During composer Jake Heggie’s recent lunch conversation with the press (which you can listen to over on the feature side), I asked whether — in preparing his opera of Moby-Dick — he had seen any of the other stage productions of Melville’s novel. No. He said he had seen the vivid but often maddening 1956 John Huston film, but mostly as a guide to what not to do. Actually, Heggie referred to “film versions” — plural — which I take to mean he also saw the 1998 Patrick Stewart made-for-TV version, which uses almost none of Melville’s language. Or perhaps the 1930 film which has a striking John Barrymore as Ahab but a laughable love interest added.

But onstage instead of onscreen, there have been several very interesting adaptations of the novel, and I’d suggest that an area theater might seriously consider programming Moby Dick Rehearsed next year, during the Dallas Opera’s world premiere of Heggie’s version. Together, the two shows would serve this landlocked North Texas area some serious seafood.

Moby Dick Rehearsed was written and directed by Orson Welles in 1956 (the same year Welles had a memorable cameo in the Huston film as the Reverend Mapple). It was a stark, “anti-naturalist” production with actors in street clothes using bare props (brooms, chairs) for whatever they needed. Welles explained the staging, a little coyly I think, by framing it as an old-style acting company, complete with a silver-maned “actor-manager,” taking a break from performing Shakespeare. And they just happen to run through this new script. The production is famous as another one of the “great lost projects” of Welles: It was actually filmed but a complete print has never been found (although people have seen daily rushes of individual scenes). And there are video clips of Welles, in later years, reading sections of the novel.

The script of Rehearsed still exists, however, and has been staged several times to noteworthy, even thrilling results, most recently by the Acting Company in New York (and on tour). Admittedly, such a show would not be a small commitment: It requires 14 cast members and some extensive rehearsing for the physical demands.

As for the other adaptations, there is a one-man version, believe it or not, that I’ve never seen and have long been curious about. And performance artist Laurie Anderson re-conceived the novel in 1999 as Songs and Stories from Moby Dick.

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AUSTIN – Among the cast members onhand to discuss the new Seth Rogen comedy Observe and Report was Anna Faris. She’s best known for the Scary Movie franchise and last year’s The House Bunny, but there are plenty of people (myself included) who know her primarily for playing herself on Entourage.

What played out on Tuesday morning (aside from miles of unprintable comedy gold) was an Entourage-esque look at how so much of making it in Hollywood is dependent on knowing the right people and catching a few breaks.

Observe and Report was written and directed by Jody Hill. Never heard of him? Neither had anyone else before last year. But his first film, The Foot Fist Way starring his college buddy Danny McBride, started making the rounds among Hollywood’s comedy elite. The worn DVD copy found fans in Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, who passed it along to Judd Apatow, who passed it to Rogen, and so on. Soon Hill was an in-demand talent with a development deal at Warner Bros.

He turned in a script for Observe and Report that he never thought would see the light of day as it was exceedingly crude and broke too many of Hollywood’s comedy conventions. As he put it Tuesday, “I thought I would just take the cash and move on to something else.”

But things changed when Rogen expressed an interest in the role, partly due to his love of Foot Fist Way. And with Rogen on-board, Hill suddenly had the power to lean on the studio to allow him to make the film he wanted to make (a hard R that earns its rating for just about everything a film can earn an R rating for). He even worked his old buddy McBride into the movie – though McBride has gone on to find plenty of success in his own right with parts in Tropic Thunder and Pineapple Express.

The rest, as they say, is history.  The point of passing along that story (other than the fact that the rest of the discussion was too profane to get into) is to show that with talent and some luck, it is still possible for outsiders to make it in Hollywood. And to prove, as I said earlier, that everything on Entourage is true.

AUSTIN – One of the most personal films showing this year at SXSW is Sunshine. Karen Skloss’ self-portrait explores society’s evolving attitude toward single mothers as she digs into her part in that transformation. And it’s doubtful anyone is more qualified to make a film on the subject than Skloss.

In 1974, her mother, Mary, became pregnant at 19. She was ushered out of her home town of Victoria, Texas, and taken to a home in Austin for what they called “unwed mothers” in those days. While there, she gave birth to Karen, who was adopted out to a family that had been wanting a baby for 9 years.

Fast forward two decades, and Karen is now the one trying to work through an unplanned pregnancy. Things had changed significantly by the mid-90s. And even though she and the baby’s father had no intention of staying together, they figured out ways to make single parenting work.

Those two different approaches form the backbone of the movie as Karen interviews everyone from her birth mother and maternal grandfather to her adoptive parents and even her daughter, Jasmine. The family portrait that emerges is one of a non-traditional family that has found a way to make it work.

You can argue that a movie about two women making the decision to keep the baby is decidedly pro-life, yet Sunshine is never preachy on that subject. Instead, Skloss prefers to spend her time letting her audience know that true families are the ones that help each other out when times are tough.

