Want to See ‘W.’ Before Your Friends?

Oliver Stone’s film about George W. Bush, W., hits theaters Oct. 17, but our local rep for Lionsgate, the film’s distributor, passed along to me a couple of passes to an advanced screening of the film on Tuesday, Oct. 14 at the Dallas Angelika. And being the nice guy that I am, I’m offering our readers a chance to win them. All you have to do is correctly answer the following trivia question:

“Oliver Stone has directed many actors to Oscar nominations, yet he shares a birthday with only one of them. Name this person.”

The first three people to send the correct answer to artandseek@kera.org with “W.” in the subject line each will win a pass good for you and a guest to attend the screening. Good luck.

UPDATE: We have our three winners. Thanks to all who took a guess. And for the record, the answer is Tommy Lee Jones.

Photo credit: Lionsgate

Anthony Hopkins and the DSO

We all know that Anthony Hopkins is a great actor (an Oscar and three other nominations ought to prove that). But what kind of composer is he? You can find out Oct. 17 when he comes to Dallas for the world premiere of his original compositions, played by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. And you can possibly attend for free by e-mailing clayton@landmarktheatres.com with the subject line “Anthony Hopkins” plus your name and mailing address in the body of the message.  Winners will be notified by e-mail on Monday.
And if you do win, please let us know how the performance was.

On a side note, I think I should be commended for not working any cannibal jokes into this post. Just know that it took great restraint.

The Big Center Hires the Big Voice for a Walk-On

And the answer to Stephen’s question (see below) about who the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts would get to make their opening-day announcement is really quite simple.

Just get the Greatest Voice for Announcing Anything in the World.

James Earl Jones

– who promptly gave the dignitaries and million-dollar arts patrons assembled at the Belo Mansion a little sampler (Jacques’ Seven Ages of Man speech from As You Like It, some reminiscences of playing Of Mice and Men at SMU, Fences on Broadway and The Great White Hope on stage and film — funny, there was nothing about this guy, though). And then Jones didn’t even announce the one (the only) new fact. The official opening date of the DCPA. That was left for John Eagle, head of the opening ceremony committee.

October 12, 2009.

Take a Piece of Tut Home

Part of any major museum exhibition is the array of collectibles tied to it in the gift shop. You can bet that the Kimbell is selling plenty of pretty Manet posters and Van Gogh mouse pads tied to “The Impressionists: Master Paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago.”

So it should come as no surprise that King Tut — the person whose own collection of stuff has generated “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” at the Dallas Museum of Art — comes with plenty of trinkets for sale. The museum gift shop offers the usual array of calendars and coffee mugs, but whoever is in charge of merchandising the Boy King didn’t stop at just the traditional items.

My favorite so far is the $100 hookah for sale on the left just as you enter the shop from the end of the exhibit. Not sure how many of those will sell, but at least it is out of the ordinary.

The exhibit also has an online store if you want so grab that Tut T-shirt to wear ahead of your visit.

If any of you took in the show during opening weekend, drop us a comment on this post and let us know what you thought. And if you bought something on the way out, by all means, tell us about that, too.

Photo: The Official Store of the King Tut Exhibition

Campaigning for Collin County

Thursday night at Plano’s Courtyard Theater, The Arts of Collin County Commission assembled a small but passionate crowd to inspire fundraising efforts for a new 124 acre “world class arts park and performance hall.” Where might the sprawling suburb cities of Allen, Frisco and Plano manage to fit such a mecca? If you’ve ever tried driving to IKEA by way of the Highway 121 exit off of Central Expressway, you know it as that long, long stretch of road that made you wish you’d ponied up the change for the Dallas North Tollway. One day soon, it will be “Collin County’s Central Park,” according to ACCC President Steve Matthews.

Raising $20 million in this economic climate sounds like crazytalk to me, but after listening to this succinct, lively program, I am a believer. First up was Vesselin Demirev, concertmaster of the Plano Symphony Orchestra, who stood alone on stage playing his violin. I don’t expect music at meetings, and I was impressed that this group should initiate a discussion of arts funding with such relevant loveliness. Following the performance, Bill Lively, CEO and Founding President of the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts, and former Plano mayor James Muns each spoke on art’s behalf, rallying the troops to get out there and raise money.

The first phase of development would include a 2100-seat main hall, parking and outdoor spaces for performance, sculpture, and hike and bike trails; the second phase could include artist studios, an education center and more theaters. The timeline for all this is a little hazy. Hazier still is exactly how they’re planning on raising money during an economic decline, but hey, Plano was the richest city in the country just last month, so maybe I’m being a pessimist. “We’re going to go after it, ” declared Muns. “You do not have enemies as a fundraiser.”

Tut’s Here: So What Do We Think?

Following Wednesday’s press preview of “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” the Art&Seek bloggers participated in an e-mail round-table discussion on all things Tut:

JEROME WEEKS: Setting aside, for the moment, the content of “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” at the DMA, what struck me immediately about the exhibition was its highly theatrical nature. That’s not intended as a criticism (not entirely). On recent visits to European museums, I’ve been struck by how some of them use much more technology than art or history museums in America seem comfortable using (or can afford to use) — TV displays, lasers, computer screens, digital re-enactments.

