“Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. . . . ”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
Klyde Warren Park,
Dallas, Texas
“There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day. Night life is when you get up with a hangover in the morning. Night life is when everybody says what the hell and you do not remember who paid the bill. Night life goes round and round and you look at the wall to make it stop. Night life comes out of a bottle and goes into a jar. If you think how much are the drinks it is not night life.”
― Ernest Hemingway, 88 Poems
If you read these pages, you know that I have an interest in murals – specifically those works of wall art around the city where I live. Especially if they are reachable by bicycle.
A while back I came across an article listing the 10 Best Murals in Dallas. I had seen all of these and photographed most of them.
But I had never shot the tacky mural on the side of the San Luis Nightclub… though I had seen it. It looked like this. Amazingly sleazy – really good stuff.
Now I’m too late. It’s been painted over.
But they have put up a replacement. It’s not as sordid as its predecessor – but it’s bad enough.
Plus, instead of reclining on a pool table – she’s riding a giant beer bottle. That has to count for something.
Design District
Dallas, Texas
San Luis Night Club
Design District
Dallas, Texas
“Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
(click to enlarge)
Entrance to the Texas Ale Project Brewery,
Design District, Dallas, Texas
“Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.”
― Martin Amis
Dragon Park
Dallas, Texas
“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
― Anaïs Nin
(click to enlarge)
Klyde Warren Park
Dallas, Texas
“Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.”
― Stephen King, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption: A Story from Different Seasons
Charles Umlauf
Spirit of Flight
Love Field
Dallas, Texas
“Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can’t fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
Klyde Warren Park
Dallas, Texas
“The ambiguous role of the car crash needs no elaboration—apart from our own deaths, the car crash is probably the most dramatic event in our lives, and in many cases the two will coincide. Aside from the fact that we generally own or are at the controls of the crashing vehicle, the car crash differs from other disasters in that it involves the most powerfully advertised commercial product of this century, an iconic entity that combines the elements of speed, power, dream and freedom within a highly stylized format that defuses any fears we may have of the inherent dangers of these violent and unstable machines.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition
Design District
Dallas, Texas
Design District
Dallas, Texas
“My nightly craft is winged in white, a dragon of night dark sea.
Swift born, dream bound and rudderless, her captain and crew are me.
We’ve sailed a hundred sleeping tides where no seaman’s ever been
And only my white-winged craft and I know the wonders we have seen.”
― Anne McCaffrey, Dragonsong
Dragon Park, Dallas, Texas
“Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides… I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life’s voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Bill Chance 