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FrontBurner

A Daily Conversation About Dallas

First thing: Jay is hosting a special D Magazine subscriber-only pizza night on February 27 in conjunction with our February pizza issue. Folks will get to eat pies from all three of his pizza joints: Cane Rosso, Zoli’s, and Thunderbird Pies (site of said pizza night). Tickets are $30, which includes adult beverages. I’m told a handful are still available. If you’re a subscriber and you missed the email invite, send a note pronto to Natalie. If you’re not a subscriber, get that situation straightened out.

Now then. Zac and I popped over to the Deep Ellum Cane Rosso to record this episode of EarBurner. Use your favorite podcatcher, or listen with the player below. Our discussion included, but was not limited to, the following: Jay’s insane number of dogs, Jay’s wife’s potty mouth, the difference between a homophone and a homonym, pepperoni’s inauthenticity, Frank Campagna’s murals in the restaurant, how Jay quit his day job to create a pizza empire that now employs 520 people, and puntata. Turns out, I knew more about puntata than Jay did.

Since I clowned on Jay a bit with the photo of him at the top of this post (from his senior year in high school), here’s him with his entire lovely family, including the four-legged members:

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Podcasts

New Podcast: Frank Campagna of Kettle Art Talks Deep Ellum and His Gallery

Matt Goodman
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Frank Campagna opened Kettle Art in Deep Ellum in 2005. Tim Rogers

Every year, Frank Campagna and his staff fill the walls of his small Deep Ellum gallery, Kettle Art, with 9-by-12s that sell for $50 apiece. Folks line up hours early and charge in, calling dibs on tiny paintings made by dozens of local artists. “For the Love of Kettle” is tomorrow, February 11, at 7 p.m.—although you’ll want to get in line a few hours prior to that if you’re serious about buying. Campagna calls it “competitive shopping,” and the event helps the gallery hum throughout the year.

Campagna joined us at the Old Monk to talk about this event, but he has been part of Deep Ellum so long that most of our conversation was about the neighborhood itself. He took us through the ’70s and ’80s, when Black Flag would crash on his floor and the Butthole Surfers would pop up every weekend asking to get on one of the bills he booked. We talked about the Premier Club and the Twilight Room and Naomi’s.

How he’s painted over a thousand murals in the neighborhood—and a couple in Prizzi, a mountain village in Sicily.

Campagna knows history is in the past, and he sees that in Deep Ellum. After all, the Gypsy is a parking lot now. “It just keeps evolving,” he said of the neighborhood. “I remember in ’86 and ’87 people saying it sold out. … You can be a dinosaur, or you can evolve.”

Westdale Asset Management is the largest property holder in the neighborhood. It sat on vacant land for years until it came time to build its office and apartment towers on the outskirts of the district. Before that came Scott Rohrman’s 42 Real Estate, which bought up dozens of old buildings and parking lots and rented them to mostly locals before selling to North Carolina’s Asana Partners in 2017. Since then, we’ve seen more national and regional chains moving in. Deep Ellum doesn’t look like it did even 10 years ago.

But Kettle Art is still on Main Street, as it has been since 2005. Frank is still inside, selling art made by local artists, sometimes to K-Pop superstars BTS. It’s why “For the Love of Kettle” is an important event and also why you should listen to the podcast after the jump.

GNO (pronounced “Gino”) is a National Poetry Slam champ who has tackled subjects from getting pulled over for being Black to the Filet-O-Fish sandwich (for a McDonald’s commercial). And he has written poems about a few of his breakups. He’ll read some of those poems on February 10 at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, in a series they call “Lyric Hour.” Cocktails are involved.

So we talked about his love life and Prince and how poetry can save young people’s lives. Obviously we also talked about the Filet-O-Fish. And about how the McRib is actually a pork belly arbitrage play (only slightly misusing the word “arbitrage”).

