The Dallas food scene is a confusing, tumultuous place. Restaurants open and close constantly, and fads seem to sweep in from the coasts with regularity before receding. For out-of-towners, Dallas is especially mysterious because our reputation is out-of-date. Around America, food lovers know Houston is a mellow melting pot of…
“As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly.”— Proverbs 26:11 Now that the 50-year anniversary of Woodstock and its attempted celebration have both passed us, no foreseeable Woodstock revivals lurk on the horizon. In a perfect world, it would stay that way forever. But it won’t. Nostalgia…
I love the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. I’ve gone out of my way to meet some of them. I have their calendar. Every year, I watch the CMT reality show based on the team. I recently bought a Debbie Does Dallas poster to hang in my apartment because it’s campy and…
Everybody in South Dallas knows something is coming. The question is what, and the question is not idle. Is the Big Thing, whatever it is, going to revive South Dallas or bulldoze it? The house money has jumped the line. Big houses in some neighborhoods that still scared the socks…
Many artists complain about how little coverage they receive from local press. Musicians work in a saturated, competitive market, so any means available to get more attention for their work is highly sought after … unless the artist is rapper Bobby Sessions. This April while on tour in Chicago, Sessions…
Stephanie Drenka never felt the need to weigh in on the abortion debate – until now. Drenka is a Korean adoptee who grew up in Southlake and now lives in Dallas. She’s a writer and activist who predominantly focuses her attention on writing about adoption and the Asian American community,…
The Hulu hit The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian drama based on the novels by Margaret Atwood, returns tomorrow for its third season. But imagine if it were shot like a ’90s-era soap opera. That’s exactly what local singers Teddy Waggy and Sudie Abernathy did, and then they shot an “opening…
There was a time, roughly 708 days ago, when we at the Dallas Observer published an article detailing our trip to Waco and our stay in one of the homes “fixed up” on Fixer Upper, a home remodeling show starring Chip and Joanna Gaines. The review wasn’t mean, we swear…
I was born in England, but my family is from Argentina, of Italian descent. In any of those places, I’d be deemed a foreigner. I like to think that those roots are still deep, no matter how neglected, and I never thought I’d do my true growing up in Dallas…
Summer is coming and if you’ve got a PlayStation 4 or a PlayStation VR headset, then you’ve got some very good reasons stock up on Vitamin D supplements and never go outside again until the fall. Sony gave the Observer a chance to preview some of their newest unreleased exclusives for…
Starting today Lyft and Uber drivers will no longer roam freely through the streets of Deep Ellum. A no-go zone, covering Good Latimer Expressway to Malcolm X Boulevard and Indiana Street to Commerce Avenue, has been enacted as part of a pilot program orchestrated by the City of Dallas and…
10. The three most naively optimistic words you can utter on Greenville Avenue during St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Dallas: “Table for 12.” In 20 years of parades, I’ve been on the Observer float, the 105.3 The Fan float and even (in 2012) a co-grand marshal. But this Saturday I’m…
After one meal at Khao Noodle Shop, I could tell that the Dallas restaurant scene had changed forever. Well, that’s not quite true. Thanks to Khao’s terrific bowls of Laotian noodles, the Dallas restaurant scene is slightly better than it was before. The real difference is that, finally, the rest…
It takes years to build a good name and only seconds to destroy one, so should you choose to organize concerts or festivals, tread carefully, always be prepared to take a loss and don’t bite off more than you can chew. Some neophyte promoters are legitimately slimy characters, but sometimes…
To win a Dallas City Council vote on a construction project, Methodist Dallas Medical Center in North Oak Cliff (“Methodist”) hitched its wagon and its long good name in the community to Dallas landlord and investor Ralph Isenberg. That’s a hitch. The last time we had much to do with…
We asked three of our regular contributors, Taylor Frantum, Preston Jones and Jacob Vaughn, to tackle a tough question: Should we still listen to the music of the late Michael Jackson, R. Kelly or Ryan Adams, three hugely popular artists in the news over allegations they were sexual predators who…
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” — Ronald Wright from A Short History of Progress *** We rightfully mock Billy McFarland and Ja Rule for the disastrous Fyre Festival in the Bahamas, but it would…
Johnny Wulff is the 14-year-old son of our writer Eva Raggio. He’s a first-chair trumpet player in the All City and All Region bands, who can solve a Rubik’s Cube puzzle in less than two minutes — and any technical problem his parents will ever have. A few months ago,…
On Aug. 13, 2017, Wall Street Journal writer Neil Shah wrote an article titled “What Happened to the Negative Music Review?” in which he stated, “[N]egative reviews are so few and far between that they rarely impact overall scores from an aggregator like Metacritic.” Despite this, online magazine Pitchfork has…
Last year’s ’til Midnight at the Nasher series, the popular (and free) Friday evening concerts at the Nasher, looked different from years past. For the first time, it seemed as if the music, which even the Nasher bills as the primary focus of these events, had been carefully curated. Since…
I don’t think there’s a way I can possibly talk you out of going to the latest rainbow-colored, unicorn vomit, sweet-toothed photo booth, anachronistically futuristic, cotton candy-headed, pop-up “art” exhibit, is there? After all, it’s time for you to stir up some FOMO with your #squadgoals real-life friends by duck-lipping…
Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalbán sing the song in 1949’s Neptune’s Daughter. In 2010, now-married singer-songwriters Karyna Micaela and Zach Balch stepped on stage together at the now-closed Art Six Coffee House in Denton. Although they were dating other people at the time, the duo decided to collaborate on a…
