1. On Art & Seek, former Dallas Contemporary director Joan Davidow expresses her hope that the developer interest in West Dallas, a result of the Calatrava Bridge’s touchdown in the neighborhood, will go right – become an “exemplar” of architecture and artists. But she rightly points to how something as seemingly benign as a choice of art may indicate that the future may not be picture perfect.

Now, as you exit the Continental bridge and drive west on Singleton, you see an uninspired metal sculpture (by Santiago Pena) of playful cutouts of children, and large, empty warehouses painted bright colors, sitting isolated on broad, empty fields.  I call this “plop” sculpture, more decorative than thought provoking.  This is the way the investment group gets your attention, as they envision their apartments, townhouses, cafes, and skyscrapers.

Sounds familiar. And Davidow is right, it is time we all start paying close attention to the simmer stew across the river from Victory Park.

2. This week brought news of the new Texas Independent Film Network, a coalition of Texas film societies, theaters, and universities that will launch an independent film circuit in February. The goal is to offer a way to showcase work by Texas filmmakers. The distribution model feels more akin to music than movies. The coalition will choose films or short films which will then travel to the cities represented in the group, beginning with a block of short films featuring work by Wes Anderson and Robert Rodriguez among others. Locally the Dallas Video Association and The Texas Theatre have partnered to host Dallas events, and the Lone Star Film Society and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth will show the movies in Fort Worth.

3. Renato Mazza, the Italian-born artist and gallerist who opened a gallery in Dallas in the 1940s, has passed away at 97. Mazza, who claimed distant relation to a medieval pope, made many portraits and busts of some of this city’s prominent citizens, including Jake and Nancy Hamon, Robert Dedman, and Virginia and Algur Meadows, while always maintaining a studio in Rome and showing both in Dallas and internationally.

Pianist Peter Serkin joined the Dallas Symphony and guest conductor Thomas Dausgaard Thursday at Meyerson Symphony Center, alternately dazzling and puzzling, with an at times stunning and at times disconcerting performance of Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat.

Serkin, scion of one of the great musical families, has, at 63, been an iconic presence on the concert stage for over four decades. He and conductor Dausgaard clearly agreed on a deliberately intense performance of this concerto from the beginning. And, ..read more

Trey Johnson/Bryan Wakeland (The Kessler)

Thrift Store Cowboys/The Slow Burners (Lochrann’s): Thrift.  Store.  Cowboys.  Really?  Will these disparaging fake new genre name jokes ever stop?  I mean, come on, can’t you just respect the fact that these people write songs in the Grand Ole tradition and quit picking on their obvious respect for roots music and Americana stylings?

Oh, that’s the actual band name.  Well, that makes me feel better, especially after taking a little bit of a verbal slap by Preston ..read more

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Fantastic Four #587: As you may have heard, a member of the Fantastic Four dies in this issue. But the clock is already ticking on that character’s resurrection. The truth is, each member of the Fantastic Four will outlive you and me and anyone else reading this. Superman, Captain America, Batman, the Flash, and the Green Lantern have all had their own overhyped death scenes,yet all of them are alive and well, starring in several comics each month.

Cowboy Ninja Viking Vol. 2: Based on positive word-of-mouth, I picked up the first paperback collection of this series about schizophrenic secret agents. My favorite part was discovering all of the other “triplet” combinations. For example, the titular cowboy-ninja-viking’s biggest rival is a conquistador-pirate-oceanographer, and his wife is a sniper-chef-samurai. 

Infestation #1: Only in comics could you have a story that involves the Optimus Prime, Snake Eyes, Mr. Spock, and Dr. Peter Venkman. Oh, and did I mention there are zombies?

If you were, say, a Super Bowl visitor, wandering into the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and encountering the work of artist Ed Ruscha for the first time, you may think the artist was road-obsessed. That’s how naturally the thematic thread of the exhibition, Ed Ruscha: Road Tested, flows through the four galleries. The show includes work spanning more than forty years of the artist’s career, beginning, in a sense, before the art, with a road map traced with ink, ..read more

Here are this week’s gallery openings.

Photo:  “Green Bay Packers vs. Kansas City Chiefs, Super Bowl 1, Los Angles Coliseum, January 15, 1967″ from NEIL LEIFER: For the Love of the Game at Photographs Do Not Bend.

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1. Yesterday artist Richard Patterson proclaimed the video piece by the artist currently known as “M” up at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts as the best piece of art by a local artist he has ever seen. In the Star-Telegram, Gaile Robinson writes about watching the work from the “Fort Worth Puck” arrive:

If the drawing were not topped with glass, it would seem as if the slightest breeze could blow the delicate lines off the paper, scattering tiny filaments of ink across the floor.

2. Preston Jones reviews the new Seryn release (programming note: the band, which you can watch perform here, will play at tonight’s Frontburner party at the Granada), and in his opening remarks he tips his hat to Christopher Mosley’s genre coinage: “dustbowl hipsterism” and “nature folk,” words our music writer used to take down related scenesters, The Fox and the Bird.

In Jones’ piece, he alleges that Mosley took his snarky stance on the band’s sound to “stir up comments.” Mosley’s thoughts stirred up comments because they were challenging, not widely shared, and cut to the core of a legitimate complaint about these bands. The real rub is that Mosley succeeded – as Preston Jones illustrates by dedicating half of his review of a band’s record release to comments Mosley made about another band — at categorizing this style of music in a trivializing, negative light. If there wasn’t some uncomfortable truth in what Mosley wrote, why would the reactions have been so strong?

Oh, Chase. It’s really not fair of you to do that to us. You can’t tease us with the prospect of seeing our beloved Annie Frost wrestle a bloodthirsty tiger, and then not even let her get close to being thrown to the beast. When the kidnappers who abducted her in last week’s episode drove up to that Mexican ranch and we first spied the giant cat prowling around in its cage, with a pile of bones nearby, I had ..read more

On February 3, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra will present a concerto entitled “Gaemlan D’Drum,” a world premiere work that is a collaboration between renowned drummer, percussionist, and composer Stewart Copeland (formerly of The Police as well as the overlooked solo act Klark Kent) and local percussionist outfit, D’Drum.  Copeland was commissioned by The Dallas Symphony Orchestra to write the piece.

Influenced by the ancient Gamelan music of Indonesia , Copeland’s concerto utilizes gamelan instruments that have been modified in order to function in ..read more