“There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through.”
― Anaïs Nin, House of Incest
Monolithic Dome Institute, Italy, Texas
Fissure In My Vision
Yearly Archives: 2017
Gremlin
But the most important rule, the rule you can never forget – no matter how much he cries, or how much he begs, never, never feed him after midnight.
—-Gremlins
Rodeo Goat, Dallas, Texas
I am of the age that I remember, vaguely, a time when an American Motors Company Gremlin (undoubtedly one of the worst cars of all time) was pretty cool. Those of you lucky enough to not know what a Gremlin is – it is a vehicle, one of the first American Subcompacts (competing against the Pinto and the Vega… yeah) made by a terrible car company, AMC. They took a bad car, the AMC Hornet, and “improved” it by chopping the back end off, leaving an almost-vertical hatchback. CBS rates it as the sixth ugliest car ever made.
But I remember the 1970’s well and I remember that I thought the Gremlin was really cool. What the hell? A lot of kids drove Gremlins when I was in college, even some of my friend’s moms drove them. I never met a male over 20 that owned one, though there must have been some, somewhere. They sold for about eighteen hundred dollars each at the time (a cherry Gremlin today might cost you almost 30 grand).
My favorite memory was a summer from college, a hot, steamy Saturday night, visiting a friend in a small Kansas town. There were four of us, packed into a Gremlin, driving up and down the rough brick-encrusted main street, up and down, listening to a quadraphonic eight track playing music at a ridiculous volume in that tiny tin space. This was the pinnacle of coolness in 1974.
It has all been downhill since then.
Faces of Deep Ellum – Holding Hands
“Miss Morstan and I stood together, and her hand was in mine. A wondrous subtle thing is love, for here were we two, who had never seen each other until that day, between whom no word or even look of affection had ever passed, and yet now in an hour of trouble our hands instinctively sought for each other. I have marveled at it since, but at the time it seemed the most natural thing that I would go out to her so, and, as she has often told me, there was in her also the instinct to turn to me for comfort and protection. So we stood hand in hand like two children, and there was peace in our hearts for all the dark things that surrounded us.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I
Faces of Deep Ellum – The Poet
“What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music…. And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’ – that is, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
Faces of Deep Ellum – Woman at a Poetry Reading
“To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.”
—–Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
What I learned this week, June 11, 2017
Big D Live Lively: Episode 3 – Pedal Power
The Iron Law of Bureaucracy
As stated by Robert Michels, Jonathan Schwartz, Jerry Pournelle and many others in several related forms, The Iron Law of Institutions states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
Stated another way:
The Iron Law of Institutions is: the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution “fail” while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to “succeed” if that requires them to lose power within the institution.
This is true for all human institutions, from elementary schools up to the United States of America. If history shows anything, it’s that this cannot be changed. What can be done, sometimes, is to force the people running institutions to align their own interests with those of the institution itself and its members.
Meal prep hacks to make your life easier
Like everybody, I read way too many listicles on the internet. This one was surprisingly useful – even if most of it’s recommendations are common sense. Maybe that’s why it was so userful.
When the weather is so awful hot, I like to cook pizza on a stone on our grill outside. Here’s the crust on a pizza peel and the stone, warming up.
The pizza and stone, grilling away.
Yeah, I think I’ll have to make one of these bad boys this weekend.
8 of the World’s Best Culinary Cycling Trips
Bicycle ‘Second Line
New Orleans, Louisiana
How Freud’s Only Visit to America Made Him Hate the U.S. for the Rest of His Life
Perhaps worst of all was his insomnia: American women were giving him erotic dreams and affecting his ability to get a good night’s sleep. While in Worcester, he confided in Carl Jung, who had also been invited to speak, that he hadn’t “been able to sleep since [he] came to America” and that he “continue[d] to dream of prostitutes.” When Jung pointed out a rather obvious solution to this problem, Freud indignantly reminded him that he was married.
12 Possible Reasons We Haven’t Found Aliens
In 1950, a learned lunchtime conversation set the stage for decades of astronomical exploration. Physicist Enrico Fermi submitted to his colleagues around the table a couple contentions, summarized as 1) The galaxy is very old and very large, with hundreds of billions of stars and likely even more habitable planets. 2) That means there should be more than enough time for advanced civilizations to develop and flourish across the galaxy.
So where the heck are they?
Scenes From Deep Ellum Lit Hop 2017
Billed as a “well-read bar crawl,” Deep Ellum Lit Hop 2017 encouraged people to wander through bookstores, art galleries, and bars in one of the city’s most vibrant areas. Literary nonprofit WordSpace sponsored the June 2 event.
Faces of Deep Ellum – Woman at a Beat Poetry Reading
“It is a great feeling to know
that from a window
I can go to books to cans of beer to past loves.
And from these gather enough dream
to sneak out a back door.”
—Gregory Corso, The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other Poems
Faces of Deep Ellum – man at a poetry reading
“Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Faces of Deep Ellum – The Stinkeye
“Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.”
― Aristotle
Faces of Deep Ellum – The Sculpture Is Alive
“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring–it was peace.”
― Milan Kundera
We were in the Kettle Art Gallery in Deep Ellum for a poetry reading by The White Rock Zine Machine. The gallery walls were plastered with photographs (including a brace by Jason Lee) and each photograph had a poem, written by a real poet, associated with it.
Off in the corner, my eye caught an odd sculpture, a mass of brownish fabric sitting on top of a white podium. As I looked closer I saw a little black eye blink. It wasn’t a sculpture at all, it was a blanket-stuffed basket with a little dog in it.
He seemed to be enjoying the poetry.
Kettle Art Gallery, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Bill Chance 