From: Leigh-Ann Jackson e-mail me

The crowd of a couple hundred was practically impenetrable, and the evening played out with nine different local designers' works taking to the runway with a backdrop of soothingly atmospheric (some said snoozy) beats by DJs Josh and Enoch Rios. There was nothing loud, over-the-top or campy about it. The models stayed demure and serene (a few seemed downright petrified), letting the clothes take center stage. The only problem with that approach was the audience took that subdued tone and ran with it. I don't think I've been to any kind of style event where there was less hoopla from the audience. You needed a cattle prod just to get them to give the obligatory end-of-set applause. Maybe they needed some Club Deville cocktails.

If the onlookers were blasé, it wasn't for lack of inspiration. The homemade gear ranged from oddball to inspired to chic to cutesy, but it was never boring. Most of the looks were rooted in fantasy. Many of the artists favored frocks made of geometric shapes run amok — how do you get those bad boys on?! Amet and Sasha's felt unicorn ballgown had quite a few girls oohing, aahing and time-warping back to their Lisa Frank sticker collection days. The mostly Muppet-y Chia Hats portion showed a tacky rug turned slinky diva dress that made you think twice about snubbing those roadside rug vendors. Estrella Bridal offered one solution to the "all that money and you only wear it once" wedding gown phenomenon: Disposable (or, recyclable) packing paper bridal wear with corrugated paper trim and headgear (just mind your beverages). There were a few ready-to-wear entries in the mostly couturelike showing. Afsaneh Taki — whom I wish I'd heard about sooner — showed sexy pinup girl dresses that seemed to get the most nods of approval. Rounding out the show, Sparkle Craft's dishy little dresses had a strange air of homemaker and Lolita, with tarty apron-inspired digs in Trapper Keeper colors (magenta, turquoise, you remember).

Off stage, there were nearly two dozen booths crammed with all things beaded, hot-glued, hand-stitched and silk-screened. It was a whirlwind of vinyl messenger bags, baby bibs, painted vintage clutches and rough-hewn leather hobo bags. With so much going on, why did I walk away without a single purchase? Maybe I needed to loosen up with a cocktail or two myself.

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From: Michael Barnes e-mail me

If that's not appealing, the vast majority of the city's better eateries are clustered in the urban core, not coincidentally within easy reach of most performing arts venues. Virtually every Austin restaurant worker understands what you mean by "curtain at 8," so no need to feel anxious about plotting the meal around an early exit.

Finding the right feedbag abroad is not so easy. For a multitude of reasons, I have traveled more than usual on arts journalism business in the past few weeks. The right formula for eating out before a concert, play or opera often escapes me when out of town.

If covering a show in the Georgetown area, I rely on Wildfire, an imaginative restaurant just off the courthouse square. Its menu is varied, the ingredients fresh and prices reasonable, although one must join a club periodically in order to enjoy a glass of wine during a meal, due to local alcohol restrictions.

In Lockhart, home to an active theater scene, it's gotta be barbecue, Black's, Smitty's or Kreuz Market, all three classics of their kind. No convenient spot with local character has presented itself in San Marcos, so sometimes I succumb to eating at chain franchises.

My favorite repasts in San Antonio have been at the historic Liberty Bar on East Josephine Street, a seriously inventive eatery in a tilting old building, convenient to the museums, not so much to the theaters. The array of juicy restaurants in central Houston is so bewildering I usually rotate the selection among Thai, Vietnamese, Belgian, Middle Eastern, Latin American and other cuisine not always handily available in Austin.

Mark's is the frontrunner among high-end establishments located not far from the performing arts — the lamb is the tastiest I have tried anywhere. Two weeks ago, melt-in-your mouth conejo (rabbit) was the attraction at a new, upscale Mexican joint, Ugo's, on Westheimer.

In Dallas, there are few moderately priced, convenient places to eat downtown — feel free to make suggestions — so I usually wander over to Deep Ellum or McKinney Avenue. A casual Italian chain, MoMo's, offers quick, unpretentious, if peppery pasta on Elm Street, convenient to Meyerson Hall and Fair Park.

Last week, Cincinnati beckoned for a national critics board meeting. Chili is the local specialty — served alone, in pasta, on fries or combined with almost any other ingredient. I also enjoyed hearty German fare at the (19th-century Mecklenburg Gardens) (http://www.mecklenburggardens.com/) and Scottish treats at the newer Nicholson's in the Backstage District downtown.

