A Literary-Bookish Discussion at FrontBurner.

Yes, we were staggered, too. But there it is: Adam McGill has proposed his list of favorite Dallas boosktores.

There’s nothing exceptional about the list — personally, I would swap the Preston Royal Borders for his top-rated Lincoln Park Barnes & Noble any day of the week because I hate the B&N layout and its looks (all the truly serious literature — and graphic novels — are way upstairs in back). Mercifully, the Preston Royal Borders has been mostly spared the awful computer-geek gutting that the Lovers Lane Borders underwent.

No, what’s exceptional about the list is that it spawned a spirited 53 comments in 24 hours. I agree with the commenters who thought to point out the soon-to-be independent bookstore in the Shops at Legacy. As for all those who said, forget bookstores, Amazon is the future: Actually, Amazon makes up only 10 percent of book sales. Wholesale discounters like Wal-Mart are a much bigger, much sorrier factor.

And as for why an independent bookstore could become a favorite on any serious local list, see the jump.

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‘The Program’: Video Art at Conduit Gallery

Drawing Restraint 13 by Matthew Barney

Video art is about to get what may be its most serious and thorough treatment ever in North Texas. Beginning Saturday, the Video Association of Dallas, best known for putting on the annual Dallas Video Festival, hosts a five-week series of video programs, installations and performances at Conduit Gallery.

Curated by art critic Charles Dee Mitchell, multimedia artist Carolyn Sortor and VAD founder Bart Weiss, “The Program” opens at 5 p.m. with a reception, followed by the screening of a 90-minute video compilation. The work will stay up until it’s replaced by a new wave of video and installations each Saturday.

This week’s works include Drawing Restraint 13 by Matthew Barney; RMB City - A SecondLife City Planning by China Tracy by Cao Fei; online access to Serpentine’s website exhibition opening of RMB City; Torcito Project by Marcin Ramocki; New Monuments, Endnotes and Hoedown compilation by Tom Moody; and The Arrangement of Two Opposites While their Maximum Contact is Under Generation by Yves Netzhammer.

The night also includes a talk on Drawing Restraint 13 at 5:30 p.m., a live performance by Treewave at 8 and an after-party performance by Apples in Stereo at Sons of Hermann Hall at midnight (ticket required).

Free screenings also will be held at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth at 7 p.m. on Aug. 5 and 12. And the Dallas Museum of Art will host free screenings and a panel discussion at 1:30 p.m. Aug. 10.

Symbols and Sexuality in Fort Worth

New Mexico Recollection #13, oil on canvas, Marsden Hartley, c. 1923

Last week, a suggestion by Amon Carter Museum blogger Nora Puckett — that perhaps Marsden Hartley’s painting, New Mexico Recollection #13, contains a hidden memorial to a man Hartley loved  — sparked debate in the comments section about homophobia and pictorial symbolism.

For what it’s worth, Hartley was closeted, at least in his early years. One reason his feelings for the young Prussian officer Karl von Freyburg, who died early in World War I, were so intense (though possibly unconsummated) may have been that Hartley, who wandered most of his life searching for a sense of place and home, had discovered the vibrant gay community in Berlin, 1914-1915. This is also where he produced some of his most advanced abstract and German Expressionist paintings, exhibiting them with the Blaue Reiter modernists, including Klee and Kandinsky. So it was an intense period in his life, both artistically and personally, a period cut short by the lack of funds that forced him to return to the U.S.

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Big D Eats the Big Apple

Guest blogger Gail Sachson  owns Ask Me About Art, she is Vice-Chair of the Cultural Affairs Commission and a member of the Public Art Committee in Dallas. She is a former New Yorker, but misses only the great bagels and egg creams.

THE AUDIENCE EFFECT: TWO NEW YORK EXPERIENCES

1. Audiences can annoy

A weekend in the Big Apple has nothing on a weekend in Big D. You name it, we’ve got it. But we’ve got different audiences.

Fawn Johnstin, Jeff Perry and Amy Morton in August: Osage County on Broadway. from the New York Times

The drama, August: Osage County by Tracy Letts has won a Pulitzer and five Tony Awards. The out-of-town audiences are clamoring for tickets, offering standing ovations and participating in the production with boos for the villains and cheers for the heroes, as if it were a daytime soap or a midnight movie like The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

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Speaking of Symphony Orchestras Doing Well … There’s News from Dallas

Yesterday, I posted a report about the Houston Symphony being in the black for four years in a row.  Which is in sharp contrast to, say, the teetering-on-the-brink Columbus Symphony, or the Minnesota Orchestra, which cancelled a concert for financial reasons. It also runs counter to the widespread and some might say sadly justified sense in the classical music world that we may be nearing the end times.

