Red Line DART Train reflected in the gold mirror of Campbell Center at Northwest Highway and 75.
Animated Train
Monthly Archives: October 2011
Tacos!
I had been eating all day, but I had also been walking a lot, so I was developing an appetite. Not too hungry, but I wanted something… and there are still food trucks I haven’t tried.
The Yum Yum Food Truck spends most of its time in Fort Worth, so I wanted to be sure to try it while it was handy. I took a look at the menu… Tacos… perfect!
Yum Yum Food Truck in the Dallas Arts District.
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- Notice all the sauces in little plastic cups. It makes me hungry thinking about it.
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- The menu. Simple, but a lot of choices. I didn’t try the hamburgers, but I’ll bet they are good. Look at the sauces… Habanero, Chipotle, Red Chile, Green Chile…
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- Chipotle Brisket with cheese and Green Chile/Tomatillo Salsa. It was delicious – as good a taco as you are going to get. The meat was tender spicy and juicy.
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Large Horse by Duchamp-Villon
I like it when I have a membership in a museum or I can get in free – because then I don’t feel like I have to see the whole thing. I can concentrate.
What I like to do is to have one favorite thing. One work of art. I like to go to that on a bee-line and stare at it, walk around it, try to understand and possess it completely. You can’t do that if you go wandering through the galleries like a tourist hurrying to catch his bus outside. You have to be selective and patient.
When the Dallas Museum of Art first opened it was free. I was working only about a block away and I would walk over for a few minutes at lunch whenever I could. My favorite sculpture was Max Bill’s Rhythm in Space. I would walk into the sculpture garden and stare at that piece of carved curved granite. It meant something to me. This can’t be put into words, but it was an idea of motion, beauty, and the timelessness of stone. The hard, unyielding granite had been shaped into something graceful and light. The sculpture looked a little like a face from the front, but was reduced to precise geometric principles. The eyes and mouth appeared to be perfect circles – but only from a certain viewpoint. There is also a complex symmetry in the design…. So on and….
That’s what I saw.
It’s gone now. I don’t know where.
For a long time, my favorite sculpture was Tending (Blue) – but it’s gone now too. Well, it’s still there… but.
So now I’ve fallen in love with Large Horse, by Raymond Duchamp-Villon (the brother of Marcel Duchamp and Jacques Villon). It’s right up front, by a glass wall, at the Nasher.
I like to stare at it, walk around it. I’ve taken some pictures of it. I would like to take some more.
To me, it’s clear that it is a statue of a horse – but that horse has been morphed into a complex machine, full of pushrods, pistons, and gears. It has an impressive, solid bulk, but feels like it is about to propel itself out through the glass and speed down the street in a blur, smelling of ozone and oil.
It is cast in very dark bronze – almost black. It swallows a lot of the light, but what does escape is subdued by the power and mass of the horse. It shines with dark energy.
The sculptor was a cavalry doctor in World War I and must have had a close relationship, knowledge, and a deep connection with his horses. He chose this animal to convert into a cubist bronze. He was able to preserve the essential horseness of the shape while implying the obsolescence of the animal – overtaken by the more powerful, rugged, and easily controlled energy of machines.
Duchamp-Villon died too young. He contracted typhoid fever during the war. He died before he finished this sculpture. All he left was the finished small scale model. After his death, his famous brother, Marcel Duchamp (Nude Descending a Staircase) finished the job and had the sculpture cast in full-sized bronze.
Thanks.
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Large Horse, by Raymond Duchamp-Villon
Scopitone
The last few weeks, whenever I would sit down at the computer – dipping my toes in the very shallow edge of the warm and wild sea of the internet – looking for youtube videos of old and tacky musical performances – I kept coming across the word “Scopitone.” A lot of musical chintz, commercial pop from the early sixties, especially stuff from Europe…
Some of the best (and worst) of it had the word Scopitone floating above the tawdry grin and shabby outfits, grainy film-transfer, inane and incongruous background singers, and abysmal dance routines. I assumed that Scopitone was a brand, or a record label, or something else rooted in the second-rate musical world of the time. I was right about that, I guess, but it wasn’t until a few days ago that I stumbled across what Scopitone actually is.
It is a machine. A musical video jukebox of the time. MTV for the sixties. An Ipod of the day, the size of a refrigerator.
A Scopitone Machine
A Scopitone is a way to pay to view sixteen millimeter films of the stars of the day. The short musical films were stored on reels inside the complex mechanism and delivered up for view on a dark, dim, blurry screen atop the contraption while the sounds, carried on an innovative magnetic track beside the filmstrip, bellowed out of tinny, static-filled speakers.
