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Tracy Curry’s mom wanted him to be a great serviceman. He wanted to be a great rapper. “I got the first flight I could,” he says. “I had a bag and a basketball and I just left.”

It’s the origin story of The D.O.C., the man who would convince Dr. Dre to record a solo album, who wrote some of Eazy-E’s best songs, who went platinum on his debut album, 1989’s No One Can Do It Better. A car wreck took his voice from him. But as Zac found while profiling the man, it didn’t take his mind.

Late last month, he sat across from Tim, Zac, and me at Table No. 1 at the Old Monk, tracing the history of his career and his plans for the future. He wants to create infrastructure for artists here in Dallas, so they don’t have to leave like he had to. “Give us our due, goddammit,” he says. “Our due” might just wind up being Death Row South, after Doc’s buddy Snoop Dogg scooped up the rights to the label.

For anyone interested in the history of rap music and Dallas’ place in it, this is a must-listen. Doc, as everyone knows him, went from walking from his home near Westmoreland and Ledbetter to changing the face of popular music. But you wouldn’t know that if you stuck to the lore; even in the N.W.A biopic Straight Outta Compton, Doc is reduced to little more than a side character.

Luckily, he has his own documentary to set the record straight. The DOC premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, and Snoop has signed on as a producer to help find distribution. (Watch Eminem geek out trying to rap Doc’s lyrics.)

Here’s Zac, in his profile: “The film chronicles his life and impact on hip-hop, and it includes testimonials to his influence and importance from the likes of Dre, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, and others. The screening’s after-party featured a surprise walk-on performance by the rapper Slick Rick, one of Doc’s heroes.”

The folks who shot The DOC are also responsible for The Last Dance, the Michael Jordan doc series that kept us occupied for a few weeks during the pandemic. It’s a big deal.

Start with the podcast, though. Give it a listen after the jump. Get to know the legend who lives among us. And thanks to Katie at the Old Monk for letting us really test out the sound system for the intro. “The D.O.C. & the Doctor” sounds best when the bass rattles the front door.

Will Evans knew what he didn’t know, and nine years ago, that was Dallas. He moved here with his wife, a native Texan, and brought ambitions to launch a publishing house that focused on books in translation. He read a lot about his new town. He talked to lots of people. He learned Dallas actually had a rich literary history—Larry McMurtry would shop for books in Deep Ellum in the 1980s—that cratered once big-box stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders consolidated the market.

He wanted Dallas to be a literary city. He called his initiative Literary Dallas, and the Dallas Morning News now uses that very phrase to brand its journalism that focuses on literature.

“I don’t want to be a niche guy,” he told us in 2014. “I want to take what I love out of the underground and get people talking about it on this big level.”

When he spoke to us for that interview, Wild Detectives was still a toddler. There was Half Price Books, but no Interabang. Pan-African Connection was holding strong in Oak Cliff. There was still plenty room for more. Including the three publishing houses it’s purchased, Will’s Deep Vellum has published over 1,000 books since and held more than 600 events in its own homey storefront on Commerce Street. (It also just flooded, so please buy a book or six.)

Will has done a lot in his time here. He’s a big part of why Joaquin Zihuatanejo holds office hours at the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library as the city’s first poet laureate. And Will is why we can all (easily) read The Accommodation, Jim Schutze’s 1986 tome about how Dallas’ power structure tried to hide the racist violence and disinvestment that was present in so much of the city in the 1950s and 1960s. Commissioner John Wiley Price owned the rights to the book and hadn’t let anyone republish it. Will had a goal to get the whole city to read it and talk about it, and he convinced Price to let him try.

Will joined us at the Old Monk to talk about all these things, but it’s timely because of Big D Reads, which has been dormant since about the time Will was hatching his grand plans.  

After August 26, you won’t be seeing Tim Ryan when you turn on Fox 4 in the mornings. He’s been in that spot for 27 years, at one point broadcasting from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m., which required that he wake up at 1:30. Lately, though, he’s been sleeping in. Fox 4’s Good Day goes from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. (He’s been with the station for 33 years in all.)

The hours nearly killed him. Ryan has had two heart surgeries to fix an atrial fibrillation that made his ticker do drum solos as he lay in bed. He’s better now, or at least better enough to knock out 40 to 45 miles on his bike on Saturdays and another 20 to 25 on Sundays. (The longest he’s ever gone is 108 miles, for Bike MS, which he tries to do every year.)