Toward the end of the movie, Skloss shows a clip of Mr. Rogers talking about how many families have a mother and father but many others are comprised of a variety of people.

“And each one is fancy,” he tells his young viewers.

Members of those “fancy” families will find a lot to like in Sunshine.

I have to admit that I’ve felt a bit like a fraud this week.

Here I am posting about the latest technologies in online communication and advances in mobile devices, while using a busted, old Nokia phone to stay in touch at the SXSW Interactive festival.

Well, no more. I experienced way too much iPhone envy while I was here and finally purchased one during a break from blogging yesterday.

I know today’s the last day of the Interactive festival and some of you may be thinking, “Why’d you wait until now?”

The answer? I don’t really know why I’ve waited this long. But I’m glad I waited until after yesterday’s breakdown in AT&T’s 3G service at the Interactive festival. More details about that ironic debacle on MacWorld.com.

At any rate, I’m the proud parent of a new, 3G iPhone and couldn’t be happier.

In this episode of Think, Nancy Edwards, the Kimbell Art Museum‘s curator of European art, discusses the exhibition, Art & Love in Renaissance Italy, which she co-curated, and which will be seen only at the Kimbell and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Think airs Friday at 7:30 p.m. on KERA (Channel 13). It airs again Wednesday at 1:30 a.m.

• The Dallas Morning News review

• KERA radio review:

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• Expanded online review:

The first images we see in Art & Love in Renaissance Italy are betrothal paintings. These are portraits of couples, some at the moment they exchange vows.

Then, in the next gallery, we see delicate jewelry and dishware – you know, the wedding gifts. Then we get to cribs and ceramic plates celebrating the birth of children. You guessed it: These are the baby shower gifts.

It’s then – only then – that we come to the gallery devoted to lust, sex, passion.

So the sequence goes: Marriage. Home furnishings. Babies. Then sex. This seems a little odd.

Portrait of Messer Marsilio Cassotti and His Wife, Faustina, Lorenzo Lotto, oil on canvas, 1523

Of course, the Kimbell may simply have wanted to keep the naughty bits tucked away with the necessary warning signs. The artworks in the erotic gallery feature some sexually explicit images — notably, the extremely rare, remaining fragments of I modi, perhaps the most infamous book of its day, illustrated by Guilio Romano with poems (in the second edition) by Pietro Aretino. The reason only fragments and imitations by other artists exist (held by the British Museum) is that I modi was resolutely suppressed by the Vatican and other Roman authorities — not just for the acrobatic, Joy of Sex-like prints but for Aretino’s sixteen, scandalously satiric sonnets sometimes mocking the papal court  (I modi literally translates as “The Ways” or, more broadly, “The Sexual Positions”).

Why are these included? Well, “there is this aspect of love,’ says Nancy Edwards. This richly complex exhibition was curated by  Edwards of the Kimbell and Andrea Bayer of the Metropolitan Museum in New York.  The curators’ aim was to take the typical Renaissance masterworks we know — the sophisticated portraits of patrons or Biblical figures or naked goddesses — and situate them with homier, more day-to-day items of glassware or clothing. Or porn.

The Kimbell’s Nancy Edwards: “We tend to see things separated into high, low, different areas, and they weren’t separate things. Whenever society has rules, people find ways to get around it.”

Actually, the layout of the exhibition — from marriage to babies to sex — tells us what was important in the period.  This was the age of the Medici. What was important were the political and financial alliances of families. The marriages were arranged by merchants and noblemen, while the women involved were little more than children, 14 or 15 years old. You’ve seen those wedding rings designed as two clasped hands? The image was popular then, too, but it represented a handshake sealing a deal.

What was also important is the proper display of wealth. This was an extremely stratified society.They even had sumptuary laws, regulating who could wear what  and when. Italians adored red fabric, for instance; it’s everywhere in these paintings. The scarlet pigment was made from thousands of crushed insects (either the  cochineal from Poland or the kermes from around the Mediterranean), and it cost a fortune. What we’re looking at is basically Renaissance bling.

Finally, what’s all important in love and marriage was producing a male heir. Childbirth was dangerous then, so a wife who survived it and who also ensured the future of the family fortune with a son — that was cause for celebration. There’s only one painting by a female artist here; it’s Lavinia Fontana’s remarkable portrait – of a baby. This was the woman’s world.

Newborn baby in a crib, oil on canvas, 1583

So in all of this procreation and pragmatic deal-making, where does sensuality or  sex fit in? Well, that was reserved for when a man was alone with his mistress or a courtesan. That’s what much of the erotica is about — courtesans. Not surprisingly, at this time, Italy was renowned for its prostitutes. If you see a play by Shakespeare and it’s set in Italy, chances are, you’ll hear jokes about Italian prostitutes.

