Deep Ellum
Dallas, Texas
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Sometimes I Do As I Am Told
Post No Bills
Deep Ellum
Dallas, Texas
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure
The Wyly Theater in the Dallas Arts District
THE STORY: The world’s greatest detective has seemingly reached the end of his remarkable career when a case presents itself that is too tempting to ignore: The King of Bohemia is about to be blackmailed by a notorious photograph, and the woman at the heart of this crime is the famous opera singer, Irene Adler. With his trusted companion, Doctor Watson, at his side, Sherlock Holmes pursues first the case, and then the affections of Miss Adler—and in doing so, marches right into the lair of his longtime adversary, that malevolent genius of crime: Professor Moriarty. In this spirited, fast-moving and thoroughly theatrical adaptation, Steven Dietz presents Holmes at the height of his powers—surrounded by all the elements that fans of his exploits have come to expect: danger, intrigue, wit, humor and surprise. “The game is afoot, Watson—and it is a dangerous one!”
As I have said before, I remember watching the enormous Borg Cube of the Wyly Theater going up in the shiny new Dallas Arts District and thinking, “What a cool place! Such a shame I’ll never be able to afford to go to a play there.”
The Wyly Theater.
I was wrong. By judicious actions and careful attention to the Internet – I have been able to find a series of bargains and go to a play down at the Wyly on a fairly regular basis. My most reliable source for affordable seats is the Dallas Theater Center’s Pay What You Can performances. As each play opens, the first performance is open to anyone and the price is what you think you can afford. I guess one way to look at it is that it’s a bargain admission to what really is a final dress rehearsal – but I have really enjoyed all the performances I’ve seen.
This time around it was Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure. I logged in exactly at ten – when the tickets went on sale – and I’m glad I did. The show sold out in eight minutes. I managed to snag tickets for myself and a couple friends from my writing group.
The play was a lot of fun. It was nice to see a straight play – nothing special (although the moving sets were ingenious and effective) except a handful of actors standing out there delivering the classic Arthur Conan Doyle lines.
I won’t give away any secrets – although this isn’t so much a whodunit as much as it is a chess game between Holmes and his greatest enemy, Moriarty. The play is faithful, with a little bit of updating (a modern love story, a very strong female character, and an emphasis on Holmes’ drug use) to make it engaging to a 21st century audience, but it keeps the quaint style and innocent entertainment.
Opening night, there were a few hiccups. The opening was delayed by a few minutes with sound board problems, but the crowd entertained itself with the start of a wave. But all was forgiven and a lot of smiles came out at the end.
Now, the next play at the Wyly is Le Mis. I’ll have to have fast fingers, I’m sure it’ll sell out even faster.
What I learned this week, April 25, 2014
Bike rider on the DART train.
Yield to Wheels: DART reconfigures rail cars to better accommodate bikes, wheelchairs and more
This is a welcome upgrade. It is surprising how many bicycles you see on the DART trains now.
What’s frustrating is the number of able bodied people without bikes, luggage, or grocery carts, that you find sitting in the fold-down seats in the handicap or bicycle spots on the trains in the present format. They sit there, usually engrossed in their phones, blithley ignoring the growing crowd of people in wheelchairs, holding bags, or doing the “DART Dance” with their bicycle (The DART Dance is moving back and forth, standing in the open area of the train, as each stop opens on the left or right). The only way to fix that is to remove the seats.
Right now, the way things are going – I can relate to this person….
This Guy Is Trying to Collect Every Single Copy of the Movie ‘Speed’ on VHS
Yeah, it’s like a radical dedication to uselessness.
Totally. I don’t give a shit whether what I do is practical or not; I just don’t want to perpetuate society’s shitty capitalism forever. If you see everything needs a use or an instrumental value as like part of a capitalistic worldview, then the World Speed Project is anti-that.
We Didn’t Believe In ‘Artisanal’ Toast, Until We Made Our Own
What the world needs now – a three dollar and fifty cent piece of toast.
Dallas is a canvas for change
Travelling Man – sculpture east of Downtown Dallas
How Highways Hurt Dallas
On a recent business trip to Dallas, I was shocked by how much concrete and how few people I saw. My first impression was that Dallas is a city stuck in an outmoded way of thinking about transportation. It was like my plane was a time machine that had taken me back to 1970, when everyone still thought that the way to fix congested highways was to build more and wider highways. Coming into town, I saw more concrete going down, from the DFW Connector Highway Construction Project north of the airport to the massive LBJ Express Project. I learned that about $15 billion is currently being spent on highways in North Texas, more than in any other region of the country. All the construction seemed bizarre because the area already seemed to have an unhealthy abundance of highways. This is not bragging material for the city; this should be embarrassing. Given what has been learned about highways in cities over the last 40 years, priorities could have been better placed elsewhere.
