Monthly Archives: January 2012

Poetry in Motion

Posted on by Bill Chance

I rode the DART trains years ago when they started operating – in the first few days. It felt like luxury then – so few folks ventured on board, sitting in plenty of space, the cars gently swaying. It was like the opening of a new highway – vast reaches of empty tarmac. It is as if the whole billion dollar enterprise was constructed just for you – a new world of dignity and comfort.

That did not last long. The crowds grew with frightening rapidity until, within weeks, I was relegated to a mere straphanger – standing for the whole commute, grimly gripping a hand hold trying not to fall during a lurching curve, propped up partly by the warm bodies of the other riders – all crammed in like ripe sardines.

The only escape from the uncomfortable situation of mass humanity on the train is to look around for a Poetry in Motion poster. These are posters, with poems printed on them. New York has been doing this for decades. The program is done by DART in association with the Poetry Society of America. They work with transit companies all across the country.

The other night I was crammed in, packed, but could turn my head and read “World Trade” by Jim LaVilla-Havelin.

When I look down the road into the enormity of sky
all I see –          golden arches
a mammoth American Flag
and the big rigs screaming down
the Old Laredo Highway

all
dwarfed
by
the blameless sky

and for a second I am transported out of that crowded commuted cattle car into… somewhere else.

After a bit it is all too much for me so I start to crane my neck. There, if I dip my head I can see next to the exit door… that woman thinks I’m staring at her… tough, I can see another poster. It’s

On the Patio, Dallas
by Isabel Nathaniel

The prickly pear and yucca
dug from a roadside
do fine in pots. Sun,
sunflowers. The August heat.
Petunias, pinks, and even the geranium
probably don’t belong. With watering
they hold on. One morning
I fed them organic fertilizer
made entirely of sea-going fish.
I hosed the place till the hanging baskets
dripped and the fence soaked dark.
There rose the brackish smell of bays
and wharves and I turned my head
to the distance as if to hear
the regular slapping of the sea.

And I can hear the slapping of the sea over the rat-tatting of the rails.

On farther, past the kid with the dreads holding a bicycle in the aisle there’s a poem, in Spanish.

En la Sangre
Pat Mora

En la Sangre

La niña con ojos cafés
y el abuelito con pelo blanco
bailan en la tarde silenciosa.
Castañetean los dedos
a un ritmo oido solamente
por los que aman.

In the Blood

The brown-eyed child
and the white-haired grandfather
dance in the silent afternoon
They snap their finger
to a rhythm only those
who love can hear

And here I am, at my stop. That trip didn’t seem to take so long.

Jig

Posted on by Bill Chance

I remember the first time I saw Riverdance on television, many years ago. I was channel surfing and stumbled across some random show on PBS. There was this line of people standing stick-straight with their arms stiffly at their sides, hopping up and down in a strange complex way. I knew nothing of Irish Dancing or anything else. My thought at the time was, unfortunately, “Uh-Oh, White People Dancing, this can’t turn out well.” Over time, I did learn better.

This new year has started, as do so many, with me getting sick. My careful resolutions have been thrown out already in a flood of virus induced respiratory difficulties. I actually don’t feel so bad, but I can’t stop coughing and if I can’t stop coughing, I can’t sleep. I missed a half-day of work, only the third time I’ve left work sick in thirty years (and the other two I was blind which I considered a good excuse). This time I was so tired I was scared I was going to make a mistake and somebody would get hurt.

So the other night I crept out from my room to sit up on the couch, swigging from a bottle of vile green liquid, and watching a bit of Teevee until I was exhausted enough to try and go back to bed. There was this movie on, a documentary, a film by Sue Bourne called Jig. It was fascinating enough that I hit the DVR record button so I could watch it the next day, with my head on more or less straight.

Jig is about the world of competitive Irish Dancing. At first, it’s a little disturbing – with the wigs and elaborate costumes on the little girls it has a “Toddlers and Tiaras” vibe going on. But it doesn’t take long to realize that these kids are learning to do something special. Every one of them is driven by the dance itself. They are going all over the world to compete… and they want to win, but what they really want to do is dance. They want to dance as well as they are capable of.

And that is something to enjoy and respect.

One important part of the film that I recognize is the dedication of the parents to the aspirations of their children. I’ve spent a lot of time and money on stuff like that, especially kids’ soccer. Thousands of dollars and tens of thousands of hours on practice, travel, tournaments. It’s easy to ask what do you really get out of something like that. It doesn’t matter. There is no choice… you do what you need to do.

