In most industries, summer is the time for the sugar-coated, mindless entertainment. There’s the dance party anthems in the music industry; the blockbuster films in film. It’s not that different for books. With the expectation of beach vacations and weekend visits to the pool, you’ll occasionally hear publishers talk about…
At SMU’s Meadows Museum last week, classical music lovers gathered for the first annual gala for Open Classical, an organization that’s been putting on inventive and inexpensive classical music events around Dallas since 2011. The gala showcased a sampling of their events, and some aspects of the evening —…
The minutes before a play begins are usually spent flipping through the program, examining coupons for restaurants you’ll never visit and marveling that one of the evening’s performers was on Law and Order: SVU. Not so at the opening performance of Stop Hitting Yourself at the Wyly Theatre. One of…
In “Language Saved,” one of eight short stories in Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories, Russian author Mikhail Shishkin writes, “The experience of a language and the life lived through it turns languages with different pasts into non-communicating vessels.” Translation is mutation, he insists, which makes Deep Vellum’s release of the…
You may not have heard of Anne Waldman, though you’ve heard of her friends. She was the co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado; she was the director of NYC’s St. Mark’s Poetry Project for more than a decade;…
The curtain has closed on the core of Oral Fixation’s fourth season of storytelling, but there’s one special show to go, Destination: America, and it’s dear to Oral Fixation creator Nicole Stewart’s heart. The cast of storytellers for Destination: America is made up of immigrants who will share their experience…
If you’re cool with letting a stranger touch you for an hour, massage is a great way to relieve stress and generally improve your health. But the real benefits only come with semi-regular visits, and monthly trips to high-end spas like the Crescent, where the most basic massage will set…
Many of us bookworms missed out on the whole competitive sports thing. Reading and writing are pretty solitary endeavors. It’s not like you can arrange a fight to the death over character development. All of that stuff is subjective. Right? The folks at Literary Death Match don’t think so. During…
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what Voodoo Chile sells. The red one-story house on Bell Avenue, just off Lower Greenville, is like a trip into another world. You’ll find vintage clothing, Halloween masks, VHS tapes, records, record players, bongs, pipes, ashtrays, books and other knick-knacks, and the walls are swallowed…
This weekend the Dallas Art Fair returns for its seventh year, with more than 90 exhibitions of contemporary art taking over the fair’s usual venue, the Fashion Industry Gallery in the Arts District. Galleries from locales as distant as Europe and China will be represented, but there are also nine…
On Thursday, the Nasher Sculpture Center announced the creation of the Nasher Prize, an international award of $100,000, to be given annually to a living sculptor, in honor of a specific body of work. The recipient will be determined by an international committee of art directors, curators, art historians and…
Next Thursday, April 9, there’s a reading series coming to the Texas Theatre. Nothing so out of the ordinary in that. Dallas has been blessed with lots of readings recently: The Dallas Museum of Art’s Arts & Letters Live series began in January and is still kicking, and The Wild…
It was 1 a.m. on a chilly September day in Marfa and the headliner, Deer Tick, had just completed their set at El Cosmico’s Trans-Pecos Festival of Music and Love, bringing an end to the weekend’s festivities — or so I thought. A man wearing an elaborate robe and a headdress…
Last Saturday marked the closing program of Dallas Medianale, the experimental film festival that’s been at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary since early January. The festival has featured seated screenings, video art installations and intermedia performances curated by an array of artists, art educators and curators involved with the Video Association…
You know what’s harder than writing a book? Writing a good one. You know what’s even harder than writing a good book? Writing one in a foreign language. Well, if you have aspirations of writing, you can get ready to feel much worse about yourself because Bosnian-American author Aleksandar Hemon…
It’s almost time for Porky Pig, but not quite: There’s one last Dallas Medianale event for your viewing pleasure. Carolyn Sortor has put together a closing program of seated screenings called “Existential Virtuality” for the experimental film festival and it starts at 5:45 p.m. Saturday at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary…
Mixmaster presents “100 Creatives,” in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. Ben Fountain is one of the most successful writers to call Dallas home. His 2007 collection of short stories, Brief Encounters With Che Guevara, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and his first novel, Billy Lynn’s…
The Dallas Chamber Symphony is coming to the end of its season; Tuesday they performed Bumpin’ Into Broadway at the Dallas City Performance Hall, the fourth of 5 concerts that comprise this season’s offerings. It was a cold and rainy evening, but the concert was a near sell-out. The performances…
Those of you who are late to the Dallas Medianale party aren’t out of opportunities to join in on the fun. The experimental film festival that took over the McKinney Avenue Contemporary (3120 McKinney Ave.) at the beginning of January still has a few tricks up its sleeve before it…
Paris has the Pont de l’Archevêché, a bridge where couples attach notes signifying their everlasting love. Verona has Casa di Giulietta, the supposed home of Shakespeare’s Juliet, where lovelorn supplicants flock to offer their prayers. Dallas, well, Dallas doesn’t have a grand, romantic locale of that order. But let’s be…
These days, classical music is necessarily an acquired taste. Unless you study music, you’re probably not exposed to it much. The songs that dominate the charts are manufactured like Doritos: They’re small bites of sound engineered to stimulate pleasure centers but also to be bland and forgettable, so they can…
Dallas Medianale, an experimental film festival programmed by the Video Association of Dallas, has been going on at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary (3120 McKinney Ave.) since January 9. I went to the opening night, which featured screenings and a series of intermedia performances, including an awesome display by a duo…