Retirement looks a lot like that. More time cycling in more places. More time with his wife, Beth. More time with his kids and his new granddaughter, Lucy. It’ll take him a week to get back to a normal sleeping schedule, which seems ambitious to me, but I haven’t woken up before 6 a.m. in years, so I’ll trust him.

This morning, the station announced that it is promoting Brandon Todd to the co-anchor seat alongside Lauren Przybyl, Evan Andrews, Chip Waggoner, and Hanna Battah. He’s been with the station for 24 years and already has a few years of anchoring experience on Good Day. “The strength of the show, and of the station, is consistency,” Ryan told us on the podcast, which seems right in line with Todd’s promotion.

Ryan joined us at the Old Monk to talk about his career and what comes next. First, though: “I threw away all the makeup except for what I need through August 26.”

Listen after the jump or with your favorite podcatcher.

Brian Reinhart joined D Magazine something like three months ago as our dining critic, following in the footsteps of the terrific now-Parisian Eve Hill-Agnus.

Since being able to log into our content management system, he’s stirred up drama with the James Beard Foundation—apparently posting your voting ballot is a no-no, and detailing the judging process is a no-no-no—highlighted the reborn Koryo Korean BBQ in Carrollton; excoriated the Design District’s newest monument to excess, The Mexican; and brought to life a series I’ve long wanted to do here that we’re calling Lunch Box, where he highlights a neighborhood restaurant that might not be a flashy opening but is doing a damn good job and deserves coverage.

He’s also highlighted the exciting world of North Texas salads, gave you a guide to the most exciting restaurant openings of the summer, and has a great piece in the next issue about the impact the city’s new food truck regulations will have on our dining scene. Subscribe now and the August issue will be delivered to your mailbox. (That’ll have Best of Big D, too.)

The guy’s been busy. He knows Dallas well, having completed the rare local journalism hat trick of writing for D, the Dallas Morning News, and the Dallas Observer. He was the Observer’s critic for many years before trying things out at the News. But the lure of the magazine—and a full-time job in journalism—was clearly inescapable.

Another interesting thing about Brian: he’s one of only about 20 dining critics left in the entire country. That’s a very good thing for readers and eaters in North Texas. So it was about time we welcomed him to the Old Monk and put a microphone in his face. One more link before I go: Here’s the cookbook he mentions.

Barak Epstein came to the Old Monk with print media in hand. This year’s edition of the Oak Cliff Film Festival kicks off Thursday, June 23, with a screening of Butterfly in the Sky, a documentary about Reading Rainbow. It closes Sunday, June 26, with the Patton Oswalt-led I Love My Dad, about a father who catfishes his son.

Big movies deserve print programs, luxurious glossy ones that are as useful as they are well-designed. This isn’t the first Oak Cliff Film Festival since the pandemic, but this one feels … larger. A 4K restoration of David Lynch’s Lost Highway will play—with the sound way up—on Saturday at 6 p.m.

Meet Me in the Bathroom, the documentary version of Elizabeth Goodman’s book about the rise of New York indie rock in the early aughts, runs at 3:30 p.m. on Sunday at the Kessler. There are documentaries about sound (32 Sounds) and about the rebel special effects expert responsible for Jurassic Park and Terminator 2 (Spaz).

The festival takes place at seven venues, most of which are in Oak Cliff. There’s the flagship Texas Theatre but also Top Ten Records, the Oak Cliff Cultural Center, For Oak Cliff, the Wild Detectives, and the Turner House.

Epstein had a lot to discuss on this episode of EarBurner. He highlights eight of the 58 films being screened next weekend, concepts a business plan for the future of Central Track (someone buy it!), how the Texas attracted Catholic protesters that spritzed the box office with holy water, and plenty more.

You can buy a badge to the festival or purchase tickets individually. Here’s our preview and here’s a link to the festival’s main page. Give this a listen, and plan your next weekend accordingly.

Come June, Dallas poets—young, old, whoever you are, so long as you have a tie to Dallas proper—will be able to schedule a time to sit down with the city’s first-ever poet laureate. Joaquin Zihuatanejo plans to have two spaces at the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library: one, “an open-air community table”; the other, an enclosed office.

Poetry can be intensely personal, and sometimes the words aren’t ready for others. But, Zihuatanejo says, “the real secret to poetry is revision.” That is where he comes in, and he believes the city stands to benefit greatly from it.

He joined us at the Old Monk to discuss what it means to be the first poet laureate of the city of Dallas. The program was spearheaded by Deep Vellum Publishing’s Will Evans, who couldn’t believe that McAllen had a poet laureate and Dallas didn’t. (Plus, we had to beat Fort Worth.) Soon, he attracted interest from the Dallas Public Library and the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs.