In the documentary one father gives up his lucrative doctor’s practice in the States to move to England so his son can get better instruction in the dance. His son, Joe Bitter talks about his set dance. He says that it is so difficult that if he dances it cleanly it will be the best dance ever done.

The dancers… the kids handle the pressure pretty well, but man, take a look at the mother’s face in this clip while she’s watching her daughter dance. It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do.

Any closed world like that of competitive Irish Dancing seems odd at first sight. But, sitting there on my couch like Jabba the Hut, coughing, I could not help but tip my hat to those kids and all their dedication and hard work. If you look closely and fairly you can see that they are trying to fly and coming a lot closer than any of us.

Irish Dancing Blogs

http://youtu.be/uJyfx_Sln7I

Babe’s Chicken Dinner House

Posted on by Bill Chance

On Sunday we met some friends for a late lunch and to exchange holiday gifts. They live on the opposite side of the Metroplex, so Candy chose a casual restaurant about halfway in between.

She decided on Babe’s Chicken Dinner House in Carrollton. There are Babe’s restaurants all over the place. One is only a couple miles from our house, in Garland. I first ate there in August of 2000 and wrote about it in my online journal.

Here’s what I had to say back then:

Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.

—-Peter De Vries

Today, Candy took Nick out for his birthday dinner, a day late. Lee didn’t want to go and headed over to a friend’s house, Nicholas (of course) didn’t mind.

Candy called me at work when they left home and I drove to meet them. The place isn’t far from my work. It is Nicholas’ favorite restaurant.

It is called Babe’s Chicken Dinner House. It could be a joke, a satire on everything Texan – except it is serious.

The place is located in a run-down strip center in northern Garland. It shares the NorthStar Center with the Mu Do Martial Arts Academy, the Celebration Bible Church, Second Look Beauty Supply, the Begin Again Thrift Store, a handful of vacant storefronts, and three different burger joints.

I arrived before Nick and Candy so I sat awhile outside, enjoying the sultry evening with the day’s heat reradiating off the partially melted asphalt in the parking lot. They have a row of chairs out front, some made from old steel tractor seats crudely welded to triangles of rebar. A cable runs through them all to discourage theft. A surprisingly powerful outdoor speaker blared out Elvis (Kentucky Rain) and Willie Nelson (an odd version of Deep in the Heart of Texas).

I didn’t have to wait long before Candy and Nick arrived and we went in and ordered. The menu is simple: Fried Chicken, Chicken Fried Steak, Pork Ribs, Pot Roast, Fried Catfish. You get a huge serving of meat and unlimited sides. They keep bringing and bringing, tray after tray. Massive bowls of mashed potatoes, biscuits, heavy cream gravy, creamed corn, stewed tomatoes and okra, green beans, that sort of thing.

“Want anything else with that honey?” our waitress asked, “Tabasco, A-1, Jalepenos?”

“I’ll have a few Jalepenos,” I replied.

The waitresses are young voluptuous local girls in impossibly tight jeans or older battleaxes that look like they’ve been rode hard and put up wet too many times. They all have that tough down-home serious look about them. So do the customers. All stiff, proper, not-too-well-off folk. Mostly families. Everybody looks hungry. One large table was full of burly firefighters, all in blue shirts and burr haircuts. A huge ladder truck and ambulance were parked outside.

The decor is beyond tacky. Lots of wood, mostly concealed with country style bric-a-brac. Hand painted signs everywhere with earthy wit – “Life is too short to drink cheap beer,” “Never squat with your spurs on,” “Work is for people who don’t know how to fish,” “Speak your mind but ride a fast horse,” “Don’t steal the government doesn’t like competition.”

Even more bizarre signs adorn various dead animals stuck on the wall here and there. A stuffed Raccoon is inexplicably labeled, “Just say NO to raccoon.” An armadillo is spray painted gold and boasts, “Roadkill Only.” A swordfish has been painted black and white, spotted like a cow, mounted above a piece of plywood that says, “No sushi.” I guess all this is supposed to improve the appetite.

Nick loves the place. He had the child’s plate – only a chicken leg. He ate the side dishes like a lumberjack, though. Mostly the creamed corn and the biscuits.

