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Monthly Archives: May 2012
Estate Sale Mola
Candy and I have developed a habit of going to Estate Sales in the Metroplex. We have signed up for a couple of email lists and on Wednesday or so get a list of all the sponsored sales that are going on. I go through the lists and pick out any sales that look interesting – then work out a driving route. I have to fight my hoarder tendencies and rarely buy anything, but simply driving around and looking is an entertainment and education in itself.
After a while, most of these sales look the same, but we are getting pretty good at picking out the interesting and unique ones from the descriptions and photographs that are sent out. Last weekend was very busy so I didn’t think I’d go to any sales, but I had a few minutes in the middle of the week and cranked through the photographs on the website.
On one house, in the background, down one hallway, there were some pictures on the wall. One of them looked like a mola.
On the north side of the Isthmus of Panama are a string of islands, The San Blas Archipelago (now called the Comarca Kuna Yala). That is where the majority of the Kuna people live. They are an indigenous tribe that after a long struggle are given some autonomy by the government and still try to cling to their traditional ways. The Kuna are most well known for the colorful cloth artworks they produce as part of their clothing.
These are called molas, and are gorgeous primitive geometric based designs, painstakingly constructed from layers of cloth in reverse applique – where the designs are cut out of the overlaying layers of cloth and sewed back, revealing the colors underneath.
I love these things. We have a few of them that I have inherited back from the time I was a kid and we lived in Panama.
I saw the mola on the wall in the photograph, but it looked silly and poorly made, and I was very busy. Candy called me at work, “Did you see what was on the wall on that one picture.”
“Yeah, it was a mola, wasn’t it.”
“That is the estate sale in Richardson.”
“Really? I was tired and in a hurry… I didn’t make the connection.”
I pulled up the website and Googlemaps and realized that the estate sale with the mola was right on the way home from work. It was a simple deal to stop by and take a look. I walked in and pushed my way into the hall.
I thought the mola was beautiful. The web photo was at an angle and the colors were wrong – making it look bad. In person it was really nice. It was well framed (we have had some framed – it’s not cheap to have that kind of work done) – I really wanted it.
The only problem is that it was priced at thirty five dollars. That’s a fair price… but it’s more than I wanted to pay (or had). So I walked out.
Candy and I talked… most of these Estate Sales drop the price on the last day, so she decided to go out on Saturday when the sale opened and see if the mola was still there. Saturday morning, I went my way and she went to the sale. I called her on my cell and she said it was there and everything was half off. So we bought the mola for seventeen dollars and fifty cents.
Also, she was looking in a bedroom and found another tiny mola… only two inches square, for a couple dollars.
I try not to get too tied up in material possessions, but I really like the mola and am glad to have it hanging on our wall.
The mola we bought at the estate sale.
Brave Combo at the Cottonwood Arts Festival
I’ve been a fan of Brave Combo for thirty years now. I wrote about them before… go read it here.
Back? Good. Candy and I went to the Cottonwood Arts Festival to walk around in the heat, look at the art, and see the band. It’s a bit different seeing them outside in a park rather than in an Art Museum… there was something odd then in doing the Chicken Dance in the middle of about a billion dollars worth of paintings (the Cottonwood has some interesting stuff… but not on that scale).
I was a bit surprised not to see the usual crowd of Brave Combo groupies that follow them around – this is spring festival season and maybe they are all getting a bit worn out. At any rate, there were still plenty of grinning dancers.
A good time was had by all.
Brave Combo has changed a lot of its members over the years… but like a flowing river – they are always different but always the same.
Dancing to the Chicken Dance.
Brave Combo plays a terrific funk version of the Hokey Pokey. Like every else though, I worry…. What if that’s really what it’s all about?
They did a great version of the Clarinet Polka. Unfortunately, I can’t hear this song without thinking about a Certain Unicorn.
Elotes – Corn in a Cup
Who wants to live forever.
One of the many delicious varieties of street food found in these here parts is Elotes… Mexican corn on the cob. You can find it roasted and on a stick, or you can find it cut off the cob and stuck in a cup.
