Opinion & Commentary

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…

No list concerning music books could ever be definitive. There’s simply far too many writers, artists and genres one could choose to explore: everything from the better autobiographies (say, Bob Dylan’s Chronicles or Miles Davis’ Miles) and top tier hip-hop books (like Book of Rap Lists) to jazz guides (The…

In yesterday’s Dallas Morning News, columnist Steve Blow apologized for calling me a “tinfoil hat” (nutcase) in 2008 when I reported that Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price was sabotaging a major shipping development in his own backyard while having compromising links to the powerful Perot family, owners of a…

On my way from work to City Hall I drive by the Palestinian demonstrations in Dealey Plaza. At home in the evening I see Texas Governor Rick Perry (not my favorite guy) on the TV news leading a rally for Israel. The anchorman on the TV news shows me a…

Oh, I swore I wasn’t going to respond to the stuff yesterday by Tod Robberson on The Dallas Morning News opinion blog yesterday, but now “Wylie H Dallas,” the scarily well-informed omnipresent pseudonymous blog commenter, has got me all stirred up. This morning he posted an old Steve Blow column…

If you listen to country music, it’s almost assured that you feel like everyone is dumping on your favorite genre as of late. As “bro-country” increasingly becomes the butt of the joke for serious music critics and old-school fans alike, this unfortunate plague on country music’s artistic house continues to…

Free Money Is Bad Dollars from HUD are the root of much evil at City Hall. Most of the comments that people offer on blog items on our web page are interesting. Some can be crazy or spam or truly offensive. But whenever I skim over the comments and fail…

This is an addendum to a thing I wrote yesterday about the recent indictment of Dallas’ most powerful county officials on bribery and tax charges. One thing we all have to do in order to figure this out is the math. We can talk all day about collective guilt –…

In a new series, Choice Cuts, Jonathan Patrick talks with artists – both local and international – about their favorite records. Most jazz musicians fall into one of two avenues. They either approach their performances with the instincts of a sculptor or with those of a bulldozer. Dallas’ Dennis Gonzalez,…

You could almost forget about the indictment last week of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, put it out of your mind’s eye, not even think where it will end and better spend your time thinking about trucking. It’s the more compelling story. Logistics is the business of taking cargo…

Photo courtesy of FLICKR/Takahiro Kyono While rock ‘n’ roll is necessarily classified as a form of pop music, it is actually an idiom whose radical, destructive primitivism established a new type of socio-cultural disorder. It’s about rejection of the status quo and celebration of the dis-imprisonment it instills. Always exploited…

Reporters do not gasp, generally speaking, but there were muttered exclamations that might as well have been gasps when Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, age 64, was led into a large and formal federal courtroom this afternoon. His hands were manacled behind his back, his awkward gait in leg-irons…

Arrests by federal agents this morning of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price on bribery conspiracy charges, along with charges against three associates, have set off a new round in everybody’s favorite courthouse whisper game, “Who’s flipped?” Multiple sources this morning say federal agents have arrested Price, who was indicted…

Seeing Tim McGraw in concert today isn’t the spectacle it was in 1996, when he was riding high on being one of country music’s biggest superstars. McGraw may have settled down slightly in his later years, but fans at the Atlanta stop of McGraw’s Sundown Heaven Town tour earlier this…

Late yesterday, just before finally answering my days-old question about it, the city manager sent a memo to the City Council characterizing $800,000 repaid to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as a kind of technical accounting error and no big deal. Most of it involves money stolen by…

UPDATED SEPTEMBER 8 2014: The Search for Mary Suhm Heats Up with Rumors of a Trinity Road Goon Squad ORIGINAL POST Is the former city manager still at City Hall? Maybe, maybe not, but her spirit still reigns. Last week I made a new hat-cam movie for our news blog…

I wanted you to know that I am still trying to find Mary Suhm at City Hall, and I need your help. Last week I made a movie based on my hunt for the former Dallas city manager, who is rumored still to be lurking somewhere in City Hall. It…

Reaching for a badly mixed metaphor, I guess I would say those of us personally involved for a long time on the opposition side of the Trinity roll road issue feel right now like we’re breathless flies on the wall with our fingers crossed and our dukes up (flies have…

WOW. Looks like bigbexardaddy knows whereof he speaks. Little over a week ago bigbexardaddy commented on an item I had posted here about the Bexar Street boondoggle, giving away a lot of detail that sure sounded like it came from inside City Hall, including a claim that Dallas, even in…

The Austin American-Statesmanand The Houston Chronicle this morning are reporting that Governor Rick Perry will hold a press conference this afternoon to announce he’s sending 1,000 Texas National Guard troops to the Mexican border to defend Texas against an invasion of unarmed Central American children. This, of course, goes nowhere…