Monthly Archives: January 2014

Travelers

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Don’t be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

Travelers
Deborah Masters
Sculpture for New Orleans
Audubon Park
New Orleans, Louisiana

Travelers Deborah Masters Audubon Park, New Orleans (click to enlarge)

Travelers
Deborah Masters
Audubon Park, New Orleans
(click to enlarge)

If we find poetry in the service station and motel, if we are drawn to the airport or train carriage, it is perhaps because, in spite of their architectural compromises and discomforts, in spite of their garish colours and harsh lighting, we implicitly feel that these isolated places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world.”
― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

Travelers Deborah Masters Audubon Park, New Orleans (click to enlarge)

Travelers
Deborah Masters
Audubon Park, New Orleans
(click to enlarge)

“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Zigzag Moderne Art Deco

Posted on by Bill Chance

Last weekend I went on a bike ride in Fort Worth with some friends (will get a trip report written, I promise). We loaded up our bikes, rode the DART train to downtown Dallas and then took the TRE train to Forth Worth.

Our rail destination was the T&P Station south of downtown Fort Worth. This is a recently restored historic building built in 1931 as a beautiful example of Zigzag Moderne Art Deco (what a cool name!) architecture.

I love Art Deco – and there are some great examples in the Metroplex. The best known are the buildings, murals, and sculptures (here, here, here, and here) of Fair Park in Dallas

But the old ticket lobby of the T&P is a beautiful concentrated example of Art Deco excess and beauty. It’s a big room lost in time, available for wedding rentals, and dripping with history. You can almost feel the millions of travelers moving through on their way to the trains. Today, there were only some guys with their bicycles looking around… but at least it is still there, waiting for the next chapter.

Abstract Art Deco design in the T&P Waiting Room ceiling, modified in Adobe Illustrator. (click to enlarge)

Abstract Art Deco design in the T&P Waiting Room ceiling, modified in Adobe Illustrator.
(click to enlarge)

T&P Waiting Room, Fort Worth, Texas (click to enlarge)

T&P Waiting Room, Fort Worth, Texas
(click to enlarge)

Art Deco ventilation screen, T&P Waiting Room, Fort Worth, Texas

Art Deco ventilation screen, T&P Waiting Room, Fort Worth, Texas

T&P Waiting Room, Fort Worth, Texas (click to enlarge)

T&P Waiting Room, Fort Worth, Texas
(click to enlarge)

Bead Tree

Posted on by Bill Chance

“To encapsulate the notion of Mardi Gras as nothing more than a big drunk is to take the simple and stupid way out, and I, for one, am getting tired of staying stuck on simple and stupid.

Mardi Gras is not a parade. Mardi Gras is not girls flashing on French Quarter balconies. Mardi Gras is not an alcoholic binge.

Mardi Gras is bars and restaurants changing out all the CD’s in their jukeboxes to Professor Longhair and the Neville Brothers, and it is annual front-porch crawfish boils hours before the parades so your stomach and attitude reach a state of grace, and it is returning to the same street corner, year after year, and standing next to the same people, year after year–people whose names you may or may not even know but you’ve watched their kids grow up in this public tableau and when they’re not there, you wonder: Where are those guys this year?

It is dressing your dog in a stupid costume and cheering when the marching bands go crazy and clapping and saluting the military bands when they crisply snap to.

Now that part, more than ever.

It’s mad piano professors converging on our city from all over the world and banging the 88’s until dawn and laughing at the hairy-shouldered men in dresses too tight and stalking the Indians under Claiborne overpass and thrilling the years you find them and lamenting the years you don’t and promising yourself you will next year.

It’s wearing frightful color combination in public and rolling your eyes at the guy in your office who–like clockwork, year after year–denies that he got the baby in the king cake and now someone else has to pony up the ten bucks for the next one.

