“Simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
New Orleans
“In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Galatyn Park Fountain, Richardson, Texas
“It took the mountain top, it seems to me now, to give me the sensation of independence. It was as if I’d discovered something I’d never tasted before in my short life. Or rediscovered it – for I associated it with the taste of water that came out of the well, accompanied with the ring of that long metal sleeve against the sides of the living mountain, as from deep down it was wound up to view brimming and streaming long drops behind it like bright stars on a ribbon. It thrilled me to drink from the common dipper. The coldness, the far, unseen, unheard springs of what was in my mouth now, the iron smell, all said mountain mountain mountain as I swallowed. Every swallow was making me a part of being here, sealing me in place, with my bare feet planted on the mountain and sprinkled with my rapturous spills. What I felt I’d come here to do was something on my own.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing
Galatyn Park Fountain, Richardson, Texas
The planet Earth is a speck of dust, remote and alone in the void. There are powers in the universe inscrutable and profound. Fear cannot save us. Rage cannot help us. We must see the stranger in a new light-the light of understanding. And to achieve this, we must begin to understand ourselves, and each other.
—-The Outer Limits, Control Voice, ending narration, The Galaxy Being
Tower, Downtown New Orleans, Processed in Photoshop(twice) and Illustrator
In dreams, some of us walk the stars. In dreams, some of us ride the whelming brine of space, where every port is a shining one, and none are beyond our reach. Some of us, in dreams, cannot reach beyond the walls of our own little sleep.
—-Control Voice, The Outer Limits, The Mice
Galatyn Park Fountain, Richardson, Texas
“It’s funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they’re related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that there’s a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen
Inverted image from tintype camera. Dallas Library
In 2014 I ran into Scott Hilton of Project Barbatype at Cobra Brewing where he was shooting tintype photographs of Beard Contestants – it was pretty cool.
A while back, I ran into him again at the Dallas Library, where he gave a fascinating lecture on his project an on tintype photography in general. I took a shot of Mark Snaps and Mr. Holga from the Dallas Photowalk Thing standing behind his camera. Yes, the photo is upside down.
That’s part of what motivated Cherry and company to conduct what they call the nation’s first “empirical analysis of rail-grade crossings and single-bicycle crashes.” To them, the problem wasn’t with the cyclists. It was with the roadway design and the fact nobody knows, scientifically speaking, the best way to bike over railroad tracks.
This footage is amazing and very, very hard to watch. It is beyond my imagination that a city could put in a dedicated bike lane that includes a railroad crossing at an angle of less than 30 degrees, and then take so long to try and correct it. Imagine someone building a road that wrecks a good percentage of the cars that drove on it. It would be on the national news.
Nobody gives a damn.
In music, as in film, we have reached a point where every element of every composition can be fully produced and automated by computers. This is a breakthrough that allows producers with little or no musical training the ability to rapidly turn out hits. It also allows talented musicians without access to expensive equipment to record their music with little more than their laptops. But the ease of digital recording technology has encouraged producers, musicians, and engineers at all levels to smooth out every rough edge and correct every mistake, even in recordings of real humans playing old-fashioned analogue instruments. After all, if you could make the drummer play in perfect time every measure, the singer hit every note on key, or the guitarist play every note perfectly, why wouldn’t you?
One answer comes in a succinct quotation from Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, which Ted Mills referenced in a recent post here on Miles Davis: “Honor Your Mistakes as a Hidden Intention.” (The advice is similar to that Davis gave to Herbie Hancock, “There are no mistakes, just chances to improvise.”) In the short clip at the top, Eno elaborates in the context of digital production, saying “the temptation of the technology is to smooth everything out.”
The man is a genius.
Munich, Germany resident Benjamin David hated sitting in traffic on his way to his job at a beer garden. So instead of hopping in a car or on a bike, he now puts on a wetsuit and jumps into the River Isar for his daily commute.
This guy is my new hero – I whine so much about riding my bike to work… and this guy swims.
Not only that, but he works in a Munich beer garden.
I moved to Dallas in 1981 – the restaurants I fondly remember from that time that are still open include Campisi’s, The Grape, Spaghetti Warehouse, and, especially, Snuffer’s.
In this blog, the author sets out to ride every street in Kansas City. What an interesting quest. I don’t think it would be possible to ride every street in Dallas, but it would be fairly straightforward to ride all the residential streets in Richardson. Something to think about.
Returning to the American cultural values of the 1950s — thrift, gratitude, temperance, continence, among others — would “significantly reduce society’s pathologies,” says Penn Law School professor Amy Wax in an op-ed published Thursday on Philly.com and co-written with Larry Alexander of the University of San Diego School of Law.
This very interesting and needed op-ed will either create a shit-storm of argument… or, more likely, be completely ignored.
Penn Prof Faces Backlash for Saying “Not All Cultures Are Created Equal
This week’s short film….
