Earlier this week, Jerome passed on the sad news that long-time arts and city advocate Jeff West died suddenly.

Passing on word that there will be a celebration of West’s life on Friday from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at the Palladium Ballroom, 1135 S. Lamar.  West’s son, Jeff Jr., posted about the event on Facebook, saying its for those who knew West and want to “reminisce about the good ol’ days (meaning no crying allowed – Jeff Sr. would just laugh and look at you quizzically if you did.)”

Congratulations to Ian Aberle of Allen, the winner of the Flickr Photo of the Week contest! You might remember Ian as he was the winner of the Flickr Photo of the Month for March. He follows last week’s winner, Matt Harvey.

If you would like to participate in the Flickr Photo of the Week contest, all you need to do is upload your photo to our Flickr group page. It’s fine to submit a photo you took earlier than the current week, but we are hoping that the contest will inspire you to go out and shoot something fantastic this week to share with Art&Seek users. If the picture you take involves a facet of the arts, even better. The contest week will run from Monday to Sunday, and the Art&Seek staff will pick a winner on Monday afternoon. We’ll notify the winner through FlickrMail (so be sure to check those inboxes) and ask you to fill out a short survey to tell us a little more about yourself and the photo you took. We’ll post the winners’ photo on Wednesday.

And now, here’s more from Ian:

Title of photo: Spanish Moss
Equipment used: Tower in the Clouds
Tell us more about your photo: Three photos were captured with a Canon EOS 7D. The photos were then merged and tonemapped in Photomatix Pro, and the resulting photo was processed in Adobe Lightroom to increase clarity and crop.
Tell us more about your photo: After enjoying some cupcakes for my daughter’s birthday from Crave Cupcakes in Houston, my wife noticed the Cameron building across 610. I quickly pulled over and took out my camera to fire off a couple of shots. I guess I was a little too jacked up on sugar, cause my hands were not very stable. My wife likes the photo, so I’m happy.

Rachel Mannes is interning for KXT 91.7 FM this summer. She’ll be providing an advanced look at the station’s Summer Cut concert as well as other posts about music this summer.

St. Vincent is the stage name for singer-songwriter Annie Clark. She has released three studio albums,  all to high critical acclaim.

Raised in Dallas, Clark graduated from Lake  Highlands High School  in 2001, attended three years of school at Berklee College of Music, and then dropped out to move back home and pursue a music career. After touring overseas with the Polyphonic Spree and in the U.S. with Sufjan Stevens, Clark began her solo career in 2006.

Her albums – Marry Me, Actor and Strange Mercy - reflect a critical stage in Clark’s life, whether it was her transition to college, the relaxation period after her first solo tour, or simply her path to self discovery and awareness. By incorporating various instruments, including guitar, piano, organ, violin, trumpets and others, St. Vincent creates a unique sound that must be heard live to be truly appreciated.

See St. Vincent in all her glory at KXT’s Summer Cut Happy Funtime Festival at the Gexa Energy Pavilion on June 1.

Get tickets for Summer Cut here!

Want to know more? Visit her website.

Afternoon Delight is a daily diversion for when you’re just back from lunch, but not quite ready to get back to work. Check back weekdays at 1 p.m. for another one.

We don’t touch on the culinary arts too often here, but these seem like helpful tips.

Kids can be cruel, but sometimes they’ve got nothing on their parents. The Theater Center is presenting God of Carnage, a story about two sets of parents who get together for what starts out as a civilized discussion about how to handle a playground fight between their sons.  And then it deteriorates into a spectrum of bad behavior by grownups that will have you laughing – and maybe occasionally cringing in recognition.

This Big Deal sends two winners off to the Wednesday May 30 performance at Kalita Humphreys Theater. (Note: This play contains adult themes and language.)

You must be an Art&Seek e-newsletter subscriber to win. You can take care of that in a sec.

And you might like to check out this week’s other Big Deals: tickets to Fort Worth Opera’s Tosca or tickets to Ring of Fire at Casa Manana.

Enter below for God of Carnage.

“I Walk the Line,” “I’ve Been Everywhere,” “The Man in Black.”