In the center of the restaurant is a massive display case filled with huge pies. Lemon, chocolate, coconut cream. The meringue flows across the top like a toasted ocean – tan peaks flicking pointed into the valley far below. I was so stuffed I couldn’t even look at them.

Now I feel sick. There is no way I can go into that place and not eat too much. No way.

Near the exit a small plastic pet carrier sits on a pedestal. “Babe’s Groundhog,” is spray painted on it, along with warning not to feed the groundhog, to keep your fingers away, that sort of thing. On the way out I couldn’t help but look inside. Nestled in a nice little bed of hay is a tube of Owen’s Sausage. Ground-Hog… Get it?

Many things have changed greatly in the almost-a-dozen years since I wrote that. Many things have changed greatly. Babe’s Chicken Dinner House is not one of them. Only a few details around the edges – the crowd is now much more diverse – the Metroplex is more of a worldly Cosmopolitan place now. The menu has added smoked chicken, so it is a little bit healthier.

The restaurant in Carrollton is a bit more upscale than the one in Garland – it’s an interesting architectural hodgepodge built from an old lumber yard and chicken coop with a nice patio that holds a giant firepit sort of place to sit around, watch some wood burn, and choke on the smoke. It is trimmed out in raw cedar posts – which are beautiful and unique. The humor is as tacky, though – on the ceiling over our table was painted a huge blue oval, with duck feet, bottoms, and a few duck heads poking down through the blue. The idea was that we were sitting under a pond and these ducks were swimming around on top of the ceiling, peering down through the water at us. I guess….

One interesting thing about that old journal entry was that it would always get a huge number of search engine hits. I had a good stats server then and I discovered that those searches were all coming from Norman, Oklahoma. Apparently Oklahoma University students loved to eat at Babe’s when they came to the Big D for the Texas-OU game. I guess….

So I had the smoked chicken, but ate too many mashed potatoes – so I ate ’til I was sick. We all sat around the fire pit and talked, until my winter cold congestion revolted against the woodsmoke and I had to beat a hasty retreat into the fresh air so I could breathe.

So I wave goodbye to Babe’s Chicken Dinner House for another year. I feel sure it will be back again next year… as delicious and tacky as ever.

The odd fire pit outside at Babe's Chicken Dinner House in Carrollton, Texas.

Links to other blogs talkin’ bout Babe’s:

Just Me Saying

Donna Cooks

Regular Joe’s Guide

Arlington Insider

Food Network “The Best Thing I Ever Ate”

NewsOK – Here’s those Oklahoma folks again

Dude Food

Southern Living – Where to Eat at the South’s Best Fried Chicken Restaurants

Estate Sale – An Orgy of Greed, Voyeurism, and Necrophilia

Posted on by Bill Chance

Candy and I have picked up a new activity/obsession – going to estate sales. I’ve always had a strange enjoyment in poking around garage sales or maybe stopping by a thrift store on my way to somewhere important, but now I’m mainlining it.

I still keep an episode of Hoarders on my DVR and watch it before going to make sure I don’t buy too much stuff. Actually, I’m not that interested in buying anything – it’s the going that’s important. You see, a true estate sale, where the owner of the house and contents is recently deceased, is a summary of a person’s entire life translated into the language of junk. You can walk through the house looking at the piles of dishes, mounds of mementos and knickknacks, and especially, stacks of books – and read the life of the owner. There, spread out on tables with little pieces of tape bearing prices is the history, values, and taste of humans beings – a life… decades of hopes and dreams, successes and failures, prizes and gifts, laid bare for hundreds of casual shoppers to see.

An estate sale is an officially sanctioned orgy of greed, voyeurism, and necrophilia, disguised as bargain hunting.

Today, you don’t have to go cruising around the hood looking for “Estate Sale” signs taped to telephone poles or stapled to stop signs. You don’t have to get out your reading glasses to squint at the classifieds. The Internet will bring you the cornucopia of an estate sale buffet right to your cathode ray tube. There are sites that list the upcoming sales, complete with glorious descriptions and often pages of photographs. There are instant messages to your smartphone, email list servers, and even Twitter accounts all poised to keep you informed about homes full of old crap for sale. So I can sit there with a website, a handful of emails, and Googlemaps and plot out a route to cruise the most interesting looking sales.

