There’s almost an overabundance of symphonic crowd-pleasers in the area this weekend. Thursday night the Dallas Symphony Orchestra played listenable music by Higdon, Rachmaninoff and Dvorak. Then, on Friday night, the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra opened its series with an all-Tchaikovsky program that included the composer’s greatest work, the Pathétique Symphony.
The Fort Worth program, a [...]

Where exactly does one go these days to buy a Nazi flag?
That’s the question that was on my mind after taking in Upstart Productions‘ staging of Talk Radio. The play’s about a talk show host named Barry Champlain (played with vinegar in the veins by Elias Taylorson). He hosts a late-night call-in show, and he’s [...]

Beginning Sunday, you’ll be able to save a few bucks while visiting Fort Worth’s three largest museums if you take public transportation. Through November, riders or the T buses of the TRE rail line can show their tickets or passes for $2 off admission to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and 10 percent [...]

THE BEST IN BOOKS: A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Big Horn, the Last Great Battle of the American West, by Dallas author James Donovan, was named best non-fiction book by the Writers’ League of Texas. Mike Merschel of the DMN’s Texas Pages books blog has the complete list. He’ll be in Austin covering [...]

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra has a program of crowd-pleasers this weekend, which may help explain the virtually full house for Thursday night’s series-opener.
Unusually for Dallas, one of the crowd-pleasers is a contemporary work, blue cathedral by Jennifer Higdon. She has a knack for composing listenable music, and blue cathedral is no exception. Written as a [...]

Dallas author/literary agent James Donovan has won the 2009 nonfiction award from the Writers’ League of Texas for his book, A Terrible Glory:  Custer and the Little Big Horn.
The award, which comes with a cash prize of $1,000, will be presented during the Texas Book Festival on Oct. 31 at the State Capitol in Austin. [...]

Set those DVRs for 10 p.m. tonight on KERA (Channel 13). That’s when St. Vincent and Andrew Bird perform on Austin City Limits. Each of them had sold-out shows at the Granada this year, so you obviously like ‘em. Drop a comment to this post tomorrow to let us know how the ACL performance was.

Suzanne Marta is the Web Content Editor/Producer for KERA’s Economy Project and has been listening to Pink Martini since 1997.
Pink Martini — the quirky little band/orchestra from my hometown of Portland, Ore. — released “Splendor In The Grass,” its fourth CD this week.
Songs from previous releases — especially “Hang On Little Tomato” –make frequent appearances in NPR [...]

– it’s now online as one of Gary Cogill’s WFAA videos, all 20 breathless minutes of it (” “magnificent!” is pretty much how the prose starts). Mighty cool visuals, though. A first look at that rooftop logo, for instance, with a big aerial reverse zoom that makes Cogill look like a tiny bridegroom figure topping [...]

Guest blogger Bart Weiss is director of the Video Association of Dallas and VideoFest, which runs Nov. 5-8. He sends this post along about the process of creating the intro that runs before each program:
Like designing a poster (which I wrote about here), the video intro for the festival has always been important to me. [...]