“Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.”
― Albert Camus
Klyde Warren Park, Dallas, Texas
“Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
“Don’t flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
“The breath of wind that moved them was still chilly on this day in May; the flowers gently resisted, curling up with a kind of trembling grace and turning their pale stamens towards the ground. The sun shone through them, revealing a pattern of interlacing, delicate blue veins, visible through the opaque petals; this added something alive to the flower’s fragility, to it’s ethereal quality, something almost human ,in the way that human can mean frailty and endurance both at the same time. The wind could ruffle these ravishing creations but it couldn’t destroy them, or even crush them; they swayed there, dreamily; they seemed ready to fall but held fast to their slim strong branches-…”
― Irène Némirovsky
“The beauty of that June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming was in bloom and blossom. The sunlight was a benediction. The breezes were so caressingly soft and intimate on the skin as to be embarrassing.”
― Dan Simmons, Drood
Every year though, I like to buy a little monster head in a box, a sculpture by David Pound. He makes little heads out of Polymer Clay and found objects, and mounts them in wooden boxes. I love his work. By Sunday, I was afraid his selection would be thinned out too much, so I decided to ride down on the DART train after work and pick one up Friday evening, when the festival first opened.
I made it down there and walked back and forth along the long line of booths about three times before I saw his booth. For some reason, every year I have trouble finding it, although it’s pretty much in the same place.
David Pound’s booth of little monster heads in wooden boxes at the Deep Ellum Arts Festival always draws a crowd.
At any rate, his work was as great as ever. As I looked over the selection, people kept coming in and exclaiming how cool the little monsters were and how imaginative everything was. It was very hard for me to make up my mind -there was the guy with the mouse in his mouth, the alien with cat shoulder blades for ears, or the guy with mole hands sticking out the top of his head.
While I was looking a young girl with bright purple hair that was walking around with her parents bought a yellow head. I told her, “That’s the one I was going to get.”
“Really?”
“No, I’m just teasing.”
Actually, hers was the last one I would have bought. It looked cool, but didn’t have a real face. I decided to buy one that had a wry expression, and picked out one called Fracture Zone.
I hope you like him.
Fracture Zone
The heads I bought in previous years:
Persuation
Burrow
Earrings I had David Pound make for Candy for Mother’s Day last year.
The part that perked my ears up occurs at the 21:00 mark.
Amir Omar: “What I will tell you though, and a place where I think (…) we ought to, do things not only to differentiate our city and make it more marketable to others, but also in its own little way to send a message that there are multiple means of transportation and that is to absolutely find ways to make our city more walkable and, although we’ve made some strides on things like bike lanes there are opportunities sitting there, right now, that are incredibly low-cost opportunites, yet there are ways for us to increase the number of bike lanes we have around Richardson substantially. And so those are the kinds of things, the low hanging fruit if you were, that I think we could do that would be able to begin to be making an impact and at least send a message.
Moderator: Some people on the blog say that those bike lanes were put in on Canyon Creek so that people have a lower, slower traffic route through the neighborheed.
Laura Maczka: That’s a fact. That’s the truth.
Amir Omar: It’s a dual purpose and probably the primary purpose was to slow traffic down, but the fact of the matter is…
Moderator (interrupting): Do people use those bike lanes?
Ami Omar: Absolutely. I hear from them all the time.
Moderator: Why have I never seen anybody, not one, never, in a bike lane?
Amir Omar: (after rebutting the statement by the moderator and talking about his Fitness Challenge) …and would come to me and say, “Thank Goodness for the bike lanes you are putting in.” So I know that, (…) whatever you may say when you have a whole lot of cycling lanes, you will see is a lot more people cycling because the infrastructure has to be there.
The part that raises my hackles is the moderator and his, “I never see anyone in the bikes lanes,” rant. First, he mentions Canyon Creek, which is the nice, old money part of Richardson, where everybody drives big, expensive SUVs (and the center of Laura Mackza’s support). Maybe nobody rides bicycles there, but in my neighborhood, the bike lanes get used. A lot. And not only by me.
And I even cross over and ride the bike lanes in Canyon Creek every now and then.
This week is the Deep Ellum Arts Festival. It’s my favorite one – it has become very popular but still maintains a bit of an edge to it.
“I love the silent hour of night, for blissful dreams may then arise, revealing to my charmed sight what may not bless my waking eyes.”
― Anne Brontë, Best Poems of the Brontë Sisters
I woke last night to the sound of thunder
How far off I sat and wondered
Started humming a song from 1962
Ain’t it funny how the night moves
When you just don’t seem to have as much to lose
Strange how the night moves
With autumn closing in
—-Bob Seger, Night Moves
Well, there’s a lion… and a tree, and desert plants, and a stylized rose and a burning dove with a key on a rope and an arm and an eye and…. plenty to go around.
When I was a little kid, I had a paint-by-number kit… you know, one of those bilious hunks of cheap canvas board with numbered areas printed in blue ink that corresponded with little plastic tubs of oil paint. Now, I imagine they come with some sort of water-based acrylic – safer and easier for children – but this one had real slow-drying artists’ oil paint.
I might have been six years old… maybe seven. Fifty years ago.
I sat at the kitchen table, wielding the cheap brush that came with the kit, carefully cleaning it after each color and moving across the canvas matching the numbers with the proper paint. It amazed me… that I could create an actual work of art (unfortunately, my skills have advanced little since).
It didn’t seem too hard to me to make the leap beyond the preprinted canvas – surely it wouldn’t be that hard to do yourself. I was a little kid, what did I know? Nothing about composition, blending… and nothing about mixing colors.
What I especially remember is the sky above the sailboat. The scene had the boat fighting against a headwind on a dramatic tumbling, mostly overcast day – with the heavens filled with irregular patches of brown, beige, gray, and a little blue peeking through here and there. It was beautiful to me.
Now, whenever I have a sky like that… like this, my subconscious conjures up the by-the-mumbers painting of the sailboat from the distant cobwebby recesses of the past. Before I realize what I am thinking about, weather like this, fills my nose with the unmistakable odor of linseed oil and turpentine. Only then do I pause, look up, and remember the sailboat.
Bill Chance 