One of the unfortunate things that happened was that I hit a gusher on one of the first sales I attended. It’s sort of like getting a big win on a trip to Vegas – you keep thinking this will happen every time. You get a feeling about a person from seeing their possessions and this was a person with too much in common with me. Right off the bat, in the living room, I found a Sheaffer Snorkle Fountain Pen Desk pen on a table… twelve dollars. I scooped it up and carried it around until I bought it. Then, back in the home office room, I found bottles of ink, piles of blank journals, and a stack of calligraphy instruction books. These were priced a bit higher than I wanted to pay.

I told Candy, “This guy had a lot of ink and stuff, I’m surprised he doesn’t have more pens.” She answered, “Didn’t you see the case of pens up at the front.”

Sure enough, the mother lode. There were a handful of European school pens, some Pelikan Piston fillers, a Namiki/Pilot Vanishing Point, a Lamy 2000, and a big, beautiful Montblanc. I picked them up and looked them over – great pens. Unfortunately, the prices were a bit too rich for me so I put them all back.

The Woman running the sale said, “You know, tomorrow at noon, the prices will be cut in half.”

So that gave me a day to think about it. At 12:05, I showed up again and went straight for the case. All the pens were still there. The Montblanc was a great bargain – but that pen is for show and not the sort of thing I’m into. That left the Lamy 2000 and the Vanishing Point. It was a tough choice, I’ve always wanted a Vanishing Point, but I bought the Lamy.

The woman said, “Tomorrow, at four, for the last hour, the prices go to twenty five percent.”

So you know where I was at 4:05 the next day. The pens were all gone. That’s not a surprise – they were a bit overpriced at first, but at fifty percent they were, if not a steal, at least a good value – so they all sold. The place was getting empty – everyone was hauling out everything that wasn’t nailed down. I ventured back into the office room and discovered all the ink and paper were still there. So I scooped up four bottles of Waterman ink, six boxes of various cartridges, some blank writing journals, a metal tin of sketching pencils and accessories and a Lamy leather pen case for ten dollars.

Oh, I love the Lamy 2000. I’m working on my macro photography, I’ll see if I can put some pictures of it up here soon.

Finally, I’d like to talk about a house Candy and I visited this last weekend. It was in a nice area of North Dallas – an established upper-crust area of winding streets and big trees. It was built out in about 1974 – which is actually pretty old for Dallas standards. The house was amazing – not so much for its size, but for its unique floorplan and astonishing flair. The place had over a thousand square feet of “porches.” Every bedroom had its own little private outdoor garden – now all overgrown and rundown, but with echoes of elegance and luxury still clinging from the salad days. The kitchen was piled with setting after setting of beautiful china, crystal, and servingware – there must have been a long series of elegant dinner parties. The whole house was set up for entertaining – thick shag carpets or hand-cut stone tiles. The living room held a monstrous pipe organ – the largest and most elaborate I’ve ever seen outside a church.

The master bedroom was the size of a generous living room and painted a bright lavender. A huge headboard covered in gold leaf leaped from the bed, growing across the wall like the crown of a golden tree. Across the rest of the walls, gilt angels peered from behind gold clouds. The attached bathroom was done in deep dark purple with a gigantic tub rising on a carpeted column in the middle of the room. In every room were piles of statuary, mostly of nude women, and on the walls were hundreds of pieces of art – oddly mixed from obviously valuable originals to tacky 1970-s era hippie posters, framed and under glass.

The house was too big to show in one setting. It will be open again next weekend, with the furnishings on the outside and in the garage for sale. I’ll probably go back for another dose.

I seldom wish I was wealthy, but I’d love to drop a half-million or so for that house, then spend another couple hundred grand bringing it back to its former elegance – while updating it into the proper century.

Such dreams.

We did buy something from amid all that faded opulence… a two dollar microwave omelet pan for Lee to take back to school with him.

Lost in Thought and luxury living

Posted on by Bill Chance

The Museum Tower Condominiums tower over Tony Cragg's "Lost in Thought"

The Tony Cragg exhibit is about to end down at the Nasher. The Museum Tower outside continues to stretch its mirrored mass skyward, now plainly visible through Renzo Piano’s semitransparent roof. I still haven’t heard what they are going to do about the fact that the tower is intruding on the skyspace of Tending(Blue)… if anything.

The tower will have 122 condominiums priced from 1.2 to 4.1 million dollars a pop – plus a custom priced full floor residence. I’ll never set foot in the place, that’s for sure.

Take a look at their advertising. The Nasher Sculpture Center features in every scene of fine bred humans smiling their way through their artistic day. They are using the Sculpture Center to hawk their condominiums. At the same time their tower has already destroyed what was, to many, the crown jewel of the museum experience.