A while back I went down to the Dallas Farmer’s Market to shoot some photographs:
here
here
here
here
here
and here
While I was waiting I tried a cup of corn from the Elotes vendor outside of the vegetable shed. He takes an ear of corn out of a warmer and cuts the kernels off fresh in front of you. Those go in a cup and are topped with everything unhealthy and delicious you can think of – margarine, mayonnaise, parmesan cheese, sour cream, hot sauce, lime (well that’s not unhealthy)… it is pretty darn good.
I tried it again the other day and took some photographs.
The elote stand at the Farmer’s Market
The corn is cut fresh in front of you.
It goes in a foam cup.
Your favorite goodies go in.
Corn in a cup
Now I want to go around and try some other Elotes Stands in Dallas, see what’s the best.
City of Ate’s 100 Favorite Dishes: #93 Elotes at Fuel City
Best Elotes Cart – 2011 Fiesta Market
Elotes Cart Converts My Skepticism Into Full-Blown Corn Enthusiasm
The Most Interesting Taco in the World
A couple of weeks ago I saw on facebook that Dos Equis was sponsoring a food promotion called Feast of the Brave. Through Cinco de Mayo, Dos Equis was teaming in Dallas with the Rock And Roll Tacos food truck in a competition to determine the American city with the bravest palate. Dallas would be competing with Miami, Houston, Austin, and Los Angeles for which city can earn the most “Bravery Points” by eating various unusual tacos. The delicacies promised were everything from wild hare, to shark, to wild hog, to goat, to frog legs, to snails (with corn fungus), to hog ear, to intestines, to alligator, to cricket….
An finally, each city would boast a “mystery taco” – worth 100 points each.
Do you think this might be something that would appeal to me?
Oh, Hell Yeah!
Unfortunately I was very, very busy and wasn’t able to hook up with the food truck until the very end. On Friday I took some flex time and left work early, hopping on the DART train and rushing to Main Street Park where the truck was set up. I ran up only to discover they were closing down… out of meat. The comely Dos Equis Taco Girls were very apologetic and showed me where they would be on Saturday, Cinco de Mayo – their last day.
We had another busy day planned, but I was not going to miss out so we drove down to the Albertson’s on McKinney and Lemmon at eleven, right when they opened. I did not realize that the tacos were free and you could get as many as you wanted.
There was no way I was going to mess around with Rabbit (only 10 points) or Wild Hog (Hey, that’s pork… what’s so brave about that? And only 20 points) – so I ordered two Shark (30 points each) and two Mystery Tacos (the Mystery Tacos were 100 points each). That totaled two hundred sixty bravery points – I feel I did my civic duty.
The Shark tacos were very good. The fish was rare and was served in a crispy shell with some tropical salsa. The mystery tacos were OK – nothing special – soft flour shells with lettuce and tomato.
My guess is that the mystery tacos were iguana. They wouldn’t tell us what they were – they said the identity would go out over twitter at ten that evening.
The Dallas “Feast of the Brave” Menu
One of the Dos Equis Taco Hotesses
Two Shark Tacos on the left, and two Mystery (Iguana) tacos on the right.
Feast of the Brave Taco Truck
He once went on vacation to The Virgin Islands ..Now they are just called The Islands.
I was right about Dallas’ mystery taco – it was iguana. Chicago’s was grasshopper, Miami was oxtail, Austin was straight jalepeno, and Los Angeles was 1,000 year old egg. I’m afraid that Dallas didn’t do too well, finishing fourth behind Miami, Chicago and Austin (we wanted to beat Austin). Bringing up the rear was Houston (at least we beat them) and last, Los Angeles.
I don’t always eat tacos, but when I do, I prefer iguana.
Stay thirsty, my friends.
Sunday Snippets
A very busy day today, out and about… I did manage to sit in the Espumoso Caffe in the Bishop Arts District in Oak Cliff and sketch out a short story in my notebook. I meant to type it up when I was home in the evening and let you see it here, but I’ve been hammering away and it’s nowhere near done. I have to drive to Oklahoma City tomorrow to pick up Nick, so I better get some sleep.
