Some people are joiners, some aren’t. I fall in the latter category. Ask me to join an organization, I’ll say no. Back me into a corner and force me to join an organization, prepare to watch me break out in hives.

When I ended up as an accidental member of
Fort Worth Sister Cities International because my daughter became involved in their summer program, I gotta say I was dreading it. Then, the next thing I knew, I was taking a picture of a Japanese exchange student riding a longhorn — and having a great time.

What happened?

Well, simply put, our visitor from Nagaoka, Japan, is one of the sweetest kids I have ever met. Shiyomi stayed with my family, and it’s like my wife and I have another daughter now. Shiyomi introduces my daughter as her sister.

Watching kids from all over the world from Europe to Asia to Africa really is kind of an eye-opener. Maybe they can fix some of the mess we leave them if they get together and get to know each other. It’s a little glimmer of hope for the future.That was the idea when the Sister Cities program was started in 1956 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He thought that creating formal partnerships and relationships with foreign cities made it far less likely that we’d annihilate ourselves. I know, sounds a little corny, huggy and kum-bi-yah. But there it is.

Saying good-bye to my Japanese daughter yesterday was very emotional. Lots of tears were shed, but she knows that she always has a home in Fort Worth, Texas.

I’m on a listserv for my old American Studies professor from the University of Texas, Bill Stott. Bill is retired from academia now, living now as an expatriate in Chile, where he works as a journalist for an English-language newspaper and continues to keep his prostate cancer in check. His listserv is a sort of online literary salon that allows participants to meet some of many interesting people Bill has come across over the years.

Bill’s most recent post was about his friend, Fred Close, a filmmaker and historian who has just completed a biography of the woman known as Tokyo Rose. While the book itself looks interesting, I was more interested in a fragment of Fred’s writing that Bill included. Fred was writing about a bit of film from the epic television documentary, Victory at Sea. You can watch the clip referenced below on YouTube. The scene in question begins about the 2:30 mark.
read more…

A man must know his limitations, that’s why last year I just said screw it to 10 best lists for a variety of reasons. Below is a little bit of my soundtrack from this year. Are they the best songs of the year? I don’t know, but I like them. Please feel free to listen, discuss, argue, comment. Let’s start off with a few albums and move on to some individual songs.

Albums
“Know Better Learn Faster” by Thao with the Get Down Stay Down
Caught these guys at Lola’s Sixth Street this fall and they rocked the house. This is a great album from start to finish, and “Cool Yourself” is my favorite song therein.

read more…

One of life’s great ironies is my love of music despite having no musical ability of my own. Thanks to Fort Worth Opera for turning this negative into a positive. Help save culture and high art from me. Support the Fort Worth Opera today. Happy Holidays!

I was enjoying a mezzatini on the patio at Chadra the other day with my friend, June Naylor, when I had to confide in her that I just don’t really understand how to write about food and dining. I’m not sure which I’m more embarrassed to admit — that I was sipping a pink cocktail or that I can’t write about a subject that it seems so many can do so well.

The mezzatini is a great local cocktail, and June, of course, is a fantastic food writer who I am happy to say is finally blogging. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that some of the best blogs in Fort Worth are food-related, including Food and Fort Worth, Fort Worth Hole in the Wall, Eat This Fort Worth and Fort Worth Foodie. People love reading about food almost as much as they do eating it. After all, everyone has to eat and everyone has an opinion.

However, writing about food as it’s own art form is a much more elusive discipline in my opinion. In an effort to improve, I read a lot about food. And one of my favorites is A.J. Liebling. I just finished reading Between Meals, a compilation of his food writing called that I picked up at a recent estate sale. I can whole-heartedly recommend this book to anyone who loves good food and good writing.
read more…

What do you think about Generation Y in the workplace?

A friend of mine asked me that question the other day. I’ve just finished up a project about generations in the workplace and I’ve done a lot of reading and writing about that question. I also know that question is a prelude to Gen Y bashing. And, if you believed everything you read in the media about them — they’re entitled, they’re rude, they don’t want to pay they’re dues — you’d probably have a pretty dim view of them, too. However, I beg to differ. I’m actually optimistic about them and their future. Why?
read more…

I can’t wait to see this movie! Tom Waits as Old Scratch. I’m there!

If I was going to select a moment that signaled a tectonic shift in the lives of Generation X, the death of director John Hughes wouldn’t have been it.

I mean, it’s not like he was Orson Wells or Francis Ford Coppola. While Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club might have been good films, I wouldn’t have hardly pegged them as epochal events. But, still, there it was. The news of Hughes’ death was like a wound on my soul. Why?

I almost didn’t write anything about because others have written about it so much better. Unlike some, I certainly didn’t know the man personally. But as A.O. Scott put it in The New York Times this week when discussing the deaths of both Hughes and fellow ’80s icon Michael Jackson, “Their deaths make me feel old.”
read more…

When the Fort Worth City Council asked the U.S. attorney in Dallas to investigate the June 28 raid at the Rainbow Lounge that sent Chad Gibson to the hospital with a brain injury, a lot of people in Fort Worth — myself included — believed this was a step in the right direction. With the all of the fingerpointing between the Fort Worth Police and the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (TABC), it seems that the only way to get a complete picture of what happened that night is to have a third-party investigate. The U.S. attorney’s office, with the full investigative power of the Justice Department behind it, seems the logical choice.

But was that really what Mayor Moncrief intended to do? Not according to one city hall insider.

Although the U.S. attorney had previously agreed to review findings of the FWPD internal affairs investigation, the Mayor asked city staff to check with the Feds to “see what they could do.” According to the source, the recommendation for a federal investigation with agents conducting their own interviews and potentially subpoenaing witnesses was not what the Mayor expected when the staff report was presented in the pre-council meeting for consideration.

“When the Mayor looked at the report for the first time, his face got very red, very fast,” said the source.

So, did someone (or several someones) on city staff “go rogue” on this one? Did they figure that the mayor was not about to argue that a federal investigation wasn’t needed? No one is saying. But to the person or people who went out on a limb for this investigation, here is one thank you from a grateful Fort Worth resident.

In the past week, I’ve been to two baseball games. Last week, I watched the Texas Rangers dispatch the Boston Red Sox from the rarified confines of a luxury suite at The Ballpark in Arlington. Tonight, I watched the Fort Worth Cats take on the Grand Prairie Air Hogs from behind the third base dugout at the far more intimate LaGrave Field. Me personally, I’ll take the Cats anytime.

The Rangers may be fielding a higher quality product these days, but I’d rather enjoy the Cats on Dollar Hot Dog Night with The Famous Chicken doing his schtick. Besides, with Fergie Jenkins and Toby Harrah in attendance and Pete Incaviglia in the dugout managing the Air Hogs, the night had a nice retro feel. I was halfway wishing Mitch Williams could come in and blow a save for old time’s sake.