Calling everyone who has ever won a chili cook-off and made a joke while doing it! The Food Network is casting for season 12 of Food Network Star, a reality show that searches for a cook or chef or someone with even just a small pinch of personality, and then…
Blink, a sour-then-sweet new play-with-music written and directed by Ochre House regular Kevin Grammer, echoes the theme of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in its lesson about not wasting life fiddling with material possessions. “Shit happens in a blink of an eye,” sings Marti Etheridge in the first of the folky…
Lorem Ipsum When an art director or graphic designer wants to see what text will look like on the page or in an online post, they will often use the Latin words Lorem Ipsum as placeholder text. Sometimes the text is used because a writer has blown a deadline for…
November is National Novel Writing Month, when writing geeks and repressed English majors everywhere (such as this author) shut themselves in their houses and attempt to write an entire completed novel in 30 days. Don’t tell us we’re crazy. We know who we are. But fellow novelists know eventually the comforts of…
Yes, it’s 3-D computer animation, and yes, it shows us more of the face of Charlie Brown’s Little Red-Haired Girl than you ever thought you would see. But the news, for the most part, is good: The Peanuts Movie is much closer in spirit to Charles Schulz’s half-century comic-strip masterpiece…
First things first: Yes, Gaspar Noé’s arthouse sexbomb quite literally goes off in your face, with an ejaculation close-up 90 minutes in that might have you wiping off your 3-D glasses. You might think that’s an impressive provocation, until you recall that every twelve-year-old boy in America sees that same…
Frank Campagna gives a quick description of Deep Ellum ten years ago: “Dead.” This is when he opened Kettle Art Gallery in Deep Ellum, which celebrates its double digits birthday Thursday. But he’s been involved with the neighborhood since 1981 and knew that it falls and rises. He opened…
Political drama has long been shaped by what we can call the conversion narrative. In a play like One Third of a Nation, one of the Living Newspaper extravaganzas mounted with New Deal funding by the Federal Theatre Project, an everyman Joe you just gotta root for tries to live…
Because women are particularly beguiling when viewed from behind, the camera loves to follow them: Anyone who’s watched James Stewart’s lovesick detective trailing Kim Novak, a platinum dream poured into a pale gray flannel hourglass, understands the voyeurism at the heart of Vertigo. With Spectre — the 24th James Bond…
The Muppets doesn’t work, exactly, but I’m still watching. As a relative outsider to the 60-year Muppets franchise, I’ve long suspected that early imprinting is the key to loving Jim Henson’s gaudy, unblinking rags. I’ve never felt a particular need to watch pieces of felt tell Borscht Belt–style jokes, and…
They don’t build musicals like Grand Hotel anymore. They don’t build lodging like Berlin’s Grand Hotel anymore either. Even in 1928, when the musical is set, the “guests” are aware that an era of opulence is fading. Characters check in for their last fabulous fling, one more waltz under the…
“Did you come here together,” a woman in a white lab coat asks, pointing between myself and Caroline North, who happens to be the Observer’s copy editor, an arts reporter and my friend. Yes, we answer. “Does she like you more than you like her?” she asks me. I don’t…
Oscar-nominated, acclaimed cult filmmaker Whit Stillman is still coming to the Texas Theatre in celebration for the 25th anniversary of his first feature, Metropolitan. Metropolitan wasn’t the immediate success that I — and perhaps you, too — might’ve assumed. It premiered at Sundance, garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay, and…
It’s Dallas. It’s Sunday. The Cowboys play at three o’clock. Every Dallasite knows that you need to plan around that. You go to the early service at church, youth soccer games are scheduled in the morning and no sensible Opera company would plan a matinee for that day. But thats…
Across the country, opera audiences are thinning. The old guard is getting older and youthful cans aren’t plunking down in the chairs. So while there’s something inherently bratty about saying “I would prefer this free thing over this other one,” just follow me here. Dallas Opera has been busy funding,…
The Halloween festivities are over, and Sunday was just not enough time to recover from all that drinking that you’re doing. You’ll probably need the next couple of days to rest up, drink fluids, and repair all the damage you’ve caused to your personal property and relationships during your evening…
If you frequent Kidd Springs Park in North Oak Cliff you may have missed the Japanese sculptures that date back until at least the 18th century. There are people who walk, jog, and ride their bikes past this artwork everyday and never give it any thought, probably mistaking antiquities for…
Halloween is fast approaching, which means that those of us who majored in procrastination in college are probably seriously freaking out. Even if you’re planning a low-key celebration with friends for this spooky holiday, you’re still going to need a costume. It’s easy enough to strap on some animal ears…
And just like that, the populist citywide art event pulls out from Dallas. A letter that went out to ArtPrize Dallas stakeholders cites reasons for canceling the event including lack of resources and disappointing resistance to an event, which was perceived by cynics “as threatening to the status quo.” This…
“I’ll be frank with you, I really don’t have anything,” said Erykah Badu as she walked barefoot onto the stage in the Naomi Bruton Theater downtown Thursday night for the first of three performances of her new one-woman show, Live Nudity. She was only slightly exaggerating. Badu had a few…
Some parents call it the “Halloween Candy Fairy.” Some call her the “Switch Witch.” By any name, the concept this thieving mythical bag of turds represents is total Tootsie Roll bullshit. The concept is simple: Kids go Trick-or-Treating, they bring home a ton of candy, they go to sleep and Switch…
Thursday, Oct. 29 Kyle Abraham: Abraham in Motion Kyle Abraham’s work is inclusive, any way you look at it. It’s inclusive of different art forms: dance (obviously, as he’s a choreographer), music, and visual art; it blends performers of different ethnicities; it mixes classical elements with contemporary; it weaves social…