I have nothing against rich people, and I applaud their luxury. But if you are going to spend that much for an apartment… can’t you throw out a dime or so and figure something out… give us back our art installation? Why did they not think of this beforehand? Tending(Blue) was the coolest place in the city. It was the best place for the ordinary citizen to watch a sunset. You can have your multi-million dollar views, but let us have our own little piece of the sky.

Please?

What I learned this week, January 6, 2012

Posted on by Bill Chance

50 Unexplainable Black & White Photographs

These are all very strange, but I think #2 may be the most disturbing.

Developing Your Creative Practice: Tips from Brian Eno

  1. Freeform Capture
  2. Blank Slate
  3. Deliberate limitations
  4. Opposing Forces
  5. Creative Prompts

Fix Bad Habits: Insights from a 7-Year Obsession

  1. Set a conditioning period
  2. Make the habit every day
  3. Strategically replace your biggest lost needs.
  4. Begin with the start in mind.

http://youtu.be/YrzSmQSwfbg

Ganesha, Lord of Obstacles

Posted on by Bill Chance

Ganesha, Lord of Obstacles. From the Crow Collection of Asian Art

Ganesha, Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings
India, 10th Century
Stone
Clever Ganesha

Ganesha and his half brother Skanda were promised a boon by their parents, Shiva and Parvati. The prize would go to the one who returned first from circling the universe. Skanda, a keen warrior, geared up for his voyage and took off with great speed. Ganesha fortified hmself with a modaka, his favorite sweet, and respectfully circumambulated his parents. Long before Skanda returned, Ganesha was awarded the prize.

Adapted from the Siva Purana, trans. Paul Courtright

 

Between the Folds

Posted on by Bill Chance

The second floor of the Crow Collection of Asian Art is separated into two galleries. These are connected by a glassed-in passageway that stretches above the fountains and stairs below. For the last few years this passage was filled with hundreds of tiny origami cranes made by schoolchildren and hung in a folded paper cloud. I really liked this and was not happy to find that it was taken down. I have no idea if they are going to repeat the installation.

Origami Cranes at the Crow Collection of Asian Art

I wanted to ride my recumbent for some exercise but didn’t have much time. So I looked around the web for a video to watch… one that offered some interest but that wasn’t too long. Documentaries sort of meet this requirement so I found one on streaming Netflix called Between the Folds. It was a PBS film about Origami.

Other than the cranes in the Crow – and the time when Lee was about six and sent me out for a book on paper-folding – I never have thought about Origami, but the documentary was fascinating. There were artistic paper folders – from some that used thousands of folds to construct realistic sculptures to one guy that was trying to make the best work of art he could with only one fold. There were mathematicians interested in using the intersecting art and science of creased paper planes to illuminate secrets of the universe.

One of these guys, to be honest, grated on my nerves a little. He is Erik Demane and he is a second generation professor at MIT. He has that self-serving shit-eating grin that all those home-schooled, MIT genius grant winning, got my Ph.D. at twenty guys always have – or at least what they show on their PBS documentaries. He said something that really got under my skin. He talked about how he only did things that “Are Fun.” “If something isn’t fun it doesn’t interest me.”

That bugs me because I always feel that activities that are important are never “fun.” If in doubt between two courses of activities, the one that is “less fun” is always the correct one to choose. I’m not talking about relaxation or amusement or recreation – but neither was he. He was saying that he chose his life’s work based on what was “fun.” To me, that’s a waste of his rather tremendous potential.

But I can’t really be aggravated at the guy. After all he is a professor at MIT, amazing all the incoming freshman girls with his abilities to fold paper. I bet he plays the ukulele at cocktail parties. He has a good beard.

But most of all, I’m serious now, he posts one of his classes online. I have always wanted to take a math course at MIT and now I can. That looks like fun. I only wish I could find the time from all the other, important stuff I have to do.

Here's some origami I did. I'm working on a story and I decided to origami my draft. The design is called, "This is a bunch of crap."

http://youtu.be/tE4lqYzS2m0

Tamale Baby

Posted on by Bill Chance

There are certain things you have to eat on holidays. For Christmas, of course, you have to eat Pho.

