There was some yelling but nobody got punched at this year’s DFW Theater Critics Forum luncheon. Nobody left angry either, which might be a first. Every September the print and online theater critics of Dallas and Fort Worth eat chicken and brownies together and hash over the previous year’s productions…
Last June, Claire Wilcher of Indianapolis, Indiana started a trip that most people only get to talk about taking in their lifetime. She quit her job, packed up her stuff and threw into a renovated RV for a 23-city trip that will take her to major cities across the country…
Welcome to 10 Brilliant Dallas Women, a pop-up online series about 10 awesome women making Dallas a better place to live. Haylee Ryan has a policy that when an opportunity lands on her plate from out of the blue, she seriously considers it. And that’s more or less how the…
Serving Second Chances begins with a gorgeous shot of the Dallas skyline before the camera pans down to a man sleeping on a bench in front of City Hall. During a Robert Johnson lookalike contest at The Stewpot, guitarist Gerald Williams showed up out of nowhere and won first prize…
LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson found out first-hand that Michael Shannon is a pretty stern Monopoly player during a recent game with the actor, who portrays a tortured Orlando real-estate baron in the upcoming 99 Homes. Nicholson and Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl open this week’s Voice Film…
The only libraries at the Lew Sterrett Justice Center are law libraries. Inmates crowd in the rooms on a weekday, buried in legal books, as if they’re in law school. And in a sense they are. People use the law libraries here mainly to understand their criminal charges, looking for…
The way is clear, the light is good and the singing, acting and comedy in Lyric Stage’s to-the-hilt production of Into the Woods are absolutely enchanting. From the frantic overlapping lyrics of the opening prologue to the sweet, soaring poetry of “No One Is Alone,” the hopeful ballad at the…
Thursday, September 10 Josie and the Pussycats There are guilty pleasures, and then there are bad movies. Guilty pleasures are films that don’t have much artistic merit, but watching them won’t necessarily make you dumber. A guilty pleasure may be mildly offensive or politically incorrect, but it doesn’t mean to…
Sergeant Amy Mills is busy. Not so busy that she can’t spare some time to talk about the job that she loves, but her brisk gait and purposeful demeanor are an instant giveaway that she’s a woman on a mission. And that mission—to resolve the backlog of rape kits in…
Despite a vibrant and burgeoning film community here in Dallas (thanks Dallas Film Society, Texas Theatre, Video Association of Dallas and the many, many others who make it happen) we tend to pay a great deal of attention to what’s new while more or less neglecting the old. We can…
The first time I stepped foot in a public library, I was an eleven-year-old awkward new girl in Butler, Pennsylvania: a steel mill town north of Pittsburgh. Since my family had already moved twelve times by then, I was used to panicking over where to sit at lunch and navigating…
Simon Bilodeau’s Story With No Ending In a sense, the museum is the sculpture housing a painting. Typically manipulated to be as unobtrusive as possible, it interacts, intentionally or otherwise, with the work on display. The two are inextriable. It follows that an artist would be hyper aware of the…
About a decade ago, Kaleta Doolin took a women’s studies course at SMU. While doing research for a paper on women in the arts, she came across a quote from the author of a book she studied for the very first art history course she took in the 1970s. In…
The success of Jean-Jacques Annaud’s handsome lupine adventure Wolf Totem relies in large part on the ratio between wolf and totem. There are wolves — those howling, majestic hunters of the Mongolian grasslands — and then there are the many things they stand for: freedom, teamwork, the delicate harmony of…
In 2012, documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer made a splash with The Act of Killing, in which he sought out members of Indonesian killing squads, individuals who murdered thousands of innocent citizens accused of being communists after a military takeover in 1965, and invited them to re-enact their crimes in the…
In a bright, open space inside Dallas’ downtown library, about 50 women and men stand alert at a table with their hands tied behind their backs. “3-2-1, go!” someone counts down, and they begin to change diapers on children’s dolls. Their hands bound, the competitors fumble with the stand-in babies…
The American Dream killed Jay Gatsby and Willy Loman, but their TV counterparts have mostly fared better. Sure, Walter White ends up in a metaphorical ditch and Tony Soprano may too. But the serialization of TV storytelling largely means that characters on shows like Roseanne, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,…
One of the first things anyone asked during Sunday afternoon’s inaugural Dallas Zine Party was, “Who are all of these people?” That same question was why the event’s founder, Randy Guthmiller, planned this afternoon in the first place. Who were the people in and around Dallas making zines? What did…
Welcome to 10 Brilliant Dallas Women, a pop-up online series about ten awesome women making Dallas a better place to live. Anne Marie Weiss is technically an American, but her life is more like an exotic tale from Arabian Nights. She radiates courtliness, carrying the folklore and wisdom of each…
Here’s how Digifest works: A bunch of kids (teenagers, mainly), who are social media celebrities, gather to showcase their talents (?). Their fans are typically 13-year-old girls, who are too old for toys but too young for boys. The social media stars that are singers sing. The rappers rap. And…
A twenty year veteran educator, Dr. Rose Brock has dedicated her career to turning teens into lovers of the written word. Building relationships with readers through books is her superpower. Here’s the Reader’s Digest version of Brock’s work: She is a professor but has a healthy list of literary accomplishments outside…
Complaining that you’re bored is, well, boring. In all likelihood, your boredom is more related to the fact that you’re not reading and enriching your booze-rotted brain than any real lack of arts and culture in Dallas. There is plenty to do, even if sometimes you do have to look…
