Funnyman Robert Wuhl – Emmy-winning comedy writer, star of HBO’s ‘Arli$$’ – created a stand-up routine and college lecture on American myths and myth-making for HBO called ‘Assume the Position.’ Now it’s a stage show he’s doing at the Out of the Loop Festival. Art&Seek on Think TV talks to Professor Wuhl about rich dumb kids, Longfellow as popular culture and Wikipedia as a research resource.
He’s New Wave but he’s old school: Someone autotuned a couple of routines by the late stand-up master George Carlin and put the mashup to a beat. It’s a loving tribute that rocks.
The West Dallas Urban Structure is coming up before the Dallas City Council. It’s a set of development guidelines created by the new office, the CityDesign Studio — guidelines for preserving neighborhoods, encouraging high-rises, improving streets. They may become a model for future development in the rest of Dallas.
‘The Black Architecture Project,’ says its creator Darell Fields, is an exploration of what doesn’t exist – black architecture itself (he’s one of the very few African-American architects around). Art&Seek on Think TV talks with Fields about his current show at UT-D’s CentralTrak, about his father, one of the first black police officers in Dallas, about re-considering a South Dallas cemetery and why his own conceptual designs are so pristine.
The Dallas Planning Commission has approved guidelines for West Dallas – now that the Hunt Hill Bridge may prompt major redevelopment there. But can profit-hungry development be directed? Can the older neighborhoods be preserved? We ask Brent Brown, the head of the Dallas CityDesign Studio, about the future of an area that includes train tracks, chickens wandering unpaved roads — and long-established Hispanic families.
Amid all of our efforts at preening for the Big Game — pitching North Texas as Open for Business and Ready for Our Close-Up — some substantive good has actually come about. Good, that is, beyond the bump up in retail. Like Slant 45, which may well have been the largest community-service effort in North Texas history. We talk to Gigi Antoni, president of Big Thought, which ran the project.
Alexander Calder looms so large in mid-century modern art, it’s hard to imagine anyone not knowing (and enjoying) his work. Yet it’s the premise of the Nasher’s current show – ‘Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art: Form, Balance, Joy’ – that the seven young artists also included here had to ‘re-discover’ Calder. Nasher director Jeremy Strick explains – and discusses the Nasher’s various sighting, sounding and speaking series.
The National Performance Network has been an important support system for emerging, unconventional artists for 25 years — helping such groups as Urban Bush Women and the Blue Man Group when they were just starting to tour. The NPN is holding its 25th annual meeting in Dallas next week with shows at the Majestic Theatre and the Latino Cultural Center. We talk with NPN CEO MK Wegmann.
Art& Seek on Think TV talks to Heritage Auctions’ director of Texas art, Atlee Phillips, about Henry McArdle’s painting of the battle of San Jacinto — a painting that sat, forgotten, in a West Virginia attic for years. We talk about what convinced her it was genuine, about the Texas legends who appear in it and why the painting hasn’t been restored. “The Battle of San Jacinto” goes up for auction tomorrow.
The violinist for the celebrated contemporary music sextet, eighth blackbird — which is in residency at SMU — talks about minimalism, the high ideals (and self-preservation) of commissioning new music and just what the group does to make ‘difficult’ music (believe it or not) so golly-gee entertaining.
