The Houston Chronicle reports:
The Houston Arts Alliance has created an “artist recovery blog” to facilitate communication between the city’s estimated 500 arts organizations and 14,000 working artists in the wake of Hurricane Ike [the blog is called haahelps.com.]…
Of the 92 arts organizations that had responded by Friday, nearly 60 percent reported wind, water or tree [...]

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has compiled a list of the ‘King Tut’ packages and attractions offered by Dallas’ fancier downtown hotels, including the “Bare Bones Package” at the Adolphus and the “Tutini” cocktail at the W Hotel.

The Swell Season, a.k.a. Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, a.k.a. the two stars of the indie smash Once, finally hit town Monday night, playing to a capacity crowd at the Palladium Ballroom. After wearing grooves into the film’s soundtrack from playing it so much, I can’t say I was disappointed in the live incarnation. But [...]

… it’s the one we’ve had since 9/11. So says Michael Boehm in the Los Angeles Times.
What many of them called “the perfect storm” hit in 2001. The tech-bubble burst, the World Trade Center was attacked, and economic recession ensued, discouraging donors and ticket buyers, curtailing government grants and leading to layoffs, cancellations, deferred expansion [...]

Doug McLennan is the mind behind Artsjournal.com, one of the best arts-news websites and art blog collectives around. Confession: I blog there as book/daddy, but seeing as Doug has been doing this for nine years and Artsjournal.com gets 45,000 users per day, my estimation of his achievement has some basis. Amanda Neer of Life’s a [...]

It’s no secret that women are underrepresented in the male-dominated film industry. For every Sophia Coppola or Amy Talkington, there are dozens of men filling those director’s chairs. And the male-female ratio on film crews is even more out of whack.
To that end, the Chick Flicks Film Festival, a fundraiser produced by Women in [...]

Guest blogger Brad Ford Smith is a Dallas artist and arts conservationist.

When disaster hits, all links to normality disappear, this affects the actual collection of information. One organization has stepped in to fill in one of those information gaps. The Texas Association of Museums has posted a city-by-city list of museums, galleries and historic [...]

The Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight says that we won’t hear about cultural policy during the presidential debates, not because cultural policy is trivial, but because the debates are designed to be trivial. They aren’t debates at all “but elaborately scripted reality television shows.”
So how about considering these issues?
As it stands now, corporate [...]

From Michael Roch’s exhibit, The Armchair Naturalist
Guest blogger Kristen Keckler, of Denton, teaches creative writing at University of North Texas.
What would happen if you fed foam peanuts to the elephants? Perhaps Michael Roch’s exhibit The Armchair Naturalist, currently at the Conduit Gallery, attempts to answer this question. At the show’s opening, among [...]

The Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra launched a slick update of its Web site this week while also branching out onto Facebook and MySpace to reach some new audiences.  The handiest function of the orchestra’s new home page is its virtual seating chart. Rather than the staid, static online seating charts most of us are used [...]