To give those readers who haven’t seen Tut some idea: The exhibition is basically split in two, with the first half devoted to Tutankhamun’s general period and immediate predecessors. It’s a mini-history of the 18^th dynasty, so that visitors may understand better such things as Akhenaten’s revolutionary monotheism, his banishment of hundreds of the old gods for his new sun god (Aten), with whom he was identified. Akhenaten may have been Tut’s father or his older brother; the precise lineage is still a matter of dispute. In any event, Tut grew up under this revolution (it meant an overturning of the dominant priesthood), and then, for some mysterious reason, Tut turned around and restored the old gods, the old priestly caste.

That first half is presented more or less like a typical museum exhibition – brightly lit and open, although with the walls and information displays designed to evoke Egyptian temples, and there is an introductory film with voiceover by Omar Sharif. But then we turn a corner and seem to enter King Tut’s tomb. Everything that follows is deliberately sunk in blue-black darkness, the better to evoke the tomb itself and, I should add, the better to highlight the gold and jewels, which are given pinpoint illumination. Tut discoverer Howard Carter’s famous remark about seeing wonderful gold glinting in the darkness is prominently posted several times (actually, there’s some dispute about whether he ever uttered those words; his own diary entries do not contain them). The ceiling has giant wood beams across it, the mummy itself is not there but recreated with a large platform in the middle of one “chamber.”

And so on. It’s all very atmospheric. A little hokey, I thought, especially with the many projected paragraphs hyping the exciting moment of discovery. But still, it’s thrillingly effective.

BETSY LEWIS: I knew this would be a tech-heavy exhibition, but the objects are amazing, and oddly I was not prepared for that. Museum regulars may be put off by the spectacle and the parking issues, but once they finally enter that first gallery – wow. The colors, the detail and the remarkable preservation of these objects will dazzle the most aloof art history major.

I thought the multimedia touches added to it, but then I have an Apple logo on my windshield. Yes, it looks like Disney, but who doesn’t like Disney? High theatricality is only a bad thing when it is intertwined with one’s personality (but I know nothing about that).

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Free Night of Theater — Success!

At the stroke of noon, I hit up www.freenightoftheater.net, hoping to score tickets. Many of the offerings sounded enticing, but the one I had set my sights on was The Light in the Piazza, presented by Theater Three. It’s not often that you get to see a Tony winner gratis. No doubt, you will all be happy to know that I succeeded.

When I checked the site just 20 minutes later, there were only a handful of shows that weren’t sold out. (And now that you are reading this, even THAT’s probably out of date.)

So now that the big ticket grab is mostly over, how do we feel about the concept? Which show did YOU target, and were you able to get it? Or was your Web browser running frustratingly slow today?

UPDATE: All the tickets are gone, folks. And in under an hour!

UPDATE II: If you missed out on tickets, a link has been added to the Free Night of Theater page that allows you to sign up for updates. There’s a chance that more tickets could be made available.

A Look Behind the Scenes at the Dallas Video Festival

Guest blogger Bart Weiss is Director of the Dallas Video Festival and president of Video Association of Dallas.

As October has arrived, I hope you have gotten some insight into how we work and think here at the fest. But like the fest, there is so much more. So forgive me if I rant a bit …

First, I want to talk about how we are are going to show the videos at the fest this year. We have always been eager to both show you new technologies and use them in the way we go about our bidness. I remember in year one (1987) there was this new thing called desktop publishing. We had no idea how do to it, but we created our first program book with it. We were one of the first festivals anywhere to have a Web site (I really wish I could find that first site ) and to have a database to automate the entry process.

So this year our new thing is iTunes (Yes, that player you are rocking to, probably as you are reading this, unless you are listening to Pandora). Aside from playing music, it can play videos in good resolution, better than playing in Quicktime. We used to dub everything to Betacam or some other tape format; now we will go digital but not DVD (they tend to skip, which is not nice).

So this should be easier to produce, look better, be cool, and, yes, put us on the bleeding edge, where sometime you get nicked, but in all or tests it worked fine. The upshot is you should not really notice any change. And now from reading this blog, you have some inside info, and when you are at the festival (did I mention that it is Nov. 6-9) you can tell the person next you you, “Hey did you know they are running that off of iTunes?”

Another cool thing we will do is talk about our videos on our site. For many years there has been a link on the site where you could just ask Bart what you should see (it is still there). But since pretty much AC and I are the only people who have seen everything, we thought we would share that with you. On the festival site, (www.videofest.org) by the schedule, we will soon have a video in which I will tell you what I like about this film and why I picked it. You sort of get a one-on-one with the director. How cool is that?

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Get the Special ‘Mummy Wrap’ at the Spa

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 — Plenty to Talk About

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 I could have gone for a little more music.

Through some double- and triple-time strumming, Hansard got more out of an acoustic guitar than any man could, and when he and Irglova harmonized, you couldn’t help but swoon. And they didn’t make the crowd wait for the goods, belting out their Oscar-winning “Falling Slowly” two songs into the night.

But never let it be said that the Irish gift for gab passed ol’ Glen by. After the former Frames frontman introduced a new song, he felt the need to go on and on (and on) about its meaning, effectively killing any momentum the previous song produced. The irony here is, though the songs have perfectly meaningful lyrics, the real beauty of the group is just listening to the delicate interplay of the male and female voice. They could have sung in Japanese and the listener could grasp those feelings of longing and love that Hansard wanted to make sure we understood.

Still, between all the talk, the show was filled with transcendent moments, including two Van Morrison covers and a sing-along version of Austin’s Daniel Johnston’s “Life in Vain.” A sign out by the souvenir stand said the show will be available soon at playedlastnight.com. It’s one that’s worth owning if you’re a Swell Season fan. Feel free to skip through the chatter if you get it.