I was 13-years-old before my parents would let me watch Psycho. Growing up on a steady diet of Alfred Hitchcock films (Rope was too boring; The Birds was too campy), I expected another suspenseful romantic black and white with a handsome devil like Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart trying to…
In 1994, a flamboyant little film out of Australia made serious waves in world cinema with a heartfelt and fabulous story of two drag queens and a trans woman driving a bus through the Outback. Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce and a brilliant Terrance Stamp take on the roles of our…
The ’20s were a great decade for women. It gave us bobbed hair, trousers, and oh yeah, a tiny thing called women’s suffrage. It would be a few decades before we mastered the art of second wave feminism, in which women began to reclaim their sexuality, but it’s certainly the…
Contrary to popular media narrative, there are still young people in America who read books. Libraries still serve as place for children to be swept away by on trails of adventure or romance. This hope that literature will forever remain a cornerstone of the human experience is an impetus for…
The fall dance season is starting off with “the best dance festival ever!” says arts patron and Dallas DanceFest producer Gayle Halperin. Back after nearly 10 years, the Dallas DanceFest will definitely give a lay of the Dallas dance land, but we’ll have to see if it’s actually the best…
As Americans — actually, just as literate creatures — we’re protective of those special treasure troves of words we call books. In fact, well before our military involvement in World War II, the United States became terribly disturbed by a certain form of censorship occurring in Nazi Germany: book burning…
Dallas/Fort Worth is getting a third Alamo Drafthouse movie theater to fulfill the needs of the Metroplex’s more hardcore and addicted cinephiles. The theater chain announced earlier today that it plans to open a third location in Las Colinas in the new Music Factory shopping and entertainment complex located at…
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. No matter the medium, the work of Roberto Munguia seems riddled with mystery. It’s not that…
“The Dallas DanceFest is very timely. Dance is surging forward…and it’s exciting because there are more emerging dance companies than ever before,” says Gayle Halperin, Vice President of Development for the Dance Council of North Texas (DCNT) and Chair of the Dallas DanceFest Committee (DDF). Returning after a 10-year hiatus,…
During a recent evening rush-hour, KERA was serving commuters one of its usual panels of NPR experts talking about the news, in this case the death of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager shot dead by a white Ferguson, Missouri, police officer. The talking heads all agreed: America needs to…
Dan Domenech wears jeans and a casual blue hooded sweater as he sips a root beer. Standing over 6 feet tall, it’s easier to imagine him dribbling a basketball than wearing fishnets and eyeliner. His dark brown eyes light up in sheepish amusement when he admits that he walks around…
Why did so few people see Sin City: A Dame to Kill For over the weekend? That and other topics are discussed in this week’s edition of the Voice Film Club podcast with the Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek, joined as always by Amy Nicholson of the L.A…
In 1994, Priscilla, Queen of The Desertchronicled an outrageous road trip story about three drag queens that provided one of the first positive portrayals of gay and transgender people in major media, and took home the Oscar for achievement in costuming. Obviously. For those who don’t know much about the…
It was unbearably hot on Saturday. A friend of mine says people shouldn’t be allowed to complain about the weather in August. “It’s supposed to be hot in August,” he says. “If it’s this hot in December, then you can complain.” You know what I have to say about that?…
For centuries, white male narrators have dominated storytelling. We’re talking everyone from Homer’s Odysseus to Shakespeare’s Hamlet to America’s Rick Perry. Western cultural mythology is steeped in white male hegemony. And at the center of most of those stories is a tricky little devil known as ego. Whether characters are…
If you haven’t been inundated with the “ice bucket challenge,” then obviously you’re not on Facebook (congratulations) or perhaps dead. For the past few weeks, thousands of people, including some of your favorite celebrities, such as Benedict Cumberbatch and Patrick Stewart, have been pouring buckets of water and ice over…
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. Dallas Comedy House performer and writer Noa Gavin started her comedy career by creating the popular…
In May, Brad McEntire and Audacity Theatre Lab brought eight artists and eight solo shows to town and stacked them all together inside the Margo Jones Theatre. For the first festival of its kind here, Dallas Solo Fest went well. So well, in fact, that McEntire has devised a quarterly…
The Nasher Sculpture Center gets a lot of things right. Jeremy Strick runs a tight artistic ship, with impressive exhibitions and thought-provoking programming. One of the most underrated programs is the 360 Speaker Series, which gives the microphone to world-renowned artists across a variety of disciplines. On Saturday at 2…
Kate Micucci and Riki Lindhome, the comedians who make up the musical comedy powerhouse of Garfunkel and Oates, are living the dream of every guitar-ukulele musical comedy duo. They have three top-selling raunchy comedy duets. They have their own TV show on IFC that Lindhome describes as a “millennial Laverne…
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. The hyper-connected world we live in makes art and music from the far reaches of the…
The Circuit 12 Contemporary gallery is constantly in a state of flux. Of late, gallerists Gina and Dustin Orlando have taken interest in playing with environment in exhibitions. Not only have owners Gina and Dustin Orlando recently made some renovations to the space and added a fashion component, they’ve also…
