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A Visit To The Etruscans At SMU’s Meadow Museum

Our good Professor Spiegelman wandered over to take a look at the new exhibit about this mysterious people and wrote up what he found for the WSJ.

Bad News: Home Prices Have A Long Way To Fall. Good News: Not In Dallas

Here’s the topline of a report from Deutsche Bank. New York could fall 47 percent? Yikes. Got a condo in Florida? Double yikes. Could this actually be good news? Megan McArdle thinks so.

Re: “D Art Slam”

One more thing. Wick and John Sughrue drafted a letter to explain what we’re up to. In part, they said:

Of all the changes to Dallas in the last decade, the most exciting to us is the burgeoning of a vibrant home-grown art community. On May 29-31, 2009, D Magazine and f.i.g. will celebrate this community at our first-ever D Art Slam at f.i.g., right next to Dallas’ fabulous new Center for the Performing Arts.

We are passionate about supporting local artists and introducing them to a greater audience. D Art Slam is a three-day, juried event designed to showcase the talent of local visual artists. We intend to make Dallas the number one city in America for promoting local talent in an elegant and sophisticated venue that complements their work.

The location couldn’t be better: f.i.g is a high-design, high-concept environment that is arresting without overpowering the work on the walls. It provides a comfortable space for patrons to interact informally with artists.

New “D Art Slam” Site Is Up

As promised, the site has been updated. Remember, deadline for artists to submit their work is Sunday. Don’t dally. Your motivation? At the D Art Slam (powered by f.i.g.!), the New Dallas Nine Awards will be given out, and those peeps will be featured in the August issue of the “print product.”

I’m Sure This Will Get Everything Running Smoothly Again: The Conficker Worm

Coming tomorrow — maybe, maybe not — is the latest version of the Conficker worm, called by Slate tech columnist Farhad Majoo “the Bugatti of worms.” Talk to your IT guy. And even if you don’t use Windows, there could be trouble. Says Manjoo:

But having a safe machine doesn’t mean you’re safe. Conficker’s true aim may be to bring chaos to the Internet, at which point you might feel its wrath even if your computer is OK. When Conficker infects a host, it ensnares it into a botnet—a massive network of computers geared for unsavory ends. Botnets can spew out spam, mount denial-of-service attacks to bring down Web sites, or consume so much bandwidth that they drown out all other network traffic.

Sweet fancy Moses.

UPDATE: A same-building-working FBvian points me here and here, where an 11th-hour double guns to the worm is emerging.

Win a Free Tut Trip to Cairo, Egypt

Today is your last day to register. If you win, consider taking Spider Monkey with you.

Gremlins At Work On All D Magazine Sites

Apologies. The sites will be painfully slow to access (as well as to post on) at times all week. They gave me a quite detailed explanation about why but I didn’t understand a word of it.

AFI Last Night: One Nation

Last night at NorthPark, I took in the premiere of One Nation, a documentary by three local filmmakers (Justin Wilson, Tony Wann, and Jack Waldrip) that uses songs, news footage, commercials, and all sorts of other pictures and sounds to recreate the turbulent year of 1968. Moving through the year chronologically, One Nation is intense and even funny at times (it includes a commercial for Colt .45, when the malt liquor was positioning itself as an elite beverage for white folks), using only the raw material the year provided with no outside comment. That’s not to say there isn’t a strong point of view or a strong way of expressing it. The most powerful sequence begins with a clip of Johnny Cash performing “Ring of Fire,” and gradually, that’s mashed up with footage of the U.S. Army making its way through Vietnam with flamethrowers. It’s a little bit long and the month-by-month setup means some of the more important events (the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the assassinations of MLK and RFK) happen well before the climax. But it’s well worth seeing — especially if you, like me, didn’t live through 1968 the first time. One Nation screens again tomorrow at 4:15 p.m. at the Magnolia.

The Marty Cortland Stimulus Plan: Buy Canada

Marty has been bugging me for weeks to post this. The funny thing is, he’s actually half-serious. He thinks the United States should offer to buy Canada.

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Leading Off (3/31/09)

1. Lincoln High School principal Earl Jones, who has been at the campus two decades, was recently given a 20-day suspension and is scheduled to be reassigned to another campus next school year because a coach paddled a student two years ago, even though the principal reportedly reprimanded the coach. Prediction: tomorrow, the details will have changed considerably.