The best meal on the road this month? Hands down: Angeluna, the eclectic, elegant but not overly posh dinery facing Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth. Prior to a Fort Worth Opera production of Benjamin Britten's "The Turn of the Screw," my companion and I munched on red deer medallions, baby spinach and goat cheese, flatiron steak and bread pudding, washed down with a complex Peter Lehman cabernet from Down Under.

I'm no Dale Rice, but this is the kind of meal that should precede an opera, when you can find it.

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From: Omar Gallaga e-mail me

At the latter half of 2003, the DVD format has made instant film aficionados out of Middle America, becoming the most quickly penetrating new media technology on record. Now extras are a given, and woe to the lowly DVD that skimps on those features.

Extras have evolved to the point where even a disappointing film like "Hulk" (some folks liked it; I thought it was a snoozer) might be worth purchasing given the massive two-disc packaging of features it comes with. For less than $20, you get the film (yawn), but also all the making-of featurettes (who doesn't want to see diminutive director Ang Lee in a motion-capture suit acting out his "HULK SMASH" impulses?) and even an Xbox-compatible "Hulk" game thrown in.

Some movies have become secondary to what the DVD can offer, offering a parallel to the game industry, where for years developers have pushed bad video games wrapped in pretty boxes with exclusive previews, multiplayer features or frills like cloth maps and pewter figurines. The bonuses are everything.

Padded DVDs have become so ubiquitous that they've become a victim of their own success. Who but the most die-hard of Schwarzenegger fans (or, now, political historians) has time to listen to the 109-minute commentary track on the new "Terminator 3" two-disc set? Then again, the promise of spotting some groping, intentional or otherwise, on the DVD's "gag reel" feature may be too tempting for some movie watchers to resist.

So many DVD releases for so many films equates to having to choose your battles on the extras front: Should you rent "Winged Migration" and watch it fresh or continue plowing through the four discs' worth of features you still haven't gotten through from last year's release of "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring"? Pleasurable as it is to get through a boxed DVD set of your favorite TV shows (I'm midway-mired through "Alias," "Buffy: Season Two," "Mr. Show: Season Three" and "Cracker"), who's got the time to go back and hear what the directors and actors have to say about the pilot episodes or to skim through behind-the-scenes featurettes after 22 hours of retro TV viewing?

Like cable TV, which suffered through decades of white noise and is only now hitting a broad renaissance of quality original programming, DVD features will need to be more innovative to stand out. Many DVD features have film-geeks-only appeal. (DVD-ROM compatible features like being able to unlock exclusive Web sites or the ability to peruse screenplays or storyboards come to mind.) I'm not sure what this next generation of features should be, but the ones I've always enjoyed most feature a little bit of history and context about a film ("The Hours" and "Frida" benefit from a look at how much of each film is fiction and how much is based on reality) and some thoughts from the director.

Not that that's going to slow down the DVD-buying juggernaut. Shoppers will keep paying $15-$20 for movies they only half-like and a trove of features they'll never bother to watch . . .

Austin is great, but sometimes the best way to love your city is to leave it.

Last weekend, I road-tripped to Houston for a birthday celebration. The first stop was the Museum of Fine Arts' "The Heroic Century: The Museum of Modern Art Masterpieces, 200 Paintings and Sculptures" exhibit.

Parking is a breeze, and the museum district is in a swanky part of town where part of the fun is driving through the nearby neighborhoods admiring the lovely homes. Inside, for $12.50, you get the essential audio tour (one of my fellow museumgoers resisted the headset at first, but soon found the little eletronic device to be useful and informative).

I have no art history background, so for me the soothing voice in my headphones and the scant information next to the works were my only context. But the exhibit is arranged smartly, and you can begin to see the patterns, the way one art movement led to another. I'd understood the words "abstract art" before, but put in the context of 100 years of art, folks like Vasily Kandinsky, George Braque and Jasper Johns really leapt out at me.

You could spend an entire day there, but we chose to leave after a little more than two hours of seeing every single work and squeezing in between the clumps of people trying to reconcile the smallness (in size, anyway) of Dali's "The Persistence of Memory" with the image they'd had in their head. . . .

