Editor’s Note: Our nightlife columnist, Deb Doing Dallas, wrote about this year’s State Fair Classic, a longstanding Fair tradition at least as much about the pageantry and the marching bands in particular as it is about the actual football game played between Louisana’s Grambling State University and Texas’ Prairie View…
As he nears 60 years of age, Steve Earle is a bearded musical buddha. He’s also most certainly one of the greatest living songwriters. His career hasn’t been as lengthy as that of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen or Merle Haggard, but since he hit the scene in the mid-1980s with…
Louie Steven Witt, are you still out there somewhere, alive? Would you tell me if you were? You know you’re back in The Dallas Morning News this morning, but only as a ghost. I wonder if you really are a ghost yet. I can’t find you with Google, which may…
Bacon blew up the Internet again. A quick Google search for “bacon” and “infertility” will produce a whole slew of articles and blog posts pointing to the results of a fertility study that were recently presented at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine Conference in Boston. Researchers evaluated the eating…
We all have strong opinions about what songs constitute good music and what songs should only be played as part of a psychological warfare campaign to drive armed kidnappers out of barricaded compounds. But that doesn’t mean we need to bulldoze every conversation with our own taste. And it can…
Dear Mexican: My wife and I are looking to buy our first house. Being young(ish) and hip(ish), we’re looking into buying in Santa Ana. It’s amazing how much house and land you can get for $350K compared with the two-bedroom stacked cracker boxes in South O.C. My question is two-fold:…
A couple weeks back, a retired Dallas businessman named Don Williams published a set of three academic studies he commissioned at his own expense, all claiming to present evidence that Dallas ISD Superintendent Mike Miles is a failure. I was impressed that Williams was able to commission a study by…
The school reform debate has a way of flipping the words liberal and conservative around like pinballs, but somewhere running deep beneath the surface is a new orientation that needs new words. North of the line are people united in the belief that children from the most brutal circumstances are…
Despite it being a a pretty good spell since booking bands for places like Crown and Harp (she also did a stretch working on the non-editorial side of the building here at the Observer), Carlin Stultz is the kind of music supporter that doesn’t seem to fade easily. The recent…
Well, I see that Jerry Patterson, the state land commissioner, has accomplished his goal: The New York Times today is flouncing its long skirts and stamping its high-button shoes over a nutty gun rally Patterson has helped organize for next Saturday at the Alamo. Called “Come and Take It San…
If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent the last two months going to a lot of weddings, either alone or with your significant other. And although we typically don’t enjoy sitting in a church and staring at comb-overs, there are two things provided at weddings we can all agree on:…
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 acting city manager who would be king, A.C. Gonzalez, has always been the inside favorite. And if there is an issue in his way, it’s that. Just ahead for City Hall is a decision to make somebody the permanent city manager. But just behind it is a series of…
Kid Congo Powers was fantastic last night. He truly was. A full-blooded romp through a set that drew from his past as an ’80s pioneer of post-punk, as well as just some straight up punk, his was a stage presence far from the snarling beast you might have expected. Instead,…
Former Dallas mayor Laura Miller has a great piece today on the op-ed page of The Dallas Morning News about the absolute insanity of hiring yet another city manager for Dallas from within the inbred, cultic, code-talking clan of apparatchiks usually described politely as “city staff.” She cites the example…
Kid Congo Powers comes through the Double Wide tonight, an unmissable chance to see a man with one of the most interesting résumés in rock in a tiny, intimate venue. A former member of The Gun Club, The Cramps, and The Bad Seeds doesn’t just turn up in a small…
For Every ZZ Top and Steve Miller our state produces, there are thousands of bands that either wallow in obscurity or just get by with endless, backbreaking tours and the hope of having enough cash to finance some studio time. Here are some acts that should have hit the big…
Dear Mexican: A friend says she read that only 20 percent of Mexican men go down on their ladies. Can you “spread” some light on the subject? El Gabacho Guapo Dear Handsome Gabacho: Let me refer her to The International Encyclopedia of Sexuality, a set of studies on the world’s…
So the Dallas ISD Board of Education, which decided at its last meeting to keep but humiliate its superintendent of schools, will meet again tomorrow, locked inside another closed-door “executive session,” to decide whether to keep, fire or further humiliate the superintendent. A person looking on as those doors swing…
flickr/adam_jonesAn actual old personDetroit rapper Danny Brown has a new album, called Old. Brown’s occasional boasts about receiving in-show fellatio aside, just about everyone who likes good rap music likes him, and this new work does not disappoint. But the title is really annoying…
Don O. has been playing blues records on 89.3 KNON for thirty years now. He was there when KNON broadcast out of an old house with no air conditioning and he’s never been late for a single airshift (despite 20 miles of traffic each way). He’s since been informally knighted…
Two interesting and ironically paired stories in the daily paper this morning — one about an expensive planned do-over for the failed Victory Park development, a monument to the perils of great-man leadership, the other about a planned museum exhibit honoring J. Erik Jonsson, one of the city’s most notable…