2. The Texas Senate passed a bill yesterday that would allow police to set up sobriety checkpoints and would expand their ability to give blood or breath tests to suspected drunk drivers. MADD is happy, but unsure if it will pass the House. I mean, have you seen the collection of drunks in the Texas House?

3. With new-car sales dropping 35 percent in North Texas, VW Lewisville has decided to start selling scooters. I’d love to buy a Vespa, actually, but I’m not sure how I’d get it home. No way I’m taking one of those suckers on I-35.

Reel FX and Massive Black Make AFI Even Cooler

This photo was taken Saturday night at the ReelFX Entertainment and Massive Black party at the Fashion Industry Gallery. Massive Black is a California-based concept art studio that does conceptual design for video games, film, print, toys, comics, and more. Reel FX is a local company that does concept design, animation, and visual effects for films, special attractions, and commercials. They came together to throw a very different type of party for AFI Dallas. I know it’s not an amazing photo, but as you can see, there is a lady modeling in the background, an artist sketching on his computer screen in the foreground, and the projected image on the wall behind him. Now, imagine about 20 other artists doing the same thing at the same time, a (really great) DJ spinning, nude and half-nude models posing, and about a hundred hipster kids sitting around sketching, and you’ve got the idea. Turns out, these kids were part of a Conceptart.org workshop in town that started yesterday. The vibe was energetic and young, a little racy (ahem female anatomy), and very, very cool. That is all.

NPR Blows Whistle on Bob Perry After Mansfield Couple Loses $800k Award

NPR’s most recent Weekend Edition featured a story about Bob and Jane Cull, a couple from Mansfield tangled in litigation with Bob Perry of Houston-based Perry Homes (the politically minded among you probably recognize Perry as one of the top donors for Republican causes—Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, among other things). The Culls claim Perry built them a shoddy home that couldn’t pass inspection, and several years ago the couple won $800,000 in damages. Perry was ordered to retake ownership of the house. In an appeal last year, the Texas Supreme Court sided with Perry and the Culls lost their $800,000 award. Here’s the issue NPR brought to light: Perry has donated more than $21 million to Republican candidates over the last three years, nine of whom are on the Texas Supreme Court. Read it here.

A Tough Day For DFW GM Dealers, Workers

Good luck to all the North Texas General Motors dealers, and to the workers at the company’s Arlington plant. After today’s moves by the White House–including the unceremonious booting of GM CEO Rick Wagoner–they will need it. The idea that Barack Obama’s “team” knows more about running a major American car company than the company itself is nothing short of ludicrous.

Bush To Throw Out First Pitch at Texas Rangers Opener

The Mighty MJH has video of his last first pitch right here.

Bonnie and Clyde Author on KERA Today

Loyal readers of the “print product” who enjoyed the excerpt of Go Down Together we ran in the April issue will want to tune in to KERA 90.1 FM today at 1 p.m. The book is about Bonnie and Clyde, and it was written by local typer person Jeff Guinn, who will discuss with host Krys Boyd the myths and truths about the murderous duo.

Christopher Hitchens Loves The Texas Evolution Fight

The genially acerbic controversialist was in Dallas for the Christian Book Expo (which, we have failed to mention, was a bust) and, naturally, got himself involved in the textbook argument. He now proposes a solution:

In the spirit of compromise, then, I propose the following. First, let the school debating societies restage the wonderful set-piece real-life dramas of Oxford and Dayton, Tenn. Let time also be set aside, in our increasingly multiethnic and multicultural school system, for children to be taught the huge variety of creation stories, from the Hindu to the Muslim to the Australian Aboriginal. This is always interesting (and it can’t be, can it, that the Texas board holdouts think that only Genesis ought to be so honored?). Second, we can surely demand that the principle of “strengths and weaknesses” will be applied evenly. If any church in Texas receives a tax exemption, or if any religious institution is the beneficiary of any subvention from the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, we must be assured that it will devote a portion of its time to laying bare the “strengths and weaknesses” of the religious world view, and also to teaching the works of Voltaire, David Hume, Benedict de Spinoza, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. This is America. Let a hundred flowers bloom, and a thousand schools of thought contend. We may one day have cause to be grateful to the Texas Board of Education for lighting a candle that cannot be put out.