Art & Love is a chance to enjoy the lushness of a Titian oil or the very modern simplicity of a marble bust by Francesco Laurana (although research indicates that like the ancient Greek statues, Laurana’s lovely bust of Beatrice of Aragon was originally painted in bright colors). But it’s also a sociocultural history, a study of what wealthy Italians owned and wore – and believed. Regardless of the varying degrees of artistry, all of these different items promoted notions of fidelity, fertility and family loyalty. They admonished women to remain chaste and complained about how they were unfaithful anyway. Even the Italians home furnishings rhapsodized about love and babies.

When we see an exhibition like this, we’re often struck by the familiar: “Look, these are just like wedding gifts.” Yet sex, marriage and childbirth have not remained the same throughout history. The meanings we’ve attached to them have varied widely. Before 1563, a wedding didn’t even have to involve the church. That year, the Council of Trent finally regularized the marriage ceremony. So what we see is a network of folk traditions, financial drives, civic institutions, learned references to ancient Roman art – and real affection.

Love — so they say — is a many-splendored thing. It’s also the basis for a fresh look at what could have been a very familiar Renaissance.

Also worth noting: The impressive exhibition catalog is a knowledgeable and scholarly collection of essays, ranging over period works inside and outside the exhibition’s purview, examining such topics as “Profane Love: The Challenge of Sexuality” and “Picturing the Perfect Marriage.”

• The Good Negro opens in New York. The play had premiered at the Dallas Theater Center last year. The current Public Theater production (in association with the DTC) gets a good-to-mixed review from Charles Isherwood in the New York Times:

“The play will bring no fresh revelations or powerful insights for those well versed in this period … But if “The Good Negro” suffers from the flaws endemic in straight-up documentary theater, they are mostly disguised by vibrant performances and a crisply paced production directed by Liesl Tommy. And the internecine squabbles within the movement will engross those with no deep grounding in the history, illuminating how numerous were the forces working against success, both from within and without.”

UPDATE: The Daily News review. The Associated Press review. John Simon’s review for Bloomberg.

Interesting sidenote: The photos accompanying the reviews and the reviews themselves suggest changes have been made to the script since the Dallas production. (The photo in the Times, for instance, looks as though the two main ministers are handcuffed — if so, it’s a scene that, as far as I can recall, never occurred in Dallas.) I’d be curious to learn what changes, if any, were made. ANSWER: Jacob Cigainero of the DTC just reminded me that in the scene during which the two ministers are put in a police car, they are handcuffed — a detail I’d forgotten. Thanks. But he did say that author Tracey Scott Wilson has made some cuts to the play.

• And speaking of theater reviews, with daily newspapers ailing, will arts journalism survive — and in what form? From the Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media and Policy:

“Arts administrators …  are just now coming to grips with the impending cutoff of one of their strongest lines of communication with the community. After complaining for years of unfair or insensitive reviews, they have come to the realization that the only thing worse than getting criticized is being ignored.”

The article examines several prospects for the future — non-profit websites, for-profit websites, collective websites like artsjournal.com, even efforts by arts organizations themselves.

• Musicians brains are different — and it comes from practice. New Scientist reports on a Harvard Medical School study on six-year-olds. They out-performed their peers in manual dexterity and sound discrimination, but only after music training.

I met up with local tech celebrity Cali Lewis briefly at SXSW Interactive and thought I’d ask her opinion on what the next big thing in technology will be.

Lewis produces and hosts Dallas-based Geek Brief TV (also known as shiny, happy tech news), a video podcast that provides news about technology and emerging trends in the industry.

She is in town to receive a Texas Social Media award from the Austin American-Statesman and was named as one of the top 50 influential people in tech by T3 Magazine in 2008.

So she knows a thing or two about a thing or two.

She recently declared 2009 as the year of the gadget house (or home automation), but said recent economic troubles may delay that prediction.

“With the economy the way it is, I’m not so sure that’s going to happen this year because that’s just kind of a luxury,” Lewis said.

But home automation, the ability to control most (if not all) appliances and gadgets from anywhere within your home with the push of a few buttons, is on its way to more consumers, she said.

“That and augmented reality are really the things that are going on right now,” Lewis said. “The research that’s happening with augmented reality is incredible.”

That’s the fourth time someone has mentioned augmented reality to me this week. I need to go invest in some augmented reality technology stock.

AUSTIN – SXSW has always been a festival that caters to filmmakers. Sure, the occasional moviestar makes an appearance (as Seth Rogen is doing tonight), but the talent behind the camera normally takes centerstage.

The reason for that is that part of SXSW’s mission is education. Hence the dozens of daily panels on everything from how to secure music rights for your film to how to make a trailer.

