Our relationships to everything — the outside world, each other, ourselves — have been altered with varying degrees of velocity over the last six months. To live through times seized by so much cataclysm is to spend your waking hours reeling from one (often ugly) surprise to another, forever in…
I promise never to bring this up again. I may have said that before. I can’t remember. But this is definitely the last time. What is the etiquette for running up silently behind unfamiliar dogs on leashes and then passing them on the same sidewalk? Actually, forget etiquette. What is…
In the 1970s, we had Happy Days. In the 1980s, we had Bryan Adams’ “Summer of 69.” In the 1990s, we had That ’70s Show. In the 2000s, we had a post-punk revival. In the 2010s, ’90s nostalgia became so big that Nickelodeon started a programming block titled NickRewind, which was…
Typically, complaints lodged against music in the mainstream would make someone look like a miserly old-timer stuck in his or her glory days, but when people take issue with artists glamorizing drug abuse, they actually raise a legitimate point. However, as much merit as these grievances have, reasonable propositions to…
It’s Christmas. I am spending a Dallas holiday afternoon sitting cozily on the sofa in front of a cold fireplace with the air conditioning on, thumbing through the year on my phone to remember all the worst things people said about me in 2019. Carols on the stereo in the…
Everybody in South Dallas knows something is coming. The question is what, and the question is not idle. Is the Big Thing, whatever it is, going to revive South Dallas or bulldoze it? The house money has jumped the line. Big houses in some neighborhoods that still scared the socks…
I was born in England, but my family is from Argentina, of Italian descent. In any of those places, I’d be deemed a foreigner. I like to think that those roots are still deep, no matter how neglected, and I never thought I’d do my true growing up in Dallas…
To win a Dallas City Council vote on a construction project, Methodist Dallas Medical Center in North Oak Cliff (“Methodist”) hitched its wagon and its long good name in the community to Dallas landlord and investor Ralph Isenberg. That’s a hitch. The last time we had much to do with…
You probably knew this. I did not. Dennis Rodman, the retired basketball player who paved the way for President Donald Trump in North Korea, is from Dallas. OK, you white? Then here’s something neither one of us knew. Back in the day, black kids had their own secret tunnel into…
It was a matter of time before singers Sudie Abernathy’s and Teddy Waggy’s fantastical worlds became one. The critically praised artists and It Girls quickly became each other’s muses after meeting only a year ago. Abernathy is known simply as Sudie, and she’s been on the cusp of fame since…
I watched the Kavanaugh hearing last week with a bunch of old white guys. Of course, it was strictly research, but I was also hoping they might get enough of it at some point to lift themselves painfully up off the couch so we could go fishing, as promised. But,…
It’s not that the State Fair of Texas has no responsibility to the bitterly poor, racially segregated neighborhoods surrounding the fairgrounds. Of course it does. We all do. I do. You do. The danger for us all, however, is that we satisfy ourselves with pinning the blame for urban poverty…
The first thing to say about the announcement of a deal to privatize Fair Park, the city’s 277-acre Art Deco albatross in South Dallas, is that everybody on every side of this endless bloody debate is utterly stunned. The deal, which would turn over Fair Park to a private operator…
My editor has been encouraging me to ride one of the new motorized versions of a child’s kick-scooter being offered for rent all over the city, so that I can write a story about it. (Editor’s note: No I haven’t. Much.) Some years ago, the same editor sent me to…
The Garland City Council voted this week to close Windsurf Bay Park on Lake Ray Hubbard for the Fourth of July because Garland police were afraid too many people would show up for holiday picnics. That’s one approach. Of course, another strategy would be to make it a better park…
Want money? I’ve got some for you. You can double your income — possibly even quintuple, octuple, septendecuple it — depending on how fast you can read, simply by reading my articles. No, really. You know I wouldn’t scam you. I just came across this. I was looking at an…
The Byron Nelson golf game — golf match? no, golf tournament, that’s it! — starts tomorrow at Trinity Forest Golf Club, and, as you can tell, I’m not up to speed. But I might at least get interested. This will be the most rich white people in southern Dallas ever…
Boys. Really. C’mon. Be real. I am addressing myself here to the boys — the mayor, the private Dallas Citizens Council, the board of directors of the State Fair of Texas. I know. Some of you are girls. But, face it. You’re the boys, too. So, boys. Listen to me…
Jim Schutze, Dallas’ beloved accommodation artist and Observer staffer of approx. 47 years, will take your questions live on Facebook today at 3 p.m. He was ambivalent at first, but then we offered soft lighting and a makeup artist. Editor in chief Patrick Williams is moderating again so try to make…
Regardless of genre or tenured status, a common thread among all musicians is the nightmare gig, the gig that just did not go the way you expected. It’s the gig where that bassist shows up so hammered that he thinks he’s the singer. Or maybe it’s the night you forget…
The Oscars ceremony was fairly unpredictable this year: Singer Mary J. Blige was nominated for best supporting actress, athlete Kobe Bryant won an Oscar for Best Documentary, actor Gael Garcia Bernal performed a song, and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead was nominated as a composer. Most importantly, Eva-Marie Saint and Christopher…
OK, this is a rant, plain and simple, plus it’s way outside my wheelhouse as a local reporter, which I am sworn never to depart upon pain of humiliation by editors. But I can’t stand it. I’m like that crazy guy in the movie years ago who said, “I’m mad…
