You saw Stephen Young’s piece last week about kids in Irving being taught to “duck and cover” (dive under their desks) in case of an earthquake. You probably have to be of a certain age (old) to appreciate the cultural importance of duck and cover drills. It’s what we old…
Courtesy of the O’s. The secret is to just keep drinking. Editor: The O’s are an Americana band comprising Taylor Young and John Pedigo. They’ve made the trek to Colorado for the Steamboat Spring MusicFest, where many of the 50 artists on the lineup (and the festival’s 6,000 attendees) are…
Courtesy of the Steamboat Grand HotelThe unlikely birthplace of many-a Texas music collaboration. Editor: The O’s are an Americana band comprising Taylor Young and John Pedigo. They’ve made the trek to Colorado for the Steamboat Spring MusicFest, where many of the 50 artists on the lineup (and the festival’s 6,000…
Thank goodness, maybe Dallas school board President Miguel Solis has found an honorable, face-saving way out of the school board reform thicket that the mayor led us into last spring. Not a moment too soon. Some members of the so-called Home Rule Commission, charged with inventing a whole new way…
Craft cocktails are finally a thing in Dallas. The rest of the country has been drinking better than us for years, but we’re catching up. At least parts of the city are, anyway. You can’t throw a rock without hitting a craft cocktail bar on Henderson Ave, Lower Greenville or…
Todd PurifoyMusicFest brings 6,000 people to Steamboat Springs for a week each year. Editor: The O’s are an Americana band comprising Taylor Young and John Pedigo. They’ve made the trek to Colorado for the Steamboat Spring MusicFest, where many of the 50 artists on the lineup (and the festival’s 6,000…
Like many foods, elotes is interpreted differently in different regions. Depending on where you place your order it can be served on or off the cob, and the slew of toppings and condiments varies as well. When elotes makes its way into professional kitchens it is subject to a new…
Forget about the end times. The real issue is whether 11 earthquakes in 27 hours is enough to poison the jury pool. Remember? In August 2013, a gas drilling company sued us for $30 million — sued our city, that is — for denying fracking permits close to churches, homes…
Can’t go see it. This isn’t funny. I laughed many years ago when a student at SMU where I was an adjunct teacher said to me, “Everything I know about Vietnam, I know from Sylvester Stallone.” The reference, which I did not think was ironic, was to the then recent…
A crow’s eye view of the stray dog problem in Dallas, especially in the city’s often poor and violent southeastern sector, is daunting. We look down on thousands and thousands of dogs running loose through neighborhoods, many in semi-feral packs that strike out fearlessly from lairs in alleys and overgrown…
At this point, the jokes about country music make themselves. There is nothing fresh or relevant about making fun of country music anymore, especially if you’re talking about the unfortunate bro-country subgenre. That doesn’t mean that we’ll stop making jokes about these inept and shirtless knuckle-draggers, but this is where…
Former Dallas Carter High School football player Arthur Muhammad, now a filmmaker, doesn’t know how lucky he is that I failed in my own attempt to get a movie made about the 1988 David W. Carter High School Cowboys. Not that I came close. But it provided me with a…
I ate a lot of bone marrow this past year, and the only dish that really wowed me was the one you see pictured above. It’s bacon-crusted bone marrow and it’s served with either uni or caviar, depending on the mood of chef John Tesar at his new steakhouse, Knife…
On Wednesday night in Dallas, this 38 year-old, balding suburbanite and married father of one (with a second child on the way) did something I hadn’t done before. Though I’ve been canvassing the North Texas musical landscape for over 20 years as a fan and, more recently, as a music…
The Dallas Morning News ran a picture earlier this week of Mayor Mike Rawlings with a huge grin on his face while he watched a gigantic mechanical claw rip down a dilapidated house in West Dallas — exactly the grin I might have have had, too, had I been there…
If you know her only in her formal public persona, one of the things you may not know about former Dallas City Council member Angela Hunt is that she’s really funny. She and her husband, Park Board member Paul Sims, would make a killer stand-up duo at any comedy club…
On the one hand there is the immediate case of Tennell Atkins, the Dallas City Council member accused of assaulting a city employee at City Hall in early December. On the other hand, there is City Hall. I thought they were having a security crackdown to protect the council from…
My big hope for this coming year would be that 2015 will be The Year of Talking Honestly. The bitterness and recrimination hanging in malevolent clouds over the 16-year-old Trinity toll road debate really have very little to do with the nature of the project itself. It’s about roads, parks…
Churlish is my middle name, so I guess I’ll go ahead and complain about people who are on my own side now in the Trinity toll road debate. In an otherwise really great piece about it last week, D Magazine Publisher Wick Allison made reference again to what he agreed…
When you think of music festivals in Texas, you most likely think of the ones in Austin. Regardless of what Dallas’ music community would like to believe, where the state’s status quo is concerned, that’s the way it is. Austin has, just to name a few: Fun Fun Fun Fest,…
As the end of the year approaches, I find myself pondering all the big questions of my existence, as in, “Why can’t I go pick up carry-out food in a restaurant without being accosted by an angry Dallas public school teacher who wants to tell me what a butt-head I…
“2014: The year in Vonciel Jones Hill.” That is my title for this essay. Why? Because I firmly believe that if you can understand what’s wrong with Vonciel Jones Hill, you can understand what’s wrong with our city. No, wait. You can understand what’s wrong with the universe. At some…
