Separated at Birth?
The Morning News ran a story today about how the Hotel Congress inTucson has for years held a ’30s-styled event called Dillinger Days — a way of commemorating the fact that gangster John Dillinger and several cohorts were arrested there in 1934. It happens to be a prominent scene in director Michael Mann’s [...]

HITTING THE BIG TIME: Arlington artist Pavel Melecky has been named a finalist in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Never heard of the contest? Neither had I before today. But the prize for the winner is what caught my attention: $25,000 and a commission to make a portrait of a living person to be displayed [...]

GETTING PLUCKY: There are some instruments that are relatively easy to play. With its 47 strings and seven pedals, the harp is not one of them. Could that be why we don’t hear from this ancient instrument all that often. Susan Dederich-Pejovich, principle harpist for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, explores that topic and explains the [...]

Having just returned from a week and a half in Berkeley and Seattle, I’m catching up on my reading. It turns out that the July 2 edition of The New York Review of Books has two essays of interest to Texas readers (yes, I see your little group, standing alone in the back. Hi there!).
The [...]

REMEMBERING MICHAEL JACKSON: As you’ve no doubt heard, the King of Pop is dead. And the news has been on everyone’s lips since Thursday afternoon. Fans gathered locally in churches and bars last night, reliving their memories of his music. The Dallas Morning News was kind enough to repost its reviews of his 1984 performance [...]

COUNT LETTERMAN IN: In our continuing love affair with all things St. Vincent, enjoy her network television debut above on the Late Show with David Letterman. She performed “Marrow” with all the funk that four saxophone players can provide. Nice guitar solo in the middle there, too. UPDATE: Also, some artsy, B&W photos from a [...]

Playwright Julie Jordan has been making the perfectly credible case that female dramatists do not get produced as often as men — even when you factor out writers like Shakespeare. She pushed for more research into the matter, and Emily Glassberg Sands, who conducted three different studies, reported on the results Monday night in New [...]

Arts & Letters Live is offering a rarity this Tuesday — a two-fer. In fact, it’s something of an African two-fer, featuring as it does authors Alexandra Fuller and Chimamanda Adichie, the one from Zimbabwe, the other from Nigeria. Fuller may be the better known in America for her justly celebrated childhood memoir, Don’t [...]

Barry Kooda of The Nervebreakers

THE KESSLER COMETH: Fort Worth music writer Ken Shimamoto shares the above video of ex-Nervebreakers guitarist Barry Kooda playing a tune at the once-and-future Kessler Theater in Oak Cliff. The theater, which was built in the 1940s but hasn’t been used for anything in the past 30 years, is currently undergoing [...]

It’s pretty rare that I would describe a film as “mind blowing,” though that term is thrown around pretty loosely by some critics. And it’s not for lack of opportunity with me, as I see 70 or so movies a year.
Thursday night, though, I saw a film that blew my mind.
Samuell Lynne Galleries kicked off [...]