Zihuatanejo was one of 21 applicants. His pitch stood out because of his vision for uplifting the poetry scene here. He wants local poems on buses and at schools and businesses. He calls this “poetry on the go,” but it’s really a way to expose more of the public to work that’s being done in the community. Those poems would include the poet’s name and the neighborhood they most identify with.

He wants kids from South Oak Cliff to see their neighborhood next to the words. Maybe it sparks a possibility.  

Zihuatanejo grew up in Old East Dallas. He’s had a long history in the Dallas poetry scene, attending slam nights at Club Clearview where he’d have to shout over the band in the other room. He won the 2008 World Poetry Slam in Charlotte, which booked him a trip to the World Cup of Poetry Slam in Paris. He beat poets from 13 other countries. His final work, which also used sign language, earned him a perfect score—besting the runner-up by a tenth of a percentage point.

He argues that North Texas has a rich poetry history. UNT is one of only about a dozen or so colleges in the country that offer a master’s program with a concentration in poetry. “People are dedicating years and years of their lives studying poetry and then settling in Dallas,” he said.

He views his role as a connector, bringing poetry into the everyday lives of the people who live here. He’s completely at home belting out a poem in the bar—as you’ll hear—and making it feel like the exact setting in which that should happen.

Listen below, and stick around after his reading to hear all of our thoughts on how the Mavericks can claw their way back in Game 2 tonight.

Emily Zawisza’s winding road to Fort Worth’s Four Day Weekend involved the following: Louisiana State University, an unfortunate and abrupt exit from filmmaking, the University of North Texas, a U-Haul van, Chicago, Second City, iO, Groupon, and The Onion.   

Later this month, the improv group Four Day Weekend celebrates 25 years in business. It operates in its original location, in Sundance Square, but expanded into Dallas in 2018, opening in a converted church in Lowest Greenville. Zawisza often hosts in Dallas, but her main gig is director of corporate sales, merging the group’s “yes, and …” culture—a structural way to encourage discussion and experimentation, as well as being a tenet of improv—with the needs of its corporate clients.

With the Dallas location, Zawisza says, “we had the chance to really create what we wanted.” During the pandemic, that turned into a streaming studio that allowed the group to keep doing business: Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price’s retirement party, a gig for the U.S. Men’s National (soccer) Team, the Vienna/Fort Worth-based eye care company Alcon’s global regulatory affairs meeting. All sorts of stuff.

That revenue kept Four Day humming while it was unsafe to do what it does: perform, in person, for an audience that’s sharing space and sharing air. Zawisza helped the show go on.

And about that show. Next weekend, Four Day has some special stuff lined up to celebrate its 25th year. The original cast will be in Fort Worth on May 20 at 8 p.m. and Dallas on May 21 at 8 p.m. The younger cast—which the group is calling “The Futures”—will perform in Dallas on May 20 and Fort Worth on the 21st. All the details, including tickets, are right here.

Zawisza joined us at the Old Monk to record an episode of EarBurner. Listen with your favorite podcatcher or with the embedded player after the jump. Oh, and revisit S. Holland Murphy’s D Magazine profile of the group from 2017 right here.

Nicole Musselman comes from basketball royalty. Her dad, Bill Musselman, coached the Portland Trail Blazers, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers. He also had nearly a dozen other stints with teams in the NCAA, the ABA, the WBA, and the CBA. Her brother, Eric Musselman, currently takes his shirt off and climbs into the crowd after basketball games in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He coaches the 18th-ranked Razorbacks and led the Nevada Wolf Pack to the Sweet 16 in 2018.

Nicole made Dallas her home after graduating from SMU. And she recently launched a new business that ties all these things together, starting with her dad’s insane goal to hold a team to zero points. He didn’t, but he set an NCAA record: in 1969, his Ashland College team held opponents to a season average of 33.9 points. Thanks to Nicole and her son, Henry, the niche luxury sneaker world now has a replacement for those fake-scuffed Golden Goose joints. They want you to put 33.9 on your feet.

Tim interviewed Nicole for the magazine, and they talked a lot about the shoes. When she joined us at the Old Monk to record this episode of EarBurner, the chat was more basketball and everything around it: a superfan named Crazy George Schauer, a canary-eating babysitter named Boot, some choice words she used as a kid to defend her dad to a jerk on a school bus, and how her father used pregame shows to attract fans. LeaguePass fans, you can see Bill’s influence at damn near any off-night local halftime show. After all, the Mavs really brought in a beatboxer before the All Star break.

