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When Calvin Littlejohn came to Fort Worth in 1934, North Texas was still Jim Crow country. Newspapers wouldn't print photos of African-Americans — unless, says Bob Ray Sanders, they'd murdered a white man or raped a white woman. Yet such segregation proved to be something of an opportunity for Littlejohn: He became the unofficial chronicler of black, middle-class Fort Worth life. The high school graduations and football games, the funerals, weddings and barbershops: Everything the mainstream media neglected, Littlejohn documented until his death in 1993.

Journalist Bob Ray Sanders — columnist for the Fort  Worth Star-Telegram and frequent visitor to KERA — has written Calvin Littlejohn: Portrait of a Community in Black and White, which features more than 150 photos by Littlejohn. Sanders spoke to Krys Boyd about his lifelong friend, about growing up in segregated Fort Worth, about how Littlejohn came to pick up a camera.

The Globe, the Rose, the Theatre: They're some of the most famous names in the history of theater, yet we didn't really even know what they looked like until a Dutch drawing of one theater interior was found in 1888. It also turns out that the theaters themselvers were hardly fixed in some classic form. They were often hastily improvised, "ongoing projects" — with parts added on as needed. Or as the competition dictated.

One point, for example, that Julian Bowsher, senior archaeologist with the Museum of London, discussed during the Boshell Family Lecture on Archaeology at the Dallas Museum of Art, was the changes affected at the Rose (about which much more is known than the Globe). The Rose apparently took shape in 1587 without a fixed roof over the stage. Later, its circular shape was seriously altered — because a stage roof was added. That meant the sightlines along the sides had changed.  In effect, a flat-front proscenium stage had become a thrust stage — which is what the later Globe adopted.  The roof, Bowsher pointed out, also now permitted new "special effects." It could hold pulleys for "gods" to fly in and out. These explanations, Bowsher said, were arrived at partly through consultations with working actors.

To give some idea of the dimensions of the Elizabethan stage: At 75 feet across, the Rose's was a little smaller than the current stage at the Wyly Theatre. As for seating, the Wyly holds fewer than 600. The Globe? It held somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000. Imagine the lungs it took to be heard in the balconies' back rows.

Bowsher is the author of The Rose Theatre: An Archaeological Discovery and a new book, The Rose and the Globe (to be released in December). He spoke with Krys Boyd for Think.

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Born and raised in Brownsville, Texas, Oscar Casares earned a bachelor's degree from UT-Austin. But he didn't start writing short stories about his life in the Rio Grande Valley until he was working in an advertising job in Minnesota. He earned a master's degree from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop and his first story collection, Brownsville, was released in 2003 — to great acclaim.

Casares has won a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His first novel, Amigoland, was published in August this year. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Texas.

The Dallas Opera launched its season Friday in the brand-new Winspear Opera house. On Saturday, Philip Glass performed in the same red venue. KERA’s Jerome Weeks reviews Glass’s score for the Dracula silent film, but first Bill Zeeble reports on Otello which, by all accounts, lived up to sonic expectations. Pictured, Alexandra Deshorties as Desdemona. Dallas Opera photos by Karen Almond.

• KERA radio story:

• Expanded online story:

Opening night of the Dallas Opera’s Otello by Giuseppe Verdi left audiences more than impressed by the sound.

DR. JIM DILL: "It is wonderful."

Dr Jim Dill served on the Dallas Opera board in the 1960s and 70s.

DILL: "I’m surprised how well the voices come across. They’re essentially not really distorted. From the various points in the stage, I’m impressed it doesn’t drop off as one gets further back in the stage, or off to either side."

Cleve Schneider says he has been attending operas for about 15 years now, and has heard productions in some of the best sounding halls in the world.

SCHNEIDER: "And the sound here, the clarity, and the ability to hear just the whisper of some of the voices in this hall is amazing compared to others."

Myra Hull, who says she’s an inveterate opera fan, has been attending Dallas productions for 30 years. She says there’s a huge acoustical difference between the new Winspear hall and the company’s old home in Fair Park.

HULL: "And you can hear the orchestra so much better here. The pit in the music hall at Fair Park was actually surrounded by concrete which is the most acoustically non desirable material you could possibly imagine. Now everything abut the sound from the orchestra pit is as spectacular as the sound from the stage."

