We were fortunate to begin reading newspapers in the early '80s in Dallas, when the sorely missed Dallas Times Herald climbed a dizzying summit of journalistic style. A group of young writers -- John Bloom, Molly Ivins, Jim Schutze, Ann Zimmerman -- achieved control of their own voices simultaneously and applied them with rigor and cleverness on their respective beats. Bloom, especially, impressed us with writing eloquent, almost philosophical, but utterly unsentimental prose in his thrice-weekly Metro columns. He walked the streets of downtown, he said, to look at the people and places and get ideas. His pieces had that quality of spontaneous impressions, and he rarely filtered his ideas through the cant and convention of current assumptions. He was alone with his topics, and although he was always honest, his words expressed a sympathy for the sad human species that is almost unheard of in a contemporary world where pundits compete to see who can be more obnoxious and politically incorrect.

He was simultaneously writing as Joe Bob Briggs in the Herald's weekend section, of course, and poking here and there to see how thin different people's skins were. His hotly debated "We are the Weird" piece lampooned the celebrity excesses of "We are the World" but was remarked upon more for its blithe reference to starving Africans. Dallas' black community condemned him at an outraged public gathering, and Joe Bob jumped ship to the Dallas Observer in 1985, where, by our unscientific count, Bloom has appeared on the cover more than anyone else.

America met Joe Bob through a syndicated column -- and then Showtime [actually, The Movie Channel] and Turner Network Television -- but the John Bloom we remember is beginning to stir again. He was in Las Vegas doing a story for Talk magazine as this e-mail interview was conducted. Remembering his Times Herald columnist days, we tapped him to tackle the utterly ridiculous task of defining Dallas -- or at least, locating and identifying some of its currents, and naming some of the places and events he misses from the '80s. A sting remains in his words when he discusses certain things about the city that denounced his brand of satire. But in almost all his criticisms, he is dead-on. Try to refute him. We dare you.

DO: We tend to think Dallas has an inferiority complex about culture, that it celebrates what has already been sanctioned elsewhere instead of nurturing its own. What gives?

Bloom: Dallas has a tradition of embracing the art of Europe and the theater of New York and the pop-culture icons of Los Angeles in the name of "good taste," while simultaneously ignoring, if not outright discouraging, its local artists. To use one example, the internationally renowned lyric baritone Charles Hammett grew up in Richardson and returns there frequently to visit his family. He has sung with orchestras around the world in five languages; once sang the entire Carmina Burana with a double orchestra in the Monterrey, Mexico "Plaza de Toros" for a massive Mexican audience; is frequently asked to teach at the Salzburg music festival -- and has never been asked to perform with any opera company or symphony in the metroplex.

DO: Where did you hang out when you wrote for the Times Herald?

Bloom: In the late '70s and early '80, the whole of Greenville Avenue had a "Studio 54" type scene. There was not just one club or restaurant, but perhaps 30 of them. That's all gone. It's been Bennigan-ized. I still miss Sol's Turf Bar. Few people realize that as recently as 35 years ago, Dallas had one of the most distinctive downtowns in the country. It was eviscerated in the name of parking. As soon as each tenant moved out, the building came down to make room for surface parking, creating big jagged gaps, a vast wasteland of heat-retaining concrete, and making it an oppressive place to be. If only a third of those old buildings had been saved, Dallas would have the downtown infrastructure of a Seattle or a San Francisco.

The Gemini Drive-In was a truly historic place, not only because it was a great drive-in where many movie stars appeared (John Wayne, Raquel Welch), but because it was the flagship of Gordon McLendon, the city's P.T. Barnum.

I also miss the Cotton Bowl Parade. It just kind of petered out. No one cared enough to organize it anymore.

DO: We've been chained to newspaper archives lately, and discovered that phrase "world-class city" was just as common 15 years ago as now. What the hell is a "world-class city," anyway?

Bloom: Dallas had a chance, in the late '70s and early '80s, to truly be the leading American city. It had the money and the cachet and the influx of young ambitious innovators. But Dallas failed to look very far into the future and lost the key businesses of the 21st century -- entertainment and computers -- to other places. Those Texas banks didn't fail because of unforeseeable cataclysmic circumstances; they failed because their leaders said, "Naw, I don't think I wanna get involved in that business, I'm just gonna stick with oil and real estate, cause that's what I know." The bankers of Dallas drove away venture capital that was not related to oil or real estate, which turned out to be the same thing.

If you listen to the words of the city's leadership, both then and now, they are always most interested in being landlords for companies that simply move to Dallas. That's always been the mantra of the city: Attract business, lure business, become a headquarters city. The only problem with that is that it doesn't create anything new. It's not innovative. It's the mindset of a miser managing the property passed on to him by his grandfather. Meanwhile, cities like Charlotte and Jacksonville and Las Vegas were suddenly becoming aggressive at times when they did not have the "world-class" cachet (they still don't, although Las Vegas is getting there), and older power cities were revving up again under leadership that was sick of losing their corporations to low-tax havens like Texas. Dallas could have been a world-class city, and could still be, but it first has to be a national-class city, and it consistently underestimates its competition.

DO: Boom, bust, boom, bust -- it seems like Dallas has been on a roller-coaster ride for the last 20 years. Assuming you agree with this, how do you think it affects the city's personality?

Bloom: I don't think Dallas has any more dramatic economic swings than any city. Sometimes they seem worse, though, because a city founded by real estate developers, and controlled by them for many years, judges everything by the current value of land and/or sports teams. And these are fickle people. Boom periods bring speculators, and bust periods see the speculators leave. Every one of those booms involves a whole new set of characters, which is why the city doesn't have much concern for its own history.

DO: You lived in Los Angeles, now reside in New York, but your drivers license still has a Dallas address on it. What keeps you coming back on occasion?

Bloom: I'm drawn back to Dallas by the warmth and hospitality of its inmates. It's like people you served with in the Army. Once you've endured that kind of fire from the enemy, you're bonded for life.