In the last decade, social media and the Internet have assisted in getting more eyes and ears on the subject of autism, giving us a better understanding of what children on the autistic spectrum need on a daily basis, whether or not vaccinations play a role and how to edge them into adulthood. As more research has been done, its spectrum has broadened as well.

Temple Grandin was lucky that her diagnosis in 1950, when little was known about autism, also came with a mother who made sure she got the one-on-one contact she needed. When she was in graduate school, Grandin visualized and developed a system for herding cattle into slaughterhouses.

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Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher are professional data sifters. You could also say they watch crap for a living.

In fact, let's say that instead.

The pair harvests and compiles snippets from salvaged VHS tapes for their Found Footage Festival, then screens the stuff publicly. It results in analog peculiarity -- old workout tapes, crafting how-tos and home shopping network goofs woven together with riffy dialogue. It's pop culture, shrinky-dinked in nostalgia. Still confused? Think MST3K on hallucinogenics at a rummage sale.

On Thursday they close their tour, ending a road trip that's lasted for more than a year, at Dallas' Texas Theatre. Then, they'll take a thousand showers.

When I rang 'em up, Joe was driving, so Nick and I discussed why VHS has verve, his own secretly recorded life, hiring private investigators and what an outsider can expect from Thursday night's Found Footage Festival. Then he begged for handouts. (Have old, must-see VHS tapes? Donate 'em to the Found mission, says Nick.)

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Via Wikimedia

This weekend brings the very first Bondage Expo Dallas. With classes like "Knots for Novices" and "Tying for Speed and Efficiency," there's something for still-not-quite-everyone, from the curious Fifty Shades of Grey reader to the experienced strap-tightener.

BED goes for three days, and even features a "Play Party" on Saturday night. But in case you're feeling overwhelmed by "Torture to Erotic Surrender" or "Predicaments & Endurance in Hogties," we talked with Jake of Dallas Kink, the man behind the expo, to find out what all he's got under wraps.

So what's the goal of this thing?
I would say more to provide fellowship and community than anything else. The whole reason I organized this was because people came to me and asked why Dallas doesn't have something like it. There was no reason why we can't have it and now we do. I polled the community to see what they cared about seeing.

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In "The Love of My Life," her 2002 essay for literary journal The Sun, Cheryl Strayed is the 22-year-old woman who fell to her knees after seeing her mother dead in a hospital bed, then pressed those same bruised knees into a strange man a week later, unbeknownst to her devoted husband. She is the woman who numbed her grief with heroin and infidelity, then decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail alone, a three-month journey for which she was sorely unprepared.

That essay laid the foundation for Wild, her 2012 novel about the journey. Strayed is an honest narrator, and we experience the emotional gut punches (the scene where Strayed calls out after a red fox, whispering, "Mom.") and physical changes (toenails falling off, hips chafing) along with her. This is not Eat, Pray, Love, as some have lazily compared. Strayed is not pining for some Italian beefcake while she eats gelato in a sunbeam. She is in the dirt; her oversized backpack, affectionately called "Monster," is a symbol of the burden she must carry, and ultimately shed.

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There's a distinctive meter to a Joan Rivers routine. A gap-filler, she's quick to follow-up a joke or talking point with a rhetorical question. It's a job most famously held by her "Can we talk?" catch phrase, tossed in to extend laughter until she pins it down with a punch line.

That doesn't change one-on-one. Rivers is always performing.

It was almost 8 p.m. in California when Joan called me last night. She lives with her daughter now, for equal parts work and companionship. In the last three hours Joan had planned Season Four of their reality show Joan and Melissa, wrote the next day's script for Fashion Police and was in the process of getting a manicure, pedicure and peroxide treatment.

But then, none of that is too surprising. She came up in the company of George Carlin, Woody Allen and Bill Cosby -- a generation of hustlers trying to succeed in 1960s New York. She'll say she was the last of them to rise up, but she used that lag time to even the playing field, letting audiences know that she could throw punches as hard as the men. Now, at 79, her career has ballooned. We'll spend an evening with her on Sunday as she performs her still-racy stand-up at the Winspear.

She's Joan Rivers: indomitable spirit animal.

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Photo by James Bland

When I interviewed John Lydon last fall, in preview of Public Image Ltd.'s Dallas reunion show, he did not feign interest in talking about his old band, the Sex Pistols. Their history had been written, and he was done revisiting or revising it. Fair enough.

Still, their January 1978 show at the Longhorn Ballroom, which Dallas' Nervebreakers opened, has taken on a mythic quality in North Texas, a floating collective memory built from stories and remembrances of the night, which has attached itself to the history of the DFW punk scene. Some memories have shown up in headlines, others in margins and footnotes.