Many fans said they weren’t sure they would see this world-class opera house here in their lifetime. Now that they have, they’re proud of their city. And they say it’s fitting that the opera season opened October 23rd — which would have been the late Bill Winspear’s 76th birthday.

• Read Olin Chism's review of Otello

• Manny Mendoza's interview with Philip Glass
  

• Manny Mendoza's review in the News

• Jason Heid's comments on Frontburner

• KERA radio review:

• Expanded online review:

[music 'The Crypt' from the soundtrack, Dracula]

Saturday night TITAS made its debut at the Winspear with the Philip Glass Ensemble playing the composer’s score for Dracula, the classic horror film from 1931.

Without the film accompanying it, Glass’ soundtrack lacks atmosphere. Many people think Glass’ minimalism is just numbingly repetitive. It’s not. Within that language, the composer can build delicate longings, nervous tension or overwhelming waves of sound.

Given all the mood and suspense in the vampire film, the CD versions of Glass’ Dracula are disappointing – both the one by the Kronos Quartet and the one for solo piano, which is what you’re hearing.

But with the film projected onstage at the Winspear and the live music orchestrated for a five-piece ensemble, Dracula often worked surprisingly well. I hadn’t seen the film in 25 years, but it impressed me again with how much it achieves — with so little. No digital effects, no splatterific gallons of gore. But some tremendous sets and, of course, Bela Lugosi's performance. He’s not an erotic, pretty-boy vampire or steroidal super-villain. Somehow, Lugosi does seem like he’s centuries old – and not fully human. He makes death aloof and formal but driven

Saturday's audience chuckled at the flapping bats and the hokey bits, especially Dwight Frye's over-the-top performance as Renfield. For those who can't see past the period moviemaking (see the other reviews above), that's all the movie seemed to be. But Glass’ score never descends into camp. At moments, it does just fill time. And sometimes at the Winspear, the audio balance had the crisply played music drowning out this film print’s fuzzy dialogue.

But by the end, the music — and Lugosi — made the silly and tattered old figure of the vampire seem almost majestic.

[music "The End of Dracula"]

SPECIAL NOTE: In the question-and-answer session that followed, TITAS' executive director Charles Santos made the remarkable announcement that TITAS is working on bringing Einstein on the Beach — the landmark, five-and-a-half-hour opera by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson — to Dallas "in a year or two."

Emma Rodgers ran Black Images Book Bazaar for 30 years.  Since its closing in 2007, she has kept busy as a full-time volunteer, working with causes such as the African American Male Achievement Bowl (to be held next year), Rites of Passage Program for Girls, Inc (leading tours to Ghana), the Irma P. Hall Theater Festival for middle and high school students, and the African American Museum in Fair Park. And that's just a sampler. She even has an award named for her, the EMMA, honoring writers of Black romantic fiction.

On Saturday, TeCo Theatrical Productions will host a blow out bash at the Bishop Arts Theater Center to celebrate Miss Emma's 65th birthday. The event is sold out, but you can wish Miss Emma an early happy birthday with this week's Art&Seek Q&A:

Art&Seek: Your life has had such a positive impact on the careers of countless authors – have you ever been tempted to write a book yourself?

Emma Rodgers: Sure, if I could stop volunteering. My daughter-in-law Kenya says I need to learn how to say no. When I came on the board of TeCo in March 2009, I said that it was the last new organization I would volunteer with. Then David Robinson Jr. with DCCCD, creator of the African American Male Achievement Bowl, contacted me about serving on the steering committee. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to infuse the competition with some of my burning questions. For example, there are only four canopy walkways in the world - name the countries each of these are found in; or, Argentina is named after what chemical element?

A&S: What is your all-time favorite book?

E. R.: My all time favorite book is always the book I’m reading. Now I’m reading Douglass’ Women, a novel by Jewell Parker Rhodes about American hero, abolitionist, former slave Frederick Douglass and his two women who loved him – his black wife and his white mistress.

A&S: If given the power and resources, what changes would you make to improve the current state of the African American literary community in North Texas?

