Dallas Arts District, Dallas, Texas
Frisco, Texas
Dallas Arts District, Dallas, Texas
Frisco, Texas
Dancers, Real and Steel
Category Archives: Photography
Turtles all the Way Down
“A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever, ” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
― Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
Audubon Park, New Orleans
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Audubon Park, New Orleans
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Ice and Iron
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A hungry feeling came o’er me stealing
And the mice were squealing in my prison cell
And the old triangle went jingle jangle
All along the banks of the royal canal
To begin the morning the screw was bawling
“Get up, ya bowsie, and clean up your cell”
And the old triangle went jingle jangle
All along the banks of the royal canal
The screw was peeping, Humpy Gussy was sleeping
As I lay there dreaming of my girl, Sal
And the old triangle went jingle jangle
All along the banks of the royal canal
Up in the female prison there are seventy-five women
And ’tis among them I wish I did dwell
Then the old triangle could go jingle jangle
All along the banks of the royal canal
All along the banks of the royal canal
—-The Auld Triangle, trad, Dominic Behan
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Ice Nine
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“…suppose, young man, that one Marine had with him a tiny capsule containing a seed of ice-nine, a new way for the atoms of water to stack and lock, to freeze. If that Marine threw that seed into the nearest puddle…?”
“The puddle would freeze?” I guessed.
“And all the muck around the puddle?”
“It would freeze?”
“And all the puddles in the frozen muck?”
“They would freeze?”
“And the pools and the streams in the frozen muck?”
“They would freeze?”
“You bet they would !” He cried. “And the United States Marines would rise from the swamp and march on!”
—-Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
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Just like the Inuits of the North have thirty-four names for snow, so do the denizens of Arkansas have seventeen names for misery.
—-Xander Redwood
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More Dancers on the Pool
Atlas Metal Works
West Dallas, Dallas, Texas
“All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people’s, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid.”
― Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory
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FEMA Trailers
Thank You Uncle Sam
Thank You Uncle Sam, FEMA trailers, Opelousas, Louisiana
I was driving to New Orleans, moving down Interstate 49, south of Alexandria. My plan was to get on Interstate 10 in Lafayette and then go east over the Atchafalaya to Baton Rouge and on into New Orleans.
But I decided to take a look at my GPS and saw the I10 highway marked in a solid bright red line all the way from Lafayette to Baton Rouge.
If you have never driven that stretch – and you will remember it if you did – that’s an almost twenty mile long bridge high up in the air over the most desolate scary swamp, the Atchafalaya River Basin, that you will ever see. It is not the place you want to spend a few hours stuck in bumper to bumper traffic as the sun sets.
My GPS showed an alternate, older route – US190 splitting off east at Opelousas and going through a more northern section of swamp to Baton Rouge. The GPS showed that route as yellow and green. As I approached the turnoff a sign promised “Alternate Route.” That was all the encouragement I needed and I drove that way.
It was a good choice. Under normal conditions it would have been slower than the uninterrupted expanse of fast concrete belonging to the I10 bridge – but today it wasn’t jammed with stopped vehicles. I only had to wait through the shorter delays caused by stoplights, fish camps, sugarcane factories, bait shops, fireworks stands, fried fish restaurants, local casinos… and the other flotsam and jetsam of the Louisiana backlands.
One thing that did catch my eye was a huge field, just east of Opalousas filled with thousands of mouldering empty portable housing units. FEMA trailers.
There were once hundreds of thousands of these left over after Katrina. Cheaply made, even by government standards, spewing formaldehyde vapors, leaking and harboring black mold – they were a controversial response to the disaster – sometimes welcomed, often maligned.
But here they still are, eight years later. Come on down and buy one, they are for sale, pennies on the dollar. What a bargain.
FEMA Trailers
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Train in the Rain
Most near-future fictions are boring. It’s always dark and always raining, and people are so unhappy.
—-Haruki Murakami
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Texas Star
Texas Star, Fair Park, Dallas, Texas
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“A Boat
O beautiful
was the werewolf
in his evil forest.
We took him
to the carnival
and he started
crying
when he saw
the Ferris wheel.
Electric
green and red tears
flowed down
his furry cheeks.
He looked
like a boat
out on the dark
water.”
― Richard Brautigan
A pond in Fair Park.
Performance
From Aurora Dallas 2013
Performance art is about joy, about making something that’s so full of kind of a wild joy that you really can’t put into words.
—-Laurie Anderson
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Bill Chance