How could anything worth a damn come from a soulless , charge card , cultural wasteland like Dallas ?
slowly – because Dallas is n’t any of those thing and has n’t been for a while . If you think so , buss Erykah Badu ’s posterior .
If you consider so , you should have been at Badu ’s 45th natal day at the ending of February . For hours , she admit masses to church inside The Bomb Factory , an actual former WWII - era bomb mill locate in the same Deep Ellum neighbourhood where Leadbelly and Blind Lemon Jefferson used to play on street corners . It was one of those nights that you’re able to finger is A Moment for every single second . You should have been there . Dave Chappelle and Andre 3000 were .
Erykah does n’t take Dallas for granted , but she ’s reasonably much alone in that respect . I mean , look , I get it , OK ? I empathize that the widely held opinion is that all Dallas has ever contributed to the culture is two versions of an eponymic nighttime soap , the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders , and a Roman host of world - television receiver wannabee , and I see why . TV has kicked us in the dungaree for X , but we ca n’t seem to say no to it . I cringed when they announce theReal woman of the house of Dallas , because 1 ) I know I ’d probably become guiltily addicted to it and 2 ) it would reenforce every dumb matter masses say about Dallas .
To be clear-cut , some of that exists . Of of course . But it ’s only part of what goes on here , and not a huge part . It just incline to get the most tending . When I cogitate of people who better represent what Dallas is mightily now , I think of people like Ben Fountain , author of the brilliantBilly Lynn ’s Long Halftime Walk , the basis for an Ang Lee film coming later this twelvemonth .
I saw Fountain at an issue in 2015 at a house in the Oak Cliff neighborhood that had been twist into a bookstore and cafe , forebode " The Wild police detective " , by a pair of Spaniards , Paco Vique and Javier Garcia del Moral . On a table were books from Deep Vellum Publishing , a publisher of translate whole shebang start by Will Evans , another transplanting , a couple of years ago . Evans recently open his own Good Book store in Deep Ellum , a few blocks away from where I and several thousand others shared a import with Badu . I could go on . masses used to forget Dallas to make their mark . But now they ’re doing it here , and it has niggling to do with oil or personal brands .
The Bomb Factory/Facebook
But , sure , we ’re just a metropolis of J.R. Ewings andReal Housewives .
talk of obtuse things people say ? A few years ago , I was in Austin for South By Southwest , the jumbo yearly music / moving picture / whatever festival that takes over the metropolis for a duet of weeks every March . The first night I was there , I was with a couple of friends and a forty - something Austin woman – I knew she was from Austin because she had a tambourine hook over one shoulder – approached us . She necessitate my acquaintance where they were from and she made small talking about their various urban center when they tell her . Then she ask me .
“ Dallas , ” I said , with a smiling even though I knew what was probably coming . And it did : her boldness now changed . Have you ever realise a baby consume something particularly unpleasant ? Like that . She slap me hard in the dresser . “ Why would you ever live there ? ” she said . She spun around , removed the tambourine from her shoulder , as if she needed a amulet to guard off my evil presence , and rattled off into the dark .
Tim Sharp/AP Photo
It was a recur theme . A couple of days later – in the parking mass of a Whole Foods , of all places – I overheard a man accuse another of “ Dallas - ing up [ his ] Austin . ” I knew what they meant without asking , just as I have it off what most of the state entail when they let the cat out of the bag about Dallas . You could try a abstemious reverberation of it lately when the august New York Philharmonic announced it had employ Jaap van Zweden from the Dallas Symphony Orchestra as its new music director .
It comes from the hang around malodour of a reputation that was never 100 - percent based in fact . Dallasthe TV show was n’t really about Dallas the city . It could have been calledHoustonorTexas . And , obviously , the Cowboys have plenty of blame to shoulder . All that " America ’s squad " business – crafty marketing – led to a national fan base that could be middling described as being made up largely of frontrunners , dudes who have a Cowboys cap on a wrack next to Lakers and Yankees hats . That ’s not our fault . The Cowboys have n’t even played in Dallas since the 1960s , no matter what B - drum roll footage onFootball Night in Americamight propose .
