It’s only Wednesday, and already this week has provided us an interesting look at what Jim Schutze, the face of the Dallas Observer, is capable of. On Monday, he showed us that he’s capable of looking like a lazy mope (his new favorite word) with a bad case of class envy. Then, yesterday, he showed us that he’s capable of kicking some ass.
First up, a Monday post titled “Just One More Bad Idea Intended to Bring the Creative Class to The Arts District” about uncertainties surrounding the under-construction City Performance Hall. Schutze was riffing on a story he’d read in the Morning News that explored frustrations expressed by some of the heads of performance groups for which the space is intended. He wrote:
Since the early ’80s Dallas City Hall and a tight cabal of influential real estate developers have poured untold treasure and time into the creation of the city’s vaunted “arts district” between Ross Avenue and the Woodall Rodgers Freeway downtown. The plan has always been to get all of the city’s cultural organizations out of their scattered venues, especially Fair Park, and put them under central control in a unified real estate development easily accessible to the Park Cities. …
Who thought it was going to be a good idea to put small independent arts groups under the city?
It’s hard to take seriously someone like Schutze who so desperately desires to live in the Park Cities but who knows with every fiber of his being that he’ll never be able to afford the mortgage. But let’s try anyway. So he’s saying — or certainly implying — that the city is going to open this new venue and then run all these small performance groups. And that this has been the plan all along. Am I reading this right? I think I am.
Schutze doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
The plan was never to move all the arts groups and arts facilities downtown. The 1977 Carr-Lynch Study that originally envisioned the Arts District — which I’ll go ahead a capitalize and not put in quote marks because that’s just the way I roll — also envisioned neighborhood-centric arts facilities. Think of the Bath House Cultural Center, the South Dallas Cultural Center, and the Latino Cultural Center.
The City Performance Hall was intended as a performance space for 40 to 50 small and mid-sized groups. None of them will be “resident” companies. The small independent performance groups won’t be “under the city.” They will not perform exclusively in the district. Groups that have their own spaces may chose to do a few performances each season in the City Performance Hall because they need more seating. But they will continue to perform whersoever they wish.
So that one was a miss.
But then, yesterday, Schutze turned his WordPress on the folks who run the Tollway in a post titled “The Secretive North Texas Tollway Authority Board Readies Another Human Sacrifice.” It’s like a different guy wrote it. Here Schutze looks at the goofy way in which the NTTA is governed. They were all set this morning to can their executive director for trying to make their operations more transparent to the public (a decision they put off). It’s really rather amazing that an agency run with our tax money (what else do you call tolls?) behaves in such a fashion. I encourage you to read Schutze’s post for a fuller understanding of the matter.
As for Schutze himself, I encourage him to do the work necessary to understand all the matters he tackles. And also to come to grips with the Park Cities thing.