E. R.: I would establish a foundation or work with a foundation that is committed to literacy and other organizations such as Project Manhood that works with students. This organization would work with established organizations (sororities, fraternal organizations, churches) that have a youth component to organize book clubs, take the children to the Dallas Children’s Theater, exhibitions at museums like the "George Washington Carver: An Extraordinary Man with a Mighty Vision” at the African American Museum in Fair Park.

If I had the resources, my next project would be to fund a “Reading to the Womb” series. We would be stationed in county hospitals, at Head Start Centers, early childhood development centers on college campuses, and church and community preschools. In other words, places where you are likely to find pregnant women. We would establish some kind of reward system, like Earning by Learning for the parent.

A&S: If you could speak for one minute to the 15-year-old Emma – yourself, 50 years ago - what would you tell her?

In a power speed minute – like those disclaimers that are made at the end of a product that has 20 side effects:

You have to ask the right questions – this pearl of wisdom is inspired by Aunt Ester in August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean. All that glitters in not gold – the moral of the story in Zora Neale Hurston’s novella The Gilded Six-Bits. My happiness is mine – the converse of what a Toni Morrison character said in Sula. The character said, “My loneliness is mine” – which means I’m responsible for my loneliness and conversely I’m responsible for my happiness. Nothing in life is free – you pay a price now or later. Everything is not as it appears – look for a deeper meaning, look beyond the surface, peel the onion back. Take care of your temple - eat right, plenty of fruits and vegetables, make water your beverage of choice, don’t drink coffee or smoke, consume only legal substances, exercise and walk.

Read the newspaper, and listen to the radio. I’m an NPR junkie. My 41-year-old son listens to NPR because that’s all he heard growing up. Now to get the 22-year-old to model her mother’s behavior regarding the radio will be a coup. But I must say that she does have 90.1 programmed in her car, so we are moving in the right direction. Her godmother, Sybil, also has it programmed in her car radio, so that when we are out and about I can listen to NPR. I have it programmed in my husband’s car also.

Know your directions – north, east, south, west. Always have a pen and paper in your purse, backpack, car. Use your initiative. Don’t wait for someone to ask you to do something. Take charge when you see that something needs to be done. Don’t take everything personally. It’s a big world – everybody is not looking or thinking about you. Don’t let anyone limit your ability to grow. Life is what you make it.

The Art&Seek Q&A is a weekly discussion with a person involved in the arts in North Texas. Check back next Thursday for another installment.

In the Saturday Spotlight, we’re talking books. The 7^th Annual Tulisoma South Dallas Book Fair and Arts Festival promotes literacy in South Dallas. The festival got its name from the Swahili word for “we read.” Visiting authors will be on hand at the African American Museum and other venues to talk about their love of books and reading. Click here for a complete schedule of events.

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In the '90s, Esther Pearl Watson and her husband, Mark Todd, were driving cross-country when they stopped in Death Valley at a last-chance gas station. In the restroom, Esther found a teenage girl's diary lying on the sink. In embarrassing, hilarious detail, it chronicled the girl's sophomore year in high school in 1988. For Esther — a magazine illustrator and painter — this was found art and comic gold: leg-warmers, big hair, Bruce Willis movies and all things self-obsessively adolescent. She turned the diary into a raw, self-published mini-comic which became a running cartoon series for Bust magazine ("the magazine for women with something to get off their chests"). Then it became the cult fave, the bright-pink-and-sparkly-nail-polish-covered graphic novel, Unlovable.

The comic style and deadpan-honest spirit of the work owe a debt to Lynda Barry's work, but with a major, sociopolitical difference: Barry's characters live in their own, almost isolated, blue-collar-fringe world of trailer parks, seemingly separate from much of mainstream/Hollywood culture. With the exception of the occasional reference to a TV show or movie, Barry's work seems almost timeless — at least any time in the past 40 years.

In contrast, Esther set her character Tammy Pierce's teenage travails in Wylie, Texas — where Esther spent her own junior-high years (as well as some time in Sachse and Grand Prairie — as she says, her early life "revolved" around Dallas ). So Tammy is immersed in a very recognizable, suburban high-school culture from the late '80s, a world of Sonic fries, Collin Creek Mall and Milli Vanilli. Lynda Barry's stories read like funky folk tales; Esther Watson's are like one of John Hughes' teenage comedies, with all of the Hollywood prettiness and sentimentality stripped out.