And on New Year’s morning, you have to eat black eyed peas. Some folks say you only need to eat one pea if you want good luck the following year. Other’s say you have to eat three hundred and sixty-five peas to get the same benefit (I wonder about leap year). Still others say you have to eat those black eyed peas while listening to the Black Eyed Peas… but I don’t know about that.

Then there are tamales. Christmas Eve is a good time for tamales… but my opinion is they should be eaten as often as possible… or at least convenient.

Tamales come in many different shapes, and delivery methods. The first type of tamale I ever ate was given to me as a small child – the infamous Tamale in a Can. I learned they can be heated in boiling water, bobbing around in the bubbles before the top is even sliced off (preferably with a P-38).

So I grew up thinking that tamales were tasteless little greasy logs wrapped in some sort of wax paper from hell.

In High School, however, I learned to love, not only the tamale, but the Nacatamal. A Nacatamal is unique to Nicaragua. It is pork filled masa wrapped in a plantain leaf. What sets it apart is that a Nacatamal is big. It’s a giant string-wrapped green thing full of mysterious steamed goodness. Every street corner in Managua had someone with a big pot full of them for sale. It’s my favorite sleep-late breakfast in the world. Unfortunately, you really can’t get a Nacatamal outside of Nicaragua and that’s a bit of a drive.

So the closest I can get here in Texas is the standard plantain wrapped Central American tamal, usually of Salvadorian origin. Which is cool, because that means Gloria’s.

The original Gloria’s was a tiny place off of Davis Street in Oak Cliff. I first went there only a month or so after it opened – even then you could tell that it was a cut above all the other places sprouting up all over. It was in a pretty rough neighborhood. Once, I had a co-diner tell me, “Bill, go check out the paper towel dispenser in the men’s room.” The bathroom was like a small closet, with a toilet and a sink and barely enough room to stand. The silver colored metal paper towel dispenser was right over the toilet. I looked at it and it had a bullet dent in it. I know a bullet dent when I see one. I turned around and found a spot in the door that had recently been filled in with plastic wood and painted over.

I wanted to ask whether someone had been murdered in the bathroom or if it was only a bouncing stray from the neighborhood. But I couldn’t work up the nerve.

Over the decades, Gloria’s has multiplied, expanded, and changed (its atmosphere, not its food) until now it is a healthy metroplex chain of semi-upscale hip and stylish eateries. They recently closed the old hole-in-the-wall and opened a big new two-story establishment in Oak Cliff, in the Bishop Arts District. They bought an old brick fire station and converted it into a restaurant.

I might have eaten at Gloria’s a hundred times and have ordered the same thing every time. Gloria’s Super Special Sampler.

One tamale, one pupusa, yucca, plantain, black beans, black rice and sour cream.

Every time I unwrap that plantain and the steam rises from the masa within I feel young again.

Gloria's Super Special: Tamal, rice, beans, fried plantain, pupusa, yucca

Tamal unwrapped

And finally, that brings us to the classic tamale, the Mexican Style Corn Husk Tamale. These are what you want to eat on Christmas eve. There are plenty of charities that offer homemade tamales by the dozen – and plenty of wholesale places that will sell you a bunch. If you are unlucky enough to live outside of Texas, you can have them shipped.

If you are lucky, you know someone that gets together before the holidays and makes a few hundred of these wonderful things and steams them up for guests to come over and eat until they are stuffed. You have to have red and green sauce (the green is made from tomatillos) but then you are set.

Tamales steaming in their corn husks

Tamale Baby

BigDNYE

Posted on by Bill Chance

We had decided to go downtown to Victory Plaza for the Big D NYE new year’s eve extravaganza. This is Dallas’ small-time answer to Times Square – a free outdoor party for as many folks as can cram into a public space. I thought about not going – it’s a big hassle to get down there with all those folks and, especially, to get back home again, plus – I was feeling pretty nasty with a cold coming on.

But we decided to give it a shot anyway. I didn’t want to hassle with parking so we took the DART train down. Here’s a hint for taking the train to big events, if you live along the Red line, like we do, drive a bit east and catch the Blue line in Garland. A lot fewer people ride the Blue, and the trains won’t be as packed.

So we made it into downtown and the weather was nice and balmy, though there was a promise of a cold front with north winds to come. When I had walked around the nightime skyscrapers for Unsilent Night I was surprised at the amount of activity that was going on in Downtown… I was used to the sidewalks being rolled up when the businessmen went home to the suburbs. I remembered a pizza joint that promised to be open ’til 3AM and had that sort of Italian down-home greasy look to it that promised delicious pizza.