All I have for this week, therefore, are three little snips of text, signifying very little. I try to keep on file, well, several hundred little scenes or sketches… mostly culled from the wreckage of failed stories – in the hope that I might be able to use them someday. I pull them out in times of low ambition and massage them, water and fertilize them… see if something roots and grows from the barren cuttings of words.
For example….
The little boy came up out of the water like a sprite from a fountain. He shook the droplets off and watched the tiny rainbows as they flew from his body. He looked down at the dark footprints his wet soles left on the hot concrete – at the space between the toes and curved pads and as he gained speed there was only the toes and the ball, then finally nothing as his skin dried.
A sudden scream of air – a whistle – blown – designed to startle – stopped the boy in his tracks right at the foot of the ladder.
“No Running!” came the simple loud command from high.
The boy shook as he looked up at the voice from the chair – but the speaker was obscured by the bright haloing sun.
He walked carefully the rest of the day, little steps, glancing up at the chair.
That night he ate his dinner and cleaned his plate. Then he copied his lessons from the book onto his blue-lined three-holed paper using his number two lead pencil. He took his evening bath, and – remembering the instructions from his health textbook – combed his hair one hundred times. Finally, he crawled into bed, pulled his blanket up to his neck and quietly, almost silently, sobbed himself to sleep.
He sat on a thin high chair at a narrow bar of blond wood facing the broad windows sipping his drink and watching people drive up outside. Two scruffy guys wearing leather jackets sat smoking and talking – making wide, violent gestures and laughing – at a little table on the sidewalk. He was looking out over their heads. One guy had long stringy dirty hair, balding a little in front. The other had given up and shaved this pate.
Across the busy intersection was a bank building of white marble alternating in vertical strips with blue reflective glass. It extended up past the top of the windows – he wasn’t sure how tall it eventually was. He glanced up and caught the reflection of an aircraft, an orange and red Southwest passenger jet, crossing the face of the building. It must have been on landing approach over his head; lined up with the bank building’s mirrored windows. The image would jump from one strip to the next, sometimes curved and distorted, sometimes magnified, sometimes shrunk to a pinpoint, depending on the flaw in that particular glass panel. The plane would dance, bend, and jump, flitting distorted and plastic.
He noticed the two guys staring at the dancing plane too. As the reflection disappeared off the left side of the bank they laughed and waved their arms bent in the air in imitation of the flexible jet. They turned and shared a silent smile with him through the window – for a split second.
Until he thought better of it and turned back down to his book.
(click to enlarge)
Paul woke up naked and crusted with what must have been vomit. His brain felt like it had swelled to twice its usual size but was still stuck in the same little head. He thought the pressure might separate his skull along some jagged line, exploding his brain in sweet relief. Every nerve in his body was firing quickly and randomly and the light pouring in from the end of the bridge felt toxic. Paul tried to protect himself by digging deeper under the pile of filthy blankets that was left to him. They weren’t thick enough and Paul was forced to try and figure out what to do. His elbows and knees were scraped bloody and his tongue felt torn on the underside, like it had been half pulled out.
He scrabbled around for his clothes, keys, and wallet and found nothing except a filthy pair of green shorts and a denim jacket that said Big Bambu on the back and a fresh bloodstain coursing across the front. He put those on, wrapped himself in the least-filthy rag he could find for warmth, slid down the concrete slope, and padded barefoot along the trail under the high Interstate overpass back to his car.
He wasn’t really surprised when he found the Chrysler missing. He dug around the camp trying to find anything of value but it had been stripped. The dirty shreds of rags, old shopping carts, and trash were still there as was a dark spot where the night’s campfire had burned itself out cold. But no food, drink, shoes, or anything else of any value remained.
Paul sat and cried for over an hour, until the sun rose and heated the mass of concrete overhead and it felt like a rumbling broiler. He could not figure out how to get home. He considered hitchhiking but couldn’t imagine anyone stopping for a horrible apparition like himself. He couldn’t find any change – not enough for a pay phone, and the thought of trying to panhandle… he couldn’t bear the thought of someone seeing him like that.
