A deeply moving scene last night at the board of directors meeting of Dallas Area Rapid Transit, our regional transit agency: Public seating in the large chamber was filled wall-to-wall with ex-offenders pleading for the very thing we should all want for them — honest work. I told you about…
Let me see if I get this. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is already paying Texas 75 percent of its costs for cleanup in West and making $8 million in low interest loans to individuals. But because FEMA ruled recently that Texas is capable of picking up the balance…
You guys are killing me. I’m a four-hyphen guy, a commie-pinko hippie-liberal nanny-state bleeding-heart libtard. I thought Dallas was supposed to be ultra-conservative. You’re supposed to have at least one hyphen. But you keep putting me on the wrong side of the hyphen. Today The Dallas Morning News has a…
Plans for the 50th anniversary of the murder of President John F. Kennedy at Dealey Plaza in Dallas just got weirder by one whole magnitude. Yesterday Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings unveiled a process that will make security much tighter for the ceremony next November than security would be for a…
We’ve all been there. You’re at a seated gig, possibly in a large stadium or auditorium, and the people around you only serve to remind you how much you dislike humanity. With their phones, their talking, and their general disregard for the etiquette of polite society, they are in actual…
The twittersphere has been all a-flutter with Kanyemania. A lot of cultural dialogue on social media has been in the vein of his new album, new baby, or new interview. Though you’re probably dying to hear more opinions regarding these topics, we’ve decided to widen the focus a bit on…
Take two things. One, five years ago the Dallas City Council told City Manager Mary Suhm not to allow gas/oil drilling in city parks. A few days later she signed a secret deal with a gas/oil drilling company to allow drilling in parks. Two, last year the council gave Suhm…
Lindsey BestAndrew Youssef [Editor’s Note: Longtime concert photographer Andrew Youssef found out almost two years ago that he had Stage IV Colon Cancer. In that time, he has continued to shoot tons of music events for our sister paper OC Weekly on top of other freelance work and working a…
Welcome to Alice Column, in which Alice Laussade writes stories about things on (roughly) the same day of (roughly) every week, making it (roughly) a column. Got an idea for a column? Start your own blog and write it up, you lazy shit. When you hear the name of the…
Interesting story in The Dallas Morning News today by Selwyn Crawford about growing national popularity for Juneteenth, a holiday originally thought to be strictly a Texas thing. Juneteenth marks the official emancipation of slaves in Texas in 1865, two years after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. My family just visited a…
We caught up with producer David Castell here a couple years ago, but he’s been up to an awful lot since then. Castell has produced, mixed, mastered and otherwise had his hands in local music dating all the way back to the early ’90s, and he shows no sign of…
Welcome to The Weekly, where we’ll tell you what’s happening at various weekly musical events going on in DFW this summer. Some of them will be well-known scenes, some will be considerably less so. If you’re into jazz, cheap drinks and getting down on hump day, the Addison restaurant Azure’s…
Oh, tinfoil hat, all that stuff about how I’m paranoid, go ahead, say it, get it out of your system. I’ve got to be ready for it by now, right? But let me tell you something: There’s a big difference between paranoia and clairvoyance. And in the matter of the…
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…
The easiest thing to say about Dallas City Council elections would be that no one gives a shit. Voter participation in the council run-off election last weekend, counting everybody who mailed in a ballot or voted early, was 4.21 percent of the people who were registered to vote. That would…
When you go to a concert, which is purportedly a collection of like-minded people on the grounds that you’re all there to see a particular thing you personally enjoy, you have two choices. You can either dress like you think everyone else will, or you can shout “FUCK IT” into…
Safe to say that I was doing bong hits on the couch one afternoon back in 1987 when Michael Alago, the A&R rep from Elektra Records who discovered and signed Metallica, called me up out of the blue and asked what was happening with the music scene here in Dallas…
Dear Mexican: In Philadelphia, there are three Spanish-language stations on regular broadcast television. None of them offer English subtitles. I bet plenty of people of all heritages would like to check out Spanish-language television or the news from Central America or whatever, if we could get subtitles. I called one…
Wrong. I said the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination in Dallas would be no big deal. It will be. And it looks as if Dallas, to the delight of many, will step right into the middle of that big deal looking guilty as sin of something or other. The…
For over a decade now, Casey Di lorio’s musician colleagues have asked him for help making a record. Nowadays, it’s the basket he puts all of his creative eggs into, at his own Valve Studios. Di Iorio played in One Ton Records-signed rock outfit Valve back in the day, who…
Lindsey BestAndrew Youssef [Editor’s Note: Longtime concert photographer Andrew Youssef found out almost two years ago that he had Stage IV Colon Cancer. In that time, he has continued to shoot tons of music events for our sister paper OC Weekly on top of other freelance work and working a…
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…