The Scopitone was developed in France after World War II. The story is that two French engineers built the prototype projector from a 16mm aerial spy camera and used other leftover war equipment for the mechanism. It was very complex and wasn’t perfected until the late 1950’s. I can’t imagine the difficulty of building a mechanism to automatically thread and rewind a pile of 16mm film reels, all in a portable machine the size of a refrigerator.
The interior mechanism of a Scopitone
The machines were mostly placed in loud, noisy, crowded bars full of desperate drunken young men. That is why so many feature skimpy outfits on skinny starlets, shimmying whatever it is that they’ve got for the three minutes or so the song spends wearing itself out.
A classic Scopitone – Neil Sedaka with Showgirls. (Is Miss June Barbara Eden?)
I love the idea of these whirring, clanking, clumsy mechanical marvels competing for spare change with the stale pretzels on the bar. What pitiful echoes of sophomoric erotic thoughts would course through the alcohol-fueled young minds while viewing something like this:
The only thing stranger that the short success of the Scopitone is the fact that these films are still around today. You can buy DVDs. There are blogs dedicated to them. I can go online, type Scopitone into the youtube search field and my screen fills with a list of hundreds of these ancient artifacts. Is it stranger that they are available… or that I actually like to look at them, or even write about them.
Oh well. It is what it is.
This is actually a great song. But why are they singing to a bear?
This one is straight from a burlesque show… and I remember the Dean Martin James Bond spoof of the same name. Did the song come first?
Have to have one with dancers wearing fringed bikinis.
This is the most heartfelt song I’ve ever seen that involved women in bikinis playing skee-ball. “Hey Kids! Play with Peppy”
Always had a soft spot for instrumental “twist” music.
Most of the Scopitone music is obscure and second-rate – but this is one of the best songs of all time… and an interesting visual of the time
And of course, Bang Bang
What I learned this week, October 7, 2011
Does your dog bite?
I’m not prepared to say this is the funniest thing in the world – but when I first saw this… what? over thirty years ago? I laughed as hard as ever have, before or since.
The Creators Project
It’s hard to describe the synergy between Swedish pop sensation Robyn and her Creative Director/kindred spirit Mary Fagot. These two women are an effortless example of how two people can seamlessly work together while maintaining an enviable friendship, one that can only be described as a mutual girl crush.
How to Craft the Perfect Calendar and ToDo List This Weekend
If your productivity routine has begun to feel a bit stale (or your productivity’s just not where you’d like it to be), spend some free time setting up a new system to get ahead on work next week.
—-From Lifehacker
Who knew? Where I live isn’t so horrendous after all.
Turns out, the South is a pretty nice place to live
This is a better picture of the thing than I can take.
Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don’ts
—-from The Guardian
And if that isn’t enough weird-ass bad dancing by Raquel Welch for you… get a load of this:
Does anybody know where the hell this was filmed? Are those structures in the background still there?
Bánh mì!
Oh, and it was food truck heaven in the Dallas Arts District! I was hungry and the trucks were arranged all up and down Flora Street. So much food and so little time.
Mae West said, “When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I’ve never tried before.” That always seemed to be good advice to me. So in choosing between six food trucks, I decided to eat one I’ve never tried before (by the end of the day, I had tried three).
The Nammi Food Truck down in the Dallas Arts District
I picked out The Nammi Food Truck. I wanted some Vietnamese food! I wanted some Banh Mi.
No Fried Egg Today
A BBQ pork sandwich and a drink was the ticket.
Waiting for her order.
There were plenty of customers hanging around, but the food came quick.
They had some sauces in squeeze bottles down in the ice in the front compartment – spicy mayo, cucumber (I think), and Sriracha. I filled ramekins with cucumber and rooster sauce.
Banh Mi from the Nammi Food Truck. Giant sandwich with rooster sauce and ... some other sauce.
The sandwich was huge and stuffed with stuff. One woman at another table was gesturing at her sandwich and yelling, “It’s bigger than my arm!” My only complaint was that I didn’t open the paper carefully enough and too much stuff fell out. It was really good. I want to go get another.
A couple sat next to me eating their Banh Mi. The sandwiches are on the messy side. Some of the good stuff spills out and falls on the ground.
Luckily the cleaning crew is right there to hop on things right away and fly away with the leftovers.
Granite
Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
—-Gustave Flaubert
I was down in the Dallas Arts District. In front of the Symphony Hall the Bald Cypress trees have been growing for decades now, they are huge and beautiful. Their knees are coming up now and pushing through the little blocks of granite that pave the ground between the sidewalk and the street.