Then Paul realized that the creek at the bottom of the interchange was the same drainage system that coursed through his apartment complex. He thought he could follow the way, make the correct turns. He limped down into the stale slow-flowing water, the mud feeling good on his feet, but the filthy liquid stinging his wounded knees and elbows. He noted the direction the water was flowing, turned into it and began trudging upstream.
The Great Dunes
A blogger, surroundedbyimbeciles that has stopped by here has a picture of himself at the Great Sand Dunes National Park as his avatar. He wrote a blog entry about it, check it out.
I knew I had two scanned photographs of Nick at the same spot, one taken in 1996 and one taken in 2001.
I dug around and found the photos and the blog entry I wrote in 2001 to go along with them.
Here’s the eleven year old entry from my archives…. July 3, 2001.
I’ve been to the Great Sand Dunes before, twice. Once, six years ago or so, a year before I started my journal the whole family stopped on the way from Santa Fe to Buena Vista. In 1997 I came here alone, on a solo trip around Colorado. I spent a couple days and camped here, and wrote about it.
Medano creek, this late in the summer, is barely a trickle, and right after we arrived we crossed it and immediately started climbing the dunes. Even when we were walking the wide expanse of level sand before the dunes actually start I had my doubts about whether I could make the seven hundred foot climb up the piles of sand. It’s tough walking and at over eight thousand feet, the altitude doesn’t help much when you’re old and fat and out of shape like me. As soon as the steeper slopes started and Nick and Lee coursed ahead, shooting up the dunes like active ten-year-olds I knew there was no way I could make it all the way. My lungs were burning and my legs felt like Jello.
I decided that I could try to get as far as I could, though. I’ve done this before so I remembered how painful and discouraging uphill walking on sand can be – so I thought I’d be patient, walk a while, rest a while, and see what happened. The day was getting hot, too.
Nick and Lee pushed on ahead and pretty quickly they disappeared. Once you get into the dune field closer ones hide the highest dunes. One good thing about dune hiking is that you can’t really get lost and it’s a lot easier coming back down than going up – so it’s hard to get stranded in the sand.
Each dune I’d climb I divide into three sections in my mind. I’d climb the first third, then pause to try and catch my breath. The second third would be tougher, I’d have to stare at my feet and force them to take little baby steps until I reached my interim goal, exhausted, so I would sit down and rest until I felt my pulse return to normal. The third third would be easy after that long rest, and I’d settle in when I reached the top so I could enjoy the view.
By patiently munching through each set of dunes, higher and higher, I soon found myself walking the last slope to the highest dune, and not feeling too bad. I was worried that Nick and Lee would be impatient and head back down before I reached them, but they were there, digging around in the sand.
There was a gaggle of teenagers with sophisticated hiking gear – daypacks with integrated hydration systems and carbon fiber hiking poles- already there. They referred to Nick or Lee, who had been up there with them for a while before I arrived, as “the kids.” One of the teenagers was trying to impress his girl by talking about Lawrence of Arabia.
“No,” Nicholas said, “This isn’t like that, this is like Dune.”
We posed for a photo, then Nick headed back down to check on Candy.
I had a tough time getting Lee to go. There is another high dune, maybe five miles away, and Lee pitched a fit when I told him we couldn’t walk to it.
The teenagers left, then some guy from Switzerland walked up and we talked a bit while Lee dug holes in the sand.
Lee digging in the high dune
“A beeg sander-boxer,” the guy said, in his thick accent, “Een Switzerland, children haf only small boxen wit sander.” He was on a driving trip from Santa Barbara and I think the distances in the American West threw him a little. “Too far for little time,” he said. I said I was from Dallas and he asked if that was over a hundred miles from there. When I told him it was seven hundred miles he looked perplexed.
Meanwhile, Lee had walked over the next dune and was stomping out a giant, “LEE WAS HERE,” in the sand. The dunes are dry and hot on the surface, but surprisingly, are wet only an inch or two down. If you drag your feet it makes a dark line of wet sand, only to disappear a few seconds later.
