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 new film, Public Enemies.

The News might have added that this is in sharp contrast to North Texas which is pretty much silent on our area’s extensive involvement with the Great Age of Bankrobbers. You often hear Dallasites remark about how their city has no history. What that actually means is that it has very little history that the city wants to acknowledge because it wants something to extol, to sell. Recall the long battle to get even something as epochal as the JFK assassination suitably treated by the Sixth Floor Museum. It’s little wonder that one could live here for years, drive through every neighborhood and learn extremely little about the region’s criminal past (from Sam Bass and Belle Starr forward) and its history of racial bombings to its role in blues and jazz and rock ‘n’ roll.

But in the ’30s, North Texas was neckdeep in the bloodshed on both sides of the law — from the fact that Machine Gun Kelly (Fort Worth), Pretty Boy Floyd (Oklahoma) and Bonnie and Clyde (Dallas) carried out a lot of their crimes in the area when they weren’t actually from here to the fact that many of the officers who hunted down and shot these killers were Texans. These include Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, highway patrolman Manny Gault, Dallas deputies Bob Alcorn and Ted Hinton (the Bonnie and Clyde ambush) and Dallas special agent Charles Winstead, who helped track Machine Gun Kelly and shot John Dillinger. (The News‘ Kent Biffle wrote a 2005 column on the man who eventually became security chief at Los Alamos.)

As the new Johnny Depp movie and Bryan Burroughs’ book (Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34) make clear –

– the early and incompetent FBI was seriously outmatched by the rapid rise of these mobile and heavily armed robbers. So J. Edgar Hoover turned to a handful of  seasoned Texas “Cowboys” to bring them down — and save his agency and his fledgling bureaucratic career.

That crime spree was almost entirely a Midwest event from upper Midwest (Wisconsin to Chicago) to lower Midwest (Kansas City to Texas). In the film, Texas and the southern half of the spree do not loom large, understandably so because Mann made the decision to concentrate on Dillinger, the most appealing of the bunch, cutting away Kelly and the (already, unjustly romanticized) Barrows. Texas is almost entirely confined to the presence of Winstead, played by Stephen Lang, although there’s also a slender Dallas connection among the performers. In a choice courtroom scene, veteran character actor Peter Gerety plays Dillinger’s hired mouthpiece, Louis Piquett. Gerety was a member of artistic director Adrian Hall’s Trinity Rep company in Rhode Island and appeared at the Dallas Theater Center. His older sister, Anne Gerety, was a member of the DTC’s acting company in the ’80s.

One of the perks of this job is that you occasionally get to talk to people who you’ve long admired from afar.  Wednesday morning was one of those times, when I spoke with Christina Marrs. She’s one of the founding members of the Austin-based Asylum Street Spankers, a band I listened to while attending UT nearly every Wednesday night at their standing gig at the Electric Lounge (R.I.P.)

On Friday, she and the five other full-time members of the Spankers will play the Granada Theater, mixing a cocktail that’s equal parts traditionalist and tawdry. You’ll rarely see a band that can seamlessly slide from a heartfelt Gospel  standard to a song like “I’m a Bear in a Ladies Boudoir.”

Here’s what Christina had to say about what you can expect on Friday:

I’ve been searching for years for the right way to describe the Spankers’ music, and I don’t ever feel like I can get it quite right. How would you describe it?

Christina Marrs: We have similar problems. I’ve been doing this 15 years, and I still have trouble describing it to people. There’s just no convenient, three-word catch phrase. I like some things that a couple of reviewers have come up with. One was “post-modern jug band.” I really liked that. Another was “punk-rock vaudeville.”

Well, I’m glad to hear I’m not the only person who has had that problem.

C.M.: Oh, no - I face similar problems all the time. “So what’s your band like?” Uh …

The band has always had a split personality - part traditionalists and part sinners. Have you found over the years that fans prefer one side over the other?

