The December issue of the print edition should be hitting newsstands near you, and here are some of the arts-related pieces you can look forward to:

1. Following up on this FrontRow piece from way back in August, I have a piece about the Booker T. Washington tap dancers who were given the opportunity to dance in a production by Dallas Symphony Orchestra Pops Conductor Marvin Hamlish, but not after some scary auditions. Says dancer Evelyn Roberts:

“I’m sure he is a big teddy bear on the inside, but that face could haunt anybody.”

2. Resident bar-hopper, Moira Muldoon, takes a trip down to Deep Ellum to visit the fabeled Adair’s Saloon and soak up all its musical Texas goodness:

It’s the kind of place where old-school Texas manners—such a lovely thing—emerge, where the guy next to you will say hello as he sits, make eye contact, and ask how you’re doing, before leaving you to your lunch. Sitting-at-the-bar conversation seems to be guided by the same principles as two-stepping: courteous, pleasant interludes that don’t monopolize your evening.

3. And our new urban planning columnist, Patrick Kennedy, throws his support behind the activist urban installation project, Better Block.

Photo by Shane Kislack for D Magazine.

Photographer Kael Alford, who moved to Oak Cliff a year ago after her husband began teaching at the University of North Texas, has spent a significant part of the last decade in highly charged areas of the world, including eight years in Bulgaria, Serbia and Kosovo, and a long recent stint in the Middle East. Her work photographing the war in Iraq is part of a traveling exhibition, Unembedded, that has shown throughout the United States. To view an audio slideshow ..read more

In tonight’s 10th episode of NBC’s Chase, Dallas finally got to play itself on TV. The opening scene showed our blonde heroine, crack U.S. Marshal Annie Frost, chasing a guy through the West End, and the screen told us that she was, in fact, in Dallas. Never mind that the building through which she pursued the fugitive and jumped to a neighboring roof was the West End Marketplace, the same building they used for Annie’s apartment in Houston a few ..read more

1. Jaap van Zweden has been awarded the Radio 4 Prize in Amsterdam, an annual honor bestowed on a Dutch musician, ensemble, or special concert for an exceptional effort in promoting classical music to a wider audience. The award comes on the heels of an extraordinary year for van Zweden, which saw successful guest appearances with a number of top American orchestras. You can read more about the award here.

2. Over the weekend, former Dallas Theater Center company actor, Martin Rayner, collapsed on stage during a performance of Freud’s Last Session, a drama about Sigmund Freud’s last months that is playing off-Broadway in New York. The New York Times reports that like the character he plays on stage, Rayner is suffering from cancer. The show closes Sunday, and Rayner hopes to be back for the final performance.

3. Many of us have those VHS cassettes of holiday movies that get dusted off once a year for ceremonial watching. In my house it was It’s a Wonderful Life, the Alastair Sim Scrooge, and, most beloved, a little 90-minute television pilot for a TV show that lives in infamy as an icon of cheesy family schmaltz (I’ll keep that one secret, but here’s a hint: it rhymes with The Baltons). Feeling the spirit, the Angelika Dallas and Plano will be screening a number of seasonal classics throughout December, including White Christmas, A Christmas Story, Holiday Inn, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and, of course, Die Hard.

There’s a moment near the end of Gasper Noé’s reckless, engaging, nauseating, pornographic, indulgent, and ultimately fascinating film, Enter the Void, when the character Linda (Paz de la Huerta) yells out through her tears: “Evil! You are all evil!” Though immediately directed at the circle of manipulators and torturers that surround and infiltrate her life, Linda’s chastisement seems to extend to the entirety of her world.

As in his last feature film, Irreversible, Noé infuses his underworld environments with drugs and ..read more

Michael Solis, Creative Director, Store Development, Visual Planning, Neiman Marcus

I”m reading Outliers : A Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, a blueprint of the hidden advantages that got certain people to where they are — from athletes, The Beatles and Bill Gates to even your date of birth. It’s a great  ”WOW” book. Also Process: 50 Product Designs from Concept to Manufacture by Jennifer Hudson. This book is an in-depth study of the creative and manufacturing processes behind 50 contemporary domestic design objects. I love the thought process involved in making things. You see design morphing though the initial ideas /sketches to the final product. Its always amazing to see how things come to fruition.

Bookmarks: core77.com; youtube.com – ( any daily monster video); instructables.com;mocoloco.com; neimanmarcus.com

Magazines, newspapers: Frame magazine; Dwell; Rolling Stone; New York Times

So much for support groups. I have completely crashed out of the National Write a Novel in a Month project. At some point I told myself that Thanksgiving would be my time of last minute proliferation, but it wasn’t to be. . . for me, at least.  Though I had all but forgot about my failed efforts, this note dropped in my inbox from one of the writers in FrontRow’s group: 

Sunday night, 65,031 words (35,000 of those in just the last three days) with three more good hours of typing left in the evening.  Unfortunately, I am not even 3/4 through the story.  There’s still a hit-and-run, a murder and kidnapping to be written.

Did I mention that it’s a romance?

I also have a title for my next book:  How I Ended Up Divorced From Writing 65,000 Words In One Month.

 Too long? 

So fearless novel writers for a month, tomorrow is the deadline. Who among you is still standing?

There is something magical and otherworldly about puppets, which make them a perfectly-suited vehicle for fantasy. When the Dallas Children’s Theater’s production of The Snow Queen begins, a puppet rendition of author Hans Christian Anderson introduces us to his story and the stage suddenly transports to a smoke filed realm where two demons create a mirror that distorts the world’s beauty. The two ugly, wooden-faced puppets cackle and shriek as the mirror shatters, creating a moment is both terrifying and ..read more

1. Take a bow, Dallas Hub Theater. The alternative theater space which fulfilled a vital role in the local scene by offering a home for fledging companies – from theater to dance to experimental – will close. Executive director Tim Shane speaks about his decision to close the space in a video on Theater Jones.

2. When FrontRow launched last February, one of our first spats came from an exchange between artist Richard Patterson and the Dallas Art Fair’s Chris Byrne about the local art fair. That conversation continued, and the two have been cooking up additions and improvements for the 2011 edition of the fair. In PaperCity, Patterson and Byrne chat about the fair and what we can expect early next year.

3. And speaking of PaperCity, for years PaperCity fine arts editor Catherine Anspon dreamed of creating a full-color volume dedicated to Texas art. Now, her dream is reality: Texas Artists Today is a “260-page art anthology” that catalogues 62 of the state’s artists.

Disney has produced some gems in recent years by focusing on big releases with cross-generational appeal — like Wall E, Up, and Toy Story 3. But missing from the recent repertoire are the kinds of heartfelt fairy tales that minted the Disney brand, beginning with Snow White, and fueled the resurgence that began with the Hans Christian Anderson adaptation, The Little Mermaid. And while the new fare have often ranked among the best recent releases, it is hard not to ..read more