Saturday, Cohn Drennan Contemporary casts a wider net over our scene history with Dallas. PUNK! 1976-1982, a retrospective of regional contributions, with ephemera by James Bland, Frank Campagna, Tracy Holman, Barry Kooda, Jonathan Lacey, Paul Quigg, Mark Ridlen and Turner Van Blarcum. This show functions as its own visual storytelling circle, a reminder of the aesthetic and cultural landscape, and that at one time North Texas was home to unconventional bands like Stickmen with Rayguns, the Hugh Beaumont Experience, the Vomit Pigs and the Telefones.

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Kasumi Chow's "Swan No. 2"

"As (wo)manorialists, of course we are feminist, but identify with that after our femininity. Our work shares our experience."

So goes the (wo)manifesto of (Wo)manorial, conceived last summer and launched virtually in October as an "online platform" for artists. This idea sprung from the think tank of Jessica Iannuzzi Garcia and Haley Kattner Allen. "Over the past summer, we discussed the lack of female representation in the arts," Iannuzzi Garcia explains. "Artists we were interested in, and our shared interest in lens-based media."

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In The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, the 1985 play performed by Lily Tomlin and written by her longtime partner, Jane Wagner, Tomlin inhabits a host of female (and a few male) characters: Trudy the bag lady; prostitutes Brandy and Tina; socialite Kate; feminist Lyn; Agnus Angst, the troubled teen. But perhaps it is Trudy's monologue that sums up not just the female experience, but the human: "As soon as humankind began to discover the truth about itself, we began to find ways to cover up that truth."

In Marilyn French's afterword in the book version, she talks about how feminist art, at least then, had to belabor its points, had to "inform its audience that everything that exists is interconnected." She points out that Search was "the first work I know of that simply takes it as a given that a mass audience will accept feminist attitudes, that proceeds on the assumption that these attitudes are shared and that therefore does not lecture, hector or even underline."

The 73-year-old Tomlin has never had to lecture. From her start on Laugh- In in the early '70s, on through movie roles like Nashville, Short Cuts and 9 to 5, she has always inhabited her characters with grace and wit. Currently, she's inhabiting the role of mother: she's Lisa Kudrow's mom on the Showtime series Web Therapy, Reba McEntire's mom on Malibu Country, and Tina Fey's mom in the upcoming movie Admission, in which she plays a radical feminist who penned a fictional book called The Masculine Myth in the '60s, and now struggles with her daughter's relationship choices.

Tomlin will be swinging by the Winspear on Sunday, to perform a new one-woman show, filed with "characters, a lot of them,10 or more. And now I use video, to satirize myself or a situation in the world."

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Kyle Kinane: "Who is to say that some person isn't going to point their Second Amendment at my First Amendment?"

"Look, no one's going to actually support TMZ, but what ever happened to shame?"

This is a big question Kyle Kinane's posing, one I'm not fully ready to unpack at 3 p.m. The comedian and actor is very vocal on Twitter, the modern stage for comedians, and on Tuesday, he had this to say about the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade: "Knowing a baby could grow up to work at TMZ should protect Roe vs Wade alone."

This may have seemed like an easy shot, as the ever-widening Twitter stage sags under the weight of immediate social commentary, but if you've seen Kinane's stand-up, you know his endgame went deeper than the desire to out-zing. He was trying to get to the root of our sick celebrity obsession, via an issue that's co-opted all too often in order to serve obsessive political agendas. Is there even a line between the two anymore?

"They're the ones giving publicity to those with no discernible talents," he adds. "But people watch it, then think, 'Who would watch this?' You're watching it! Nielsen doesn't care if you're watching something ironically. We've still made the Jersey Shore people millionaires."

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Photo by Dan Busta

He's a former ticket scalper, NPR contributing storyteller, author of two books and longstanding editor of Found Magazine. Also, Davy Rothbart delivers the occasional pizza. He'll be in Dallas tonight (Tuesday) at the Texas Theatre doing what he was born to do: engage an audience of voyeurs with stories from abandoned scraps of paper, and give tiny windows into the lives of others. But on this tour, there's a twist: You'll get a look at Davy's life also.

He's just released his first, fully autobiographical book of essays, titled My Heart Is An Idiot. So when you slump into your seat this evening, you could learn what it was like for the author to decant his own urine, follow his heart on unlikely escapades or have long-running phone sex with a stranger.

I caught up with Davy, mid-tour, and he filled me in on all of the details.

Mixmaster: How long, exactly, has Found been going now?
Davy Rothbart: Ten years.

Man, I read that the other day and thought, 'Shit, I'm so old.' You've been with it for a decade, so the magazine itself must feel like an extension of you at this point. How has your relationship with the publication changed over time?
I know. I found some old pictures of us puttin' that first issue together by hand the other day and it was crazy to see what kids we were. It's still great and it's really grown. I liken it to a giant community art project, where we get these little glimpses at other people's lives.

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