Then:
Then - Lee Studying
This picture was taken out in our converted garage in Mesquite. I’m not sure when, Maybe sixth grade?
Now:
Lee studies now
Lee in Architecture Studio, Tulane, Freshman year.
Then and Now – Lee Studying
Monthly Archives: July 2011
A Bit of Three Trails in the Heat
Last night before I went to sleep I watched a little bit of the Tour de France coverage. I had forgotten how exciting bicycle racing was.
There was a time, a long time ago, that I was a pretty good bike rider. I was talking to Lee the other day, he has bulked up quite a bit now that his major exercise is playing rugby rather than running. I told him that he weighed twenty pounds more than I did when I got married (and I’m a bit taller than him).
He said, “Yeah, but you were one of those skinny biker-dudes, weren’t you.”
Candy and I at the finish at the Cross Timbers Bike Ride in 1988
That was a long time ago.
I decided to go for a little bike ride around the neighborhood today and take some pictures. I always say that bike riding is a great sport for hot weather because you make your own breeze. That is true, but when the mercury is pushing the century mark or higher… hot is hot. So I knew I would have to take it easy.
We live at the nexus of three Richardson multi-purpose trails. The new Glenville Trail runs along the creek right in back of our house and connects up with the Duck Creek Linear trail. The Owens trail runs north from Duck Creek under a high voltage line and connects with the trail system to the north.
I piddled and pedalled a bit along all three of these.
The Owens Trail runs north and south for a few miles along the right of way for a set of high tension towers.
The Owens Trail is actually how we found the neighborhood we live in how. While we lived in Mesquite, Nick swam in the swim team at the YMCA at Collins and Plano road and while he swam, I’d walk along the Owens Trail. I found the Duck Creek area at the south end of the trail and thought it might be a good place to live.
In many parts of my city there are areas that volunteers have planted trees under the Tree the Town program.
I have followed the progress of the Tree the Town program and am an enthusiastic supporter. It will be interesting to see these trees grow as the years/decades go by. Tree planting is truly one of the things we do for the future, we will not live long enough to see this to its fruition. I hope most of these can make it through the burning summers.
Shady Rest Stop
A shady bench is a valuable find on a hot day. I sat there and drank a whole liter of ice water. I had to lie down in the trail to take this picture. When I did I heard a voice say, “Are you all right?” It was another guy riding by on his bicycle – the only other one I saw out in the heat. “I’m fine, only taking a picture.” I felt like an idiot.
Saigon Mall
The south/east terminus of the Duck Creek trail is at busy Jupiter Road, with the Saigon Mall across the street. I love this place. Sometimes, when I have the time, I ride my bike over to Lee’s Sandwiches and buy their fresh baguettes. I have to ride how with the long, thin, loaves sticking up out of my backpack. I feel like a Frenchman.
They don't call my neighborhood "Duck Creek" for nothing. While I was digging my camera out a car pulled up on the other side and a couple began throwing bread. The birds went crazy.
Ponds
Past my house, the Glenville Trail loops around a couple of flood control ponds and a bridge crosses over to the new Huffhines Community Center. It’s all very nice, actually. You can see some more “Tree the Town” trees in front of the rec center.
I wanted to ride some more, though my water was empty, but I have a lot to do today, so I went the half-block home.
I felt good, actually. I need to do this more often… like every day. We’ll see… I’ll let you all know, I guess.
The Judy’s are on YouTube
1982 – I was excited. A bunch of cow-orkers and myself had tickets to see the B-52s. The venue for the post-punk, new wave show was a strange place called the Wintergarden Ballroom on John West Road in East Dallas. The cross street was Dilido – the worst name for a street, ever. The building is still there, it’s a factory that makes raised flooring for datacenters now. I had seen Devo at the Wintergarden a few months before. If memory serves, there were only a few rows of seats, almost everybody stood – which added an intensity to the shows.
A ticket to Devo at the Wintergarden
We were all there, I was very excited. The B-52s had really meant something very special to me after I had had an epiphany while hearing Private Idaho on a car radio at three in the morning driving hell bent for leather somewhere in the vast expanse of the Kansas Flint Hills.