Esther and husband Mark are both artists; she's getting a name for her naive, deliberately awkward, "outsider-y" paintings set in small-town Texas, frequently featuring the flying saucers that her father was always trying to build from used auto parts. In Esther's graphic novel, the reader can usually tell when Tammy goes off, dreaming of eye shadow and romance and pop celebrities (her dreams tend to look like cheesy movie posters). But with her paintings, part of their whimsy lies in the way it's not clear how we're supposed to take these matter-of-fact visions of space ships — when they fill the skies or when they've caught fire or when they're just being towed down the street. Her paintings have been shown in art galleries from Canada to Austin to California (where she and Mark teach at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena). Through Aug. 9, some of Esther's and Mark's painting are on view at the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie as part of the exhibition, When in Texas – Act Like a Texan.

Esther and Mark have also been leading lights in the world of 'zines, self-published, hand-made, small-circulation magazines. As one might imagine, hers have stood out for their humor and their deadpan, consciously low-grade, comic-book visual style, which lends a sense of bemused grotesquery to the proceedings, if not self-induced anarchy. Mark and Esther created the best, illustrated, self-empowering "how-to" manual in the field, Whatcha Mean, What's a Zine?

In this KCET video interview, filmed in their no-longer-extant studio in Eagle Rock, the duo can also be seen discussing Unlovable, their collaborations and the thinking behind their 'zines (which have proved to be effective calling cards with magazine design editors). Added bonus: a slide show of their 'zine collection and pages from Mark's own work.

• KERA radio story:

• Expanded online story:

Attica Locke is a bit of a rarity. She’s an African-American, female novelist from Texas who's made her debut with a big-city crime novel. It's called Black Water Rising, and rarer still, Locke is getting compared to such master thriller writers as Dennis Lehane, the author of Mystic River, and George Pelecanos, who wrote for the HBO series, The Wire.

Locke has already been a successful screenwriter in Los Angeles for more than a decade. But while her scripts got sold they never got made. Partly, this was just because of the cumbersome economics of filmmaking. Partly, it’s Hollywood’s very limited openness to serious movies about African-Americans.

So Locke decided that this time, she’d write a novel. And she’d set it in Houston in 1981. She was inspired by an incident that happened when she grew up there.

ATTICA LOCKE: "My dad, who did not have a lot of money, wanted to do something for my step-mother, for her birthday. And he knew somebody who knew somebody who ran boat tours on Buffalo Bayou. And you dock in downtown Houston which is kind of, you know, city lights and somewhat picturesque, but the ride takes you into parts of the city that are not so nice."

Somewhere in the darkness, a woman screamed. Then, gunshots. Locke’s father did not play hero. He wasn’t going to endanger his wife and children by abandoning them to leap unarmed into a swamp at night.

In contrast, in the opening of Black Water Rising, Attica’s main character, Jay Porter is in the same situation. But he jumps. And he lands in a world of trouble. Real estate swindles and big oil money and racial violence.

Those are the other reasons that Locke set her novel in Texas in the ‘80s.

ATTICA LOCKE: "Texas in the ‘80s, particularly Houston and Dallas were emblematic of the early optimism about the Reagan ‘80s – before people figured out that wasn’t going to work out for everybody [laughs]. There was just a lot of oil money going around, the cities and the state were getting international attention. Kinda just like a really interesting time that represented a country trying to transition from a segregated America into an integrated America."

In Black Water Rising, Jay Porter makes for an unusual hero. He's scared. He was once a black activist, a student associate of Stokely Carmichael. But then he led a protest that ended in violence – and in his own trumped-up murder trial. Ever since, Jay has slept with a gun nearby. He's left the movement, satisfied to scratch out his own legal career and a married life — but the fear has never left him that everything could suddenly be taken away.

Jay's racial paranoia is not true for all African-Americans, Locke says. It reflects her own experience. She grew up bifurcated, as she calls it, bused from a black neighborhood to an integrated school.

ATTICA LOCKE: "Being thrust into a newly integrated American culture that still had some serious problems, I was always scanning my environment to figure out who I could trust – because you would make friends with someone on the playground one week and the next week they might call you the 'N' word. And I'm not even saying that is genuine racism – some of that was just kids. But they knew that if you used that word, ooh, you can really hurt somebody."