C.M.: I think that’s part of what sets us aside from a straight-up novelty band. I think our fans like that we can be reverent and irreverent in the same show. … We’re not afraid to use humor and be bawdy, but it’s not all just one giant joke.

On your myspace page, you say that you have a very low tolerance for “idiots and drunks.” That must be tough for someone who performs in a lot of clubs and bars?

C.M.: [Laughs] Yeah, it can be kind of a challenge sometimes. I don’t drink - I quit drinking about 10 years ago. And it’s hard to deal with certain people when you’re sober and you’re at work! I find that especially if there is a particular annoying person stalking me throughout the evening, I’ll have to lock myself in the green room until everyone’s gone home.

I’ve always wondered where the band’s name came from.

C.M.: Asylum Street refers to Guadalupe here in Austin, which is also known as The Drag, and it’s the main quarter that goes right in front of UT here. If you look at a really old map of Austin, you see the city center, and then way, way out on the outskirts, north of town, is the insane asylum, which, of course, is now called the state hospital. And the street that lead out to it is what is now Guadalupe. So it was referred to as “Asylum Street.” Actually, it might have been “Asylum Avenue” - I’m not sure now - but Asylum Avenue Spankers just didn’t have the same ring. But we started out busking on that same street. The spankers part refers to an old musicology term that refers to a “spanker” as being someone who can play their instrument vigorously or with skill, as in, “Spank that bass!” or “Spank that guitar!” Anyway, that’s our story.

REALITY GETS ARTSY: Sarah Jessica Parker’s production company will launch an art-related reality show on Bravo. Contestants will compete for cash prizes and a gallery exhibition. There’s no word yet on when this will air, but given the lead time necessary for reality shows, I’m guessing sometime next year. As you know, North Texas has always had a presence on reality shows, offering up everyone from Kelly Clarkson (American Idol) to Colby Donaldson (Survivor) to Lisa Garza (The Next Food Network Star) to Melissa Rycroft (The Bachelor AND Dancing with the Stars). So given the number of artists living and working in this area, surely one of you is right for the show. It looks like you’ll have to travel to one of the casting calls, though, so here’s the deets on that.

DCT GETS MAGICAL: A smart way to get parents to take their kids to children’s productions is to stage an adaptation of something the parents might have watched when they were kids. The may be the strategy with Dallas Children’s Theater’s The Neverending Story, based both on the 1979 book and 1985 movie. Mark Lowry and Nancy Churnin have each reviewed the show, and they came to a similar conclusion: the script could use a little work, but the staging is fantastic. Reviewing for theaterjones.com, Lowry says, “From a book about the power of imagination comes a very creative stage production that illustrates how theater can create its own kind of magic.” And over on dallasnews.com, Churnin calls the show, “a magical mix of potent projections and eye-popping puppet.”

You get the picture: The Terminator Conquers Hiroshi Araki.

But what’s interesting about SUPER DYNAMIC ACTION GO!, the current exhibition at the Fort Worth Contemporary Arts gallery — interesting, that is, to us media-cubicle-zombie types with our shameless need for fresh online content — is that the curator involved, Joel Kiser, is a grad student in Texas Christian University’s art department.

Who makes videos.

So SUPER DYNAMIC ACTION GO! is a local art show that actually has a couple of video promos on YouTube.  And they’re not the usual “hushed footage of white walls with images affixed” or “party shots of cah-razy wine-sipping at the opening reception.” These babies convey (or “sell”) the exhibition’s general aesthetic by being tongue-in-cheek-ish movie trailers. The one above comes complete with a voiceover booming “Super Dynamic Action Go!” The background music is a cheesy, James-Bond-Meets-Astro-Boy mix with screaming horns and meaningless explosions. The overall effect is of a low-budget Japanese anime series that’s been dubbed for the American market. There’s just a little of the pop-send-up spirit of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

The other trailer (there’s a third on YouTube but it doesn’t work) –

– plays like a big-budget, techno thriller (Kiser has the satirist’s cojones to make his name logo resemble Lucasfilms’). This trailer has cooler visuals and richer, more symphonic music (angelic choirs, percussive string section, tolling bells). But the weakness here is that it takes the video 58 seconds (an eternity in YouTubeTime) to get to an artist’s name or work. (For the record, the other artists involved are Dustin Wallace, Colin Morse and Yousif Del Valley.) And then the video doesn’t really have enough fresh imagery for the full, four- minute running time –without repeating. Still, these ain’t your grandfather’s gallery promos.

