On a Friday afternoon one week after the Transoma Five reunion show, Sloppyworld is doing a fantastic job of living up to its name. It’s dark and filthy, lit only by a few barely functioning fluorescent tubes. Dozens of bottles—empty, half-full or broken—litter the floor and every horizontal surface. Hundreds…
If you love to travel and you haven’t really decided what you want to do when you grow up, here’s one suggestion: Learn photography. You don’t even have to develop an identifiable style. There will always be a demand for pretty landscapes and endangered animals. Last summer, Dallas photographer Tom…
When you were a kid, did you ever suspect that some of the seemingly pointless busy work you were forced to do actually had some ulterior purpose? Those assignments that you just knew the teacher wasn’t grading: What did she really do with those word searches? Were there secret messages…
Good thing the Miracle League of Frisco joined with the 2008 Winter Games of Texas—because it will take a miracle to pull off winter games in this part of the state. Just having snow would be unusual, but only a miracle could create a ski-worthy mountain in time for the…
Because most people are too lazy to exercise and stop stuffing food into their stupid fat faces, we’ll always need more pitchmen trumpeting magical new weight-loss solutions. According to one new diet fad, the answer to the obesity epidemic has been available all along. No, it’s not the occasional walk…
It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted to go to an all-day, all-night rock festival in Deep Ellum or Exposition Park. I’m sorry to admit that a few awful lineups were all it took for me to develop something of an allergy to them. The teenage me would have…
It’s hard to believe that anyone, let alone a member of the Foo Fighters, takes the Grammy Awards seriously. But bassist Nate Mendel says he’s honored that his band has been nominated. And he’ll be damned if Kanye West wins Album of the Year. At the 50th Annual Grammy Awards…
The meandering improvisation that makes Violent Squid’s music so fascinating for brief, beautiful moments is the same characteristic that makes it so easily dismissed at other times. The ever-evolving Denton collective, led by Ty Stamp, released nine albums or EPs in 2007, with two more already in the works. It…
Quentin Tarantino’s first few stabs at directing are reminders of how much talent he has and how wasted that talent has been lately. His first film (aside from 1987’s partially lost My Best Friend’s Birthday) Reservoir Dogs created the template that his future films would use with successively diminishing returns:…
Allow me to throw out a half-baked psychology theory: Mutilating books is one of the earliest forms of creativity a child will express. Many a parent has picked up a kid’s copy of Goodnight Moon and discovered that said kid has torn pages or blackened the face of every character…
Unbelievably, not a single person on our 2007 music death pool (see “Pool Queue,” January 4, 2007) was waved past the velvet rope into the Ultimate Afterparty—though Britney Spears was flirting pretty hard with the bouncers. We recommend that you keep the previous year’s picks on your list and add…
Last year was a tough year. Clubs in Deep Ellum, Denton and Fort Worth closed, only to be replaced with sterile, corporate-owned chain venues. Carter Albrecht was killed. The Toadies, one of the most overrated bands in Dallas history, reunited. Zooming out beyond the local music scene, things don’t look…
As a seventh-grade movie fan, I was about as sophisticated as Joe Bob Briggs, but without the irony. All a movie required was bullets, blood or boobs. Beautiful cinematography and complex characters were mere distractions. An interesting plot meant the screenwriter came up with some novel killing method. Trying to…
Let’s briefly review 2007. Presidential campaigning began in earnest. Wildfires in California. The Virginia Tech massacre. Turns out everything from China will kill you, and everything you buy is from China. ‘Roidy Bonds broke the most cherished record in sports. The Sopranos ended—badly. Striking TV writers means you have to…
In the pages that follow, our corporate overlords provide an alternative to gratuitous music writer geekdom and end-of-year lists, but being who we are, we threatened to burn down the building if we didn’t get to make some kind of contribution to the list-making canon. Apparently, they like this building…
The holidays are a time of family, schmaltzy Christmas commercials that somehow make you cry and, for music journalists, list-making. Lots and lots of list-making. Over the past few years, the availability of year-end critics’ lists has multiplied faster than the worry lines on Ben Bernanke’s brow. Mark our words,…
The Dallas area has several neighborhoods whose residents go over the top with Christmas displays. There’s the visible-from-space wattage draping the mansions of Highland Park, the eccentric displays in Little Forest Hills, the Twelve Days displays in Oak Highlands and the elaborate decorations in Plano’s Deerfield neighborhood. Participation is a…
If you’re reading this to find something to do on the one day when almost everything in North Texas is closed, it’s possible that you’re stranded here, with some misfortune keeping you from your family gathering. It’s happened to me too. Two days before Christmas 2003, the wife, kids and…
The best Christmas songs, whether they’re classic carols or new favorites, embody whatever you love about the holiday. The worst, on the other hand, are grim reminders of all that is unbearable about the season’s orgy of consumerism, exploitation of Christian tradition and ham-handed sentimentality. I e-mailed a few local…
The Dallas Observer music section strives to be your go-to source for sports-talk radio news, naturally, so we’d be remiss not to mention the Orphanage Second Annual Christmas Benefit Show Friday night, December 21. As with the inaugural Christmas charity show, the benefit will be held at the Double-Wide Bar…
Bridges and Blinking Lights straddle that line that divides the area’s roots- and Americana-influenced rockers from the pearl-snap crowd. They’re definitely not country, but you ain’t gonna mistake these guys for Brooklynites. What set them apart from every other boring North Texas country-influenced rock act are Jake Wilganowski’s beautifully clear,…
Sometimes it seems like the best acts in the area these days are turning down the volume on their guitars to make way for more intricate indie-pop instrumentation, or forgoing it altogether for keyboards and laptops. Saturday’s bill at Andy’s should prove there are still possibilities for the old six-string…
