I.

I was explaining to a friend, Fire Rabbit, last night that I cannot but help look at Dallas through the eyes of the Deep South. Or that “Ol’ Southern Game” as Steve Young called it and as ARMAC deeply understood.

We were discussing the whole-assed culture of the Uber-Wealthy around Turtle Creek et al, stretching up along Oak Lawn into Highland Park.

My dad’s last bender involved getting drunk on shift tending bar at VI’s on Oak Lawn. This was in 1971. I have “genetic” memory of when that whole area along Lemmon and Oak Lawn was more or less a working class neighborhood. My great-grandmother ran a boarding house on Gilbert Ave. They all went to Mass at Holy Trinity.

60 years later, VI’s on Oak Lawn is some kind of med spa. The boarding house is a concrete park. Holy Trinity endures. I’m tending bar more or less on Oak Lawn, looking at how the 1% pushed all of us out of our own neighborhoods in Dallas and gentrified the fuck out of everything, slowly turning Dallas from a segregated Southern city into this centro/periférico model that it’s morphing into now.

I have absolutely zero desire to return to segregation. But I have even less desire to see Dallas turn into a Latin American city with an uber-rich core and slums on the periphery.

There was this bright shining moment in Dallas, probably starting from the mid 1990s, where the city was trying to make peace with the past. It all came to a screeching halt in 2016. And it didn’t even have much to do with Trump. It had everything to do with neighborhood noise ordinances.

It’s no different than what has happened in New Orleans. God forbid the fucking yuppies move to Frenchman Street and hear music. This shit is universal in the US.

As beautiful as all these gentrified areas are, they erase the memories of those who lived there before. How many family memories of Mexican-Americans in East Dallas are sitting underneath some ugly assed new build that looks like a gigantic fridge with zero-lot lines? You want ghosts, Mr. Real Estate Developer? This is how you get ghosts.

Then Fire Rabbit told me about her recent trip to New Orleans and Whitney Plantation. “If the worst thing that happens to me in this place is that I get soaked in a rainstorm, I think I’m doing ok.”

That Ol’ Southern Game.

This is why in Dallas, I cannot help but see plantation dynamics at work in all of this.

Because my great-grandmother would have listened to her husband talk about Pine Bluff during the Civil War when he was a boy. My grandfather would have heard those same stories. Up until the day George McNally died in 1916 when my grandfather was 12. And Lena moved herself and the boys to Dallas.

II.

It doesn’t help that Dallas is shot through with the hoarder wealth of Trammell Crow. The Anatole has serious hoarder energy. The Crow Collection? That’s what a hoarder does when they have enough money to put their shit in a museum and call it art.

Trammell, you’re a fucking hoarder, bro.

You bought insane amounts of Asian art, forgot that the fucking things become sentient at 100 years old and then stuck them in a bunch of warehouses across Dallas. And then built a goddamned hotel filled with the shit. Forgetting that they off-gas ghosts like a new car smell.

And then your son bought a Supreme Court Justice.

III.

Crow was nothing more than a damn rich white tourist in Asia. Who brought objets d’art home as little more than curios. He was just a daban (大班), the most despised class in Ming/Qing culture, lower than Buddhist monks.

IV.

So, with Dallas, my-having-sat-in-Taiwan-as-a-white-monkey ass looks at all this with my one Southerner eye and my one Chinese eye and am like “Fire Rabbit, this whole thing is completely fucked.”

— ✦ —

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