Finally, what’s also interesting about SUPER DYNAMIC ACTION GO! is that it’s not really a gallery exhibition inside Fort Worth Contemporary Arts. The FWCA was established last year as half of the Art Galleries at TCU (the Moudy Gallery is the other half). Part of its mission is to allow TCU students “to interact with all aspects of the planning, implementation, and staging of exhibitions within a pedagogical setting.”

In this case, that means a window.

That’s right, despite the world-conquering hypey-ness of its all-caps title, SUPER DYNAMIC ACTION GO! is window dressing. Or, if you prefer, a window installation. It’s part of this summer’s Window Space series at FWCA. Which means, like the videos, the whole East-West, high-low, gizmo-cartoon mix is emphatically compact. Instead of the discreet, thoughtful distinctions and separations of a gallery show, SDAG! is chock-a-block with references, a collective compilation, wired together, interconnected, all there.

In short, a nifty mash-up.

A memorial service will be held at the gallery, tentavely scheduled for Aug. 15. The Light & Sie Gallery will issue an announcement soon, Hilton said.
“First Snow” by Belgian photographer Wouyter Derutter

The owners over at indie clothing hot spot House of Dang on Bryan Street are continuing their weekly Summer Smackdown (last week’s free Sarah Jaffe performance had the backyard party space packed) with a Michael Jackson tribute party tonight. Coincidentally, the organizers had been planning this party weeks before MJ passed away, but wanted to continue on by throwing a tribute to the man in the mirror. Partygoers will get to watch Moonwalker and Thriller. We hear a group sing-a-long is also planned. 

Check back tomorrow for a full report…

A WINNING WOODY: On Tuesday morning, we let you know about a honey of a deal to see Woody Guthrie’s American Song at Theatre Three. And as the reviews come in, it’s sounding like those five-cent tickets are worth every penny. A production built around a famed singer is obviously going to live and die on the strength of the cast’s voices, and Theatre Three has assembled quite a cast. Alexandra Bonifield says, “all singers brought their varied slices of Americana to vivid life with guitar, banjo, piano, bass and mandolin accompaniment.” Meanwhile, Lawson Taitte writes, “The singers are all so good it seems invidious to single out favorites.”

WELCOMING THE NEIGHBORS: As a way to celebrate the opening of the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts in October, the Dallas Museum of Art will stage a pair of exhibitions that highlight the link between performing and visual arts. The first show, Performance/Art, will focus on a group of six contemporary artists who feature elements of theater, opera and performance into their work. It will run from Oct. 9 to March 21, 2010. The second show, All the World’s a Stage: Celebrating Performance in the Visual Arts, will group works from the museum’s permanent collection that center on the performing arts. It will be up from Aug. 30 to Feb. 28, 2010. You can read the complete news release here.

ETC.: Winners of the 13th Annual Videographer Awards were recently announced. Several of the award recipients are from North Texas;  click here for the entire winners list. … Artisan Center Theater has hired a new artistic director (dallasnews.com) … The Dallas Museum of Art is giving away four tickets to the museum to three winners of a photo contest. For more details and to submit your pics, visit the museum’s Facebook page.

Photo by Orville Brown

“Jazz has no promo, there’s plenty of good jazz out here, but no one promotes,  starting with the record companies. But we cannot stop fighting status quo, keep playing, singing and improving.  Jazz is Art for the Ear !!!”

-Wendell Sneed’s Facebook status on Monday, June 29, 2009