“Wanna see some shapes?” It’s the first thing Randy Guthmiller ever said to me. We were at The Power Station for a gallery opening, I had walked out to the terrace, looking for a friendly face who might be my next target for cigarette bumming. He was wearing a snug…
This summer Dallas brought the heat when it came to live music offerings. From Queen Bey’s legendary turn at American Airlines Center to Greg Barrett’s genre mashing Animal House party at Sandaga 813, there were plenty of shows we’ll still be talking about this time next year. We’ve narrowed the…
Things are getting pretty crazy in Dallas’ art scene. Museums are handing keys over to inspired and innovative artists; houses are converting into galleries; one-off group and solo exhibitions are popping up in vacant Deep Ellum properties; and artists are adopting multiple roles as curators, musicians and publishers. We want…
Things are getting pretty crazy in Dallas’s art scene. Museums are handing keys over to inspired and innovative artists; houses are converting into galleries; one-off group and solo exhibitions are popping up in vacant Deep Ellum properties; and artists are adopting multiple roles as curators, musicians and publishers. We want…
You could hear it from the sidewalk, salsa, disco and funk seeping through the Cavern’s grimy walls, wrapping itself around your legs and jarring your equilibrium out of its drunken stupor and back to it’s natural positioning. This was The Cool Out in the mid 2000’s, when a night out…
Once a year at The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, you, your cousin and your auntie can all exhibit at the gallery. No, not a prank, but an interesting opportunity given to artists of all levels at the MAC. For a fee of $30, aspiring and established artists get a one-year artist/student…
The plethora of beatmakers, producers and DJs in Dallas are bussin’ the local music scene wide open. We here at the Observer wanted to showcase that talent through bi-weekly mix’s made by the best in the business, and made especially for DC9 at Night. So stream, download and share this…
Raw and Underground event organizer AV The Great isn’t the least bit shy about proclaiming his freestyle battle and beat competition being the “best representation of the Dallas hip-hop scene.” In fact, in the spirit of rap battles and DJ swagger, he’s not the least bit shy about anything. “This…
While we hear a lot about Dallas’ emerging artist movement, what’s less publicized, though equally compelling, is the emerging gallery force. In the last couple years we’ve watched makeshift spaces spring up everywhere, many of which are artist-run or double as homes and studios. At these start-ups you’ll find folks…
Replacing locally loved DJ Sober is no easy task. Especially when he is across the highway, spinning at his relocated residency at The Basement at The Travis. That’s why Peru born, Dallas trained DJ Ynfynyt Scroll sees his new Thursday spot at Beauty Bar as a new endeavor, rather than…
In a cracked parking lot, sharing a mercantile space with Sprockets Bicycle Shop, sits Taqueria el Picante, home to one hell of a barbacoa taco and formerly the best DIY performance space in North Dallas. The Lego-yellow colored business’ owner and operator helped give local bands and their fans a…
Dallas has a reputation for being materialistic and sex-crazed, but that’s judging a city against its veneer. For as many valet brawls and big hair meltdowns as you witness in Uptown, there are dozens of less-visible, more important scenes occurring — humble moments, where neighbors work together to improve our…
It sounds perverse, but failure can be a welcome motivator. When you’re molding your masterpiece, it’s rarely the success at the end of the road that drives you. It’s the potential blown-tire-flip-over-median-and-tumble-over-cliff-on-the-way-there that keeps you going…
Riley Holloway has been waiting for this moment for months. All the late hours in the lower-level studio, alone but for the lyrics motivating him through the speaker box, manifested themselves in a packed gallery space on Friday night in the Fairmont Hotel, where Holloway is the artist in residence…
When I first saw She and Him were playing at Verizon Theater, in Grand Prairie’s desolate “entertainment district,” I wondered why for the group’s first ever stop in Dallas, they didn’t play a venue like Granada Theater or Palladium Ballroom. But once their set was done, and the almost all-couple…
The plethora of beatmakers, producers and DJs in Dallas are bussin’ the local music scene wide open. We here at the Observer wanted to showcase that talent through bi-weekly mix’s made by the best in the business, and made especially for DC9 at Night. So stream, download and share this…
He was on the last six songs of his LP. Six damn songs and he would finish a yearlong endeavor under his new moniker, Buffalo Black. But shit always picks the most inopportune time to hit the fan. First his beloved grandparents died. Then his father experienced financial hardships. As…
The plethora of beatmakers, producers and DJs in Dallas are bussin’ the local music scene wide open. We here at the Observer wanted to showcase that talent through bi-weekly mix’s made by the best in the business. So stream, download and share the mix with your friends. Relive the weekend…
As a French princess or prince in the early 18th century, if you wanted to shit in a golden toilet, you simply commissioned a golden toilet. And from lavish latrines alike bore the tropes of the Rococo movement, which stands voluptuous and well hung next to other styles. Homeland Security,…
Do-gooders and art promoters ArtLoveMagic held their annual art party in the basement of South Side on Lamar over the weekend. The heat and an overkill of art-centric activities conspired to kept the crowd modest, and maybe that’s also why the attendees, their plastic cups of wine sloshing, were slow…
The 10 to 15 artists and musicians who performed at ArtLoveMagic’s first “REACH” event in 2007 wasn’t exactly what co-founder David Rodriguez had in mind. “Since ArtLoveMagic started I had the vision of Underground in my head,” Rodriguez says of the grandiose interactive art experience that returns this weekend. “It…
KoolQuise’s new EP, Small Time Lo$er (The Dream Theory), is definitively his. No overabundance of guest spots, no swagger-jacking flow or a grandiose gamble on riding a trends coattails. At times self-deprecating and at others stream-of-conscious confessional, it wasn’t until songwriting was complete did the lyricist realize he had written…