Monday afternoon, Austin filmmaker Robert Rodriguez and Henry Selick put on a mini film school in special effects. Selick is the director of this year’s animated 3D smash Caroline, while Rodriguez is credited with the revival of 3D earlier this decade with Spy Kids 3D.

Each showed behind-the-scenes footage of how they pulled off certain effects, the simplist of which had Rodriguez painting a treadmill green and having the actor walk on it so as to not run out of green-screen space.

“Not having the resources you need is the ultimate gift you can give your creativity,” Rodriguez said.

Those words of wisdom no doubt resonated with the many student filmmakers in the crowd, including nearly everyone from the Birdville ISD Media Tech program that I profiled last week.

AUSTIN — Late Monday morning, a group of 75 or so artists and crafters crammed into a meeting room in the Austin Convention Center to solve a problem: How do you sell your creations online? Everyone from photographers to T-shirt makers to jewelery makers to painters and musicians were present.

Ideas were bandied about, and what follows is the best of the ideas I heard:

1) Get thee to Etsy: For those already selling online, this is a no-brainer. But if you haven’t carved out space for yourself at etsy.com, that’s a good place to start. The site is an online marketplace for all things handmade. The site has other cool features, including a section called alchemy, where buyers who want things made can make requests and sellers bid for the job.

2) Tap Your Network: Those social media tools (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) aren’t just for catching up with people from high school. They are also places where your friends can be your advocates. Start out by letting your immediate network of friends know what you are making and let them help spread the word for you. You’d be surprised how many people actually want to help. If you are having trouble setting up our Web site or need pro marketing help, offer to trade some of your work for the services your friends specialize in.

3) Price it right: The question of what to charge seemed to touch a nerve with nearly everyone in the room. The easiest formula suggested actually comes from the retail industry: basically just take your core cost (including what you pay yourself) and multiply that by 2.5. Does that number sound too high? It might not be. Several in the room said that undercutting yourself can be as dangerous as selling for too much. A higher price also brings with it a perception of higher quality (and vice-versa).

4) Consider a kit: If the thing you make is very time consuming and can’t be mass produced, consider making smaller versions of that thing that can be made more quickly and sold for a lower price. Another brilliant idea was to sell a kit containing all the materials and teach the buyer how to make it whether through an online video or instructions. You pass the labor onto the buyer, and that person enjoys participating in the creation.

5) Sell the story: Part of the appeal to buyers of purchasing handmade goods is having the backstory to pass along. It’s one of the things that separates those items from mass-produced stuff you can buy in big-box store. If you learned how to make that wooden jewelry box while serving as a missionary in Africa or your family has been knitting scarves for three generations, let people know! It adds value to your creation, and the buyer will get a kick out of passing your story along when they show off what you made.

For further reading, check out the following sites:

instructables.com

cheaptweet.com

rebellwith.us

escapefromcubiclenation.com

willotunes.com/getcrafty

When the Barbie video game burst on the scene in the mid ’90s it sold more than 600,000 units, forcing retailers and developers to take a closer look at girls and their place in the gaming realm.

The number of girl gamers has risen significantly since then, and they aren’t interested in Barbie anymore. While still a minority within the industry, more women are entering into computer science professions and changing the way girls are represented within the tech and gaming world.

At a panel discussion titled “Gaming as a Gateway Drug: Getting Girls Interested in Technology,” gaming and education professionals discussed how to use play to spark a bigger interest among girls in technology and build a brighter future for women in the industry.

The key, they said, is getting girls interested in learning technology at the very beginning of their educational careers.

GirlStart, a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering girls in math, science and technology, is working to achieve that. The organization holds week-long camps where girls discuss female portrayals in video games, their own place in the industry and the power of blogging.

“Growing up, I always heard video games were for boys,” said Dee Kapila, a panelist and technology and program coordinator for GirlStart. “We’re hoping to inspire and provide support for girls who are wanting to get into technology. What’s a more fun way to do that than with video games?”

Panelists also discussed the obstacles girls face when learning technology, one being a lack of confidence among girls to enter the computer science industry.

In classrooms, girls are more likely to indicate a fear of technology and not recognize their existing abilities, said Cindy Royal, an assistant professor at Texas State University.

“They’ll say things like ‘The computer hates me’ or ‘I’m afraid I’m going to break something,’” Royal said. “Meanwhile, they are tricking out their MySpace page, not realizing that it’s made of HTML coding.”

Some suggestions to increase confidence among women included introducing different teaching styles geared toward girls and putting more women in leadership positions within the educational and tech industries.

“We need to change the gaming culture because it’s always been a boy’s club,” said Sherri Graner Ray, senior designer for Sony Online Entertainment. “Like any medium, it takes a balance of both genders to create unique and diversified content.”