We spent the evening at a birthday dinner at swanky La Strada near the Galleria, which claims to have the strongest bellinis in town. Folks we dined with who eat there regularly told us the bellinis, frozen and purple in tall glasses, were served at a two-drink limit. They're Houston's own version of the Trudy's Mexican Martini. The multi-ethnic cast of characters at dinner mixed South Texas Latinos with Persians, Indian Americans and Arabs. A spirited discussion about upbringings, customs and language segued perfectly into a night of clubbing: One place was a hotspot that featured a mix of Spanish and Arab music, the other was a hip-hop club playing mostly Top 40. (The ubiquitous end-of-2003 dance tune has to be Andre 3000's "Hey Ya": As soon as it came on, everybody rushed the dance floor, and one week later, it inspired a "Saturday Night Live" parody.)

The next day, we ate Persian food in an area of town full of Indian American storefronts and Middle Eastern cuisine. I traveled two and half hours to get to Houston, but the mix of cultures and art made me feel like I'd taken a cruise around the world.

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From: Jeff Salamon e-mail me

The second season of "The Office" has been painfully funny (at moments I have watched David Brent's humiliations through barely spread fingers), but it has also shown some signs of desperation. Most notably, Mackenzie Crook's Gareth has been reduced to making sexual propositions to Tim's girlfriend Rachel (in front of Tim!) that even this clueless git would never utter. . . .

Toward the end of the first season of "Alias" I started to get a bit weary of the show's relentless "Perils of Pauline" cliffhanger structure. But in the second season my interest perked back up when Sydney's mother, the charismatic Lena Olin was introduced, and the show turned into a compulsively watchable story of a dysfunctional family featuring a mother/daughter action team and a pair of dueling fathers who weren't afraid to duel with real guns. This season, Olin has disappeared (so far), and the show is starting to slide back into Spy vs. Spy territory. I'll bet they ramp the family stuff back up soon enough, but for me it can't be soon enough enough . . .

What do I have to do to get you people to watch "Karen Sisco"?. . .

Missed the last episode of "MI-5," which apparently featured the return of Jenny Agutter's Tessa (whom I think of as this show's Lena Olin). Unless someone's got a tape I can borrow, I guess I'll have to wait a few months until the A&E reruns get back around to it. . . .

In case you hadn't picked up on this, I've been watching way too much TV for a guy who's job has nothing to do with watching TV. There's just too many good hourlong dramas around these days. Still, life's a zero-sum game, and I didn't want my social life to be the zero, so something had to give. That something turned out to be a slew of Jerry Bruckheimer shows — "CSI," "Cold Case" and "Without a Trace" — all of which I like, but none of which are essential to my well-being. Or so I thought. I was sitting home sick a couple of weeks ago, and decided to tune in "Without a Trace" because it seemed easier than cooking up some chicken soup. It was the episode where that creepy child molester from last season shows up to torment Jack, and boy, it was good. So I'm back in "Trace's" graces, a decision made easier by the swift cancellation of Bruckheimer's "Skin." (About which I have mixed feelings.) . . .

Everyone says the debut of "Arrested Development" was great, but because Fox's sports coverage ran late, my Time Warner digital recorder only caught 10 minutes or so of it. This isn't the first time this has happened; can't Time Warner do something to deal with this sort of situation? I mean, I'm pigskin illiterate, and even I know that football games often run late, right? . . .

Another, not unrelated, digital video complaint: A few weeks ago, I wanted to see what was on Fox Sunday night, but the Time-Warner onscreen guide listed the seventh game of the World Series as that evening's entertainment. Unfortunately, there was no seventh game of the World Series this year, a possibility that Time-Warner could have foreseen, oh, forever ago. When I called their help line, the fellow on the other end told me that the guide is filled out a couple of weeks in advance and doesn't get updated. He called up the Fox Web site and kindly offered to read me the night's schedule (I thanked him for his trouble and then looked it up online myself), but that didn't really address the systemic nature of the problem. Is this what I'm paying $100+ for every month, or are we still shelling out for Gerald Levin's severance package? . . .

Can't stop listening to that new Shins CD. . . .

Caught local dronemeisters My Education at Emo's Saturday night (on a bill that included the fine Swords Project and the awe-inspiring Mono) and was really moved by the septet's (bass, drums, keyboards, two guitars, two violinists) sweepingly dramatic instrumentals. It was only halfway through the set that I realized the keyboard player is a guy I used to hang with back in the day. . . .

The preview for Bob Zemeckis' "The Polar Express" (due winter of 2004!) reveals that his crack team of digital animators have managed to create a character who looks exactly like a real-life version of Tom Hanks! This is, of course, great news to all those Hanks fans who were devastated by the great star's recent death. Oh, wait a second . . .