We walked around and never found the place. However, everything was hopping, and we ended up at another, more pedestrian pizza spot, The Original Italian Cafe and Bar at the corner of Field and Main. We sat outside on a sidewalk table and enjoyed a really good pizza, terrible service, and a parade of interesting folks walking by on new year’s eve. There were women in sequined evening wear and impossibly high heels stumbling along, homeless drifters stunned by the activity, and groups of football fanatics (holiday bowl games in town) wearing their teams colors and wandering around staring at tourist brochures. One group called out, “Does anyone know where Main Street is?,” while standing under a street sign that spelled out “Main and Field.”

I only intended to eat a little because the big celebration at Victory park promised a lineup of food trucks, but I gobbled down too much pizza anyway.

Which was fine because, once we hoofed it over to Victory Park, worked our way through the security checkpoints we were presented with the tasty lineup of food trucks, and none of them had a line less than a hundred yards long.

We arrived at about ten and Candy found her usual spot of grass at the corner of Houston Street and Olive.

She set up the folding chair we had brought and sat down to relax while I, as she said, “walked out into that mosh pit.” It’s true, sometimes I like to simply mix with humanity, and a street party on New Year’s Eve is good for that. There are a lot of people, incredible diversity, and everyone is in a good mood. I’m big and tall enough to not feel too intimidated by the crowd, as long as it isn’t pushing, moving, and swelling (like it sometimes does at Mardi Gras on Bourbon).

I managed to get back to check on Candy and she said Lee had come by with his friends. They were out in the crowd somewhere.

The festivities began to heat up and the crowd began to grow as we approached midnight. There were the usual lineup of bands. We didn’t have Lady Gaga, but we did have Sleeperstar. Lee knows that band from their early days – he said he’s gone out to eat with them a few times.

http://youtu.be/gDf6P9-6edg

The crowd kept growing, pumped up when the Dallas Stars hockey game ended and dumped another ten thousand or so out on the streets. I tried to get back to check on Candy, but the crowd was getting really dense and I couldn’t move more than five feet. Midnight arrived, we all yelled and the fireworks went off. It’s an impressive display, fired off from the roof of the American Airlines Center and the buildings around it. By that time the cold north wind was really blowing and the smoke and burning embers blinded me to some of the spectacular. At least I was able to see a few rockets blown astray by the wind scream into the expensive balconies of the W hotel next door – that alone was worth the price of admission (it was free).

I didn't want to carry my good camera in the crowd, so this is the best I could do. Fifty thousand of my best friends.

That always fascinates me standing there trapped in the rowdy crowd in the street. I can look up where the skyscraping towers of the W hotel and luxury highrise condominium towers rise up into the night sky until they almost seem to touch their blue-neon lined tops together, far overhead. I can see lonely rich folks standing at their floor-to ceiling windows, in suits and evening gowns, holding champagne flutes in their hands, staring out and down onto the massive dense crowd stretching out, filling the streets for blocks on end. What are they thinking? What is their opinion of the rabble in the streets below? Are they happy? Are they having fun?

I’m sure they are glad they don’t have to wait in line at the porta-potties.

There is nothing more boring than blurry, shakycam, youtube footage of fireworks – but here is some anyway.

This footage is from within Victory Plaza itself, I was outside in the streets, at the foot of the W Hotel – the tall blue neon-topped building in the footage.

This youtube video was taken only a few feet from where I was standing.

Once the fireworks died down I fought my way through the huddled masses to where Candy was and found she had been pushed back behind a line of trees by the growing crowd. I’m afraid that the current location may be about maxed out as far as the number of people that it can support. I would guess that about fifty thousand were down there – if they want it to grow larger they are going to have to figure out how to get some more open space involved.

Walking out, I looked up and noticed the ball on top of Reunion Tower was multi-colored. This was something new.

We didn’t want to get involved in the crowds fighting onto the trains at Victory Park itself, so we walked back into downtown and caught a train at Akard Station. It was packed up until Mockingbird, when the Red line folks got off, and as I thought, the Blue line was fine from then on.

It was fun and I was glad I went, but I think this might be the last year for me to go down for the big crowd event. The crowds are getting a bit large, and I’m not sure what else it will have to offer in the future. I think I might find a nice little party somewhere next year. Even though I don’t think I can afford one of those glass-lined suites overlooking Victory Plaza.