Life & Arts

It's happened to all of us: just when you're ready to deliver the perfect rebuttal,  last word or final point, your tongue trips up and you slaughter your English.

Don't fret about it, says author Ammon Shea. The man who spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary is taking on grammarians and nitpickers alike.

Shea's new book "Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation" (out this June) is an eye-opening look at how language mistakes have become accepted as correct usage.

In Austin, many see live music not just as an opportunity, but as a way of life.

Every day brings the possibility to see a variety of talents – both from music’s biggest and brightest, to up-and-coming acts in Austin’s live music scene.

For many outside Central Texas, Austin’s “Live Music Capital of the World” status is summed up by two of the city’s biggest music festivals: South by Southwest and the Austin City Limits Music Festival. The latter, now in its 13th year, carries the brand of the historic Austin City Limits television show, which has a rich and storied history all its own.

Now in its third year, the Moontower Comedy and Oddity Festival is quickly becoming one of the largest comedy festivals in America. For this year's fest, around 100 comedians will come together from Austin and around the world to perform dozens of shows, including sketch, improv, and lots of standup comedey.

Headliners include The Kids in The Hall, Hannibal Buress, Mike Birbiglia, Maria Bamford and more. They'll perform at the Paramount Theatre, while several smaller venues host shows nearby.

Calling it one of their most energetic lineups to date, the 13th annual Austin City Limits Music Festival also includes a blast of nostalgia.

Pearl Jam is headlining and The Replacements are top billed. Major hip-hop acts of the 2000s, Outkast and Eminem are also headliners. The festival also sees a significant number of electronic music acts with Calvin Harris and Skrillex headlining – and groups such as Major Lazer, Zedd, Phantogram, Chromeo and CHVRCHES in the big font. Beck rounds out the list of this year’s headliners.

Last year’s festival drew some criticism for a lack of female performers. However, this year’s top billing includes international superstars, Lana Del Rey and Lorde (though the latter will be for the second weekend only). Female acts such as St. Vincent, Iggy Azalea, Jenny Lewis, Nikki Lane, tUnE -yArDs and My Brightest Diamond also made the cut.

On this edition of In Black America, producer/host John L. Hanson Jr. speaks with Dr. Monique W. Morris, Ed.D. Co-founder/President of The National Black Women’s Justice Institute, and author of "Black Stats: African Americans by the Numbers in the Twenty-first Century."

Saxophone great Coleman Hawkins helped to establish jazz as a stand-alone art form, separate from the popular swing music of the day.

With his originality, lyricism, and a keen sense for the latest trends, Hawkins' work was the foundation for bebop and the most expressive jazz ballads.

And yet, what is the price for a creative who expresses his art?

Read by Michael Lee

Thirty minutes left
I scavenge through my house
Grabbing my karaoke machine
All my things
I don’t want them to get wet or float away

Twenty-five minutes left
A messed up pipe
My house will become a swimming pool
Then a memorial site to my family
And a pile of dead rubble
The walls breathe in water

Twenty minutes left
I put on my jacket
The one that I wore when we bought this house
And stuff my pockets with everything
I want to remember living here
I want to bring it all

Read by Laurie Viault

Your name means Night; mine is Song
Together we used to fit like a puzzle
Once upon a time we grew up happy; you the stars, I the starlight
But I don’t know what happened to make that change

Suddenly the starlight--blotted out like a cloudy moon
All that replaced it was a stormcloud
That flashed with light, yes, but not the same light
It’s now cold and angry--why?

To commemorate National Poetry Month, we've been airing poems by the students of Kealing Middle School's Blank Page writing program every day this April.

We're pretty proud of the lineup of talented Austinites we got to read those poems, including Patty Griffin, Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, Kathy Valentine, KUT's own John Aielli, and even Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell. Check out a video of our distinguished poetry readers below.

The novel "The Burgess Boys" took the nation by storm last year. This month, the novel is available in paperback.

The follow-up to Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel "Olive Kitteridge" spent weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list and months making the rounds of book-circles.

Elizabeth Strout visited with the Texas Standard's Emily Donahue to talk about her book. Listen to their conversation in the audio player below.

There have been many incarnations of The Intergalactic Nemesis over the years. The 1930s era science fiction story started life as a live radio serial staged in a coffee shop, then became an actual radio serial that ran right here on KUT many years ago. Then there was a revised version of the stage show, then a comic book series, and finally a live action graphic novel, which combines all the previous elements into a large-scale show that has toured the world.

But it’s never been captured for the screen until now. This Saturday at the old Austin City Limits Studio, The Intergalactic Nemesis will tape its newest incarnation before a live audience. The show will go back to its radio serial roots in a way, as it becomes a series of short web videos produced by KLRU and PBS. It'll also be available as a TV broadcast and a DVD.

Read by Jennifer Stayton.

For only their second outing, young theater company Soubrette Productions is taking on a challenging show: Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Assassins, a musical that examines the motivations behind the actions of attempted and successful assassins of American presidents. It's long been a controversial work, as it examines the history of and parallels between the men and women who were convinced that their violent actions were justified or even necessary.

The subject matter isn't the only difficult aspect of Assassins. It's also a pretty elaborate production, with a large principal cast and detailed costuming, sets, and props. All of this makes the production a challenge for the folks of Soubrette, but a challenge they were eager to undertake.

A young man about to go to war meets a young woman. They fall in love. A reckless, passionate affair follows. It lasts just a week, but it reverberates through six lifetimes.

That's just one layer of the narrative in a new novel by Austin author Justin Go. “The Steady Running of the Hour” includes a race against time and crosses two centuries and multiple continents – from the drawing rooms of London to the horror of World War I battlefields – through Europe, Asia and the U.S.

Producer Ron Berry created the Fusebox Festival a decade ago as a way to foster communication between Austin's arts scene and the national and international artistic community. The conversation he started way back then is still going strong; Fusebox has grown every year and this year celebrates its tenth anniversary.

As has usually been the case, this year's festival will feature hundreds of artists and performers, with roughly a third of them hailing from Austin, a third from the rest of the USA, and a third from other countries. What is different about this year's festival is that all events will be free to the public (although for some shows, reservations are required).