The warm up band came out. It was a Houston based trio named The Judy’s. I had never heard of them. They started to play.
I can’t remember anything about the B-52s that night. But after almost thirty years I think I know and remember every song in The Judy’s’ set.
They simply blew everybody away. It was incredible.
They might have seemed like a novelty act. Dressed in some sort of obscure uniforms (Milkmen?) they played strange instruments. The keyboard player used a child’s toy piano, often holding it on his shoulder. The drummer mostly beat on a string of pots and pans hanging from a stand. They made use of a static filled television to provide an odd harmony.
But they were not a novelty act. The music was unlike anything anybody had heard before (or since), but it was unquestionably great. The audience didn’t leap about or dance (much) – they stood there stunned, swaying, enthralled by what we saw on the stage.
It was special. The funny thing is, talk to anybody who saw The Judy’s back then, they will tell you the same thing.
I guess the Judy’s were the prime example of a local hit. They were worshipped in Texas. The Talking Heads opened for them in Houston.
They got a lot of airplay on George Gimarc‘s seminal radio show back in the day. I remember waiting on line at the Granada Theater for a midnight showing of Shock Treatment (the awful sequel to Rocky Horror) when The Judy’s’ Guyana Punch came on somebody’s cassette boom box. The line went nuts and made him rewind and play it over and over.
Washarama
I bought vinyl copies of Washarama and Moo.
Moo
Everyone assumed they would be a big hit – but they slowly drifted into obscurity. They pretty much disappeared, except in the minds of their fans from back in the day. I guarantee that none of us ever forgot them.
And now they are on YouTube. And their music has been pressed into CDs. Now, where’s my wallet, where’s my credit card.
The Judy’s live in 1981 singing their quintessential number – Guyana Punch
My favorite Judy’s song has always been Her Wave. Here is that song from the same 1981 show.
I don’t know how I missed this: they played at SXSW in 2008. Man, I wish I could have been there.
This is truly the best of all possible worlds.
The Geneva of my youth
A photograph of me working at the Geneva Industries Superfund site in South Houston, Texas in 1984.
I was cleaning out a closet at home and came across this old photograph of myself in my youthful prime. Good lookin’ feller, don’t you think?
The picture was taken in, I believe 1983 or 84 – at the Geneva Industries Superfund Site in South Houston, Texas. The site was a bankrupt and abandoned manufacturing plant for Polychlorinated Biphenyls, amongst other nasties.
I’m not sure exactly who I was working for when the picture was taken… Weston Engineering, Ecology & Environment, or Jacobs Engineering… at any rate I was a contractor to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund division. I was part of the TAT – the Technical Assistance Team – that provided expertise during the emergency removal at the site. We had a certain amount of money to go in, take care of any immediate hazards and prepare the site for a long-term remediation to come.
As you can see, I’m suited out and doing some monitoring to insure our safety plan fit the hazards on site. I’m wearing a respirator, which worked well because the major inhalation hazard was dust particles contaminated with PCBs which the respirator protects against well. The yellow case on the cinderblock is a rescue air pack. Inside is a coil of steel tubing full of highly compressed air attached to a plastic hood. If something went wrong and toxic gases were released I could throw the thing over my noggin and have five minutes of safe air to get the heck out of Dodge. Yes, I had practiced that and was confident I could get it on in a hurry.
Between me and the rescue pack are a couple of sampling pumps. Usually these are worn by workers, but I was using them as area samplers. I had a small portable lab set up either on site or in my hotel room and could quickly analyze the samples on a daily basis to make sure something unexpected wasn’t going on.
In my left hand I’m holding the probe of an HNU photoionization dectector – used to detect organic solvents in the air. The state of this equipment in 1984 was a lot more crude than it is today – the thing was big and most of it is hanging out of frame on the strap over my shoulder. In my right hand I’m holding an air horn. That site had a lot of water-filled holes, sumps, and pits all over it and it was so easy to fall in. I always carried that horn in case I got in trouble. You don’t see it, but I also had a radio – wrapped in a plastic bag – taped to my right arm.
