Style changes, style stays the same, style comes full circle.
Car show, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
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Red
Category Archives: Photography
Parasol
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
There is the umbrella. The umbrella lives under the passenger bucket seat and you pull it out at dawn in the spitting rain and roaring cold wind. Your only hope is that it opens and stays more or less together while you trudge your way across the vast tarmac parking lot at your work. If it does its job, you can arrive breathless and plop down in your soulless cubicle with a few square inches of almost dry clothing.
A parasol, on the other hand, is a completely different thing. Darts of flimsy tissue paper and delicate bamboo ribs – it was not made to stand the power of a howling gale. The gentle rays of the sun are all it can deal with – and barely that. It’s a translucent bumbershoot, a portable shade canopy, standing against the day. Its name tells you that it’s for (para) the sun (sol).
But it’s not only for protection. It’s for twirling.
What better attention grabber than a pretty parasol with hand drawn artistic designs carefully chosen to compliment your tattoos? Ink and ink.
I think of the sweaty hut in some faraway land with workers carefully, quickly, hopelessly putting the things together – cutting the paper, stapling the ribs, or brushing out long-practiced patterns across the delicate field – all the same yet each one different.
And here it comes, spinning down the middle of the street.
And all eyes turn.
Chris Johnson – Patio Sessions
Enjoyed Chris Johnson – of the very popular Fort Worth band, Telegraph Canyon – doing a solo set at the Patio Sessions in the Arts District of Downtown Dallas. One of my favorites, Madison King, opened, but I have plenty of pictures of her… here, here, and here.
You were wearing all black
Face that warned of going back
Turning pages oh you grew
Testifying nothing but the truth
Walking in your righteousness
Shake em’ like you shake your fist
I loved you for getting more
Left you when the night was warm
—-Telegraph Canyon, Shake Your Fist
Chris Johnson, of Telegraph Canyon, at the Patio Sessions, Dallas, Texas
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The winter has shown us
All of the faults
That are hidden well beneath
Hurried shoulders and heavy feet
As sure as we stand
By the body you’ve left
The fastest of hands
And the shortest of breath
You don’t have to hide
Don’t ever have to hide
—-Telegraph Canyon, Welcome to the Night
Chris Johnson, Arts District, Dallas, Texas
when you’re lost and you try to find
someone with a heart beat be a friend of mine
into the woods I’ll stay with you
I found why I came but my plans fell through
—– Telegraph Canyon, Into the Woods
Shiny
Shiny happy people laughing
Meet me in the crowd, people, people
Throw your love around, love me, love me
Take it into town, happy, happy
Put it in the ground where the flowers grow
Gold and silver shine
—-REM, “Shiny Happy People“
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
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Steel rusts. It’s mostly iron anyway – and iron always desires oxygen, leaving the crumbling brown rust behind. Steel always rusts. When you see something this shiny… and it isn’t plated – look for the polishing marks. Somebody really went after it with a buffer – grinding away the oxidation, the spent, the ruined – leaving the fresh metal to gleam in the sun.
It won’t last. Nothing ever does.
“I like it when she’s shiny, like a star, like a guest on the Donnie and Marie Show.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors
Pinstriping
“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.”
—- W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil
Pinstriper at work, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
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To watch someone do something like this is like watching someone doing magic – real magic. I can’t imagine having the eye, the dexterity, most of all the ability to shut everything out of mind other than the brush, the fender, and the paint. Notice how he has the two colors of paint he is using in daubs on his index finger – he picks up what he needs and brushes it in place. It is completely freehand – no masking tape, no guide lines, not even a design done ahead of time.
Yet the result is perfect. It is smooth, faultless, and symmetrical – even though it is applied to a complex curve on a rusty Volkswagen Beetle fender. The sun was beating down – it was about 104 degrees. It was so hot, I could barely think straight.
“I hate to paint portraits! I hope never to paint another portrait in my life…. Portraiture may be all right for a man in his you th, but after forty I believe that manual dexterity deserts one, and, besides, the colour-sense is less acute. Youth can better stand the exactions of a personal kind that are inseparable from portraiture. I have had enough of it”
—- John Singer Sargent
Kids on the Pool
One of my favorite things to do in the city, the Patio Sessions, has started up again. These are small free concerts held on Thursday evenings, in front of the Winspear Opera House in the Arts District. I’ve been to a few of these and written about them before.
The performer sets up at the corner of a large rectangular reflecting pool. The water flows slowly over a field of perfectly level and even black stone – at a depth of maybe a quarter of an inch. The spectators sit on grassy areas, paved sections, or concrete steps around this pool to watch and listen. High overhead, giant aluminum louvers provide some shade from the sun before it falls below. There’s a pop-up bar, food trucks, and a new coffee pavilion. With the surrounding buildings glowing in the setting sun (there are five Pritzker Prize winning architects represented here) it is an amazingly picturesque spot.
The only downside is that expanse of wafer-thin water is a magnet for little kids. Now, I like kids as much as the next guy, but they are noisy and distracting. The pack of rugrats cavorting on the reflecting pool diverts attention from the music. Plus I am bothered by their parents that wander around with that smug, “look at my spawn” half-smile of pride. This would all be cool – except that there is a concert going on.
But, I will admit, they are pretty cute.
Kids on the reflecting pool at the Patio Sessions, Dallas, Texas
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Woodall Rogers
I took this photograph as a message to a friend. If they see it they won’t know it is to them and they won’t understand what it says. And neither do I.