Gene Locke is Attica’s father. In the '80s, he was a struggling criminal defense attorney, just like Jay Porter in Black Water Rising. But the similarities don’t go much farther. As Attica insists, Gene is not Jay. Still, reading his daughter's novel took Gene back. And he was struck by the novel’s accuracy in depicting portions of unpleasant, big-city Texas life that aren’t normally found in fiction – like the labor community and its racial tensions.

GENE LOCKE: "All of that’s part of the rich history of change in Houston, You know, rather than deny it, let’s acknowledge it and acknowledge that it was some of the very struggles that she has in the book that has given rise to the Houston we are quite proud of now."

The Lockes themselves embody those changes in Texas’ racial history. Attica Locke’s husband is white, and they have a two-year-old biracial daughter. As for Gene Locke, he’s no longer just another criminal defense attorney. On Monday, it became official.

Gene Locke is running to be the next mayor of Houston.

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Scene from The Butcher Shop

• Star-Telegram review by Gaile Robinson

• Anthony Mariani in the Fort Worth Weekly

• Kristian Lin in the Fort Worth Weekly

• WRR video of the exhibition tour by Philip Haas and Malcolm Warner

• Philip Haas' interview on Art & Seek on Think TV

In Butchers, Dragons, Gods & Skeletons, the current exhibition at the Kimbell Art Museum, director Philip Haas immerses viewers in miniature worlds — ancient Greece, a Chinese Buddhist temple, the splendor of a Baroque hall, a dark stroll through James Ensor's brain. Haas selected five period paintings from the Kimbell's permanent collection and built film installations around them. He's extended the painted works into elaborate, theatrical experiences complete with stage sets and cinematic narratives about the artist, the surfaces and purposes of painting, the sources of creativity.

In chronological order, the five works that Haas chose to reinterpret are:The Death of Pentheus, a Greek wine cup from the 5th century B.C.; Arhat Taming the Dragon, a painted Chinese scroll by an unknown artist in the 14th century; Annibale Caracci's The Butcher Shop (circa 1582); Giovanni Tiepolo's canvas, Apollo and the Continents, from 1739 (one of several versions of this subject he did as a ceiling fresco) and James Ensor's grimly funny 1889 oil, Skeletons Warming Themselves

Haas has transformed these paintings into magic lantern shows, into shadow plays and puppet theater, and he has brought them all — even the Kimbell itself — into our hi-def, stereo-surround, digitally projected age. Butchers & Dragons is more than a Pygmalion project; it doesn't simply "bring the paintings to life." The installations continually shift, they play with the two-dimensional turning into the three-dimensional — and back again.

Consider the simplest piece: Carracci's The Butcher Shop (video clip, above). It's not easy to explain these installations in a few sentences, so a year and a half ago, when Haas pitched his ideas to the Kimbell's deputy director, Malcolm Warner, Haas was given seed money to develop a more complete presentation. Rather than craft some elaborate PowerPoint demonstration, Haas took the money to London, where he has worked for years on such films as Angels & Insects and where he knows theater and film professionals (like actors Julian Glover and Anna Walton, both of whom appear in Butchers & Dragons). Haas created The Butcher Shop as a stand-alone solo work, a seven-and-a-half-minute short. It has proved a very effective calling card; it was hailed last year at both the Toronto and Venice film festivals.

The Butcher Shop appears on two screens in a darkened, fairly conventional projection room. But viewers sit between the two screens with the butchers and the hanging meat on one side, the artist and his easel on the other. In this way, Haas puts us in the shop with Carracci and his subjects, a situation that he jokingly underscores when he has the young butchers clowning around. Carracci walks over — essentially walking past us — to admonish them, "No more jokes." (Video recommendation: Because the video clips are beautifully detailed but sometimes rather dark, if you can run them in the  "full screen" mode, you get a better impression of what they're like.)

