Phosphorescence, Jackson Pollock, 1947 At the Meadows Museum, the recent exhibition Coming of Age: American Art, 1850s to 1950s told a familiar enough story — America’s turn from European models and immigrant imports to our own bluesy, jazzy, urban, abstract, post-war styles — but it did it with surprising cross-connections and influences. In England, in [...]
A timely confirmation of David Okamoto’s contention that Eryka Badu’s “Honey” is a tribute to the cult-like devotion of vinyl fans: A National Post story (datelined from Austin’s SXSW) about the resurgence of LP Love: In the United Kingdom, where the CD single is basically dead, there is such a resurgence in vinyl that retailers [...]
A lecture on Texas outlaws at the Dallas Heritage Village, a lecture by Dr. Alessandra Comini at SMU on the oft-married Alma Mahler and Chilean guitarist Carlos Perez presented by the Allegro Guitar Society at the Latino Cultural Center: It’s Tuesday and Gini has other suggestions as well.
Parisian Boulevard, Edouard Cortez – were indigent writers, 672 of them in Paris alone. They were mostly hacks, says Robert Danton who has pieced together the life of the author of Les Bohemiens, a two-volume novel from 1790, a “lost masterpiece” that started it all. Consider this during Puccini’s La Boheme. Or Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge: [...]
You see your town, your country, differently when great artists have written about it. It “thickens” the landscape with reference and insight. A new British TV series sounds rich with possibility: Travels in Written Britain — “the most scrawled over, word-worked, scribbled and scripted on” country in the world, according to host Melvyn Bragg. But it [...]
Author Thomas Cahill will discuss How the Irish Saved Civilization for Arts & Letters Live at the Dallas Museum of Arts, Lola’s in Fort Worth will hold a St. Patrick’s Day Post-SXSW Hangover Party with O’Death and Langhorne Slim, Debbie Reynolds will be Simply Ballroom at the Meyerson Symphony Center and Gini will be simply informative [...]
The dilemma at the annual South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin is choosing between great bands you’ve seen before and taking a risk on acts you’ve only heard or heard about. For me, the latter approach usually wins out and this year, I didn’t see anyone I didn’t like. I did, however, discover seven [...]
W.A. Mozart, 1783 You may recall the the laser-scanner, computer forensic creation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “real” face in February. Now researchers think they have found what Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart really looked like – all previous images were not based on life portraits. To the great excitement of musical scholars, two previously-unknown oil portraits painted [...]
The Houston Grand Opera has it, says Henry Vogel, CEO of the League of American Orchestras. It means making “the orchestra important to your whole community, not just your main-series audience.” And the HGO did it with The Refuge, a commissioned piece about immigrants coming to Houston from Pakistan, India, Vietnam, Mexico and Central America. [...]
John Mullan in the Times Literary Supplement on Ronan McDonald’s new book, The Death of the Critic: Nowadays, there are more critical responses than ever, but critical authority has been devolved from the experts. McDonald surveys the rise of blogs and readers’ reviews, of television and newspaper polls and reading groups, under the heading “We [...]
