North Texans have the chance to see an Art&Seek original documentary, Albert Alcalay: Self Portraits, at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth prior to its television premiere on KERA (Channel 13). Albert Alcalay survived a concentration camp during the Holocaust, then became a jazz-influenced abstract painter and ultimately a Harvard professor. Three of his [...]
I could probably listen to Maya Wiley all day. To me, she was the real discovery of the first Festival of Ideas, presented by the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture over the weekend. Wiley is the founder and director of the Center for Social Inclusion, a research and advocacy group for social justice. Passionate, [...]
Another Dallas Video Festival has come and gone — that makes 21 now. But fear not, film fans — we’ve got another big-time scene starting Wednesday with Fort Worth’s Lone Star International Film Festival. (Read Manny Mendoza’s excellent preview of the festival here.) I e-mailed DVF Artistic Director Bart Weiss yesterday to see how it [...]
Retired FBI agent Robert Wittman at home. He often worked undercover, so his face remains unphotographed. The KERA radio story: The expanded online story: Heritage Auction Galleries has been presenting a monthly lecture series in Dallas. The speakers have included experts on collecting antique silver or how to preserve artworks. This month’s speaker is a [...]
Pinetop Perkins takes the stage before a gaggle of new young Blues enthusiasts at the Meyerson Symphony Center. Take the energy of a single 11-year-old and multiply it by 2,000. What could possibly entertain a crowd like that? On Friday morning, the antidote to 2,000 fidgets was two nonagenarian blues legends, 90-somethings playing music that [...]
Unfair Park has reported the closing of Frisco’s tiny independent bookstore, Bookworm. And if you call the number on the store’s website, the taped message sadly confirms this. It’s bad news, of course. But there’s one significant fact I didn’t squeeze into last week’s feature story on Legacy Books in Plano and Dicho’s in the [...]
Denis Johnson’s novel, Tree of Smoke, was something of a literary event when it arrived last year; it won the National Book Award. (You can read my brief Men’s Vogue rave of the book here.) It wasn’t for everyone, especially in its more hallucinogenic borrowings from theater pioneer-madman Antonin Artaud (“a bad acid trip” one [...]
Barack Obama sailed to a fairly easy victory on Tuesday on many voters’ hopes that he will patch together the fractious state of our country and bring an end to the divisive nature of recent politics. Wanna know why all that is necessary? A good starting place is Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story. The [...]
Richard Wright The KERA radio story: The expanded online story: Elaine Johnson: “Richard Wright was probably one of the first books that I read. But I didn’t remember Black Boy and so when I read it again, I found it quite interesting that a lot of the racism – to me, it’s like, ‘Ooh, this [...]
The Big Rich, Bryan Burrough’s history of Texas oil men, just got a starred review from Publishers Weekly, the industry guide used by many booksellers and book editors as an advance word on soon-to-be-released titles. The review calls the book not a piece of nostalgia for when giants roamed the Texsas countryside, drilling everywhere they [...]