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Scene from Arhat Taming the Dragon

That's actually one of the simpler bits of cinematic sleight-of-hand and fourth-wall breaking that Haas pulls. Butchers & Dragons is an ambitious and skillful piece of work, one that keeps topping its own technical challenges, brilliantly succeeding in entertaining, enlightening and exciting. To be blunt: It's a jaw-dropper and an eye-dazzler. The exhibition takes over large portions of the Kimbell's gallery space (and more). The five works stand in different corners (and the auditorium), while many of the Kimbell's other works are clustered around the appropriate installations, providing context and comparison: Ancient Greek vases stand near The Death of Pentheus, Chinese scrolls are next to Arhat Taming the Dragon, Giovanni Tiepolo's other paintings are displayed alongside his Apollo and the Continents.

Scholars and museum purists may find this multi-media folderol a distraction, just more easy-access Hollywood treatments of art. After all, Butchers & Dragons features a "bio-pic" of James Ensor's gothic life, haunted as it was by skeletons and masks and a drunken father. The Death of Pentheus, based on a Greek wine cup, includes a demonstration of how Greek pottery and wine were made — like a History Channel re-enactment — while the faded scroll, Arhat Taming the Dragon (above), is transformed into a colorful little Chinese fable staged with painted backdrops and cardboard waves.

So why aren't the paintings themselves, alone, enough? They are — as paintings. But there are different ways to interpret and experience a work of art. And this way often feels utterly new. The installations, for instance, offer a feast of art-history references, illuminating their painted inspirations in a richly "knowing" fashion. Carracci's bare-chested young butchers pose with the carcasses — clearly, a joke about beefcake and beef but also a homage to Francis Bacon's portraits-with-meat. The adolescent Ensor is taunted by a line of masked revelers, an image quoting one of his own adult paintings, Masks Confronting Death (below). On one wall in Apollo and the Continents, Tiepolo himself appears at his easel, echoing his 1726 work, Alexander the Great and Campaspe in the Studio of Apelles.

One hardly needs to catch the inside jokes to enjoy Butchers & Dragons. The shorts are gorgeously filmed, and the installations also provide a vividly direct, sensual contact with the art of painting itself — as in The Butcher Shop, when Haas cross-cuts between the butchers and the painter, between the gutted meat and Carracci's palette, thick with blood-red paint. Tiepolo's Apollo and the Continents, becomes, here, a droll commentary on the place of art patrons: It seems they ascend into heaven.

In particular, Arhat Taming the Dragon is a delightful, "mirroring" fable. The Buddhist monk-painter paints the scroll — magically causing the dragon to come to three-dimensional life. It's a comic, highly artificial fable with a puppet hawk and puppet dragon (courtesy of Blind Summit Theatre). And the entire story appears on a thin film screen, hanging in the Kimbell gallery from the very same shrine that appears in the short. (It was filmed using a Cinemascope, or anamorphic lens, and the camera was placed on its side. Hence, the long, tall, scroll-like shape.) So we stand before a temple-within-a-temple, watching a scroll-within-a-scroll.

In all this, Haas hasn't plucked any low-hanging fruit. Excluding Ensor's Skeletons Warming Themselves, Haas didn't select the better-known Kimbell masterpieces, dramatic scenes like Caravaggio's The Card-Sharps. He's amplified 'lesser-known' works. He's found all of this humor and drama and death in works that most of us have passed by.

Or at least, I have, anyway. The Tiepolo, for example, isn't really a ceiling painting; it's a proposal for one, a drawing. So Haas decided to realize Tiepolo's planned fresco by re-creating the Milanese painter as a wired-up master of cinematic trickery. Apollo and the Continents is a Baroque piece of godlike showmanship. It's an entire room of projections, walls and ceiling, all the surfaces full of tromple l'oeil and foreshortening effects with real columns and cornices topped by a video-screen pantheon of topless goddesses and satyrs. Some are in the flesh, some chalk-white as though they're stone statues. Over here's a live owl; over there's a stuffed ostrich. What is real, what is false, what is alive, what is theater, what is film, what is art: These are much the same games as in Arhat Taming the Dragon, but they're done in a way that puts us inside the puzzle box as the entire cosmos is created by Apollo. It's as grand and as fake as an operatic set, yet we stand in Apollo and the Continents, letting it flow over and around us, transported.

