If you listen to the much-welcomed, often pretty darn great Music to the Core station (a slogan which sounds to me like a good name for a nostalgic hour-long radio show for KNON that exclusively plays cuts from D.C’s early-80s scene) you’ve likely now heard Dallas’ favorite Brit-pop outfit, the Happy Bullets, co-headed by Oak Cliff’s resident bicycle / urban planning advocate Jason Roberts. KXT is not the only outlet digging the Bullets as of late. One of the group’s songs, “Good Day,” has been picked up by a Swedish ad campaign. You can watch two ads here and here. Via Jason: the band’s royalties so far consist of wooden shoes and IKEA gift cards. (Got the powder but not the gun / got the dog but not the bun, I guess.) So in related news, the Happy Bullets need a manager.

Boy, it’s been quiet around here lately. I apologize to our regular readers – some changes are afoot and we will fill you in soon. For now, I couldn’t help but break the silence with this little video on Art Babble about photographer Catherine Opie (some of her work was in the Pretty Baby exhibition at the Fort Worth Modern a couple of years back, if you remember). Perhaps you know about Art Babble; I’m just learning about it now. It is a project out of the Indianapolis Museum of Art that aggregates video about art from a variety of sources. As IMA head honcho Max Anderson explains here, there is something about the way video can teach about the visual arts that makes it uniquely engaging and enlightening. Think of Art Babble as a mini-Art 21. Enjoy.

A couple of days ago we mentioned our silent urban spaces. Now comes this via Gorilla vs. Bear: Phoenix’s poetry in the public square. Enjoy.

Why does a city needs honest and intelligent criticism from its mainstream media? It is a way of expressing – and keeping in check – our ideas about ourselves. A city’s character is expressed in a particular and poignant way in the art it produces, and in the way it views and understands art from other places. Criticism helps plumb that expression, articulating ourselves to ourselves. So why am I worried about this new management structure at the Dallas Morning News that places entertainment editors a rung below sales managers on the chain of command? I’m not sure. To be honest, I rarely head to the DMN for criticism and arts news. This has more to do with the absolutely frustrating and convoluted workings of their Kafka-esque web-ad machine known as Dallasnews.com. (I used to read Hunter Hawk on DART when Quick was daily – he was usually the best thing in there.) But whereas the DMN seems to have been loosing relevance in this city’s scene for some time, I can’t imagine how this new arrangement won’t at the very least add a new layer of distrust, if not compromising their views altogether. It will be interesting to see how this one plays out.

Responding to Hannah Arendt’s half-century-old lamentations about the loss of public space, City Journal contributing editor Michael Knox Beran challenges Arendt’s diagnosis that the loss public space is bound up in a degeneration of politics. Instead, Beran argues the condemning finger should be pointed at the loss of public poetry, an insight which he hopes may help those seeking to reestablish our lost public culture:
“Over the last few hundred years . . . there has been a falling-off in every department of public poetry—choral, dramatic, liturgical—as well as in popular and proverbial poetry. The traditional town-square transmitters of poetic culture . . . have turned their attention to other matters. Rock concerts and iPods we have in abundance, but our public spaces are unmusical.”

Although it is possibly the most interesting thing happening in Dallas right now architecturally speaking, it seems Robert Wilonsky has been the only person in the city beating away at the Urban Re:Vision competition to redesign the block behind city hall. Today he brings word that the project architect has been chosen: Portuguese-based architectural firm Atelier Data & Moov. This is no empty plan, Urban Re:Vision says they will break ground in early-2011, at which point the concrete swath behind city hall will be turned into an “urban hillside”—literally. From the designers:
“The space is organized as valleys, slopes and hilltops, to maximize solar gain, views and productive surfaces. The final goal of this project is not to build a physical structure, but rather set the means for a community to inhabit it. Not counting on people that will dwell here is only seeing half of the equation. This project intends to bring Dallas up to date, as well as aims to forward Dallas to the word as a paradigm of a solution to other cities facing the same problems.”

Terribly sad news that Jeanne-Claude, the artist and longtime collaborator and partner of Christo, passed away on November 18. In recent years, the husband-wife team achieved incredible critical and popular success with their “The Gates” project in Central Park, yet that statement seems to undercut what “The Gates” was able to achieve: its elegance and simple beauty, its transformation of space and movement, its gentle consideration of society, life, leisure, nature, and beauty - and achieving these ends on such a grand scale. Heck, my parents, who rarely step inside a gallery save the annual pilgrimage to the Met’s old masters and medieval collections, even went to it. My favorite story about Jeanne-Claude, though, comes from the documentary about another art couple, collectors Herb and Dorothy Vogel. A number of decades ago, the Vogels wanted to buy a Christo rendering, but the artist’s recent success had priced-out the Vogels. Hearing the Vogels were cat lovers, Jeanne-Claude came up with a solution: cat-sit Jeanne-Claude and Christo’s cat for the summer, and they would give the Vogels the piece. The AP obit is here.

It’s Le Corbusier’s fault that architecture has tended towards the soulless and the inhuman, concrete structures that turn the social landscape into a banal wasteland, says Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal:. Whatever the shortcomings of Le Corbusier’s ideas made manifest, Dalrymple is right to point out that is more often the students of the master who do the most harm:
“By their very presence, the raw-concrete-clad rectangular towers that obsessed him canceled out centuries of architecture. Hardly any town or city in Britain (to take just one nation) has not had its composition wrecked by architects and planners inspired by his ideas.”

The Winspear gets its archdaily write up here, complete with lots of pretty pictures and diagrams. It’s a no nonsense rundown of the opera house’s essentials, a building which “redefines the essence of an opera house for the twenty first century.”

The International Association of Theatre Critics has published a code of practice for theatre critics, which include such suggestions as asking critics to acknowledge that they are “explorers of the art of theater” and should “welcome new ideas, forms, styles, and practice.” Seemingly harmless stuff, it seems, but on the Guardian theater blog, Chris Wilkinson rounds up all the ruffled feathers.