Real quick, here are some other links you might find useful while listening to this episode of EarBurner, the award-winning D Magazine podcast hosted by actual editors who talk about Dallas and stuff: Prince destroys your eyes and ears playing a “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” solo in 2004. That’s a remastered video. Here’s what it looked like when the video first came out, and it appeared as if Prince made his guitar disappear. I tried to call Rod Dreher on the show; that clown just caused an international incident.

Podcasts

New Podcast: Rev. Peter Johnson’s Living History

Matt Goodman
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Peter Johnson, photographed in 2021. Photography by Josh Blaylock

How the Rev. Peter Johnson tells it: it’s 1969 and he’s a 23-year-old with big goals and a bigger mouth. He’s known for cursing out racist sheriffs and other authority figures who trammel the rights of others, particularly based on the color of their skin. In the ’60s, that tendency often landed him in jail.

Dallas was a mission. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference—its brand of radical nonviolence was born from the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycotts—had trained Johnson and others like him as community organizers. Its co-founder, Martin Luther King Jr., had been assassinated in Memphis the year before Johnson landed at Love Field. To help Dr. King’s widow and children financially, the SCLC planned to show a documentary, King: A Filmed Record, in 800 cities around the world.

According to Johnson, 799 cities agreed to show it. Dallas didn’t. Peter took that personally; it was his job to get it on screens here, deputized by civil rights leaders such as Ralph Abernathy (who married Johnson and his wife years later) and Andrew Young. SCLC leadership told him to go to Dallas, get that movie shown, and get back to Atlanta. But the city’s establishment refused to recognize its own racial strife and suppressed the film.

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Business

After the Success of Dumplin’, Arlington Author Makes Christmas Raunchy

Tim Rogers
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Julie Murphy
Shelf Love: Murphy and her co-author, Sierra Simone, split the book into two points of view, each not sure where the plot would lead. Danielle Jenkins

Julie Murphy is the most successful young-adult author working in Arlington. Her 2015 book Dumplin’ became a New York Times bestseller and the 2018 Jennifer Aniston movie of the same title. Now she has gone a bit more graphic with her latest novel, A Merry Little Meet Cute, about a plus-size porn star who is accidentally cast in a wholesome Christmas movie and falls in love with an old childhood crush who grew up to join a boy band and now needs to rehab his career.

My wife made me watch Dumplin’ and so I’m angry with you because I absolutely cried my eyes out. I guess that’s more of a statement than a question. I accept your statement.

Are you and Jennifer Aniston and Dolly Parton best friends now? We’re all best friends. We get together for a yearly vacation. Obviously Dolly and Jen foot the bill. No, they are wonderful and kind women, and I’m really thankful to them for letting me ride their coattails throughout that whole experience.

Podcasts

New Podcast: Ken Bethea of the Old 97’s Is Now a Movie Star

Matt Goodman
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Old 97s christmas special
That’s Ken on the left. Disney

This one’s for the Dallas music nerds, the ones who recognize Shibboleth from beyond EarBurner’s theme music. The folks who might know how the Old 97’s got together when they were all living in the Marquita Court Apartments in Lower Greenville. (The apartments whose roof recently collapsed.)

Ken Bethea is the guitarist for the band, which will celebrate its 30th anniversary early next year. But he’s making his second appearance on EarBurner for a different reason. He’s now a movie star. Sort of. The whole band is, even though Rhett Miller is the only one with a speaking part.

The Old 97’s are in the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, which premiered Friday on Disney+.

Ken wrote about the experience in our December issue, and you should absolutely read it, but he goes deeper in the podcast: about his relationship with Guardians director James Gunn, how this experience was different than the role the band played in 2006’s The Breakup, and how he spends one day a week working behind the register at a board game shop in Bishop Arts. It’s a good chat (even if Tim’s voice was a wreck because he’d just shouted himself hoarse watching World Cup). Plus, hear his exclusive reaction to the roof caving in on his old apartment complex, the one that helped spur the creation of Dallas’ finest rock band.

Listen after the jump.  