A cloud blew down from the mountain and it began to rain. “Rain in zee desert!” the guy from Switzerland exclaimed. I convinced Lee to head down then, I was afraid of lightning up on the exposed dune.
“That’s more sand than I’ll ever have to play in,” said Lee.
“Don’t worry, you can play in more at the bottom.”
“Not as much as up here.”
The walk down was a lot easier than the one up. The hot day was suddenly cool from the rain, the dry yellow sand at first mottled, then dark from the falling water. By the time we reached Medano creek it was over and the sun came out again.
Nick and Lee in the parking lot at the edge of the Monument. 2001
Nick and Lee standing in the parking lot of a gas station right outside the Great Sand Dunes National Monument. The dunefield is a lot bigger than it looks, the tallest dune is seven hundred feet high or so. The mountains behind are the Sangre de Cristo range, several are over fourteen thousand feet high.
Lee busied himself in the creek, making a dam. While he worked I chatted with a Park Ranger – he had brought down a special sand wheelchair for a park guest. It had huge red balloon tires so it could be pushed across the soft sand. The Ranger said that the sand was twice as hard to walk in or to climb as firm ground.
Lee getting help with his dam in the creek.
Meanwhile, Lee’s dam was stretching in a ragged arc across a portion of the creek. Medano creek is odd because of the load of sand it carries (the creek is what helps corral the dunes in place, it carries escaping windblown sand back around to the upwind side of the dunes) the stream is constantly moving around in little pulses and rushes as the sediment raises the bed of the creek itself. It was a good lesson in hydrology for Lee, with several lessons:
1: Don’t make a dam out of sand.
2: Little leaks soon become very big leaks.
3: The more you patch the little leaks the higher the dam gets and the faster the little ones get bigger.
4:Eventually, your dam is toast.
Nick in 2001
I posed Nick in this picture at that spot because I wanted to compare it to this picture.
Nick in 1996
This was taken in early June 1996. There is a lot more water in the creek due to spring melting snow. This picture was taken a couple weeks before I started this journal.
This is Nick, Lee, and I, taken at the top of the highest dune at The Great Sand Dunes National Monument. The thing is a lot taller than it looks in this picture – we had to climb seven hundred feet of sand to get there.
The three of us on the highest dune in 2001.
One good thing about keeping a blog (notice I still called it a “journal” – blogs were pretty new in 2001, though I’d been writing online every day in a journal for five years by then) is the preservation of memories. Until I reread this from my archives I had forgotten so many details – the Swiss Tourist that was flabbergasted at the sheer size of the American West, the teenagers with their high-end camping gear, the fact that at ten years old Nick knew what Dune was. In 2001 the Great Sand Dunes was still a National Monument – it became a full fledged National Park in 2004.
This is more than ten years old. Nick and Lee are both well into college now. I would love to go back there with them, pose Nick in the creek again as an adult. But there is so much to do now, so much to do and so little time to get it done in. Everything is so difficult.
What I learned this week, May 4, 2012
I have been writing about the ultra-expensive condominium Museum Tower cooking the Nasher sculpture center the same way a bully with a magnifying glass burns the ants on the sidewalk:
here
here
and here
The New York Times now has an article on the issue,
Dallas Museum Simmers in a Neighbor’s Glare
There are a couple of interesting quotes. First, from the Los Angeles based architect that designed this monstrocity:
Scott Johnson, the Los Angeles architect who designed Museum Tower, said he was willing to consider remedies but that the Nasher also had to be open-minded. “My responsibility is to fully vet solutions vis-à-vis Museum Tower — that’s my building,” he said. “But I can’t say sitting here now that the Nasher may not need to do something on their end.”
So, you see his concern for the neighbor (The Museum) that actually made his project (The Museum Tower) possible. I would imagine it would have been a good idea to “fully vet” his design before the thing was built, don’t you?
