Well, I just got into town about an hour ago
Took a look around, see which way the wind blow
Where the little girls in their Hollywood bungalowsAre you a lucky little lady in The City of Light
Or just another lost angel…City of Night
—-LA Woman, The Doors
Time Exposure, Night, Downtown Dallas, Ross and Pearl
Band Photo
At the Lakewood Brewing Company one year anniversary party at Goodfriend.
Mountains Majesty
New Orleans, French Quarter, Halloween
.
One pillar in the Dallas Art Park was painted by a Dallas Police Officer. It’s a good story.
“I know the law-abiding people don’t hate us, but just dealing with the criminal element, we get a lot of hate,” she said. “If I could plant one little seed in someone’s head that the police are the good guys, I would consider myself to be successful in this deal.”
—from the Dallas Morning News
From the Pillar:
This mural was painted by DPD officer Cat Lafitte 8642 as a reminder to citizens and officers alike that we are a community.
Supplies provided by the Dallas Fraternal Order of Police, the Dallas Derby Devils, and all the awesome folks who donated their hard earned money
Pillar in the Dallas Art Park painted by Cat Laffite
The side of the pillar – Justice Shall Be Served
The pillar contains some words of wisdom –
What I’ve Learned in 32 Years:
Thank a cop, a nurse, a teacher, a soldier, a firefighter – for working so hard for the benefit of everyone and never getting paid enough.
What I’ve Learned in 32 Years
Unfortunately, things did not work out well. The internet remembers everything.
A Dallas police officer who is under investigation after getting into a fight with a Plano hospital worker bragged about the incident on her Facebook page.
“I threw my boot at him, Jerry Springer style, and nailed him in the face,” Senior Cpl. Cat Lafitte wrote this week, several days after police were called to the hospital Feb. 9. “It broke his glasses and cut his face and bruised it up real good!”
—-from The Dallas Morning News
Cat Lafitte, Police Officer Fired for Brawling and Bragging About It, Refused Help, Cops Say
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
― Anaïs Nin
Andrew Rogers, Australia
Growing
1999
Frisco, Texas
You’ve got to work hard! There’s no substitute for hard work, it doesn’t happen by itself. I think about art seven days a week, 24 hours a day. I work really hard. That’s the only way you get the work done!
—-Andrew Rogers
Andrew Rogers, Growing, Frisco, Texas
“Dear God,” she prayed, “let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry…have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere – be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Andrew Rogers, Growing, Frisco, Texas
“Most people don’t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.”
― Maya Angelou
“When a child first catches adults out — when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just — his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden
“He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Technium
The Four Noble Truths
1. Life means suffering.
2. The origin of suffering is attachment.
3. The cessation of suffering is attainable.
4. The path to the cessation of suffering.
There is a path to the end of suffering – a gradual path of self-improvement. It is the middle way between the two extremes of excessive self-indulgence (hedonism) and excessive self-mortification (asceticism). Craving, ignorance, delusions, and its effects will disappear gradually, as progress is made on the path.
Gecko in a Watering Can
Graffiti in the Dallas Art Park, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
The Travelling Man Sculptures have become an instant icon in Deep Ellum.
Painting at the entrance to the Urban Gardens, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Up with the sun, gone with the wind
She always said I was lazy
Leavin’ my home, leavin’ my friends
Runnin’ when things get too crazy
Out to the road, out ‘neath the stars
Feelin’ the breeze, passin’ the cars
Women have come, women have gone
Everyone tryin’ to cage me
Oh, some were so sweet, I barely got free
Others they only enrage me
Sometimes at night, I see their faces
I feel the traces they’ve left on my soul
Those are the memories that make me a wealthy soul
Sometimes at night, I see their faces
I feel the traces they’ve left on my soul
But those are the memories that make me a wealthy soul
I tell you those are the memories that make me a wealthy soul
Travelin’ man, yea
—-Bob Segar, Travelin’ Man
Click on any of the photographs for larger versions on Flickr.
I’ll always remember when I went down there and took these. In particular I remember walking backward looking through the viewfinder, tilted up at the tall sculpture looming overhead. Do you see that little green step by the sculpture’s feet?
I didn’t.
You don’t forget those kind of falls.
“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sakes. Now, I mean, I’m talking about singing in the shower, I’m talking about dancing to the radio, I’m talking about writing a poem to a friend–a lousy poem.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
“The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing.”
― Hermann Hesse
“The funny thing about writing is that whether you’re doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That’s actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.”
― John Green
“Life is the dancer and you are the floor.”
― Armando Vitalis, No Reason to Get Out of Bed – A Murderous Mystery
“We danced in the handkerchief-big space between the speak-easy tables, in which stood the plates of half-eaten spaghetti or chicken bones and the bottles of Dago red. For about five minutes the dancing had some value in itself, then it became very much like acting out some complicated and portentous business in a dream which seems to have a meaning but whose meaning you can’t figure out. Then the music was over, and stopping dancing was like waking up from the dream, being glad to wake up and escape and yet distressed because now you won’t ever know what it had been all about.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
“there is no new experience in life. something may happen to you that you think has never happened before, that you think is brand new, but you are mistaken. you have only to see or smell or hear or feel a certain something and you will discover that this experience you thought was new has happened before.”
― Horace McCoy, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
Well there she sits buddy just a-gleaming in the sun
There to greet a working man when his day is done
I’m gonna pack my pa and I’m gonna pack my aunt
I’m gonna take them down to the Cadillac Ranch
Eldorado fins, whitewalls and skirts
Rides just like a little bit of heaven here on earth
Well buddy when I die throw my body in the back
And drive me to the junkyard in my Cadillac
—Bruce Springsteen, Cadillac Ranch
Cadillac Ranch, is west of Amarillo, Texas. I’ve stopped there a few times, mostly on the way back home from Santa Fe. It is an odd place – a modern American Icon of the New West.
Dallas Art Park, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Cadillac Ranch, West of Amarillo, Texas
A crude little sketch I did in watercolor pencil on a postcard at the Cadillac Ranch west of Amarillo.
Old Guys Rule
Cadillac Ranch
Dallas, Texas
Wink
Have a drink.
It’s Texas… you never know who’s packin’
Bill Chance