Matt Mrozek

Karen Parrish, Max Hartman, Jenny Ledel in The Arsonists.

When Kitchen Dog Theater mounts a new play, you put on your theater loafers and show up. This weekend, the well-oiled comedy machine mounts a new translation of Swiss playwright Max Frisch's mid-century classic, The Arsonists. This comedic parable focuses on a town that's struggling with a serious arson problem, and the wealthy businessman who takes in houseguests who need some extra room in his attic for a few drums of gasoline. It opens this weekend, and if you've never attended a Kitchen Dog opening night, do yourself a favor and buy a ticket to this Friday's show. They know how to throw a rager. Tickets and more info at kitchendogtheater.org.

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I never thought the DVD would fall from grace so quickly. The digital media revolution was inevitable but who knew it would happen so fast? Places like Netflix, Crackle and Hulu haven't just eliminated the need for a DVD player to watch movies. Traditional broadcast and cable television may very soon become obsolete. At this rate, it won't be long before you won't need a television to watch your favorite shows. Someone can just beam a broadcast directly into your central cortex and you can watch anything you've ever wanted until your mind literally melts from all the radiation such a signal would produce.

It's a shame because it wasn't that long ago when VHS tapes were still around and even the most horrid productions gave us hours of awkward, hilarious entertainment. Thankfully, the folks behind The Found Footage Festival are out there collecting these relics of poorly lit productions from garage sales and thrift shops to present them the way God intended them to be seen: in a theater by a crowd of drunken voyeurs.

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Photo Courtesy Wikimedia

Bartok's Bluebeard and his fatefully curious wife.

In a month marked by pioneering modernism, concert standards take a backseat to rarely performed masterpieces by the likes of Charles Ives, Gyorgy Ligeti and Bela Bartok (yes, more Bartok, again!). The nights are now longer, and the air is taut with its first chills of the season--it's just the right time for some dark, challenging music. At least, that's what some of this month's selections might tell you; there's even some leftover Halloween-style horror film music for you to chew on. This is your November in Dallas classical music.

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Christopher Nolan's space epic Interstellar is a big, ambitious picture but it didn't connect with our critics. We discuss the film at the top of this week's podcast before moving onto a few other notable films on screens large and small this week.

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#AlexfromTarget with #EllenfromEllen

#AlexfromTarget will appear on the Ellen Show at 3 p.m. Wednesday, and host Ellen DeGeneres gets to the bottom of the entire viral thing.

That's an exaggeration because really the only thing we learn from the segment is that he does in fact work at a Target just outside of Dallas, a.k.a. Frisco, like we told you Monday, and he learned of the photo when his store manager showed it to him.You can wait until 3 p.m or watch it online here.

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Raymond Uhlir

Left Hand First
In daily life, pretty is quite the compliment. Sure, it may rank lower than beautiful or stunning. But every good flatterer knows the power of telling a woman she's pretty. In art, pretty is perjorative. You want to insult a serious painter? Tell her that her life's work is pretty. To be pretty is to be trivial, to be agreeable, to be shallow. But the declaration of beauty is far more complicated. In Left Hand First, an exhibition at Beefhaus opening this weekend, two complex questions are posed: "If there is beauty in the profane is there profane in beauty? Do you head straight for the pleasure and save the hard stuff for last?" The the work of three artists are shown in conjuction to explore this multi-faceted idea. Austin-based Raymond Uhlir exhibits alongside Dallas-based Randy Guthmiller (the man behind the local Zine SHAPES), as well as the duo The Color Condition, who are known for their colorful streamer installations. See it at Beefhaus (885 Exposition Ave.) from 7-10 p.m. Saturday. Admission is free.

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Courtesy Randy Guthmiller

Randy Guthmiller started a zine to make friends. When he moved back to Dallas after college, he would attend gallery openings and leave without talking to anyone. He needed a conversation starter, an entry point to access the sometimes-insular art scene. So he created, SHAPES, a simple publication filled with colorful, unusual figures printed on plain white copy paper, held together by staples. With it, came the question that decorates nearly every new encounter, "Wanna see some shapes?"

"I started making a zine to have something to start talking to people about," says Guthmiller. "And then they knew what I was all about. Because, well, I like shapes."

SHAPES helped him build a community, because in his description it encourages people to live in the moment. The print product demands physical presence, and the shapes themselves lead to more questions than answers. To flip through an issue is not to see triangles followed by squares; instead, each page contains unidentifiable forms. And more than a dozen issues later, he's interested in spreading the community he's found in zine making by launching a zine publishing business.

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If you didn't grow up frequenting museums or galleries, navigating the art world can be extremely intimidating. Thanks to the state of arts education, most of us have a very limited knowledge of art outside of recognizing the "Mona Lisa" or that Van Gogh painting of sunflowers that hung in your mom's kitchen. Plus, there's this long-held idea that viewing and learning about art is extremely expensive.

But that isn't really true, at least not in Dallas. Sure, there are special exhibitions and traveling pieces that require you to plunk down a little coin to view, but much of the city's art is accessible entirely for free, meaning that you have no excuse to continue ignoring Dallas' flourishing arts scene. Take an afternoon to check out these eight free art exhibitions, most of which look nothing like the boring old classics you remember from your college art appreciation class. Go forth with this new knowledge, and argue with those who (wrongly) claim that Dallas is devoid of culture.

Dallas Museum of Art
Last year, the Dallas Museum of Art made general admission to their permanent collection free. The DMA's permanent collection exceeds 22,000 items, and includes an impressive selection of works by recognizable figures like Salvador Dali and Piet Mondrian. There's plenty of historical art from cultures all over the world, and an assortment of oddities to keep things interesting, like a bunch of late 1800s silver from Tiffany and Co.

The African American Museum
Contrary to much of our education, not all art is created by crazy, old white dudes. The African American Museum in Fair Park has a self-described "small but rich" collection of art created both in Africa and the United States. The museum's collection of African masks and textiles is particularly notable, along with a collection of African-American folk art with works from greats like Clementine Hunter. The museum's program of special exhibitions is particularly varied, including a current exhibition on quilting as an art form.

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Muscle Memory Dance Theatre

This past weekend, the fall season of dance in Dallas started off with two very different shows from two very different companies. In the Arts District, Dallas Black Dance Theatre opened its 2014-15 season with The Director's Choice series; in Deep Ellum, Muscle Memory Dance Theatre opened its season with two Dallas premieres from guest choreographers. Each show intended to illustrate the future direction each of these companies --both during this present season and in the many that will hopefully follow. Which seemed fitting as both are going through monumental changes.

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Jane the Virgin is this fall's most charming new show.

BY INKOO KANG

There's more television today than at any other point in the medium's history, but there's a good chance you're stuck in a TiVo rut. That's because, with a handful of exceptions, this fall has delivered a truckload of mediocrity and dead-on-arrival trends. (Goodbye, "rom-sit-coms" like the already canceled A to Z and Manhattan Love Story. Farewell, hopefully forever, comedies about women whose defining characteristic is their poor job performance, like spring's Bad Teacher and autumn's Bad Judge.)

Fortunately, there are a few new shows with fresh perspectives, novel conceits, encouragingly diverse casts, and/or deep emotional undercurrents worthy of your Hulu queue. And, of course, there are the season's letdowns -- not necessarily the worst the small screen has to offer, but the ones that suffer the greatest lapse between expectations and execution. Here are this fall's five best new series -- and its five biggest disappointments.

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