In the background, past the rusty tank and before the metal building, you can see a long horizontal cylinder. This was an abandoned tank car that once was full of chlorine and the piping was all rusted. We went to a lot of trouble to mitigate that thing (this picture was probably taken right at the start of that operation) because that much chlorine released in the middle of Houston could have been devastating. It turned out to be empty.
Another tough job we did on that site was to plug an oil well. PCBs are heavier than water and there was a fear that the contamination would follow an old, uncapped well down through a thick clay layer and contaminate the city’s drinking water aquifer far below. We used some old maps to locate the well’s probable location and I went out with a steel tape and spray painted a big X where I thought it was (the whole area was paved over long after the well was abandoned).
We brought out a portable air compressor and a jack hammer and I was chosen to go out there fully suited out and jackhammer down through the concrete. I had some experience with using a jackhammer in protective gear (some work I had done the previous year around St. Louis – but that’s a whole ‘nother story), I was young and strong then, and I had done the measurements – so if I was wrong it would be me that had to do all the wasted work. I was very proud of the fact I hit that wellhead nail right on the head.
Then we brought out an entire drilling rig, full of roughnecks slinging pipe wearing respirators and Tyvek Suits in the Houston heat. Those guys drilled out the old mud, broken concrete, and burlap sacks that plugged the well, and then we concreted the whole thing up.
If you look at the Geneva site now you’ll see a bare green mound in the middle of a pretty rough part of the city. Most remediated waste sites look like this – the open ground patterned with the piping system and tanks of a groundwater interceptor and treatment system. Back then, though, it was frightening complex of rusting equipment, open pits, and ponds full of toxic chemicals.
Over a few jobs I spent months at Geneva. I worked even more at Crystal Chemical on the other side of Houston (I’ll write about that some time- real horrorshow). Then there was Cleve Reber in the swamps of Louisiana and the big train derailment in Livingston. There was a burning subterranean landfill in Tulsa, and countless oil spills all the way from New Orleans to West Texas. There were chemical trucks turned over in ditches, leaking rail cars, and burning pesticide factories in small towns.
I spent a lot of time when I was young out in isolated unpleasant places cleaning up other people’s messes. Actually, I didn’t work at this too long – nobody did, nobody could. It wears on you. It’s when you realize that wearing that respirator and mask, that suit with gloves and boots taped to the sleeves and legs so that nothing can leak in, feels normal, feels natural, that you realize it’s time to move on.
Sleep Deprivation
Sleep
Sleep is an eight-hour peep show of infantile erotica.
—-J.G. Ballard
I have had this terrible habit of coming home from work absolutely exhausted, grabbing the first edible crap from the fridge I can lay my paws on and then tumbling into a deep, restless sleep full of furtive uneasy dreams. I would then wake up late and be up most of the night, only to haul my tired ass back to work the next morning and start the whole sad cycle over again.
So yesterday I worked out a plan to combat this. Instead of going home, I stopped off at the library and did some writing. Then when I came home I was able to get a bit of stuff done and then it was time for bed – a healthy hour to retire.
As I put my head down on the pillow for a restful repose my phone went off. There was a pseudo emergency at work and off I went. Took care of this and that and came back home at about one thirty in the morning.
It’s impossible for me to go right to sleep after I’ve done stuff like that… too hyped up – so I wasn’t able to get back to the lad of nod until somewhere after three AM. That gave me a good, solid, 180 minutes or so of sleep.
The best laid plans…
All day today I was a zombie. It’s that awful dizzy nauseous sick lack-of-REM state where if I close my eyes for more than a blink I start to dream. My mind becomes clogged with brain-freezes and I can’t remember anything important. It scares me more than a little – it is too easy to make a dangerous mistake in a state like that… but I have to go on. There is too much to do and a few hours of missed shut-eye isn’t a good enough excuse to shut it down.