- The small granite paving blocks.
I set my camera down on the ground and took these pictures – mostly to remind myself of the spot. I’ve always liked the stretch of shaded sidewalk along there, and the rough displacement of the carefully set granite pavestones… the bits of goldbrown cypress needles falling into and filling the gaps… I like that even better.
The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.
—-Thomas Carlyle
“For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world. I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: ”I will understand this, too, I will understand everything.””—-Primo Levi
Then and now, DART train and the White Rock Creek Trail
And there is the headlight, shining far down the track, glinting off the steel rails that, like all parallel lines, will meet in infinity, which is after all where this train is going.
—-Bruce Catton
I like to take pictures of the DART trains. While I was exploring the Cottonwood Trail I snapped this one of the intersection of the Cottonwood and While Rock Creek Trails.
- The southern terminus of the Cottonwood Creek trail, where it connects with the White Rock Creek Trail. The DART train is crossing White Rock Creek over the trail.
Have you ever had one of those moments when you look up and realize that you’re one of those people you see on the train talking to themselves?
—-Marc Maron
And here’s a picture of the trail from the train, showing the spot I took the picture.
The White Rock Creek Trail from the DART train. I don't know what the crap on the window was. I probably don't want to know. It was on the outside, at least.
Here is what it looked like this Saturday. I took this picture from the train with a better camera (my Nikon is back from repairs). Look how much greener everything looks after only a rain or two over the last weeks.
The trail runs through some thick woods between the train line and the creek south of Forest Lane. There is a nice rest area built there. This homeless guy was sitting in the rest area, reading and writing in his notebook. We talked about the weather and I helped him find a lost sock.
I took this picture of a homeless guy at a nice wooded rest area along the Cottonwood Trail.
Here is the same spot along the trail taken from the passing train. There is usually a homeless person (different ones each time) camped out here, but today it was deserted.
Shooting in the Galleries
I decided to go downtown on Saturday for the first day of the Arts District’s Art in October celebration. The night before, I struggled to get to sleep, and didn’t get up as early as I wanted – but soldiered on anyway.
When I arrived at the DART station and was buying my ticket at the kiosk I looked up to see my train go by. They are scheduled every twenty minutes on weekends so I knew I would have to wait a while. No problem, it was a beautiful day and I settled down on a little seat on the deserted train platform and started to read my Kindle application on my Blackberry.
The Richardson Library now has Kindle books available for loan. I haven’t mastered the method yet, but I had managed to get a book of Billy Collins‘ poetry (“Ballistics”) to appear on the tiny screen – so that is good.
At a break between poems, I looked down and noticed a laptop bag right beside me, leaning up against my little seat. I looked around, nobody… so I unzipped the bag a bit and peered inside. There was a top-end laptop with accessories, including a really nice USB camera, folders of papers, and a VISA card stuck into a side pocket. I zipped it back up and sat there, trying to think of what to do.
A train going the other way pulled into the station and the doors opened wide right in front of me. I expected some panicked commuter to tumble out and yell, “Thank God it’s still here!” and grab his laptop case. It would be easy to get on the train and leave your case behind, but surely you would realize it was missing by the next stop. It would be easy to hop off and grab the next train back the other way.
Nothing.
I sat there for a second and stared at the gaping door in the train. I would love to have a nice high-end laptop like the one in the bag – among physical possessions that is the only thing I can really think of (now that I have my camera back). It would be so easy to simply stand up with the bag and get on that train. The platform was still empty.
I could actually see myself doing this – lifting the case and entering the train with a sigh, as if I was having to go to work on a Saturday. It would be the perfect crime.
A lot of people… maybe even most people (but not you, dear reader, surely) would not even consider this stealing. They would consider it a “found” laptop and they simply lucky. I wonder about people like that. What does the world look like to them? I guess they think of all the stuff that has been stolen from them and that the world owes them one now and then. I guess they have a piece of their head missing, the one that imagines the pain and suffering of someone else that has lost their valuables – in the case of a personal laptop, lost a big chunk of their life. Morality aside, a laptop case like that – with all the critical data in it – is a lot more valuable to the person losing it than to the person stealing it.
The train doors closed and it sped off.