Woodall Rogers Freeway
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Looking At Her Phone in the Dark
“I fear the day technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.”
—- Albert Einstein
There is something special about standing around in the middle of the night and talking with a bunch of your best friends. To stand around with them in front of a beautiful art museum is extra special.
So special, in fact, that it is something that you would have to text to a bunch of people… people that aren’t there.
“This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. – Murray (WN 285)”
—- Don DeLillo, White Noise Critical: Text and Criticism
A group of friends in front of the Dallas Museum of Art, night, long exposure
“This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can’t escape. Life was easier then. You just didn’t pick up the phone.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Beasts
I used to work a little closer to where I lived. Sometimes, I would go home for lunch… but not very often. One day, while I was home, the phone rang. This was before caller ID – back in the days when people would actually answer their phones. It was, however, after the invention and installation of the answering machine….
…do you remember when these had little tapes in them? Once, I left for a long business trip and when I returned I had a large collection of very interesting phone messages left from a number of my friends and even a couple of cool ones from strangers. I liked these so much I replaced the tape with a fresh one and carried the old one around with me for a year or so. Sometimes I’d listen to it for fun. I know that sounds stupid – but I wish I had that tape now, thirty years later. I’d love to hear it again.
…at any rate, back to the story. I was home, the phone rang, I picked it up. It was a friend. She said, “Oh, I didn’t think anyone would be home. I called to leave a message.”
“I’m home making a sandwich. But it’s ok,” I said. “I’ll hang up and you can call back and leave a message.”
So I did. And she did.
When the phone rang my hand quivered over the receiver. I was torn on whether I should pick it up (as a joke, you know) or to let it ring and let her leave her message. I decided the joke was too stupid (strange, I know – I don’t usually pass up an opportunity for a stupid joke). As the machine picked up, I walked out the door, left for work, and let her leave her message in private.
I never listened to it.
We’re Walking Here
I’m walkin’
Yes indeed, I’m talkin’
By you and me, I’m hopin’
That you’ll come back to me, yeah, yeahI’m lonely
Yes I can be, I’m waitin’
For your company, I’m hopin’
That you’ll come back to meWhat you gonna do when the well runs dry?
You gonna run away and hide
I’m gonna run right by your side
For you pretty baby I’ll even die—-Fats Domino – I’m Walking Lyrics
The anime convention is in town.
Near Main Street Garden Park, Dallas, Texas
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Dedicated urbanites “know” beyond shadow of doubt – because doubt never raises its disturbing head – that civilization is the real world: you only “escape” to wilderness. When you’re out and away and immersed, you “know” the obverse: the wilderness world is real, the human world a superimposed facade… The controversy is, of course, spurious. Neither view can stand alone. Both worlds are real. But the wilderness world is certainly older and will almost certainly last longer. Besides, the second view seems far healthier for a human to embrace.
—-Colin Fletcher, River, 1997Frankly, I fail to see how going for a six-month, thousand-mile walk through deserts and mountains can be judged less real than spending six months working eight hours a day, five days a week, in order to earn enough money to be able to come back to a comfortable home in the evening and sit in front of a TV screen and watch the two-dimensional image of some guy talking about a book he has written on a six-month, thousand-mile walk through deserts and mountains.
—- Colin Fletcher, The Complete Walker III, 1989
An Object of Beauty
“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes. working jobs we hate, so we can buy shit we don’t need.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
I have never been a car guy. I am interested in three things in an automobile. One, that it start. Two, that it get to where I want it to go without falling apart. And Three, since I live in Texas, well, air conditioning is important.
Other than that…
On the other hand, this is, without a doubt, a thing of great beauty.
Invasion Car Show
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
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Quick! Hang a right…Cut over to G Street. I just saw a vision! I saw a goddess. Come on, you’ve got to catch up to her… This was the most perfect, dazzling creature I’ve ever seen… She spoke to me. She spoke to me right through the window. I think she said, ‘I love you.’ That means nothing to you people? You have no romance, no soul? She – someone wants me. Someone roaming the streets wants me! Will you turn the corner?
—-Curt Henderson, American Graffiti
This is the American dream forged in steel and covered in gloss. The curves, the mass, and the speed. Conceived in that back seat would be the only way to properly start out a real life. It’s painted the color of Angel’s blood and polished until the objects that appear in its coat are more real than life.
And that’s what it looks like standing still. Think of the throaty roar of the engine – the smell of the exhaust – the blare of the radio (I still don’t think digital music sounds right in a car – nothing since the quadraphonic eight track has).
I was looking at this car and a cop walked up, stood beside me, and said, “That is a beautiful car.”
“It sure is,” I replied.
I guess I should have made a note of its make and year, maybe the person or garage that restored it… but I didn’t. I usually do that sort of thing, but I guess I wanted that car to exist simply as it is, as a vision of metal, rubber, glass, and paint – not as an object with a history that was created from nothing by the mind and sweat of men.
Drivers Wanted
–VolkswagenThe power of Dreams
–HondaEverything We Do is Driven By You
–FordNever Follow
–AudiPorsche, There is No Substitute
–PorscheEngineered to move the human spirit
–Mercedes-BenzBorn to perform
–JaguarBaseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet
–ChevroletSheer driving pleasure.
–BMWDon’t dream it. Drive it.
–JaguarThe Penalty of Leadership
–CadillacZoom, Zoom, Zoom
–MazdaThe Relentless Pursuit of Perfection
–Lexus
Bill Chance