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Scenes from Skeletons Warming Themselves

Much like both Apollo and The Butcher Shop, Ensor's Skeletons puts us inside the work, too — but this time, inside the artist himself, inside his imagination. Haas has fashioned a room-sized skull as the projection room, a skull made to look as though it were constructed of papier-mache — just like one of the carnival masks sold in Ensor's parents' store in Ostend. On four screens inside the skull, we witness Ensor's life flash before him as he dies, a life glimpsed as a series of nightmarish vignettes: a childhood incident of a giant bird attacking Ensor in his cradle, Ensor's father providing one of the models for both his 1885 oil, The Drunkards and his 1883 painting, The Scandalized Masks, and so on.

While the other installations' concerns are aesthetic, historical, even cosmological, the Ensor is the only one whose focus is psychological. In most of the installations, revelry and death appear in some form — as do food and paint (and even monkeys). But here, the revelry and death are foregrounded in Ensor's macabre humor. Death is a childhood chum, a cackling mask, a night terror, a satiric folk figure japing at the Belgian grotesques all around it.

A pity that Butchers & Dragons will come down Oct. 25 — a few days before El Dia de los Muertos would suit the Ensor so perfectly.

The only weak point in Butchers & Dragons is The Death of Pentheus. Haas trips himself up with his own cleverness. He has teased out narratives from these paintings and he's tried to make the story and the overall film and set construction suit each artist, each work. But he also tries to up the ante, to do something more (or different) each time. And the challenge of transposing a Greek vase painting to film and to fill in the mythological background of Pentheus' death has led to a fussy work.

Perhaps that's because, ironically, the Douris wine cup is the only one of these painted items that already had its own narrative — from Euripides' play, The Bacchae. King Pentheus attempts to suppress the growing new cult of Dionysus, which involves seeking the divine, the anti-rational, through bacchanalian frenzy. But Pentheus has insulted the god, and Dionysus allows his followers, including Pentheus' own mother, to think he is a deer and tear him apart like a cannibal sacrifice.

The Pentheus installation is also the only one displayed in a room designed for film presentations (the Kimbell's auditorium). Yet The Death of Pentheus doesn't have nearly the impact it should. That's partly because, compared to the immersive experiences of the other installations, Pentheus remains distant and stage-y. Haas wanted to find some contemporary, cinematic equivalent to the way Douris related Pentheus' story around the circumference of the wine cup. But the floating, disk-like image that's projected on the auditorium stage requires viewers to get up very close to catch anything going on, and it still seems more of a curiosity, a minor piece of magic.

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Scenes from The Death of Pentheus

For Friedrich Nietzsche, the story of Pentheus' death in a bacchanalian frenzy is one of the two, originating myths, one of the forces behind ancient Greek culture — balanced by the shining beauty and reason of Apollo (who appears, naturally, in the Tiepolo ceiling).

But to the legend of the Bacchae, Haas adds all of the silhouetted wine-making and pottery-firing. He neatly details similarities between the two arts  — just as he did with painting and meat-cutting in The Butcher Shop. Yet Pentheus is the only instance in Butchers & Dragons that — in adding materials and background references and a digitalized interpretation — Haas actually detracts from the graceful simplicity of the original. He overreaches, over-complicates.

Still, taken as a whole, Butchers & Dragons is a splendor — audacious, challenging, gorgeous. And it's free. It's a big, bold, smart move, a much smarter multi-media extravaganza than the touring King Tut, which used videos to prop up an exhibition that lacked some major pieces and clearly aimed to cash in at all costs. By all rights, Butchers & Dragons should be the real blockbuster; it's a benchmark for what a small, classically-based (and well-funded) collection like the Kimbell can do.

Paul Theroux is the dean of American travel writers: literate, wide-ranging, observant and more than a touch acerbic. His most recent book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, finds  him re-tracing the trip across Europe and Asia he took 35 years ago for The Great Railway Bazaar, the book that launched his travel career. Ghost Train to the Eastern Star will be released in paperback in two weeks.

In addition to his travel writings, Theroux is a prolific novelist. Several of his books have been adapted into films, including The Mosquito Coast and Saint Jack. He has also written criticism, children's books and short-story collections.

Presented by the University of North Texas, the Mayborn Literary Non-fiction Conference promotes the art of narrative non-fiction — the writing of biographies, histories, crime stories and adventure tales. Theroux will deliver the keynote address Friday on "The World is Elsewhere: A Life in Search of Stories."