Well, you know who we’re talking about here: Johnny Cash. And if you burn, burn, burn for the legend’s music, then you’ll want to enter this Big Deal. Two winners will each receive a pair of tickets to  June 2 opening night of  Casa Mañana’s Ring of Fire, a musical revue featuring performances based on 30 of Cash’s songs.

You must be an Art&Seek e-newsletter subscriber to win. But that’s free and easy.

You might want to check out this week’s other Big Deals: tickets to Dallas Theater Center’s God of Carnage at the Kalita Humphreys, and tickets to Fort Worth Opera’s Tosca.

Enter below for Ring of Fire.

This Big Deal whisks you away for a night at the opera – passion, risk, love and treachery.

Our heroine Tosca makes a deal with a real lech to save her lover from doom.  Four lucky winners will get a pair of tickets to see the June 2 performance of Tosca at Bass Hall. Get lost in Puccini’s classic tale, starring soprano Carter Scott.

You must be an Art&Seek e-newsletter subscriber to win. But how hard could that be? (Hint: It’s not, and it’s free.)

And you might want to check out this week’s other Big Deals: tickets to Dallas Theater Center’s God of Carnage at Kalita Humphreys and tickets to Ring of Fire at Casa Manana.

Enter below for Tosca tickets.

MORE ‘FIGARO’ REVIEWS: On Monday, we pointed you to a few reviews of Fort Worth Opera’s The Marriage of Figaro. And since then, a few more assessments of Mozart’s opera have emerged. “The Fort Worth Symphony and conductor Stewart Robinson constantly interwove Mozart’s flowing of lines and expressive colors, contributing to the aura of humanity and immediacy that kept the audience laughing out loud at this immortal comedy of manners,” writes Wayne Lee Gay on Front Row. Olin Chism also liked the music, but he found problems elsewhere. “Fortunately, the Fort Worth Opera’s new Marriage of Figaro has musical pleasures aplenty. It needs them to compensate for a theatrical conception that’s pretty much a mess,” he writes on dfw.com. Meanwhile, David Weuste was pretty ecstatic about the whole thing. “Figaro was yet another comic-opera on par both with last year’s The Mikado, and Elixir of Love the year before that — which should already have Fort Worth Opera-goers excited for next season’s La fille du régiment,” he writes on everydayopera.com. Your next crack at seeing he show is Sunday.

LOCAL MUSIC BITS: Becki Howard talks about how she goes about programming the Patio Sessions at the AT&T Performing Arts Center. (DC9 at Night) … Fort Worth’s new Live Oak Music Hall & Lounge opens in June, and the venue has announced the first acts who will perform there. (dfw.com)

PARTIAL TO PARIS: For Cicerone, Ochre House’s Matthew Posey delivers us to 1930s Paris to watch the maturation of a young Henry Miller. Along the way, we run into Anais Nin, Salvador Dali and a host of other characters as the aging Miller (Posey) recounts his heyday. “The strength of the play is in Posey’s extraordinary sympathetic portrayal of Miller – and the actor looks awfully like the photos of Miller from the ’40s after he returned to America,” Martha Heimberg writes on theaterjones.com. “As always at Ochre House, the performances are terrific,” Lawson Taitte writes on dallasnews.com. “Company regulars Mitchell Parrack and Trenton Stephenson could be the Marx Brothers as they pop up from time to time as friends of Miller’s.” Catch the show through June 9.

Rachel Mannes is interning for KXT 91.7 FM this summer. She’ll be providing an advanced look at the station’s Summer Cut concert as well as other posts about music this summer.

Any band can tell you that being a headliner for any concert, much less a music festival featuring multiple artists, is a huge deal. Each band wants to create an experience that will stand out among others. One band that embraces its unique qualities is the Flaming Lips. With modest beginnings in Norman, Okla., in 1983, it is inspiring to see how successful these artists have become worldwide.  The five current members – Wayne Coyne, Michael Ivins, Steven Drozd, Kliph Scurlock and Derek Brown – have come together to create an eclectic sound.

