper is an unlikely salon entrepreneur. A CPA with more than a decade’s worth of experience in the HR field, it seemed her life was tidy, on track and heading in a predictive direction. In fact, aside from the occasional servicing appointment, hair was never something she considered with…
Potty training a toddler isn’t fun. Trying to convince a toddler to crap into a toilet is like trying to convince a drunk person that whatever stupid shit he’s currently doing is a bad idea. Conversations with both the toddler and the drunk will end with the same result: he…
Listen, I understand where you’re at. First, you were emotionally mugged while stumbling down love’s path. Then, those tickets to see The xx — the ones you planned to buy when your paycheck cleared — sold out. Now you’re staring down the barrel of a rather unremarkable Valentine’s Day, planning…
“Look, no one’s going to actually support TMZ, but what ever happened to shame?” This is a big question Kyle Kinane’s posing, one I’m not fully ready to unpack at 3 p.m. The comedian and actor is very vocal on Twitter, the modern stage for comedians, and on Tuesday, he…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Ahmed Ahmed’s Next Generation Comedy Tour at the Majestic Theater Ahmed Ahmed (Yep, that’s his name, not a type-o.), star of the TBS hit comedy Sullivan & Son, returns to stages across the…
(Look up to see video evidence of last year’s Artopia.) Giant weekend alert: I hope you’ve recovered from FluFest 2013, because you’ll need your A-game if you want to hit up Friday’s Shining-themed costume party, tonight’s ’70s Motown bash and an Art Con 8 thank you joint on Monday. Personally,…
Each week, we tell you exactly where you can go … cinematically speaking. The Room Tommy Wiseau’s melodramatic love triangle is a mainstay of the Inwood’s midnight features. The movie’s trailer calls it a black comedy, but just how much of that humor is intentional is part of the film’s…
The murder of the children should be the most disturbing thing. The crime-scene photos of three young boys killed in 1993 in West Memphis, Arkansas, are, of course, harrowing, as is footage of the parents shattered by the loss. But recent American life has made such scenes all too familiar…
A decorous gathering of dames and other knighted U.K. doyens, Quartet centers on the residents of Beecham House, a baronial residence for retired musicians. Former conductor Cedric (Michael Gambon), bedecked in a series of fantastic caftans and charged with organizing the annual gala fundraiser, determines that the reunion of the…
Do I hear a waltz? And a Charleston? And some numbers from Ghost: The Musical? The theater year gets off to an upbeat start with talented actors singing their faces off in a trio of musicals, large and small, stretching from Fair Park to Turtle Creek to Addison. The biggie…
Matthew Posey writes, directs and stars in all of the weird, wonderful musical dramedies he puts on at his Ochre House theater, and he always shows the audience something unexpected. He plays the banjo in Old: a Vaudeville Tragedy in Two Acts, currently running at the tiny space near Fair…
Putting It Together, a two-hour revue of Stephen Sondheim songs, isn’t much of a musical. It’s more of a meh-sical. But WaterTower Theatre in Addison has a reasonably pleasant staging of it directed by Terry Martin. Singer-actors Alex Organ, Bob Hess, John Campione, Diana Sheehan and newcomer Sarah Elizabeth Smith…
In George A. Romero’s deeply silly 1993 Stephen King adaptation The Dark Half, Timothy Hutton stars as Thad Beaumont, a writer whose highbrow pretensions don’t pay the bills. When Thad needs to make a quick buck, then, he seals himself into his study and grinds out a nihilistic thriller to…
How often do you get a chance to be a part of an experiment? No, not the kind where you take a pill and see if it gives you a third arm. We mean the kind where art and social commentary come together. Mega art farts the Goss-Michael Foundation and…
Bold, impassioned, ecstatically beautiful, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color — a lyric reverie on loss, love and various invasions of the body — was in a class by itself at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Well, let’s say it was a class shared by a more conventional but no less heady…
“It’s hard to get these things started,” says Walter Hill, the dean of the American action movie, speaking to me from Los Angeles. “Action films are by their very nature more expensive than what are sometimes called, in the independent world, ‘relationship films.’ But I despise these categories. I’ve never…
Few activities, if any, are as straightforwardly and aptly named as Naked Girls Reading. Lord bless ’em, am I right? The unorthodox series originated in Chicago and grew so popular that it couldn’t be contained to one city. Now burlesque performers, authors and other ballsy broads get together to read…