And also, a fact I did not know, that helps to emphasize the whole political disgustedness of the whole thing:
Complicating matters is that the $200 million Museum Tower is owned by the Dallas Police & Fire Pension System, on whose board sit four members of the City Council.
Ok, that makes it even more clear how the developers knew they could get away with this without the city doing a thing to stop them. Remember, none of this went into action until Raymond Nasher died – then the powers that be moved in to devour the carcass of his philanthropic vision.
The final word is from the livid Renzo Piano… who just might know a little about this sort of thing.
“By doing this, they kill what they use to sell it,” Mr. Piano said.
I think that, right now, the tower should be requred to change its name (Maybe to “Death Star Condominium Tower”) and to remove all reference to the Nasher Museum from its sales pitch (where it, of course, figures very prominantly). Actually, they should be required to warn their potential residents of the skin cancer danger poised by the neighbor next door due to the reflected sunlight.
The Museum Tower Condominiums tower over Tony Cragg’s “Lost in Thought”
From Bloomberg: Dallas Museum Seeks to Shade Pension-Backed Tower’s Sunny Glare
Nine Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School
Wooden Canoe
I am now to the point where everything brings back memories… not even a single memory but a chain of them… separated by great space and greater time – yet linked by a single thing, the inside of my head.
Something as simple as a wooden canoe lying on a grassy bank:
I found a small dugout wooden canoe upside down in a tropical lake, abandoned and rotting in a bank of watery weeds along the shore. I came up under it with a scuba tank on my back, the bubbles catching in its concave interior and I, looking at the long oblong shape against the sun, wondered what it was. There was nobody in miles so I took it for my own.
The wood was soft and I could scrape out the rotten part with a hunting knife. The bow was broken but I fixed it with a piece of plywood and some marine glue. I found some half empty used cans of bilious old paint in a garage closet so I painted it black and gray. I cut a plastic Clorox bottle into a bailer and I was good to go.
I learned to paddle there on that humid lake. Learned to fish from a canoe, learned to navigate in the darkness, saw creatures I never thought existed in fresh water – they had followed ships in through the Gatun locks and most were slowly dying from the lack of salt.
Then I learned to maneuver a rented dented aluminum canoe through the spring flash flowing Ozark rivers on college weekends – the rocky adrenaline thrill of white water and the relaxing lazy languid sluggishness of deep dark green. I learned that a foot of water can be dangerous when it is moving fast under a fallen tree. Also, be careful when you stop in the middle of a ten mile stretch of isolated river for a quick refreshing swim on a gravel bank… don’t leave your car keys behind.
I paddled into the netherworld of Spanish Moss and Bald Cyprus in East Texas Caddo lake. A place out of time where you can find an abandoned church in a place where God has forgotten. I learned to always check the flow of the water before setting out. You are never as strong as you think you are – sometimes it is hard to get back.
Paddling on a lake with two little kids in the boat I learned that you not only have to check the flow of the water, but the strength of the wind. A damned up prairie lake can throw air fast enough to grab the bow and turn it the way you don’t want to go.
There is the sound of small waves banging against aluminum. The feeling of an ill-fitting life jacket while you are trying to work the paddle. The smell of old fish bait. The heat of the sun on the back of your neck. The sight of the little vortexes that spin off your paddle, the little drops of water when you swing it to the other side. There is the ache in your shoulders at the end of a long day and the anticipation when rounding a curve in the river.
Most of all the rhythm of boat, paddle, and water when you get moving across a lake. When it’s all working together and you feel sorry for the folks roaring by spewing oil out of their big outboards (though you do look jealously at that nice little sailboat).
Clarinet in the Park
I went for a bit of a walk in the very picturesque Prairie Creek Park here in Richardson. The place was crawling with photographers – most of them pros, lugging huge lenses, and carefully posing children, couples, or recent graduates along the rocks of the waterfall or in the fading patches of bluebonnets and other wildflowers.
Off to the side, a man was sitting on a metal park bench playing an ancient metal clarinet. He had a bag of sheet music at his feet and he’d select a piece, clip it into his music holder, and then play. Nobody was paying any attention to him.
Except for me.
Bill Chance 