Lowlights of Friday night's Rock Bottom Remainders show: Mitch Albom, author of "Don't Sweat the Chicken Soup You Meet in Heaven with Morrie," snapping his fingers and swiveling his hips like he was at a Sha Na Na audition (thanks, Mitch, we'll call you); and "Joy Luck Club" author Amy Tan singing "These Boots were Made for Walkin' " so tunelessly she made Nancy Sinatra sound like Frank Sinatra. At moments like this, the band might as well have renamed itself The Joyless Club . . .

CD of the Week:

Da Lata, "Serious" (Palm Pictures). This is a real good world beat record from a London-based outfit that dips into Brazilian, African and house musics. But the title leadoff track is the killer — a buoyant Afro-beat number featuring an irresistible groove, three-dimensional production that foregrounds Dennis Rollins' hearty trombone, Marcelo Denici de Silva's bright accordion and the vocals of Bembe Segue and Mamani Keïta (the latter's album-length collaboration with Marc Minelli, "Electric Bamako," is worth checking out). It also boasts a catchier chorus — "You not gonna take me serious/You just wanna let me be" — than most club music bothers with and a bridge that has me singing along and scratching my head at the same time (what language is "fanagwa tagettah panagwa" and what does it mean?). There's supposedly a 12" of remixes out, which may be the first 12" I've bought in months.

Comic Book of the Week:

"Fables" (DC/Vertigo) Bill Willingham hasn't been an Austinite for a while (he's done two tenures as a resident of this town) but there's no reason we can't take some pride in the success of his year-and-a-half-old fantasy series. Willingham takes a nifty gimmick of a premise — what if the characters of fairy tale fame (Snow White, Little Boy Blue, Little Red Riding Hood, etc.) left the realm of fantasy and secretly settled in our world? — and gives it flesh. His stories are funny and lifelike and take unexpected turns; it's tough to imagine anyone who grew up with these characters (which is to say, just about everyone) not being entertained. Willingham's latest assignment: He's about to become the writer on the monthly Robin comic book. If anyone had told me even a year ago that I'd be entering middle age reading the adventures of Gotham's Boy Wonder, I'd have conked 'em in the head with a Batterang.

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From: Joe Gross e-mail me

From its start in in June 1940, Eisner's strip was innovative— a short comic book distributed through newspapers — and the content solid. The stories were tight if not especially groundbreaking, and the draftsmanship was, if not brilliant, as good or better than most of what passed for comics in those days. As the strip progressed, Eisner's pen became more fluid, his line more sure, his vision more expansive. But Eisner headed off to war from 1942-1945, and was forced to hand over the strip to ghostwriters and artists. A talented bunch to be sure, including the brilliantly surrealist Plastic Man artist Jack Cole, groundbreaking-in-his-own-right Jules Feiffer and breathtaking draftsman Lou Fine, but ghost artists nonetheless.

After Eisner gets back from the war, it seemed like he'd had three years to meditate on exactly what he, the strip, and indeed the form itself are capable of, and "the Spirit" just explodes to life. Strange page layouts, cinematic camera angles, tight, compelling stories . . . it's all there. It's become a cliche to call Eisner comics' Orson Welles, but that shoe sure is snug. Week to week, it felt like Eisner was inventing the comics form, bending it, shaping it, bouncing his dynamism off of your eyeballs.

At $50 a pop, these books are far from cheap, so save yourself $550 and skip the first 11 volumes unless you're some sort of fanatic (or rich). But starting with Volume 12, there isn't a comics fan (or a visual arts fan or film fan) who shouldn't pick up this piece of pen-and-ink heaven.

All of that being said, contemporary readers and parents should be aware that Eisner's "Spirit," owing to its time more than to any genuine malice, includes Ebony White, an exceptionally unfortunate African American character. He is a major protagonist and trusted Spirit sidekick, but an ugly stereotype nonetheless. For years, fans have debated the damage Ebony does to Eisner, and as the strip wore on until its end in 1952, Ebony grew more nuanced. But he's still a discomfiting reminder of where we were back then. (Check out this essay for a thoughtful, balanced look at the problem with Ebony.)

Ironically, Eisner has spent much of his post-Spirit career meditating on Jewish immigrant life in graphic novels such as "The Building," "The Dreamer" and "A Life Force." His new book, "Fagin the Jew," provides a complex and sensitive backstory for one of Charles Dickens' problematic Jewish characters. Eisner addresses all of this in this brief but fascinating chat.

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