I am so miserable when I’m sleep deprived. I remember reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in The Gulag Archipelago when he talked about the worst torture of all was when they simply kept him awake for night after night, day after day. I find that easy to believe.
One of J. G. Ballard’s oddest and most harrowing short stories was Manhole 69 – where a group of subjects were surgically modified so they did not need to sleep any more. It seemed like a good idea – to get a third of your life back. But they all went catatonic, locked in a horrible prison inside their own minds. The human mind can’t stand continual consciousness; it becomes exhausted at simple existence.
So I stumble through the day, trying to put off any difficult critical thinking until tomorrow, and procrastinating on any demanding and crucial projects while I’m in such a state. The day fills with busy work – mundane tasks that I can do in my sleep (which is pretty much what is going on).
Until finally the clock winds down and I can crash. Now is the time. So I’d better stop writing.
See you tomorrow, when I’m worth a bit more of a quality effort.
Radio Paradise
Radio
Internet radio is a gift from the gods. I mean it, isn’t it amazing that this music can come out of the ether? And it follows you around, were ever you go.
I have tried out a thousand Internet radio stations but I keep coming back to one, Radio Paradise. Right now, I’m at the library after work, listening to it on my laptop (yes, very good sound-isolating headphones, of course) trying to get some pages hammered off in one window, radio paradise in another, and this procrastinating tripe in a third.
Day after day, I’ve fallen into the bad habit of coming home from work and collapsing. To try and put that vice to rest, I’m going to stop off at the library on the way home. I guess I can fall asleep at this little cubicle, but at least it will be uncomfortable and I’ll drool and such – can’t snooze too long.
Back to Radio Paradise… over the last few years I have found so much great new music from their programming. It’s a great mix of old and new, popular and obscure (leaning toward the new and obscure) – mostly not too upbeat, but not too downcast either.
I love it when I can play it while I sleep and wake up to some mysterious music pouring and bouncing through the dark room.
At home, I’ve been playing around with the Roku Box and found something really cool. Radio Paradise has a channel on the box and while it plays the music it displays a series of HD still images. You can watch it here on your computer screen – but it is really something nice on a big screen HD television and sound system.
This truly is the best of all possible worlds.
Quintet
Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
—- Robert Frost
Ok, I’m going to write about a movie you will never see. I can’t really call it a review – the movie sucks so much and in such an interesting and ambitious way that it isn’t really reviewable. I knew it sucked – had known it sucked for decades. That doesn’t mean I didn’t want to see it. That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy watching it (Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t).
I’m not sure why I even bothered to watch it. Or why I even bother that it exists. I could write about a fictional movie. You’re not going to see this one anyway – so who cares if it actually exists. If nobody except me sees a movie-does it even exist?
This movie that you aren’t going to see is called Quintet and it stars Paul Newman and is directed by Robert Altman. When I think of science fiction dystopian film making… I always think of Robert Altman. It was made in 1979 – a year after I graduated for the last time.
A scene near the begining of Quintet. Don't think I blurred the edges of the frame for artistic effect - I didn't. The whole movie looks like that. They must have used a gallon of vaseline on the lenses.
Back then I used to love to read the movie reviews in Time magazine. I think I enjoyed reading the reviews more than seeing the movies. Remember, this was long before the Internet – information was scant then. You tended to believe what you read.
Now we know better.
So I read the reviews of Quintet. It was a big deal – Paul Newman, Robert Altman, all-star international cast. With all this going for it, with all this at stake, it couldn’t suck. But it did. They didn’t really come out and say that – but we all knew how to read between the lines.
I bought my first television cable in about 1980. That was when HBO was still called Home Box Office. Quintet was on, but I only saw a few minutes of it. It actually looked like something I might enjoy – odd, eccentric, but entertaining in a quirky sort of way.
I was wrong.
Now, all these decades later, we have Netflix – and I’m able to watch this old chestnut in the privacy of my own laptop.