The 50 Best TV Shows Streaming on Netflix (2014)
You already know what #1 is, of course. Still, there are 49 more to discover – it could ruin your life if you wanted to let it.
Kristen Wiig, Alice Munro And Negative Space In Fiction
Director Liza Johnson on the Challenges of Adapting Alice Munro For “Hateship Loveship”
Hateship Loveship Departs From Alice Munro’s Iconic Story — But Still Does Her Proud
The 23 Best National Park Adventures – #10 Carlsbad Caverns
I have actually done this one. If you visit Carlsbad – be sure and sign up for the Slaughter Canyon Tour. You get to hike a very long half mile through some steep and intimidating scenery. A ranger then unlocks an iron gate and takes you on a tour of an undeveloped cave. There are no lights (a spare flashlight is required), no paths (you use ropes to get over a tough patch), no sound effects… only an enormous ancient beautiful cave.
They have been giving tours of the Slaughter Canyon Cave for decades, but you will feel like you are the first person to walk in there.
Cross-Post: A Reaction to DMN Editorial on 345
I-345 near downtown Dallas
How to Build Another Uptown
This battle is not just about I-345. It is about a strategy. It is about duplicating as many times as we can the one success urban Dallas has—Uptown. It is about a city devoted more to residents than to commuters. Tearing down the aged hulk of I-345 is a first, small step. But it could be enough to tell the market that Dallas is finally about to assert itself as a real, honest-to-God city.
SORCERER, The Movie That Got Blown Up By STAR WARS
SORCERER is one of my favorites; one of the most tense and exciting films ever made. It is a shame that it never hit the big time – a victim of (as the article says) Star Wars fever, and an unfortunate mistake in titling (trying to tie in to The Exocist). See it if you get a chance.
Of course it is a remake of a classic French film, THE WAGES OF FEAR. It’s the rare example of the remake being as good as the original. I don’t know which version is better, they are very similar and completely different. THE WAGES OF FEAR is available streaming on Hulu plus.
Gathers No Moss
Cobra Brewing Company
Lewisville, Texas
Joanie on a Pony
New Orleans, Louisiana
New Orleans, Louisiana
More Murals
Artists at work
More entries in the Tunnelvisions mural contest
Deep Ellum Arts Festival
Dallas, Texas
Deep Ellum Arts Festival, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
Deep Ellum Arts Festival, Dallas, Texas
Tintype
This last weekend, at the Cobra Brewing Company event, there was a complex apparatus set up in one corner of the brewery. Scott M Hilton of Camera~Absurda was there taking tintype photographs on-site of the contestants in the beard contest.
The process was interesting to everyone – but to me; professional chemist, wannabee photog, enthusiast of the obsolescent, devotee of the unusual, and aficionado of the useless – it was irresistible. What an amazing collection of toxic chemicals, explosive reagents, antiquated equipment, and bright lights.
We were there early enough to be able to talk about the process before the crowd became too thick (though I’m guessing here about the exact chemicals used). They start out with a small aluminum plate and coat it with a collodion (basically gun cotton dissolved in ether – not too safe) solution and silver nitrate. That is exposed with a bright light in a camera.
They were using a powerful electronic strobe. I asked him why he didn’t go whole-hog authentic and use a tray full of flash powder. The reply was, “There are plenty of dangerous chemicals involved already, no need to add more hazard.”
Some magic is done inside a light-proof booth and then the print is developed in an acid solution. That’s the most amazing part, watching the image appear from a frosty cloud. In the age when this process was current, it would have appeared to be magic. Today, it’s still pretty damn amazing. The image is fixed (probably in a cyanide solution of some kind) coated and done.
The image is a prime positive on a metal plate – the image is therefore reversed. The tonality of the print is amazing. There is something about the contrast, tint, the detail, and the lack of grain that gives it an aura of primordial beauty. The portraits have that ancient dignity that you always see in historical photographs. I always assumed that people have changed – but it seems that is is only their snapshots.
There is no dignity in digital.
Here are the photos they took at the Cobra Brewing Event.