Podcasts

New Podcast: Mark Lamster Argues for Redesigning Dealey Plaza

Matt Goodman
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(Louis DeLuca/The Dallas Morning News, courtesy Mark Lamster)

Last month, Dallas Morning News architecture critic Mark Lamster set about solving what he calls “one of the city’s most profound urban failings.” Dealey Plaza, perhaps the most frequented tourist destination in Dallas, “is a deplorable state of affairs,” a tangle of wide access roads that ferry vehicles onto Interstates 30 and 35 and to points west while hiding and minimizing the tragedies it should seek to memorialize.

It fails its responsibility for the future, as this will be the front door to an eventual park along the Trinity River levees. It fails its present, too, by putting pedestrians in danger and failing to appropriately recognize the assassination of President John F. Kennedy beyond crudely drawn white Xs that pop up along Elm Street. (Today is the 59th anniversary of Kennedy’s murder.)

Hidden behind concrete is Martyr’s Park, which Lamster notes is difficult to access and fails to be an appropriate home for a forthcoming $100,000 memorial to victims of racist violence. Jerry Hawkins, the executive director of the nonprofit Dallas Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation has a strong quote for why this is a problem: “If Martyr’s Park is a reflection of the city’s will to address its past wrongs, then the mirror is broken.”

It’s a lot to unpack, so we invited Lamster to the Old Monk to discuss the work. The News commissioned a team of designers to rethink the space, including Stoss Landscape Urbanism’s Chris Reed and Monica Ponce de Leon of MPdL Studio in New Jersey.

The News presents this speculative proposal — a big idea, complete with renderings and architectural drawings — to show how these spaces could be transformed; to suggest what is possible if the city can summon its collective will,” Lamster writes.

The News held a discussion with the designers involved last week. Michael Granberry’s coverage of the event includes statements of support from Mayor Eric Johnson and Park Board Chair Arun Agarwal. Some of the hundred or so attendees had their own concerns, largely with the decision to shut down Elm. It sets the table for the sort of discussions that will need to happen before this becomes reality.

Other quick takes: Lamster says depressing I-345 is a “half-measure” and “generally half measures don’t work.” Elm Street near Dealey Plaza needs to be closed to vehicles because it’s a “dangerous traffic disaster waiting to happen.” As for Dallas: “I think the city is changing, but it’s not changing fast enough.”

Listen after the jump.

Education

New Podcast: Meet Melissa Chessher, SMU’s New Journalism Boss

Matt Goodman
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Professor Chessher takes Roscoe Holiday for a walk. The cat was named after a relative who was a Texas Ranger.

D Magazine readers may recognize the name Melissa Chessher from the November issue. Her column, titled “It’s Always Sunny in Dallas,” chronicled her return to Dallas from Syracuse, where she was the chair, professor and interim associate dean at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. At SMU, she’s effectively leading the journalism department and sports a more direct title: the Belo Foundation Distinguished Chair in Journalism.

She also goes way back with Tim Rogers, who worked with her at American Way, the now-grounded in-flight magazine for American Airlines. Expect a spirited chat that eventually digs into some interesting questions about the state of journalism in North Texas and beyond.

It sure sounds like SMU’s journalism students are in good hands. Listen below.

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We stayed close to home for this week’s EarBurner. Kathy Wise, the magazine’s executive editor, published a deeply reported investigation into how justice wasn’t served in Collin County. But it’s more than that, about how our judges are elected, about what type of donations are legal, about how a spurned incumbent judge used the county’s previous district attorney’s office to pursue a criminal investigation against a challenger who defeated him. That challenger, Suzanne Wooten, was the first in the county’s history to defeat a sitting judge. She paid dearly for it, and so did a few others.

Kathy tracked all this in her October story, “The Most Lawless County in Texas.” If you haven’t read it, please do. And then come learn more about what went into her reporting—and her masterfully named tennis squad, Sets and the City. Listen with your ears.