Yet that same afternoon, the Dallas Symphony announced the return of Douglas W. Adams — previously the DSO’s general manager, now its new president, replacing Fred Bronstein who left five months ago.

What has Adams been up to since he left to run the Colorado Symphony? Keeping it financially sound for six years in a row, increasing ticket sales by 40 percent and helping to get a bond measure passed that would pay for renovations to Boettcher Hall, the CSO’s home.

Here’s a Worry: Will High Gas Prices Hurt Arts Attendance?

They haven’t so far in Southern California, says the Los Angeles Times:

The Pacific Symphony in Irvine had its highest-grossing July Fourth fireworks concert ever, drawing more than 10,000 people to its summer home, the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre — a venue that does not list any mass transit options on its website….

Officials at other cultural destinations — including the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pasadena Playhouse, the Bowers Museum and Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana and the Laguna Art Museum and Festival of Arts in Laguna Beach — said that shows and exhibitions since the spring run-up in gasoline prices have drawn good crowds or had normal ups and downs….

All the same, some arts organizations have been experimenting with ways to draw people without drawing down gas tanks. For more than a year, the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, with a Red Line subway stop at its doorstep, has been offering a 20% “Wicked Tuesday” discount to Metro riders who present a monthly transit pass. As of two weeks ago, 1,486 riders — or about 25 per week — had seen “Wicked” under the offer. But the takers have slowed to a trickle lately, despite high gasoline prices, said Martin Wiviott, general manager of the Pantages….

Los Angeles Opera, on the other hand, is discontinuing last season’s venture in mass transit, in which it sponsored a single bus from Westwood to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for select weeknight performances of each production.

“It didn’t meet expectations, but we can reinstate it at any time” if the surge in gas prices fuels demand, spokesman Gary Murphy said.

The Mouse That Roared

Remember the recent opening of Bookmarks, the Dallas Public Library’s children’s outlet in NorthPark?

If you can look past the needless tumult over the Obama-as-terrorist cartoon cover of the July 21st New Yorker, you can find a terrific story by Jill Lepore about a time when libraries for children, even books for children, were considered suspect, at best. The free public library is one of America’s greatest inventions, but the earliest ones turned away anyone younger than 16 and had trouble with the morally corrupting books even the adult general public seemed to enjoy. Samuel Tilden nearly changed his mind about giving millions to establish a New York library when he heard that 90 percent of all books checked out of the Boston Public Library were fiction.

But what the story, “The Lion and the Mouse,” is really about is the  librarian who single-handedly changed that, who invented the children’s library (and invented serious reviews of children’s literature along the way) — and who, at the end of her career, set out to destroy Stuart Little.

Also, NPR has just run a report about the current state of popular children’s books — at least those adapted from the recent spate of comic-book/superhero movies.

Michelangelo Was One Homely Dude

A new exhibition in Florence, Italy, showcases some of the few portraits that exist of Michelangelo Buonarroti. Art historians have long known that the famous sculptor, architect and painter of the Sistine Chapel wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous: At 17, he had his nose smashed by a fellow student. Also, his personal hygiene left a fair amount to be desired.

A chief reason there are so few likenesses of the artist seems to have been his avoidance of any portraiture.  This is the first exhibition to collect the drawings and paintings.

“Movies have always portrayed Michelangelo as an attractive, good-looking man. On the contrary, he wasn’t handsome at all,” exhibition curator Pina Ragionieri, the director of Casa Buonarroti, a house the artist bought in 1508, told Discovery News. “Most of all, he was perfectly aware of his ugliness and did not want to be portrayed. Indeed, he left no documented self-portrait.”

One image that has been construed as a possible likeness is the flayed skin that St. Bartholomew holds up in “The Last Judgment,” the wall fresco that Michelangelo painted in the Sistine Chapel.

Despite Reports, Not All Classical Orchestras Are Dying

The Houston Symphony Orchestra reports a modest budget surplus — for the fourth year in a row.

Texas Jazz in Europe: End of an Era

Neil Slater conducted the One O’CLock Lab Band in Italy

The One O’Clock Lab Band’s tour of Europe is coming to a close in Perugia, Italy — and so is director Neil Slater’s career with the band.  After 27 years, he’ll be stepping down in August. So this is his last tour performance. We’ve been following the University of North Texas crew practically since their start in early July, posting photos from photographer and UNT student Michael Climents’ Flickr photos. We’ve also highlighted some of the blog posts from band member/trombonist Sara Jacovino.

What we hadn’t realized is that this is Sara’s last gig with the band, too. She and ten other members are graduating. Check out their farewell concert on the jump.

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