A guy standing next to me happened to work at Texas Instruments (on the same campus where I work for… somebody else) and we discussed the similarity of what the photographers were doing and modern semiconductor manufacturing. We speculated what we could do with metal plates and some sophisticated photoetch solutions.
One interesting thing was that the photographers were having the beard contestants sign a model release so that they could use their images in their projects. Instead of ink on paper they were signing an electronic release by swiping across an iPhone screen. If someone wanted to buy a print – they used a Square to swipe a credit card. Here you were using the most modern of wireless portable e-commerce machinery to facilitate the work of taking tintype photographs with technology out-of-date a hundred years ago.
The contrast was palpable.
The camera is focused with the ground glass
A big electronic flash is used for the exposure.
Adjusting everything takes a lot of work.
Some sort of photographic chemical wizardry – kept from mortal eyes.
The plate goes into the acid bath.
Everything goes cloudy.
And the final image emerges. Notice that it is reversed.
Cobra Brewing Company
Rhythm and Beards playing at the Cobra Brewing Company in Lewisville, Texas.
I often say (boast?) that with a bicycle and a transit pass I can get anywhere in the Metroplex. I think I have proven that (at least to myself) it is possible… but I never said it was always easy.
Jeffrey Sailer, a friend of mine that runs Bike Friendly Carrollton invited me to the Saturday event at the Cobra Brewing Company, a relatively new brewery in Lewisville. It looked like a great time – craft beer, three bands, beard contests, food (the party was also the first anniversary of Juniors Lone Star Barbecue Sauce) and lots more.
We were to meet at the Dowtown Carrollton DART station at 10:15, in order to get to the brewery by noon. Since I can always count on the Gods of Transit to be against me (every time I arrive at a train station, the train is pulling out, every traffic light I hit on my bike takes forever to change) I had to leave home two hours before that.
I packed up my Xootr Swift – carrying some extra weight (bottles of iced water) to verify that my homemade panniers are up to snuff – and rode down to the Arapaho train station. I bought the slightly more expensive regional day pass – until now I didn’t realize that it covered the A Train to Denton as well as the TRE to Fort Worth. I caught the Red Line downtown and then waited for the Green Line which took me out to Carrollton.
We met there and road a short trip to the Trinity Mills Station where we caught the A Train. One of these days I need to do this ride and take the train all the way to Denton (a fun city to visit and ride around in) but today we only rode it one stop to the Hebron Station then went the rest of the way on our bikes.
It seem silly to buy a train ticket for only one stop – but this is all new construction, fast stroads, and empty space filled with wetlands and there is no way to ride through there. Someday there will be bike trails, lanes, or more friendly roads, but now it is in the hands of the car-exlusive mindset of developers and suburban governments and they can’t see beyond the dark-tinted windshields of their Tahoes.
We climbed off the train at the Hebron station (the Old Town station is closer, but we wanted to get a couple of extra miles in) and rode up to the Brewery. Our timing was good, it was opening right when we arrived.
The event was a blast – one of the best Brewery Events I’ve been to. Good beer – loved their Best Mistake Stout (but I am a stout fan, after all) and their Junior’s Snake Bite JPA (a smoked jalapeño IPA) was really good. The jalapeño aroma was amazing and the heat was balanced just right.
Beer selection at the Cobra Brewing event.
Cobra Brewing Company, Lewisville, Texas
There was a lot going on – music, classic Triumph sports cars, plenty of facial hair for the beard-growing contest, two guys doing vintage tintype photography, and vendors of everything from food to growlers to mustache wax.
It was also the one year anniversary for Juniors Lone Star Barbecue Sauce – there was a lot of praise for their products. They arrange their array of sauces by heat – most folks settled in at the jalapeño level, but I, of course, want to try the hotter habanero variety.
One nice thing about these brewery events is the wide variety of folks that show up. Young and old, rich and poor, bearded and hairless – everybody is there and everybody is friendly. This one was especially diverse and I’ll be back sometime… even if it takes me three trains and about a dozen miles of bike riding to get there.
The festivities went on until six, but I left a bit early – around four. That was eight hours after I had left my house and I was getting a bit tired and dehydrated. I rode to the nearest train station and drank the water I had packed – which made me feel a lot better. I thought about riding back, but my train pulled in and I decided to call it a day. Always better to leave too early than too late.
The Stone Weeps
Lafayette Cemetery No.1
New Orleans, Louisiana
New Orleans
Lafayette Cemetery No. 1
Bill Chance 