Early voting begins on Monday in the November 8 election. The races for governor and Texas attorney general rightly get a lot of the attention, but there are local races that will have a significant impact on Dallas. One of those is for district attorney, where incumbent John Creuzot, a Democrat, is facing Republican challenger Faith Johnson. She last occupied the seat in 2018, after Gov. Greg Abbott appointed her to serve following Susan Hawk’s resignation. Johnson’s camp did not respond to multiple requests to join us on EarBurner, so it looks like the podcast will bring you only Creuzot in this contest.

Tim Rogers and Zac Crain sat down with the district attorney to talk about his platform but also about his time working for legendary DA Henry Wade, his ties to the Frenchy’s Chicken chain in Houston, his divert court, Rick Perry, and plenty more. Listen in your ears below or use your favorite podcatcher.

Movies

James Faust Talks 2022 Dallas International Film Festival on EarBurner

Matt Goodman
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James and his wife Jenn, who digs horror flicks. Courtesy James Faust

On Friday, the Dallas International Film Festival will begin showing 77 films at six different venues—including a skatepark!—across the city. James Faust is DIFF’s longtime creative director, the man who spends his year watching hundreds of selections that he gets to winnow down and figure out how to bring to town.

Over the years, he’s also helped shepherd an intoxicated Harry Dean Stanton from the Balcony Club to his hotel (there’s more to that when you listen), met Joan Jett while working on Walker, Texas Ranger (there’s more to that, too), and fell in love with film after watching E.T. five times in a day when he was a kid. We talk about all that, but the crux of the chat is DIFF, which will show films such as Acidman, with Thomas Haden Church; documentaries about jazz musicians Roy Hargrove and Louis Armstrong; and more than a few shorts that made James cry.

Head here to get tickets.

In this podcast (the player is below), James mentioned that he’d been in three car chases in his life. We didn’t have time to go into it. But then we recorded an episode of “EarBurner After Dark” in which he told us all about it, and Tim used a bunch of gratuitous swearing. We won’t put that up here on FrontBurner. You have to subscribe to the podcast to get that saucy content. Listen on your favorite podcatcher.

Media

Mike Rhyner Returns to Radio With 97.1 The Freak

Tim Rogers
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Photo by Elizabeth Lavin

Mike Rhyner retired in early 2020 after a storied 40-year career in Dallas radio during which he played a huge role in launching The Ticket and creating a radio format that has been copied around the country. Zac Crain profiled Rhyner when he stepped away from the mic. We did a podcast with him, too (recorded in Main Street Garden, because we were just getting accustomed to Covid).

Now, ladies and gentlemen, Rhyner is back. Richie Whitt broke the news on Si.com a week ago. The Eagle is switching formats and rebranding as The Freak, as of 3 p.m. today. Whitt got nearly everything right, missing on only the detail about the new station being a sports talk joint; it’s not. As Rhyner told us on an episode of EarBurner that we recorded before the news broke, The Freak won’t be a sports station. It’s free-form talk, unlike any other station in this market.

Rhyner will hold down the 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. shift, with a show called The Downbeat co-hosted by Mike Sirois. Michael Gruber will run the board. (Lots of Mikes, right?) Ben Rogers and Skin Wade, whom I profiled last year, will move to middays and bring Krystina Ray with them. Those two lads deserve much of the credit for this concept. Rhyner calls them “hustlers,” in the best sense of the word. Jeff Cavanaugh will do morning duty. There are other names still in play.

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As you can see from the magazine stories we’ve written about some of the folks involved, Zac and I have relationships with these people. Those relationships led to a bit of access. We signed an NDA that allowed us to record this podcast with Rhyner on September 16, on the condition that we hold it until the launch of the new format, which, again, happens today at 3 p.m.

On the podcast, we talked with Rhyner about who convinced him to come out of retirement, how to fix the Cowboys (remember: this conversation took place after the season-opening loss), what made him move out of downtown Dallas after living there for a decade, and why you’re never too old to wing it. Oh, and we talked about jorts. You can listen via the player below, or you can use whatever podcatcher floats your boat.

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