Day one of Fort Worth’s Fortress Festival threatened to be a wash, but the clouds held as storms rocked further east around Canton, Texas. As I parked the bike at Will Rogers, the thump thump thump of a heavy bass line was shaking the parking lot.  As I dismounted and walked through or rather […]

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  On the eve of Fort Worth’s inaugural Fortress Festival, the Triumph Thunderbird cruiser was parked in front of a large, redbricked-warehouse-of-a-structure, next to a food trailer. Inside and in the garden behind there was one old, long-haired blogger and a bunch of Fort Worth hipster elite for a invitation-only gettogether with one of the […]

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Like many of my friends, I have been playing The Facebook game listing 10 concerts.  Good timing.  After the weekend, I will have a few more artists to add to my master list, and hopefully more good stories.  (More on that in a second …)

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    If you hang out at a film festival it’s only a matter of time … right place, right time and you will meet celebrities … The PingTeam has been fortunate enough to rub shoulders with a number of stars in our Sundance Film Festival excursions … hah … one chance meeting almost landed […]

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With this new fad, now that records … or albums … or vinyl have become back en vogue, I don’t feel as silly for still carrying around a few crates of music from back in the day.  But man … I wish I had my old 45s too.  For the younger audience, 45s were the […]

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  A diminutive, yet scrappy kid from Fort Worth moved up north and found himself managing a record store in a place that gets entirely too much snow. He moved back to Texas and settled down in Austin to be a writer, at a time when the folksy city was little more that the State […]

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  Galveston … right smack dab in the semi-circle of muddy water that is the Gulf of Mexico.  But it’s also a wonderful place, memorialized in song by Glen Campbell, and for me it forever will be the place where the locals run to the ocean, not away from the ocean when severe storms roll […]

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  Day three of The 2016 Dallas International Film Festival was farmer day for PingWi-Fi.  An old friend recommended “Farmer/Veteran.”  Well, the filmmakers had me at “farmer” … or “veteran” for that matter (two of my favorite groups of people). If you check out the link below, you will see the primary subject of the […]

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I walked into the theater with prejudice, ready to NOT LIKE the film “Occupy Texas.”  You see, as a rule of thumb, I walk into a theater knowing as little as possible about the film … my anti-spoilage mechanism … or ASM … I digress … So … When I heard “Occupy” was one of […]

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    So what’s Erykah Badu done for me lately?:) It seems she has faded a bit since she exploded on the scene as Dallas’ new “it girl” — “The Queen of Neo-Soul” a few years back, having gone triple platinum with the 1997 “Baduism” … a prodigy of Dallas’ multi-talented Booker T. Washington High […]

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