Miles Fisher, the World’s Best Tom Cruise Impressionist

Miles Fisher is a St. Mark’s grad. He does a heck of a Tom Cruise impression. He lives in Los Angeles now, but Fisher will be in town tonight for an AFI screening of a film he wrote and acts in called Headshot. It’s a 10-minute short, and Fisher says if you find him after the screening, he’ll grab a pint with you.

Andres Duany on Krys Boyd’s “Think” (90.1) At Noon

He is the godfather, father, and uncle of New Urbanism (read his favorite quotes here: they encapsulate the movement wonderfully), and he will be talking today with my favorite interviewer, the lovely and talented Ms. Boyd on KERA.

D Art Slam Artist’s Deadline Extended

The deadline for submitting artwork to our juried art show has been extended, to April 5 (the site still says April 1 but will be updated shortly). I’ve been asked who the jurors are. Here’s what I can tell you: the jurors are anonymous until the artists have been selected on April 20. But the panelists are arts community advocates, including a local arts media expert, curator, and renowned artist. So, again, the deadline is Sunday, April 5. Chop, chop.

Leading Off (3/30/09)

1. If you catch this before heading into work, Ryan Moats and his wife will be on Good Morning America today, talking to Robin Roberts. Updating the story: former Cowboy Zach Thomas says Officer Robert Powell mistreated his wife, too. (I’ll say the timing seems questionable, but that’s as far onto Powell’s side as I’ll go.) And Angela Hunt has called for his dismissal.

2. Prepare for a feisty Wednesday, when the per-pack tax on cigarettes goes from 39 cents to $1.01. Between that and the smoking ban taking effect on April 10, not to mention my wife’s unquenchable blood lust, there is little to no chance I’ll be smoking in a month. Thanks for kicking me in the jeans again, America.

3. The Mavs made a concerted, team-wide effort to murder me dead yesterday afternoon, allowing the Cleveland Cavaliers to outscore them…let’s see…carry the two…huh, that’s doesn’t look right…82-44 in the last three quarters of the game. In other Mavs news, Mark Cuban was fined 25 grand by the league for comments he made about refs via Twitter. He responded with a joke about someone figuring out how to make money off Twitter and several other similar japes that I would publish in their entirety, but he’s sounding litigous. (He’s @mcuban, by the way.)

Donald Hodges: “I’m very much embarrassed.”

I’m just now getting around to Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, in which there appears a touching story about Donald Hodges, a Dallas mutual-fund manager who, as you might expect, hasn’t been doing well lately. Some of his clients might have another word to describe the story. But it goes to show you how even the most prudent, well-respected investors were incapable of navigating The Mess.

Dita Shops Dallas

Speaking of people you bump into at the AFI festival, here’s Hollywood actor/model Dita de Leon. Dita, who’s currently in the flick Senior Skip Day with Tara Reid on Comedy Central, was in town partly to chat up Dallas and Houston investors in a movie project she’s shopping tentatively titled Infamous. Written by de Leon, who bills herself “The All-American Latin Girl,” the movie’s about the power struggle between actors and filmmakers and may involve some shooting in Big D, Dita says. If de Leon looks familiar, you may have seen her in Paris Hilton’s Bottoms Up, or in Boys & Girls Guide to Getting Down (Showtime). She also tried out to be a Bond girl, but didn’t get the part. I’ll say this: the All-American Latin Girl’s got moxie.

Re: Pics From Last Night’s AFI Gig

I’ve got better pics of Adrien Brody at last night’s event over here.

New iPhone App Developed by Former T.I. Guys

They don’t live in Dallas anymore, but the guys who started Bump Technologies are former T.I. guys from Dallas. It’s a way to share info on two iPhones by bumping them together. Which will surely lead to the line: “Hey, you wanna bump?”

Friday Afternoon Random Question: Smuggling Gang

Since it’s been AFI Day here for the most part, here’s a question prompted by last night’s screening of The Brothers Bloom, which involves con men and smuggling and so on:

If you were a smuggler, and I’m not suggesting you should be, what would you smuggle?

(Pretty sure, like always, this will backfire.)