Opinion & Commentary

Today The New York Times tells me that, while Republicans in the Congress continue to paint the kids at the border as an invading horde of knife-wielding lepers, Republicans with presidential aspirations are maneuvering to win over Latino voters. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey will journey to Mexico next…

Life is pretty simple, really. Don’t mess with Texas — or Tim McGraw, for that matter. Where’s that bumper sticker, America? Country music fans know McGraw as Faith Hill’s loving husband of 18 years. And hell, he’s even been sober for six years. But sometimes he gets angry. Tonight, Texas…

Déjà vu, that French term meaning “already seen,” the feeling you get that you’ve been here before, it can be creepy, right? You start investigating your memory to find what it is you’re remembering. I got that feeling when I read about Dallas City Manager A.C. Gonzalez’s so-called shakeup of…

In terms of what is classified as country music, the definition seems to be expanding at a faster rate than ever. Southern rock, folk, and even hip hop have all recently cemented with Nashville artists that have historically been resistant to a whole lot of change. Fortunately, scenes cropped up…

Punk rock has been a part of cinema ever since the music was created in places like Los Angeles, New York and London in the mid to late ’70s. Aside from the music, either live or on record, the big screen provided another medium to convey what punk truly stands…

From this rag and that bit of bone, a picture emerges of what Dallas has really been doing with hundreds of millions of dollars in federal housing money all these years. It’s not a portrait of theft or castles in Spain, but it’s not a pretty picture. Instead what we…

The Dallas Morning News has an editorial this morning suggesting that the Dallas school district put a top internal investigator on leave last month to cover something up. The editorial is a development of some good writing Mike Hashimoto has been doing on the paper’s opinion blog, and, for once,…

An unquestioned tenet of local political culture is that white-owned companies that want to do business on the turf officially designated by Dallas as “southern (black, maybe brown) Dallas” must pay a toll. Five days ago I reproduced here a 2009 Dallas Morning News editorial that gave an explicit rendition…

Screengrab via YouTube Back before he was the host of The Daily Show — back even before Josh Hartnett chopped off his fingers and stabbed him in the eye in The Faculty — Jon Stewart was the host of his own eponymous show. It aired for almost two years, first…

Are you a musician? Is your group having issues? Ask Fan Landers! Critic Jessica Hopper has played in and managed bands, toured internationally, booked shows, produced records, worked as a publicist and is the author of The Girls’ Guide to Rocking, a how-to for teen ladies. She is here to…

No list concerning music books could ever be definitive. There’s simply far too many writers, artists and genres one could choose to explore: everything from the better autobiographies (say, Bob Dylan’s Chronicles or Miles Davis’ Miles) and top tier hip-hop books (like Book of Rap Lists) to jazz guides (The…

In yesterday’s Dallas Morning News, columnist Steve Blow apologized for calling me a “tinfoil hat” (nutcase) in 2008 when I reported that Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price was sabotaging a major shipping development in his own backyard while having compromising links to the powerful Perot family, owners of a…

On my way from work to City Hall I drive by the Palestinian demonstrations in Dealey Plaza. At home in the evening I see Texas Governor Rick Perry (not my favorite guy) on the TV news leading a rally for Israel. The anchorman on the TV news shows me a…

Oh, I swore I wasn’t going to respond to the stuff yesterday by Tod Robberson on The Dallas Morning News opinion blog yesterday, but now “Wylie H Dallas,” the scarily well-informed omnipresent pseudonymous blog commenter, has got me all stirred up. This morning he posted an old Steve Blow column…

If you listen to country music, it’s almost assured that you feel like everyone is dumping on your favorite genre as of late. As “bro-country” increasingly becomes the butt of the joke for serious music critics and old-school fans alike, this unfortunate plague on country music’s artistic house continues to…

Free Money Is Bad Dollars from HUD are the root of much evil at City Hall. Most of the comments that people offer on blog items on our web page are interesting. Some can be crazy or spam or truly offensive. But whenever I skim over the comments and fail…

This is an addendum to a thing I wrote yesterday about the recent indictment of Dallas’ most powerful county officials on bribery and tax charges. One thing we all have to do in order to figure this out is the math. We can talk all day about collective guilt –…

In a new series, Choice Cuts, Jonathan Patrick talks with artists – both local and international – about their favorite records. Most jazz musicians fall into one of two avenues. They either approach their performances with the instincts of a sculptor or with those of a bulldozer. Dallas’ Dennis Gonzalez,…

You could almost forget about the indictment last week of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, put it out of your mind’s eye, not even think where it will end and better spend your time thinking about trucking. It’s the more compelling story. Logistics is the business of taking cargo…

Photo courtesy of FLICKR/Takahiro Kyono While rock ‘n’ roll is necessarily classified as a form of pop music, it is actually an idiom whose radical, destructive primitivism established a new type of socio-cultural disorder. It’s about rejection of the status quo and celebration of the dis-imprisonment it instills. Always exploited…