Let me make sure I’ve got this right. The Dallas City Council, local grocery chains and the Texas Retailers Association go at it for two years about a plastic bag ban. Last March at the end of a long, agonizing process, the council passes a deeply compromised ordinance that doesn’t…
Two moments caught my ear last week when Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings addressed a well-heeled, smoothly coiffed crowd about the latest effort to get a new highway built along the river through downtown. He’s hiring a panel of experts to help redesign the road, months before a final federal ruling…
Couple weeks ago just before leaving town on vacation, I told you the city of Dallas won big and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Affairs lost big in a settlement of the 5-year-old HUD complaint against the city for racial discrimination. Wouldn’t you know, court papers were filed…
By Amy McCarthy and Jaime-Paul Falcon Bars, clubs, and music venues are generally great places to be, especially when you factor in copious amounts of alcohol and loud live music. Still, there are plenty of people in Dallas who are dead-set on harshing your mellow while you’re taking in a…
Last week, Bedhead, the renowned slowcore pioneers from Dallas led by brothers Matthew and Bubba Kadane, saw the re-release of its entire body of recorded work. Chicago-based record label Numero Group, a label that specializes in offering up richly detailed, comprehensive collections from artists deserving of further inspection, released the…
Sharon Grigsby of The Dallas Morning News editorial page posted an interesting item on their opinion blog yesterday saying the paper’s pontification board had just met with Dallas school Superintendent Mike Miles, that Miles wouldn’t tell them anything and they support him. I agree. He won’t tell me anything, either…
The most popular rapper to have ever come from North Texas is one Robert Matthew Van Winkle. You probably know him as Vanilla Ice. This is nothing short of equal parts silly and embarrassing. Vanilla Ice is the Psy of the ’90s and “Ice Ice Baby” is hands down the…
Results of the Trinity toll road public opinion poll released yesterday by State Rep. Raphael Anchia are so devastatingly obliterating, so thermonuclear, in fact — 94 percent of Dallas zip code respondents opposed to building it – that they direct a hole-burning focus on the obvious correlative question: OK, so…
Wednesday the mayor is holding some kind of meeting to see if people can come up with “design tweaks” to make the Trinity River toll road plan more palatable. Well, yeah, if shooting it in the head is considered a design tweak. This idea — to build a fat new…
Music festivals are a tough business. It’s hard to make them stick. Organizers don’t usually expect to break even for the first five years, often longer. Even if a festival survives, it’s not the end of the story. Maintaining what you have often means expanding your model and your audience…
For what it’s worth – not much, probably – nobody’s sadder than me about the South Dallas/Fair Park Trust Fund and the saga about to unfold around it. I know the history. It was one of those crumbs that poor black South Dallas had to wrench from a fat callous…
I’m headed out of town for a week’s vacation. Spent a good deal of yesterday thinking about the outcome in the HUD case against Dallas. As you know by now, HUD folded a couple days ago and withdrew its racial segregation allegation against the city. If you were here yesterday,…
City Hall announced late yesterday that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has caved on the 4-year-old Lockey/MacKenzie racial segregation complaint against Dallas officials, vacating most of the findings of a four-year federal civil rights investigation. A settlement signed yesterday by HUD and the city (see below)…
Man’s connection to nature, his desire to simultaneously embrace, tame and succumb to the siren song of the wild, has been expressed through art for centuries. And there’s no more fitting musical accompaniment to Mother Nature than metal and punk, two genres that place a premium on organic, unvarnished performances…
The ninth incarnation of Austin’s Fun Fun Fun Fest starts tomorrow, and the growth of the festival shows no signs of slowing. It’s a festival that feels loved, that feels like an awful amount of care and attention has gone into it and that is booked by some sort of…
We took a pretty bad hiding over Ebola here when Dallas became the first city in the United States to harbor the disease. How much of that we deserved and how much we did not will be fodder for somebody’s doctoral dissertation someday. Right now it’s worth noting that a…
The city auditor’s new bad report on a 27-year-old economic development fund in black South Dallas talks about technical problems with paperwork and mumbles on about the need for better “performance measures.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. But when, Mr. Auditor, were you going to tell us about the missing five million…
By Roy Robertson At the end of October, Denton’s Pageantry traveled to New York City for the annual CMJ Music Marathon. We invited singer and guitarist Roy Robertson to reflect on the band’s experience there — their first time attending the convention — and its potential value to Texas musicians…
New York Times media writer David Carr, who’s almost always right about everything, has a piece in today’s paper about sponsored (paid-for) journalism, in which he singles out The Texas Tribune in Austin for having avoided the obvious pitfalls. I’m not too sure about that. Carr kicks off his piece…
The Dallas ISD school board is supposed to meet soon to discuss an incident from a couple weeks back in which the superintendent ordered district police to forcibly evict a school board trustee from a middle school. I hope they also talk about the school. At first blush, Dade Middle…
It has taken me a long while — I was slow — but I guess now I sort of get why some people think the “Ebola House” is funny. Sort of. Still working on it. Decorated for Halloween as an Ebola disaster area and located in a rich part of…
In a new series, Choice Cuts, Jonathan Patrick talks with artists, both local and international, about their favorite records. Pinkish Black is perhaps the most internationally celebrated of all current DFW acts. Their two LPs, Pinkish Black and Razed to the Ground, were critical darlings, garnering near-unanimous praise throughout the…