After the jump, listen to the first new EarBurner in months. And learn how to keep your 16-year-old occupied while launching a new business that sells $295 sneakers.

Last week, D Magazine editor Tim Rogers wrote a post detailing how someone had complained at a grocery store about the cover of our November issue, causing the magazines to be pulled from racks. The cover bears these words:

“If the poor Negroes in their shacks cannot be seen, all the guilt feelings … will disappear, or at least be removed from primary consideration.”

The quote was taken from a 1966 report commissioned by the State Fair. The report laid out a plan: seize the homes next to Fair Park, about 300 owned by mostly Black residents, pave over the land, and the White fairgoers would not have to see who lived nearby. That’s exactly what happened, as our Zac Crain explains in the cover story.

But back to that grocery store. Tim intimated that it was likely a White customer who complained—the store “happens to be in an affluent, predominantly White part of town,” he wrote—and a lot of the comments under the story and on Facebook fell right in with that assumption.

Out west in Fort Worth, Jean Marie Brown trained a skeptical eye to Tim’s words and wrote him an email. “I was struck by your assumptions, as well as the comments from readers, that the objection came from a white person,” she wrote. “While that’s possible, I would also think it’s possible that the cover language could have been jarring to a black person standing in line.”

Brown is an assistant professor of professional practice and the director of student media at the Bob Schieffer College of Communications at TCU. She noted that her 87-year-old mother “despises the word negro because it was used so pervasively through the late 1960s.”

“There’s a part of Dallas, a part of the U.S., that doesn’t need to be ‘confronted’ with this history because they have lived it,” Brown wrote. “It’s important when trying to heal old wounds, not to inadvertently create new ones.”

Part of the goal of our November issue was to spark a conversation: about race, history, and how our city has treated Black people. But that extends to our own work: the language we use, the audience we target, the editorial decisions made on the cover and inside the pages of the magazine and on this website.

We’ll be recording a few podcasts around Zac’s cover story. But we’re starting with Jean Marie Brown, who graciously drove all the way from Fort Worth to the Old Monk to chat with us. The episode is after the jump.

Beginning tomorrow, August 17, D Magazine subscribers will find Alex Macon in their inbox each weekday. Our senior digital editor is launching what we’re calling LeadingOff, a title that readers of this space are surely familiar with.

He is calling it a “daily roundup of everything worth knowing today in Dallas.”

Think of this newsletter as your cheat sheet to what’s happening in Dallas, a daily pulse check on the state of the city. You’ll be hearing about the latest news from across North Texas as well as the weather, things to do, and more, along with stories about the people who make this such a strange and wonderful place to live.

It will be delivered directly to your inbox, five days a week, around the time you’re waking up. I know it’s early, and you’re busy, so I’ll be making all of this as engaging and to the point as possible. It should pair well with a cup of coffee.

This is D’s first daily newsletter. We have our weeklies—D Brief, SideDish, FrontRow, AtHome—but we saw a need to deliver the most important information about the city every morning. We want to help you cut through the noise. And there is no one better than Alex to do that.

So we invited our colleague to the Old Monk and recorded a half hour EarBurner to introduce himself and what he’ll be working on. And how everyone with microphones is afraid of bridges and why you should be, too.

Head here to sign up for LeadingOff. It’ll cost you a whopping $1 a month, but you’ll also get it for free with a subscription to the print magazine. If you’re on the fence, shoot me a note and I’ll send you a sample for free. (Just don’t tell our wonderful audience development department.)

Are you ready for some stuff to go down? Seriously. This is about to happen.

In the next few weeks — OK, maybe a month — D Magazine will launch a new sports thing called StrongSide. It’ll be just like FrontBurner and SideDish and FrontRow. Only it will be totally different and focused on sports in North Texas. Its tagline, until we decide to change it, is: “Smart takes and winning stories about Dallas sports.” And the guy who will call the shots is named Mike Piellucci. In this episode of EarBurner, Mike introduces himself, and Zac insults my bottom. And we discuss competitive collegiate meat judging.

Quick links to stuff that comes up in our conversation: the D story Mike wrote about the first professional bridge team; the Sports Illustrated story he wrote about meat judging; the Athletic story about the discord within the Mavericks organization that Mike edited; and the D story Matt wrote about Dr. Death that NBC won’t even send him a thank-you coozie for.

You’ll find the podcast player below. Or you can subscribe through whichever podcatching app you prefer. Also below, you’ll find a letter of introduction from Mike himself that ran in the August issue of D.