The Lips have steadily released albums every few years since 1986’s Here It Is.  And the band’s also released oddities like a 12-part pieces intended to be played simultaneously on YouTube, or a microchip embedded in the gummy brain of a seven pound limited release gummy skull. Yes, I said gummy skull. Seven pounds of it. These guys don’t mess around. That almost makes the 24-hour and six-hour-long songs released in 2011 seem tame. Almost.

The Flaming Lips have been nominated for six Grammys, winning three. Many of their songs have been featured in movies, such as Spiderman 3, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, The Heartbreak Kid, The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie and a few others. In 2008, the Flaming Lips released an indie movie of their own, Christmas on Mars, written, directed and filmed by the band and their friends and family. They played the movie at various rock festivals during the summer of 2008 before it was released on DVD.

June 1, the Flaming Lips will headline KXT’s Summer Cut Happy Funtime Fest at Gexa Energy Pavilion. Get more information and your tickets online. See for yourself the show that this band presents, including balloons, lights and a human size plastic ball. No, I wouldn’t want to miss that either.

Find out more about the Flaming Lips at their website.

Art&Seek Jr. is one mom’s quest to find activities to end the seemingly endless chorus of the “I’m Bored Blues” while having fun herself.  Impossible you say? Check back on Tuesdays for kid-friendly events that are fun for adults, too.

It was Career Day at Rose’s school last Friday and, as usual,  we waited until Thursday night at bedtime before selecting the proper attire for a pint-size veterinarian.  Sadly, my Anne Klein cotton blouse was a casualty because no other “lab coat” could found at that hour.  A toy stethoscope, a stuffed dog  and an old KERA name tag with tape over it and we were good to go.  The next morning at school as we encountered no less than a dozen other mini-vets two things struck me.   (1) Many high-end ladies blouses died bravely for the “lab-coat” cause that day and (2)  the love affair between kids and animals is very evident on Career Day.

I don’t have to tell you that a visit to the local zoo is a great treat for the animal lover in your life.  Besides the obvious entertainment value it’s also great exercise hiking around to all those exhibits and then back to the car at the end of the day.  Of course, both Fort Worth and Dallas have fabulous world-class zoos, but here are are two smaller zoos that are worth a visit.

Don't forget to feed the giraffe while you're at the Frank Buck Zoo in Gainesville

The Frank Buck Zoo in Gainesville (named after native son Frank “Bring Em Back Alive” Buck  who collected wild animals from all over the world), bills itself as “the best little zoo in Texas”.  The zoo started as the Gainesville Community Circus in 1930 and is currently home to more than 130 animals.  It’s the perfect zoo for little ones with it’s loop design. The mile-long path around the zoo is handicapped/ stroller accessible and features an elevated walkway over the kangaroos, giraffes and zebras.  I think the best feature of this zoo is that kids get to see the giraffes at eye level. They can also feed them during the public feeding every day.  Another attraction near the zoo in Leonard Park  is the 1/4 size replica of a steam engine train.  The train’s route is only about a mile but the ride is a nice relaxing end to your day in Gainesville.

Feeding chickens at The Gentle Zoo is just the ticket for city kids

The Gentle Zoo in Forney should also be on your summer bucket list.  Rose and I and her friend Zoe visited last weekend and we had a super time.  Besides the bumper crop of animals to pet (and feed) there are also also pony rides, a bounce house, a playground and a train ride.  The ”train” is actually several small cars pulled by a John Deere tractor, but the girls loved it as we bumpty-bumped all around the property.  My favorite moment of our visit was watching a girl of about 8 or 9 “play” with a pony in a corral.  They were on opposite sides of the fence and as she ran back and forth the length of the fence the pony would follow. As soon as she stopped the pony would rear up on its hind legs and beg for more.  Yes, the place is small  but it’s packed with simple pleasures.

Therese Powell is an Art&Seek calendar coordinator and KERA-TV producer.  She spends most of her free time seeking out adventures for her 7-year-old daughter, Rose.  Tell us about your time at the zoo or clue us in to your ideas for quirky kid adventures by leaving a comment. Or e-mail Therese at tpowell@kera.org.