Music festivals are a tough business. It’s hard to make them stick. Organizers don’t usually expect to break even for the first five years, often longer. Even if a festival survives, it’s not the end of the story. Maintaining what you have often means expanding your model and your audience…
For what it’s worth – not much, probably – nobody’s sadder than me about the South Dallas/Fair Park Trust Fund and the saga about to unfold around it. I know the history. It was one of those crumbs that poor black South Dallas had to wrench from a fat callous…
I’m headed out of town for a week’s vacation. Spent a good deal of yesterday thinking about the outcome in the HUD case against Dallas. As you know by now, HUD folded a couple days ago and withdrew its racial segregation allegation against the city. If you were here yesterday,…
City Hall announced late yesterday that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has caved on the 4-year-old Lockey/MacKenzie racial segregation complaint against Dallas officials, vacating most of the findings of a four-year federal civil rights investigation. A settlement signed yesterday by HUD and the city (see below)…
Man’s connection to nature, his desire to simultaneously embrace, tame and succumb to the siren song of the wild, has been expressed through art for centuries. And there’s no more fitting musical accompaniment to Mother Nature than metal and punk, two genres that place a premium on organic, unvarnished performances…
The ninth incarnation of Austin’s Fun Fun Fun Fest starts tomorrow, and the growth of the festival shows no signs of slowing. It’s a festival that feels loved, that feels like an awful amount of care and attention has gone into it and that is booked by some sort of…
We took a pretty bad hiding over Ebola here when Dallas became the first city in the United States to harbor the disease. How much of that we deserved and how much we did not will be fodder for somebody’s doctoral dissertation someday. Right now it’s worth noting that a…
The city auditor’s new bad report on a 27-year-old economic development fund in black South Dallas talks about technical problems with paperwork and mumbles on about the need for better “performance measures.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. But when, Mr. Auditor, were you going to tell us about the missing five million…
By Roy Robertson At the end of October, Denton’s Pageantry traveled to New York City for the annual CMJ Music Marathon. We invited singer and guitarist Roy Robertson to reflect on the band’s experience there — their first time attending the convention — and its potential value to Texas musicians…
New York Times media writer David Carr, who’s almost always right about everything, has a piece in today’s paper about sponsored (paid-for) journalism, in which he singles out The Texas Tribune in Austin for having avoided the obvious pitfalls. I’m not too sure about that. Carr kicks off his piece…
The Dallas ISD school board is supposed to meet soon to discuss an incident from a couple weeks back in which the superintendent ordered district police to forcibly evict a school board trustee from a middle school. I hope they also talk about the school. At first blush, Dade Middle…
It has taken me a long while — I was slow — but I guess now I sort of get why some people think the “Ebola House” is funny. Sort of. Still working on it. Decorated for Halloween as an Ebola disaster area and located in a rich part of…
In a new series, Choice Cuts, Jonathan Patrick talks with artists, both local and international, about their favorite records. Pinkish Black is perhaps the most internationally celebrated of all current DFW acts. Their two LPs, Pinkish Black and Razed to the Ground, were critical darlings, garnering near-unanimous praise throughout the…
Just when we thought we could never show our faces again, thank goodness for Chris Christie. We owe him. Only the governor of New Jersey could make Dallas look good on Ebola. Look, we won’t be bragging any time soon about the day Ebola hit Dallas. It was a mess…
Sorry, everybody else, but this is one of those times I have to go all-in, full-tilt, do-or-die East Dallas on you. East Dallas! Listen to me! They’re going to take Tietze Pool away from you! Tietze Pool! One reason you moved into the Greater M Streets Area, also known as…
Amy Silverstein’s cover story here last week, “Road Runners,” exploded one of my own favorite and time-honored paradigms; the city versus the suburbs. Silverstein exposed a scenario in which people in the boondocks are getting reamed in exactly the same way and even by the same people as folks in…
A little over two years ago The Battery Conservancy, a nonprofit support group for Battery Park at the confluence of the Hudson and East rivers on the southern tip of Manhattan, decided that it needed a new chair. The conservancy wanted a new park chair that would be light enough…
Hoping it’s not bad luck to say this so soon, knocking on wood, rubbing my figurative rabbit’s foot (my wife won’t let me carry a real one), but I think this city and maybe even the nation deserve praise for overwhelming equanimity in the face of the first American Ebola…
Talk about mixed feelings this morning. On the one hand thanks to a youthful experience I would rather not recount here in colorful detail, I know exactly how Dallas school board member Bernadette Nutall feels about getting rousted by the cops earlier this week in a Dallas school building. My…
News media continue to present a picture of Ebola transmission that is significantly inaccurate by omission. They assert much more certainty than the science justifies. The version repeated like a mantra in most accounts — only direct physical contact with an infectious person — is wrong on its face and…
News that Ebola virus had escaped Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital and invaded the city in the body of an infected nurse was the last straw. It’s not the virus that’s going to drive us crazy. It’s the officials who keep making stupid promises that they have no ability to fulfill…
Big teachable moment right now in the Dallas school system — huge! — and the school board and superintendent should rush to take advantage of it. I’m talking about the deal I reported here yesterday in which the superintendent called school district cops to physically evict a school board member…