We do n’t do ourselves any favors . The Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau ’s slogan is “ bounteous things happen here , ” which wreak off the ridiculously overused “ everything is bigger in Texas ” cliché , and means that we end up trumpeting the fact that Dallas has the largest liberal arts dominion in the country – 19 contiguous pulley-block broadcast over 68 acres of museums and carrying out halls and a performing arts high schooling that produced Badu and Norah Jones , among others – rather than anything regarding its timbre .
Nasher Sculpture Center/Facebook
Which is a shame , because none of the institutions there ask to blot out behind mine - is - bigger - than - yours swash . The Nasher Sculpture Center , for instance , curb ( inside a Renzo Piano - designed construction ) one of the fine collections in the world , with works by Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning and Joan Miro and Matisse . It is not all of the artistic creation amassed by the late Raymond Nasher . The residuum is located in his other donation to Dallas , NorthPark , and that ’s where it get catchy . Because NorthPark is a shopping mall .
citizenry no doubt seethe their eyes when they larn that one of the city ’s shopping mall houses an estimable appeal of modern art – mostly carving , but also a large gridiron of Warhols and piece by Frank Stella and James Rosenquist , among others . You ca n’t take the air too far without coming across another induction . Some might argue this is a perfect distillment of the metropolis ’s culture : “ Oh , of course Dallas keeps all of its art in a shopping mall . ” Counterargument : yes , is n’t that amazing ? Would n’t it be heavy if all malls did that ? It ’s a free museum .
Ray Nasher is just one of Dallas ’ bluff - faced epithet that struck it rich and then used a big chunk of that money to enrich the city ’s polish . But because they put their name on every park and theater and museum , it belike does n’t change the stock judgment that Dallas is a metropolis of condition - obsessed slave always worry what the rest of the country thinks of us . You have to understand that , for an sure-enough generation , it was a very real worry .
Courtesy of Klyde Warren Park
The blackwash of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 was a stain that no amount of boosterism could wash away , but that did n’t stop anyone from trying . For decades , the city looked for a magic smoke that could make everything OK again . So we tried diddlysquat . We turned a bridge into a park over the Trinity River and built another park over a main road . ( Austin only has another main road on top of its main road . ) There is an one-time guard that still think in those terminal figure , eternally touting this project or that one as the final step in making Dallas “ public - class . ” Those two words are used so often they might as well come pre - printed on press releases .
But here ’s the muckle : Dallas is already there . Is it a work in progress ? Sure . pretend what ? So is everywhere else . Every city is in some flesh of transformation , rebuild or reimagining itself . But we have the pearl of a big urban center . We have the people .
In tardy 2014 , when Dallas became a flashpoint in the Ebola epidemic , Mayor Mike Rawlings awkwardly noted that the comer of Ebola evince what an “ international city ” Dallas had become . It was an odd tone to strike at the prison term , but Rawlings was not incorrect . In my locality , there are Eritrean and Vietnamese churches . The city has one of the largest Sudanese population in the country , part of a turgid and thriving immigrant community . Last yr , when Texas Governor Greg Abbott drink to keep Syrian refugees out of the state , Rawlings refused , saying it was “ the spirit of Dallas ” to receive them , and it is . But I ’m not just talking about refugee . On a recent weekend first light , for example , I went to the gilded gap of a new coffee shop and coffeehouse in the Dallas Farmers Market startle by one transplant from southern Italy and design by another from northerly Italy .
Courtesy of the Office of James Burnett
you’re able to feel that multiculturalism most , perhaps , in the food , particularly the Chinese and Korean and Thai from the northern suburban area ’ deep rooted Asian residential area and the best tacos in the state ( yes , serious than Austin ’s ) spread mostly in the south . You need something fancier ? We ’ve got that , too . Dallas not just a barbecue town – although we have one of the best barbecue marijuana cigarette in the state , Pecan Lodge , if that ’s what you ’re after . It ’s a urban center of wild , imaginative chefs : Matt McCallister at FT33 , Teiichi Sakurai at Tei - An , David Uygur at Lucia , Omar Flores at Casa Rubia , and Misti Norris at Small Brewpub – and those are just the ones constitute for James Beard Awards this yr .
Not that we necessitate awards to prove ourselves to anyone . The city ’s younger coevals is no longer terrorise about how the sleep of country and world thinks about us , but it maintains the can - do liveliness born during those thin post - assassination yr . We still adjudicate shit . That ’s what Dallas has always done .
And that ’s why I live here , tambourine ma’am .
Evans Caglage/Lucia Dallas/Facebook
