The nonprofit Writer's Garret has as its stated mission the education and development of readers, writers and audiences. It stages writing workshops, panel discussions, peer critiques, contests and movie screenings. But the organization's two-year-old Writer's Studio Series, hosted by KERA at Theatre Three, takes the top prize. This year, the series brought best-selling literary stars Margaret Drabble, James Ellroy, Umberto Eco and Walter Mosley to Sunday night readings. KERA radio host Glenn Mitchell interviewed each author, who then read from one of his or her books and answered questions from the audience. Each two-hour session was taped and later played on NPR affiliates. The programs are fascinating, unpredictable and sometimes infuriating, as when politically incorrect and always controversial Ellroy told the audience that John F. Kennedy "got what he deserved." Authors scheduled this fall include Bret Easton Ellis (his new one is Lunar Park), Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking) and Scott Turow. With all the lawyers who want to be writers in town, better get your ticket early for Turow, attorney and author of Presumed Innocent and other novels.

The Landing looks like a rec room from the 1970s; think of the basement in That '70s Show or any scene from Freaks and Geeks where people drank, got high or made out. There are a few tables, a handful of booths, one couch, a pool table, Golden Tee, a jukebox and a long bar in a narrow space. On the weekends, it's crowded like a high school party in a John Hughes movie. And that makes the Landing the best place to go after work. On early weekdays, you can hold court at one of the big round tables, feed dollar after dollar into the jukebox (it's one of the best in town with everything from Etta James to the Clash, the Old 97's to Elvis Costello), order a burger or some loaded cheese fries (also some of the best in town) and actually hear people talk while sharing a pitcher of Shiner.

White Rock Lake offers more than bike and running paths. For years, the Bath House Cultural Center on the eastern shore of the lake has been a little powerhouse of art, theater, history and music. Built in 1930, the art deco building is tiny but boasts a 120-seat theater, two galleries, a darkroom and other spaces for activities including yoga classes, jazz concerts and dance workshops. It also houses a small but fascinating museum about the creation and history of the lake. (Did you know people could swim in White Rock until 1953? It was closed to bathers due to "drought, polio and racial tensions.") The galleries showcase regional artists, often those who live and work in the lake area.

On a good day at the dog park, you'll meet dozens of dogs of various breeds and, sometimes, dozens of breeds in one dog. Not a dog owner? White Rock Lake Dog Park is a great place to "window shop" for your next pal; you can see how spectacularly tall (and drooly) a great Dane is or how mind-numbingly adorable a 4-month-old basset hound puppy can be. Good-weather Saturday afternoons seem to be the time to encounter the highest volume of canines, especially since this summer's renovation.

You can't fling a paintbrush/film canister/chisel/flashcard/pencil/found object in this town without hitting an artist. They're sketching at White Rock, shooting Deep Ellum in gritty black and white and wandering downtown, picking up lost Post-It notes and other detritus for assemblages. For most, the biggest opening reception their art will see is when they pop the top on a Bud Light after hanging their latest masterpiece over the couch. But if they're lucky, they'll catch the discerning but unpretentious eyes of Sarah Jane Semrad and Nyddia Hannah of Pigeon-Stone Project, which gives local artists and curators opportunities to show off their work in public by giving local businesses new, innovative local art to display. The duo currently books exhibits--with receptions and everything--in the Continental Lofts, the bar at the Magnolia Theater, Sozo Salon on Knox-Henderson, Zeo Salon on Travis Walk, Two Sisters Catering in Deep Ellum, Counter Culture at Mockingbird Station and the Elbow Room near Baylor Hospital on the edge of Deep Ellum. But look for them to expand to every nook and cranny with enough blank wall space to accommodate a piece or two.

At Fair Park in the building and area where the botanical society used to be, Texas Discovery Gardens is a year-round medley of all-organic garden themes, including a butterfly habitat (especially worth seeing during the State Fair), wildlife pond, scent garden, shade garden and heirloom garden. The Dallas Arboretum is more fancy-schmancy, of course, but unlike the Arboretum, the Discovery Gardens is a place where you can see what you can grow without excoriating the earth with 50-pound bags of toxins in the process. Of course, they do manage to achieve those really unearthly hues at the Arboretum, but at least here you can peruse the posies and not need a Hazmat suit.

When you're getting married, the most important thing is to impress people, right? Screw that whole love and commitment thing. This event is really about blowing the pants off everyone so they'll be talking about it long after you've paid off the credit card bills. Required elements include a full bar, romantic mood lighting, a stone balcony (perfect for a ceremony), a cool downtown location and, above all, impeccable, memorable food. Truffled mac 'n' cheese with black trumpet mushrooms and quattro formaggio or chef-carved New Zealand lamb chops with mint aioli might do the trick. Follow up with chocolate and hazelnut marjolaine with coffee and vanilla creams (or...sigh...go with wedding cake) and your guests will be serenading you all the way to your chauffeured Bentley. This little gem tucked away in the DMA has all of the necessary elements.

At the core of this year's best-of artist's category is a loss: the death of our most stellar, the rising young artist Scott Barber. The Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell once said "art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it." It is a meager, dull and uninspired life without Barber and his art. He artfully deployed his private life in the public sphere, waging his battle with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma on the painterly surface. Though we know Barber for his lapidary painting, the faintly bubbled and brightly colored planes of the renderings of his cancer cells, he was a polymath when it came to artistic medium. He worked in video and sculpture, the virtual and the plastic. His three large, round urethane-cast wall pieces give light form in plastic hirsute bodies. In yellow, blue and red, they are the primary colors of Mondrian's palette translated into an electric light-swooning affair that is perfectly shagadellic. Barber died on April 22 from complications resulting from a bone-marrow transplant.

Consistently elegant work, large luminescent space and magnetic urban location constitute the trifecta that makes Holly Johnson Gallery a winning space. Though a newcomer, having opened in early April 2005, the gallery has had a triumphant run of shows. Casey Williams, whose work was shown in late spring, makes photographic abstraction out of the molten stuff of a harbor. His photographs of the Houston Ship Channel play on the entropy of different surfaces--the expressive decay of a painting's desiccated canvas and the rust-strewn hull of enormous cargo ships. William Betts' work, the subject of a more recent show, makes a world of stripy colors from bits of pixelated detritus. Manipulating digital information into flat planes of infinite lines, Betts makes surfaces of colorful stripes that would knock the socks off of Peter Brady, that erstwhile master of striped pants. Proprietor and namesake of the gallery, Holly Johnson has injected an intelligent sense of subtle experimentation into the beau monde of the local gallery world.

Readers' Pick
Goss Gallery 2500 Cedar Springs Road 214-696-0555

You just want an inexpensive faux hairpiece. That's all. Not so much to ask. Your girlfriend wants a fake Louis Vuitton wallet. Easy. Or so you thought. The logical destination is, of course, the Sam Moon Trading Company off LBJ Freeway and...hey, the new location even has one big-assed parking lot. Unfortunately, that means more room for minivans, which means more obnoxious screaming children and their clueless, inattentive parents. We don't know how many toddlers we've crushed on our way to the sparkly, dangly earring wall, but to be honest, we don't really care. Breeding licenses, anyone? Anyone?