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.
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
There were four food trucks hanging out on Flora Street downtown for lunch when I stopped by as part of the Dallas Arts District Bike Crawl on Thursday. I have already tried three of the trucks (and found them good) but the fourth, Easy Slider, was new. When presented with a choice, I will choose the one I haven’t tried before.
I looked over their list of sliders and chose two – a Black n Blue – beef, blu cheese slaw, and bacon, and a Baby Bella – portobello mushroom with mozzarella, pesto, and a tomato. These came in a deal with a drink and chips for ten dollars – which came with a homemade caramel for dessert – and the candy was especially good.
The sliders were great. The beef slider actually had enough meat on it to taste like a hamburger. The grilled portobello mushroom was good too, with a round cheese and tomato stuck onto its skewer.
I usually like to take pictures of my food for these reviews. Unfortunately, I was so hungry and the sliders looked so good, I lost my head and ate the beef slider and a good bit of the portobello mushroom one before I remembered to take a photo. No problem, though, this blog has a review with better pictures than I take anyway.
Bill Chance 