Now what to do? My train would be there soon and I would have to make a decision. Obviously, until my train came, all I had to do was sit next to the case. Any thief would assume it was mine, only the owner would walk up and claim it. But my train would be the next one – nobody will arrive before then. Should I look in the case again, try to find a cellphone number? Should I take it with me and hope to locate the owner later? The easy thing to do would be to simply leave it where it sat and be done with it – but isn’t that about the same as stealing? I wouldn’t get to keep it but I would be abandoning it to a heartless and uncertain world – it would surely end in grief and while I would not be directly responsible and would not be aware of its fate, by inaction I would set the wheels in motion.
Luckily, I didn’t have to make the choice. I looked up and a Hispanic woman and a DART ticket official were walking up from the tunnel (the Arapaho train station is separated from the rest of the world by a wide, busy street – you have to go under it in a long pedestrian tunnel to reach the platform). The official asked me if the case was mine. She began to carefully probe the case, weary of terrorism (something that had not occurred to me until then). I didn’t mention that I had already opened it up. She moved the zipper and inch and saw the laptop within.
The woman that had made the report said the case had been there for a while, “At least five trains,” she said. She and I talked about how odd it was that nobody came back for the case. The official was making a report on her radio. I asked her if there was a lost-and-found and she said, “Yes, but I’m not allowed to do anything, I have to call for the transit police to pick it up.”
At that moment my train pulled up and I was gone.
On the train I went back to reading the Billy Collins poems on my Blackberry. The poems are short and I could pretty much digest one between each train stop.
One of them, “August in Paris” in typical Collins style, spoke of the poet watching a painter in France and standing behind the painter, taking notes, while he worked. He then made the jump to the reader, and how this readers can’t watch him work but he thinks about who they are.
He says, “there is only the sound of your breathing/and every so often, the turning of a page.”
I thought about this… how times had changed. There isn’t the sound of my breathing, but the clacking rails and the tumult of a crowded commuter train cabin. There is no turning of pages… only the silent movement of my thumb across the tiny black Blackberry trackpad and a new dinky screenfull of luminescent text appears.
Dining area at the Dallas Museum of Art. Glass by Dale Chihuly.
Nasher – Tony Cragg
Everyone is taking pictures, not everyone likes it.
The one person not taking photographs was sketching
At the Nasher
Ceiling of the Nasher
One of my favorite Bang Bang videos will not allow imbedding.
Shame.
Trailercakes!
It was a long beautiful afternoon down in the Dallas Arts District. It was the first Saturday in the Art in October thingy and I had been hanging around for a while, visiting the museums, taking some photographs (I have my Nikon back from the shop and it seems to be working better than ever) and scarfing down some food truck food. I was sitting right off the sidewalk finishing off a pair of chipotle bar-b-que tacos when a couple women with children dressed in white t-shirts that said, “Trailercakes,” on them came by passing out menus.
“We’re down another block,” they said, “come on down and try our cupcakes.” Their menu looked impressive – I’ve never been a huge cupcake fan – but my idea of a cupcake was a stale cylinder of dry cake slathered with some oversweet food-colored goop passed to you at some underfunded church luncheon. These Trailercakes looked like treats of an entirely different sort.
I had seen the silvery glint of an Airstream trailer down in front of the Meyerson Symphony Center. At first I thought of getting some dessert for myself, then decided to hoof by there on the way home and get something for Candy.
So once I was ready to head homeward I walked over to the Meyerson. The main thrust of the festivities and the rest of the food trucks were all down Flora Street towards the Nasher. I hope some folks were able to wander down to the other end – it’s a nice spot, actually.
The Trailercakes Airstream “Bubbles” sitting down in a grove of bald cypress trees in front of the Meyerson. From this picture, you would think it was camped out in a rural park somewhere.
Bubbles!
Customers looking at the selection of cupcakes while the bubbles float by.
Working on an order.
One of the things I like about the whole food truck thing is the interaction between the chefs and the customers (me). I bought six mini-cupcakes to take home and we talked about what to get. They asked about peanut butter and jelly cupcakes. I hesitated and they said that was their specialty. They gave me one to try and I gobbled it down.
It was pretty darn good. So I had them include one.
Here’s what I walked away with. Clockwise, from the top, ending with the peanut butter one in the center:
- Hitched (white/white)
- Slap-Your-Mother Chocolate (chocolate/chocolate)
- Bananarama (I think) (banana/cream cheese)
- The King (banana/peanut butter)
- Happy Days (white/white/sprinkles)
- PB&J (white/grape jelly center/peanut butter fluff)
I had to ride home on a crowded DART train with this in my lap. It was full of kids coming back from the Texas State Fair. They all eyed that tray of cupcakes the whole way – I’m lucky I wasn’t attacked.
Bill Chance 