1979 were pre-global warming days – when it was assumed the world would end in ice, not fire. In the film, ice has taken over and the world is about to freeze solid. Everyone has given up and is waiting around to die. Paul Newman arrives from the wilderness – the prototypical outsider of the dystopian tradition – with a young pregnant wife. This should be a big deal – but nobody cares about anything. They go on playing this game, Quintet, and the losers get slaughtered and literally fed to the dogs.
"The earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever." What the hell does that mean? I suspect very little.
The only interesting character is killed off thirty minutes in.
The move has a languid pace and an interesting frozen broken down look – but in the end, nobody gives a damn about anybody.
So why should we?
Paul Newman and Fernando Rey enjoying a hearty drink together. At least the beer is cold.
Into the Blast Furnace.
The light - not the heat
It is so hot. I remember talking to people that moved to Dallas from Cleveland. I said, “Summers in Dallas are like winters in Cleveland – you can’t be outside for an extended time. You have to live running from one air-conditioned space to another.”
That understates it. You can, in cold weather, always dress for it, put on layers, preparation. In the heat, naked is as good as it gets, and that isn’t enough.
I am so tired of the droning of the air conditioner – the feeling of artificial, fake, conditioned air against my skin. It is painful, it pricks.
When I was younger I had a muffle furnace in my laboratory. Actually, over a period of years, I had a series of muffle furnaces. A muffle furnace is used to get something, usually a crucible containing some substance you are interested in, very, very hot. They are a little ceramic cave, with squiqqles of electric heating wires running all around. A heavy door swings down over the front, allowing you to lift and peek if you want. This is a door to hell. The inside glows like Hawaiian lava – then it gets even hotter. White hot.
Sometimes, whatever you have in the crucible explodes. A little. This makes the door swing out and a puff of superheated smoke jumps out. The door clangs shut. Any muffle furnace worth its salt will have a stained front, paint smoked by escaping violence from the reactions within.
I feel like that all the time.
Heat
Taqueria – La Marketa Cafe
Lee and I were driving downtown yesterday, later than I had wanted to go, it was Texas nuclear hot, and nobody had eaten. Lee announced that he had to have something to eat before we went to the Nasher. When a college boy says he has to eat, he has to eat.
I threw the criteria in to my head…
-We were headed downtown (not a lot of action downtown on the weekends – shame on Dallas)
-We were in a hurry (no sit down restaurants)
-No chain-type fast food (general rule of mine, whenever given a choice, I choose local, privately owned – have to support the peeps)
I did not have much of an idea until an old, musty memory came bubbling up. I was at the Dallas Farmer’s Market, buying vegetables, and I saw a Taqueria in a run-down stand right in the middle of things. I remember wanting to eat there in the worst way, but we had other plans that day.
Tex-Mex is not my favorite, but I love Taqueria food. Incredibly unhealthy, probably not too sanitary – but fast, spicy, and good. What can be better?
“I think there’s a taco stand in the Farmer’s Market, Lee. It’s not too far from the Nasher, can you handle that?” I said to Lee.
“Go for it,” he said. So I exited on Good-Latimer and threaded my way through the giant glass canyons of downtown to the Farmer’s Market.
The place was hopping. The ragged field that serves as a parking lot was filling up – groups and families were wandering around with bags of vegetables, flats of bedding plants, and carts with Mexican clay pots and sculptures. A street musician was playing wildly inappropriate music (I have never heard Steve Miller’s Swingtown done by a busker before) and they were setting up a stage for a cooking demonstration.
I love the Dallas Farmer’s Market and am glad that it has become so popular (at least on a Saturday morning). I’ve been going there ever since I worked downtown twenty years ago and would walk over for a bag of tomatoes before taking the bus home to Lower Greenville.
It has grown quite a bit since then – the area is now surrounded by condominium urban-hipster type developments and the city has built a new air-conditioned “shed” to accommodate more retailers than the traditional farmers and wholesalers that still line up in the lines of stalls in the old open sheds.
La Marketa Cafe in front of Shed 2 at the Dallas Farmer's Market
We walked up and in front of the new “Shed Number 2” was, sure enough, a run-down, rounded, concrete building with a sign that said, “La Marketa Cafe” and a big, hand-lettered menu board.
