Steven Soderbergh and Mark Cuban
Artsy indie director Steven Soderbergh’s second low-budget project for Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner’s 2929 Entertainment will be The Girlfriend Experience, a look at the world of high-priced prostitution through the eyes of a $10,000-a-night call girl. Like his first effort for the Dallas mavericks, 2005’s Bubble, Girlfriend will be released [...]

Bass Hall inaugurates its 10th anniversary celebrations tonight with Learning How to Fly, an evening of performances by Fort Worth-area students, including choirs and jazz bands.  The Marty Walker Gallery hosts prints from fine-art publisher Durham Press and the Dallas Philosophers’ Forum screens Expelled at the Angelika Film Center. For more, here’s Gini.
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 Two guys from a magazine called Reason write in yesterday’s Washington Post — their tongues only partially in their cheeks – how the 1980s prime-time soap opera Dallas won the Cold War. Sound reasonable to you? The article arrives as the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin prepares for the opening of an [...]

1. The kindness of strangers: I lied yesterday. I had every intention of seeing a movie at the USA Film Festival. But when I walked into the lobby of the Angelika, a stranger offered me his plus-one for the opening event of the Dallas Wine and Food Festival, talking place simultaneously in the theater cafe [...]

 
William Wegman
Too weird for commercial television, too…well, video-y, for art collectors (who eventually caught on), video art has been around since the late 1960s invention of the video camera. Charissa Terranova explains the form and a new retrospective at the University of Dallas’ Haggerty Gallery (through May 4) while the Dallas Video Festival plans a [...]

Dallas’ oldest film festival, now in its 38th year, is underway at the Angelika with screenings, Q&As with directors and stars, tributes to the semi-famous, and parties. While this guy is entertaining the audience tonight at The Reinactors, I’ll be in a nearby theater watching America Unchained, that rarity of rarities at film festivals: a [...]

The comedy troupe Kids in the Hall are playing at the Nokia in Grand Prairie, the film You Belong to Me is screening at the Four Day Weekend Theater in Fort Worth and the Craighead-Green Gallery has a group show in Dragon Street. You want more? Gini has it.
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Good Records
It’s Monday afternoon, and there are no reports yet (ever?) on Saturday’s eighth anniversary band-fest at Good Records. Dallas is lucky to have a number of indie record stores like Good, CD Source and CD World at a time when they’re closing across the country by the thousands.
Speaking of good local music, Murry Hammond [...]

It’s the 38th annual USA Film Festival at the Angelika Film Center in Dallas, mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie  von Otter [corrected] at Bass Hall in Fort Worth and “Animals of the World” at the Heard Natural Science Museum in McKinney. Meanwhile, Gini is here with more.
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In the May 1 issue of the New York Review of Books, Caleb Crain has written a  richly thoughtful (and sometimes amusing) essay on American recreational photography — or what we call the snapshot, as seen in the current Amon Carter Museum exhibition, The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888-1978. Unfortunately, you need to be [...]