Opinion & Commentary

See also: The Kessler’s Melissa Hennings tends bar and shoots your favorite bands See also: KNON’s Don O. knows the Dallas blues Damon K. Clark, co-musical director at Winspear Opera House, is changing lanes. He’s sidelining what has been a pretty spirited performance career in local jazz and choir to…

The doormen. They are Dallas’ gatekeepers, ticket takers, fight breaker-uppers and occasional crowd curators. Before you ever get past that velvet rope, or even show your ID, they are sizing up our city’s finest and not-so-finest. The Overserved wants to introduce you to the gents and ladies letting you in…

What country is this? Have I been on some kind of horrendous toot, and did I sleep for a month, and did I wake up in the wrong country? All weekend long on my TV set I kept seeing Paul Ryan, the right-wing social Darwinist cheese-head, and they said he…

All right. A brief time-out? Before we all die of West Nile or shut down our endocrine systems with toxins, should we call in somebody who, unlike me or some editorial writer at the Morning News, actually knows something? An editorial in The Dallas Morning News today more or less…

Wait. I’m a libtard. I’m politically correct. I hate bullies. I despise people who make fun of a co-worker for being different from them. But they sent a Dallas police sergeant to deep nights at the jail because he came back to his division with a bag from Chick-fil-A? You…

Dear Mexican: So often when we see Mexican bands perform in the U.S. and Mexico, the crowd at some point starts chanting “¡Cu-le-ro!” (“Ass-hole!”). Why does the crowd yell “Cu-le-ro” at a band that they seemingly adore? Need Más Earplugs Dear Pocho: “People yelling ‘Cu-le-ro’ doesn’t happen at every concert,”…

The Carnival Cruise Ship boat club barge that a rowing club wanted to build on White Rock Lake seems to have shrunk back into a modest, nicely designed facility that shouldn’t really bother anybody. More amazing, the rowing club people themselves seem to have shed their long forked tails, horns,…

The moment Channel 8 reporter Teresa Woodard opened her mouth to tell viewers Dena Schlosser, the Plano baby chopper, had been seen working as a checker at Walmart, you knew Dena Schlosser was already no longer working at Walmart. Of course they fired her before the story ever hit the…

See also: Kessler front-of-house man Paul Quigg finds a niche in Oak Cliff Melissa Davis Hennings stumbled into photography, really: Her first shot was The Black Keys. But taking photos of local bands isn’t how she makes ends meet. She’s the bar manager at The Kessler, an ideal gig for…

See also: Photos from House of Plates’ Endless Summer In Texas, hibernation season has arrived. Our cold tombs of constantly running A/C evolve into sacred spaces during this third act of summer. We need a safe place to toss up the blackout curtains, draw the shades and hideout from the…

The Houston Mayor’s Office of Homeland Security and something called the regional Catastrophic Planning Initiative have produced a public service video called “Run, Hide, Fight,” advising people on what to do if somebody wants to shoot them. I personally wish to nominate this production for the 2012 “No Shit Sherlock…

Basic rule of American democracy: Anybody who wins an election gets 10 seconds of credibility. Let’s hope in the case of Ted Cruz, lionized today in The New York Times as “A Republican Voice With Tea Party Mantle and Intellectual Heft,” we can make it to the second 10 seconds…

Dear Mexican: I’m a Mexican-American high school student, and just as patriotic as the Joneses who live next to me. In my neighborhood, a gabacho got mad when someone hung a Mexican flag and ended up cutting it down. I think this whole idea of putting one’s flag up and…

Not trying to be obnoxious. This is not I-told-you-so. But I did told you so. In a column published December 29, I did point out that North Texas was taking all kinds of wild chances with its water supply by refusing to adopt the type of strict safety measures in…

The so-called “New Black Panther Party” in Dallas, now trying to exploit the James Harper shooting in Dixon Circle, always leaves me with the same dilemma. Don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I felt like this when they were doing their half-assed ineffectual protest last winter at a South…

Tale of two cities in the morning papers — well, two and a half, if you include Mitt Romney. The Reverend Gerald Britt has a mesmerizing op-ed piece in The Dallas Morning News today about the agony of Dixon Circle, the South Dallas neighborhood where a near-riot took place last…

Don O. has been spinning blues records on KNON since 1983, literally about a month after they went on the air. See, he was a listener of the pre-KNON station at that frequency, KCHU, from ’75 until they were switched off in ’77. Heartbroken at the station’s demise and subsequent…

There, next to the Rio Room dumpster, was one of club’s well-suited security men, manned with a velvet rope and a flashlight. The beautiful people were in Rio’s front room, but Saturday night another set of Dallas misfits were making their way down the stairs into that glow-in-the-dark basement. The…

Wait. Time out. Take notice. We are experiencing a new form of national crisis. It can no longer be denied. The United States is now suffering from a crisis of Total Wrongness. Most people are going to think the trigger was a mea culpa speech a couple days ago on…

We’re all holed up behind our verbal barricades on this Dixon Circle deal, me among the worst of them, surprise surprise. So maybe it’s worth remembering that Dallas city councilman Dwaine Caraway was out there Tuesday night. He was urging calm among the hundreds of people angry about the fatal…

I get window shocked every once in a while. I’m in the car going from some pillar to some post, staring straight ahead thinking about stupid City Hall or the stupid North Texas Tollway Authority or stupid Fair Park, and then for some reason I look out the side window,…