I asked if it was still early enough for breakfast and it was. The menu was complex, but we quickly settled on tacos and burritos – corn and flour – and the options:
chorizo
potatoes
ham
sausage
bacon
beans&cheese
“Two tacos, one corn, one flour, one sausage, one beans&cheese, one burrito…, bacon and two bottles of water.”
I had to repeat it twice, but I didn’t really care if they got it right. It’s all good. They asked if I wanted “everything?” and I said, of course, “Sure.”
The food wasn’t very fast (there were a lot of people ordering and waiting), but it was very, very good. Large, full of eggs, onions. and peppers and “everything.” The best was the sauce (that’s the most important thing isn’t it?). Two paper ramekins – one with a hearty red, the other a wonderful spicy guacamole (I hate wimpy guacamole).
Lee getting ready to attack a breakfast taco
La Marketa Cafe (I have no idea where the Cafe come from) has now risen to the top of my extensive list of approved taquerias.
Now I want to go back, early, when there is a little cool morning air left wafting around, have some tacos, watch some people. I might even pick out a bag of tomatoes before I go back home.
Eating al fresco in front of the taqueria - HDR
Then and Now at the Nasher Sculpture Center
Some time long ago – I think it was the early spring of 2004 – Lee and I went down to the newly-constructed Nasher Sculpture Center in the still nascent Arts District of Dallas. I took some pictures of him, and wrote it up into my journal, The Daily Epiphany, at the time. It was popular enough that I re-wrote it into a magazine article and it was published in a local magazine, Richardson Living, (I’ll dig up what I wrote and put it up here when I get some time). The folks at the Nasher liked it so much they sent me some free tickets.
Now, about seven years later, Lee and I went down there again and I took some more pictures. Like most museums the artworks move around quite a bit – so nothing was exactly the same. Lee has, of course, grown a bit, and my camera is different. The trees in the Nasher garden have grown a lot. In 2004, the place felt like a finely tended garden – now it’s more like a forest glade.
It was hot as a humid blowtorch today, and the light wasn’t very good, so the pictures aren’t great. I wanted to go early in the morning, but the house was full of sleeping college age boys, nobody slept much last night, and it took some doing to get myself enthused and then roust them up and out the door.
Night (La Nuit) by Aristide Maillol
This is Lee sitting on a wall in front of Night (La Nuit) by Aristide Maillol.
Lee sitting by Night, 2004
Seven years ago, the sculpture was out in the grassy garden area.
Eve, by Rodin
Eve, by Rodin, 2004
Bronze Crowd, by Magdalena Abakanowicz
Bronze Crowd, by Magdalena Abakanowicz
Bronze Crowd, by Magdalena Abakanowicz - 2004
Richard Serra - My Curves are Not Mad
One sculpture that is still in the same place is Richard Serra’s My Curves Are Not Mad. That’s not surprising – it weighs fifty tons or so and I read somewhere that they had to do some serious work on the foundation when the museum was built. I did this by memory, but it looks like I stood in the exact spot I did seven years ago. You can really see how much the trees have grown.
My Curves are Not Mad - Richard Serra, 2004
Inside My Curves are Not Mad - 2004
Quantum Cloud XX (tornado) by Antony Gormley
Quantum Cloud XX (tornado) by Antony Gormley used to be down at the bottom of the garden. I liked it there, it looked like a ghost emerging from the shrubbery. It’s always been one of my favorite pieces and I still like it. Actually, today I was glad it had been moved into the air conditioning.
Untitled (Sprawling Octopus Man), by Thomas Houseago
Untitled (Sprawling Octopus Man), by Thomas Houseago, is part of a temporary exhibit, called Satuesque.
Hammering Man, by Jonathan Borofsky
Everyone that has lived in Dallas for a long time remembers Hammering Man, by Jonathan Borofsky, because it used to grace Raymond Nasher’s shopping mall, Northpark. I love it that he was allowed to stay in the city.
Bill Chance 