LOADED IMAGES: One of the focuses of the Amon Carter Museum‘s “Masterworks of American Photography: Popular Culture” is those Life magazine-type photos that remind us of simpler times. The ones where some boy who looks like Opie Taylor is trying to hang on to a squirming dog. Light stuff like that. The thing is, as more time has passed since we first saw those images, our ideas of what they represent have changed. “That’s the downside to universally appealing photographs,” Gaile Robinson writes in her dallasnews.com review. “We bring so much of our own experience to them, or they have been co-opted into advertising messages so many times, that they no longer arrive without baggage.”

MORE MUSIC IN FAIR PARK: Except for the little use it gets during the State Fair of Texas, the Fair Park Band Shell mostly just sits and collects dust. That might be about to change. Unfair Park reports on a proposal to produce at least 10 events that will go before the Parks and Rec board on Thursday.

MORE WALL ART IN OAK CLIFF: At least half-a-dozen murals will be decorating the walls along Seventh Street in time for April’s second annual Oak Cliff Art Crawl. The immediate efforts are designed as  “grafitti abatement,” but according to dallasnews.com, Kevin Obregon and Vanessa Neil with the Cube Creative Design Studio and Gallery are working to make it an ongoing program with professional artists mentoring students and painting public spaces for compensation.

BIG BUCKS FOR NTFB: If you attended one of the Dallas Theater Center’s performances of A Christmas Carol this holiday season, you had a chance to donate what ever extra cash you may have had on you at the time to the North Texas Food Bank. The DTC has finally been able to tally up all those ones and fives and learned that an awful lot of them were donated – $42,124 in all. “We are grateful for the Dallas Theater Center’s partnership and audience support during the holidays. The holiday season is our busiest, so this donation could not have come at a greater time,” NTFB COO Paul Wunderlich said in a news release.