The new top dog at the Dallas Museum of Art started earlier this month, and he’s already blogging. He also wants you to follow him on Twitter, where you can read cute little updates like
New bill: Love how droit de suite became droit du seigneur! Do artists get to sleep w successor collectors? http://tinyurl.com/6tkneue
See, I told you you’d like this guy.
That said, I thought I’d offer a little advice to get the new director off on the right foot. Jump for it.
When referring to the regional urban cluster of which Dallas is one of two centers, as you did in your first blog post, please don’t say “Metroplex.” We have a moratorium on that word here at D (in fact, I just had to edit out five instances of its use in this latest, awesome piece on FrontRow via Dick Sullivan about North Texas’ underground hip scene). And I wholeheartedly support the magazine’s long-time (c. 1975), albeit somewhat futile effort to abolish the word from the local vocabulary.
First off, as Wick has harped before, “metroplex” is an ugly collision of Latin and Greek, which you probably already noticed, since you speak both. And back in 2008, Tim wrote about how we got stuck with the word in the first place, about some bureaucrat named Harvie Chapman who grafted together the word as part of larger marketing campaign trying to lure businesses away from the Panhandle with cheap bourbon and juggling kittens, or something like that. That’s how Tim’s mind works; you’ll have to read the piece.
Me, I don’t like how “metroplex” makes this area sound like a horizontal Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s vision spilled across a great expanse of empty prairie with all its inhuman mechanization intact. It smacks too much of a Robocop sequel’s plot summary rewritten by a PR firm. Our region is much more disconnected, incongruous, idiosyncratic, and elusive then that. I prefer the very cardinal “North Texas,” or even “Dallas-Fort Worth Metropolitan Area.” Or just “Dallas-Fort Worth.” Or even “That Sprawling Mess Down in Texas.”
But “Metroplex,” we’re trying to bury that in the hole with the 1,304 downtown master plans. We figure that’s a good place to hide it.
3 comments
Every time D magazine gets their panties in a wad about the usage of the word “Metroplex”, I make it a point to email my media friends and encourage them to use it AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE!
I’m contrary that way.
From Deep Inside The Metroplex,
Chris Chris
@Chris Chris: [smooch]
“Metroplex,” as a word, is graceless, vulgar, and seems to have been artificially inseminated and gestated in one hour. Unlike the region itself!
Right? Please?