Oh say can you see Francis Scott Key sitting on a picnic blanket nursing a michelada on the velvet green meadows of Auditorium Shores tonight as the Texas National Guard Salute Battery's 70 millimeter cannons (!) keep time with the Austin Symphony and a fireworks display to rival the decadent aerial ordinance of the Hunan Dynasty explodes overhead? We can. ...

Harvard scores papers related to Norman Mailer's sex life three years after the author sold his official archives to UT. Yo-Yo Ma will play with the Austin Symphony later this year; maybe some of the parking issues evident this Sunday will have been dealt with by then. Burnet Road Farmer's Market land for sale (again). Hope you didn't try to bribe a fake cop downtown earlier this month. Infant asphyxiation deaths at an increase this year in Travis County, Austin's Center for Child Protection reports....

Kathleen Battle performs in recital at the Long Center on Monday evening. Kudos to the Long Center for offering up an amazing inaugural season, and especially for kicking it off with such a rare, classy event—one we probably won't see the likes of for another several seasons. And only that soon if we're lucky....

The Long Center opened this past weekend for perusal by the general public. We’re happy to report that the new/old building has a sleek modern aesthetic that nicely alludes to the center’s mid-century past. That's not surprising, as lots of parts from the original structure of Palmer Auditorium were recycled and re-imagined into the new, two-venue, $77 million-dollar space....

Starting on Thursday evening, The Long Center is offering a Sneak Peak of the facility, with building tours on Thursday and Friday from 6-10p, and all day Saturday and Sunday from 10a-10p. The performance schedule is a tad overwhelming, so we're pointing out the theatre goodies we'd most like to see....

The week's news on arts, books, film and music....

The week's news on arts, books, film and music....

From ImageAfterArt The Teresa Long Center for the Performing Arts (formerly the Palmer Auditorium) will be opening with a bang in early March 2008. Enter: "The Earth Harp," a gargantuan outdoor stringed instrument created by these guys. /// Art thieves strike in Brazil! They robbed the Sao Paolo Museum of Art (MASP), making off with two paintings worth a total of approximately $100 million dollars. The paintings: Portrait of Suzanne Bloch (Picasso) and The Coffee......

The Austin Symphony announced last week that Christopher Theofanidis has been commissioned to write a work for the opening of the Long Center next year. Theofanidis, a native Texan, is the composer of Rainbow Body, one of the most-performed new orchestral works of the last decade. This Masterprize-winning piece was inspired by a Hildegard von Bingen chant. You may have heard Rainbow Body if you attended the Austin Symphony's series-opening concert in 2005. Theofanidis' work......

The City of Austin wants your input in naming the new 21-acre, $7.3-mililon park just south of Lady Bird Lake. The recently opened area, which houses the Palmer Events Center and the Long Center, is currently dubbed "Town Lake Park," but a "facilities naming ordinance" calls for the park to be rechristened in honor of "an individual(s) (living or dead) or something other than an individual such as a place or natural feature." Submit your......

Next week, the City of Austin will officially unveil Town Lake Park, the latest chunk of land to join the already expansive family of city parks. Austin Parks and Recreation are responsible for some 206 parks, 26 greenbelts and 12 nature preserves, totaling a whopping 16,682 acres. Add 20 acres to that total on August 29, when the city officially celebrates the opening of Town Lake Park. Where is this all coming from, you ask?......

After years of dormancy and abandonment, the old Treehouse restaurant and nightclub -- a swinging joint back in the 80s, now an eyesore in a prime development location -- will finally be replaced with something new. Construction on the project -- a high-end, luxury condo building called 1155 Barton Springs -- will begin by the end of this year. For over seven years, developers Elisabeth and Steffen Waltz and their partners have butted heads with......

We read in the paper this morning that Austin I.S.D. is hoping to team up with the city and the Long Center to house a performing arts center for students. The school district might be able to use the Topfer Theatre, part of the Long Center plan that had been on hold for lack of funding. Currently Austin ISD has to rent venues, such as Bass Concert Hall, for district events since the school district......

In case you haven't been "outside" lately, there is some construction going on downtown. The two cranes in the left side of the pic above are for the AMLI Downtown (condos for rent) and the one on the right is for the 360 (condos for sale). Click here for more construction photos. Other projects currently under construction include the Monarch (condos for rent), the Shore (condos for sale), Bridges on the Park (condos for......

Maybe some of you noticed the recent passing of the State Theatre. (By “passing”, we really mean “death”.) The June water main break that flooded the theatre – moving artists like Kathy Dunn Hamrick and Steven Tomlinson to other venues in town – has now, for all intents and purposes, killed the organization entirely. At the very least, the current season is all but canceled, and all State Theatre staff (except Artistic Director Michelle......

UT PAC's Bass Conert Hall is already the largest performance space in Austin, boasting 3,000 seats and playing host to everyone from Ballet Austin to the touring company of Movin' Out (and, really, every other large scale performance that comes from, or to Austin). In case they're not already impressive enough, Bass has just been approved by the UT Board of Regents to spend $14.7 million dollars renovating and upgrading the theatre. The goal......

The Long Center's construction webcam at about 8:00 this morning.......

The Austin Business Journal reports that The Long Center recently received an influx of $150,000 from international law firm Fulbright & Jaworski and the foundation side of health insurance giant Humana. The legal beagles ponied up $100k, and Humana gave $50k. This brings the Long Center's total committed amount to $67.7 million of the $77 million they need to raise. The Long Center will bring Austin's performance arts community into a whole 'nother realm......

Maybe teachers should set a "due date" Lawmakers just can't seem to make a decision about schools, and we just can't seem to make ourselves do the homework on it. It's afternoon cartoon time. [Statesman] Out with the OldConstruction of the $77 million Long Center is set to begin at the end of the summer and is expected to be completed in 2008. Much of the Palmer Auditorium will be reused in renovations, even......

Austin took a big leap forward earlier this week in its goal to become a major performing arts powerhouse before the next decade. The ambitious Long Center - which when completed in 2008 will consolidate the Austin Symphony Orchestra, Ballet Austin, and Austin Lyric Opera as well as serve as an exhibition space for hundreds of local artists and organizations - received $500,000 from the Dallas-based Meadows Foundation. This brings the total level of......