Results tagged “Dallas” from book/daddy

In the Dallas and Fort Worth daily newspapers, there will no longer be separate reviews of many cultural organizations and events. The two city papers, the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, have begun running the same review by the same writer. It's the latest development in what has been a series of cutbacks affecting area arts reporting and reviewing. With newspapers across the country facing serious financial problems, maintaining an individual, local critic's voice in print is no longer a priority, even when the art under review is locally based.

A month ago, the Morning News and the Star-Telegram announced that the two newspapers may collaborate in unspecified ways -- beyond the joint distribution agreement the companies had already arranged. Frontburner, the D Magazine blog, ran a memo by DMN editor Bob Mong that said those unspecified ways would include "a few targeted areas of newsgathering."

It became clear this past weekend what this will entail for North Texas arts: The two papers will run a single, shared review. In effect, there will be a single daily newspaper arts staff unevenly divided between the two newsrooms.

The African-American Museum in Dallas is presenting a celebration symposium of author Richard Wright this weekend to mark the centennial of his birth. Surrounding the symposium are a number of lectures and book club meetings.

Elaine Johnson: "Richard Wright was probably one of the first books that I read. But I didn't remember Black Boy and so when I read it again, I found it quite interesting that a lot of the racism - to me, it's like, 'Ooh, this reminded me of things today - especially with the election going on.'"

Elaine Johnson is a member of the Black Pearls Keeping It Real Book Club in Dallas. On this particular Saturday afternoon, the club has met at a Half-Price Bookstore to discuss Black Boy, Richard Wright's 1945 autobiography. It's his account of growing up in the South in the 1910s and '20s and escaping to Chicago.

Wright's family was so isolated, he didn't really encounter many white people until he was nearly in his teens. Because his father abandoned Wright's mother, the family was so desperately poor they ate lard gravy as a daily meal. As a result, Wright was seriously malnourished: By the time he was 20, he failed his first job application at the Post Office. He couldn't meet the minimum weight requirement of 120 pounds.

Wright's original title for Black Boy was -- American Hunger.

Doris Nelson is another Black Pearl member. She found the book's extreme poverty and isolation hard to get past at first:

The case of Rudy Kos, the Dallas priest who was convicted of sexual assault in 1997, made Dallas one of the first Catholic dioceses to be rocked by a sex abuse scandal - one of the first of dozens of such scandals throughout the church.

WaterTower Theatre in Addison deserves praise, then, for finally premiering Doubt in North Texas. Doubt is John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize (and Tony Award) -winning drama about a priest, who may be a pedophile, and the nun, the school principal, who sets out to bring him down. I say WaterTower is finally bringing the play here because we're getting to see Doubt two and a half years after it debuted in such places as Seattle, Singapore and New Zealand -- and only a few months before it opens as a Hollywood film.

Doubt is clearly inspired by the horrific raft of recent cases of pedophile priests and what often turned out to be the collusion of the Church hierarchy in covering up their crimes. It got so bad for the church that at one point, David Letterman joked that with the Gambinos gone, the Catholic Church was now the largest organized crime syndicate in the country. Shanley sets his drama in the Bronx in 1964, though. This permits Doubt to be separate, to explore its own case without entangling itself in all of the accusations and counter-accusations, the hundred-million dollar court settlements we've seen the past decade.

Yet it's impossible to un-learn what we learned in the '90s. It's impossible for us to watch Doubt without knowing what would follow, without seeing it through (broken) stained-glass windows.

The neon Pegasus has been a  traditional symbol for Dallas because it graces the top of the Magnolia Building, at one time the tallest skyscraper in town, and could be seen for miles. If it looks familiar, that's because it became a trademark of Mobil Oil. Mobil Oil started as the Magnolia Oil Company. This means that a favorite symbol for Dallas is an oil company corporate logo. Image from www.3baylor.edu.

Harvey Graff's new book, The Dallas Myth: The Making and Unmaking of an American City, is a thorough and devastating examination of how Dallas developed its larger-than-life image, its aggressive business culture, its ambitions, its conformity and fearfulness - and, especially, its malign neglect of the past.

A history and English professor at Ohio State University, Graff lived here for more than 20 years, teaching at the University of Texas at Dallas and eventually teaching a class on Dallas' history. In doing so, he discovered how ignorant his students were about Big D. The bus tour of the city that his class would take often was the first time many of his mostly suburban students had ever visited downtown.

Why should they? And why should anyone care about Dallas' past? As many newcomers to Dallas eventually learn (especially if they've asked to see any building older than 30 years), this is the city without history. It's a popular idea about Dallas' origins: This is the city with no reason to exist here -- there are no natural attractions, no mountains, no real lakes, and the Trinity River is not navigable to the Gulf of Mexico, ergo, it's not good for trade.

Actually, there were perfectly practical reasons to build a city here in the 19th century. Dallas stood on trade routes and was surrounded by great land for cattle, wheat and cotton (and later, oil). That's how the city first sold itself to people headed west. It was only when hard times hit in the '20s and '30s and the Dallas labor market began turning to unions that the city began inventing the myths about our lack of history and natural resources.

Why? Because if there was nothing here, then our city leaders and businessmen must have been true visionaries, building all this from scratch. We peasants owe them everything. And if there's no historical significance to anything, everything is up for grabs: Anything can be bought, bulldozed and redeveloped. Dallas is constantly reinventing itself like this in the hopes that the next big project will change everything (while fearing that it won't). Simultaneously, it's constantly trying to bury the past - such as its history of political extremism and racial violence.