If you weren’t an only child, then you surely understand the realities of relatives in family dynamics. As the middle child, I fell between the first child strictures and the spoils of being the baby, which means I was allowed to date, but not given a car to drive to…
Your Instagram feed is a work of art. You’ve spent hours perfecting it, getting the perfect angle for that shot of your breakfast or of the puppy you recently adopted. Everyone needs to see your adoption story. Hashtag puppy. Hashtag look how good I am. Hashtag down with puppy mills…
Los Angeles based artist Mark Grotjahn has earned a following across the world for his focus on textures, colors and forms. In his Face and Butterfly painting series, he uses color to sear the canvas to what some have described as a hallucinogenic effect. Opening at 11 a.m. Saturday, the…
We’ve been talking about AMC’s new show Halt and Catch Fire for months. If we sound a bit excited, it’s because we are. In fact, we’ve been nerding out so hard, we convinced our cool friends over at Sundown at the Granada to invite us over to watch it on…
There’s no real way to describe how Tony Barsotti enters a room. It’s part Kramer, part swagger, mostly Tony. He’s full of energy and confidence and talent. And holy shit, this man has talent. He was the drummer in Hagfish back in the day — the hard driving, mid-’90s Deep…
I should open this blog post with a caveat. These are the 10 best theater companies in town that aren’t the Dallas Theater Center. The budget of the Dallas Theater Center sweeps it out of the competition. It’s our local member of the League of Resident Theaters (LORT), which implies,…
Boston native Bill Burr may sound bothered and on the constant edge of a nervous breakdown on stage but he has a weird, almost Zen-like attitude toward his aspirations, or as close to Zen as most clinically depressed comics can achieve. While comics may dream of getting their own self-titled…
If you haven’t seen the hashtag #YesAllWomen pop up in your newsfeed this week, you have the wrong friends. In the wake of the Elliot Rodger shootings, women across the globe began to stand together, sharing harassment and assault experiences, in order to draw attention to the continued reality of…
Jim Henson created some of film’s most lovable characters. Kermit the Frog, Gonzo and the gang only grow more endearing with age. But Henson also created quite a few fantastical monsters that scared the bejeezus out of little kids. The creatures in the mystical, often scary world of Henson’s The…
Something’s been missing from the past few years of the Festival of Independent Theaters. It’s been difficult to pinpoint exactly what was missing and the upbeat festival organizers aren’t ones to complain. But it seemed from the outside that must have been a lack of truly engaging submissions. Of course,…
From the outside, the Dallas arts world is filled with enigmas. Certain projects, galleries, or even artists, demand definition or exposition or at the very least a label that says, “This is art.” Two puzzlers linked arms last month, skipping into the much deserved spotlight. The local anachronistic zine, semigloss…
Each year, season subscribers to The Dallas Opera get a chance to vote on their favorite of all the singers who debuted with the company during the previous season. Votes are tallied and the winner receives the “Maria Callas Debut Artist of the Year” award. This year’s award-winner was no…
Name the most walkable or bikeable city. GO! No shocker if Dallas wasn’t your first pick. At least not yet. We may be a veritable metropolis of sprawling-sprawl-McSprawl and super-sized suburbs, but we have efforts like The Better Block Project, the Dallas Bike Plan and other short-term events to create…
The eternal swan. That might a better name for the ballet we love to hate. OK, so maybe hate is too strong a word, but more often than not, when we dance writers see Swan Lake on the bill for a company’s season — it’s being performed by the Texas…
If you’ve never seen a Muay Thai demonstration, you’ll need to put the Thai Culture & Food Festival on your calendar. The world champion of the sport known as the “art of eight limbs” takes the stage of the two-day culture showcase Saturday and Sunday at The Buddhist Center of…
When Booth opens at Second Thought Theatre this Friday, it will be the product of many years of friendship and work by co-creators Steven Walters and Erik Archilla. The pair met as freshman at Baylor University and have sporadically worked on the political thriller about John Wilkes Booth since they…
Your summer wardrobe just got a little cooler thanks to up-and-coming line, NeoBantu. Blending together classic feminine shapes with vibrant African prints, designer Tendai Tawonezvi is producing pieces that reflect and celebrate your individuality. She sources handmade African fabrics to inspire and fabricate her designs, all of which are done…
America’s sweetheart Jennifer Lawrence truly can do anything. In the course of three months, she’s managed to graciously lose an Oscar (her third nomination in four years), swan above the mansplaining condescension of a male pundit who tsk-tsked her for getting drunk in public, and burst into the summer blockbuster…
Remarkable as it seems, there’s still poetry to be found in the idea of kids tooling around with nothing much to do. Whether you grew up in a small town or a midsize-to-large city, in 1962, 1982 or 2002, you probably remember getting into a car, unwisely, with the first…
Let’s rewind 20 years, to the summer of 1994. O.J. Simpson has been arrested for murder, the World Cup is in America and being ignored, and the biggest hits at the multiplex are Forrest Gump, The Lion King, True Lies and Speed. Notice anything odd about those movies? There’s not…
The phrase “summer movies” will never not mean broad, action-driven crowd-pleasers to me: I counted the days until Batman (June 23, 1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (July 3, 1991), and Jurassic Park (June 11, 1993) were released. For every Dark Knight there are 10 Prometheuses — and that’s just among…
In 2014, any filmmaker who has a feel, and a flair, for romantic melodrama is doomed, and just one recent example from the world of blockbusters suggests why: In the final moments of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the hero tragically fails to save a major character, but the moment, coming…