Mardi Gras is the love of life. It is the harmonic convergence of our food, our music, our creativity, our eccentricity, our neighborhoods, and our joy of living. All at once.”
― Chris Rose, 1 Dead in Attic

Bead Tree, Gibson Quad, Tulane, New Orleans, Louisiana

Bead Tree, Gibson Quad, Tulane, New Orleans, Louisiana

“I dust a bit…in addition, I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.
~Ignatius J. Reilly”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Bead Tree, Gibson Quad, Tulane, New Orleans, Louisiana

Bead Tree, Gibson Quad, Tulane, New Orleans, Louisiana

“Leaving New Orleans also frightened me considerably. Outside of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Traffic

Posted on by Bill Chance

I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car. It sums up everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising and consumer goods with the technological landscape. The sense of violence and desire, power and energy; the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape.
We spend a substantial part of our lives in the motor car, and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being…, the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. I think the 20th century reaches its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there: the speed and violence of our age; the strange love affair with the machine, with its own death.
—-J.G. Ballard, Narration for Crash! (1971), a short film by Harley Cokeliss

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

“In a sense life in the high-rise had begun to resemble the world outside – there were the same ruthlessness and agression concealed within a set of polite conventions.”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

What I learned this week, January 17, 2014

Posted on by Bill Chance

A Janitor Secretly Worked On This For 7 Years. No One Knew Til Now… And It’s Baffling Everyone.

6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person

14 Photography Project Ideas


Sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov predicted the world of 2014 in 1964: here’s what he got wrong

The Serious Eats Guide to Ramen Styles

Delta

Posted on by Bill Chance

“The industries were there because of the river. They had come for its navigational convenience and its fresh water. They would not, and could not, linger beside a tidal creek. For nature to take its course was simply unthinkable. The Sixth World War would do less damage to southern Louisiana. Nature, in this place, had become an enemy of the state.”
—- John McPhee, The Control of Nature, Atchafalaya

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

The structure was obviously undermined, but how much so, and where? What was solid, what was not? What was directly below the gates and the roadway? With a diamond drill, in a central position, they bored the first of many holes in the structure. When they had penetrated to basal levels, they lowered a television camera into the hole. They saw fish.
—-John McPhee, The Control of Nature

Baritone

Posted on by Bill Chance

Used to tell Ma sometimes
When I see them riding blinds
Gonna make me a home out in the wind
In the wind, Lord in the wind
Make me a home out in the wind

I don’t like it in the wind
Wanna go back home again
But I can’t go home thisaway
Thisaway, Lord Lord Lord
And I can’t go home thisaway

I was young when I left home
And I been out rambling ‘round
And I never wrote a letter to my home
To my home, Lord Lord Lord
And I never wrote a letter to my home
—-Bob Dylan, I Was Young When I Left Home

My little bike ride through the Tulane campus was bittersweet. It was fun but I was filled with a melancholy nostalgia. Lee has graduated – this might be my last visit… or at least it will be the last visit with any connection or significance. I remembered visiting five years ago for parent’s weekend, walking the sidewalks on the guided tour, imagining what it would be like to study at such a beautiful place in such an amazing city.

This last visit – I almost felt more connection than with my own campus… that was long ago and I was just a kid, anyway. Nobody knows the terrible lucidity of nostalgia at a young age – it only comes with the onslaught of incipient dotage.

Baritone
Mia Westerlund Roosen
Tulane Campus
New Orleans, Louisiana

Baritone Mia Westerlund Roosen Tulane Campus, New Orleans (click to enlarge)

Baritone
Mia Westerlund Roosen
Tulane Campus, New Orleans
(click to enlarge)

“The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

Deere

Posted on by Bill Chance
(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

Well, I’m working on the new railroad
With mud up to my knees
I’m digging for big John Henry
And he’s so hard to please
And I’ve been all around this world

Hang me oh hang me and I’ll be dead and gone
It’s not the hanging that I mind it’s laying in the grave so long
And I’ve been all around this world

Well, the new railroad is ready, boys
And the cars are on the track
And if our women leave us
Money’ll bring ’em back
And I’ve been all around this world

—- Working on the New Railroad (trad)