September was a fine opening to the 2014-15 classical season, even if it had the occasional off-kilter gait. However, this month’s schedule looks even more substantial than the last; is this where the season launches in earnest? More Shostakovich, more Mozart, more Beethoven, some complex offerings from Prokofiev, Bartok and…
As Index Fest was happening in Dallas, I found myself headed west to Marfa for another music festival — the Trans-Pecos Festival of Music + Love. The long drive gave rise to a lot of important realizations. One: Being able to move 70 mph in one direction for eight hours…
Yesterday, D Magazine’s Frontburner blog got their fingers sticky in some scoop batter via the boob tube. The Internet’s cutest repetitive Preschooler, the “Apparently Kid” got his first reporting gig from Ellen Degeneres, who is sending him to cover the State Fair of Texas. On a scale of 1 to…
Local author Merritt Tierce is quite the media darling these days. After publishing her debut novel Love Me Back, Tierce has made the rounds on TV, been compared to Joan Didion by one critic, and perhaps most famously, told The Dallas Morning News about the time she donated Rush Limbaugh’s…
This morning, KERA’s Jerome Weeks commented on my Facebook check-in at Shakespeare in the Bar last night with a link to a New Yorker article about Drunk Shakespeare, pointing out that New York did it first. I squinted at the screen, rubbed my aching head and thought, damn it, it’s…
Much of the art on display in The Modern’s newest exhibition doesn’t belong in a museum. The very title, Urban Theater: New York Art in the 1980s, implies the art’s original presence in the streets. Even today, after decades of moving the risky stuff off the streets and onto the…
Some rebellious theater kids take over The Wild Detectives tonight for the first-ever rendition Shakespeare in a Bar. Well, we’re pretty sure we’ve heard some drunken actors (maybe even some of these guys) reciting lines of iambic pentameter over a double whisky on the rocks. Now it’s just a bit…
First, we had Scott Schuman and his collection of photographs, The Sartorialist. Then came the onslaught of fashion, DIY, and lifestyle blogs. We loved it. We still love it. Don’t tell you don’t check Refinery29 every morning (or that you’re not following them on Facebook and Instagram), or that you…
You noticed. Something about last week felt different. That’s cause it’s fall, you dummy. Here are 25 signs of the new season…
By Monica Hinman “People used to say ‘Bon Voyage”, comments Rick Steves at the beginning of our phone conversation. It was a way to express excitement and adventure, instead of “Have a safe trip,” which suggests fear and danger. Why such an ominous farewell? Travel is safer than ever but…
Our Best of Dallas 2014 issue rolls out this week. While we can modestly say it’s the greatest, most comprehensive city guide ever created, Dallas is a pretty big place that’s filled to the brim with best-ness. To cover all the good stuff we might have left out, Mixmaster will…
Donald Byrd has a dance career to would make anyone envious. For more than four decades, he has been living his dream of creating, performing, and educating. Oh, and he cut his teeth working for Twyla Tharp. His impressive career started in 1978 and includes prestigious credits like The Joffrey…
Mixmaster presents “100 Creatives,” in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. Know an artistic mind who deserves a little bit of blog love? Email lauren.smart@dallasobserver.com with the whos and whys. Katherine Owens has made her mark on Dallas as founder and artistic director of the critically…
As Bob McCall in The Equalizer, Denzel Washington plays a regular Joe who turns into an eye-gouging, brain-drilling nightmare for Boston’s Russian mob. At first Washington “toodles about a Home Depot-like store, helping customers, decked out in New Balance shoes and jeans so last-century you’ll be looking for pleats,” writes…
It’s that time again. Fried food, bird shows, no bird shows (sad face), and a visit with your old buddy, Big Tex. The State Fair of Texas officially opens Friday, and as usual we’ve got your go-to guide of what to do when you get there. We’ve also got suggestions…
Summer’s over. Well, according to the calendar. For North Texans, the end of summer can be bittersweet. On the one hand, the mercury will finally drop to a tolerable level, but it also means no more days spent by the pool, margaritas in hand. There’s nothing more exciting as a…
When The Brittany Murphy Story aired on Lifetime earlier this month, articles upon articles slammed the movie for its bad acting, bad wigs, and ultimately bad writing (surprise!). But among all of the negative press, actor Adam Hagenbuch seemed to receive the most praise for his portrayal of Murphy’s boyfriend,…
By Michelle Foster On a suburban corner in Plano, across from a llama farm, Celebration Event Center and Ballroom is home to a bunch of oddballs called Circus Freaks who run Open Stage, a weekly romp of weirdness guaranteed to make you feel things. Tonight’s event is speakeasy-themed. Performers and…
The Boxtrolls is a kiddie charmer that makes you laugh, cower and think of Hitler. That’s an unusual trifecta, but then again, this is an unusual film. If the German Expressionists were skilled at stop-motion animation, they’d have already made it. This is cartoon Caligari, a fable set on a…
Before its regular-Joe hero gets bitten by a radioactive equation and becomes the Equalizer, who’s sort of the Rain Man of puncturing Russian mobsters’ windpipes with corkscrews, Antoine Fuqua’s eye-gouging, brain-drilling, crowd-pleasing latest gives you a reel or two to remember what movies felt like back when they were about…
Simon Pegg has always been more like a cartoon than a real boy. He’s one part Charlie Brown to two parts Tintin, a round-faced runt who can channel both childlike depression and old-fashioned cowlicked pluck. In Pegg’s new film, Hector and the Search for Happiness, director Peter Chelsom simply allows…
Groupie has come to be an ugly word, a misogynist dig that’s used all too casually by men and women alike. A groupie is a woman who doesn’t “do” anything; she gets all of her glamour via her association with a strong man, most often a rock star. How can…
