“In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise. But still he wandered through the streets of the town, always silent and alone.”
― The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Mural (detail), Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― A Man Without a Country
Two girls enjoying the art for sale at the “For the Love of Kettle” event.
Sometimes, there is something you know you need to do but you don’t really feel up to it and almost don’t go? When you finally gut it up and trudge out the door – you are really glad you did. That happens all the time, doesn’t it.
Every year there is this event at the Kettle Gallery in Deep Ellum – For the Love of Kettle.
From the Facebook Description:
“For the Love of Kettle” is one of the most highly anticipated events of our year. This One-Night-Only, annual fundraiser keeps Kettle Art Gallery operating in the black, allowing us 51 weeks a year of eclectic, North Texas based, cultural programming. Over one hundred and fifty, 9 x 12 works will be available for just $50.00 each, created by artists who exhibit & support this gallery. There are no previews or pre-sales available to anyone, so please get here early and grab a place in line, as the doors open at 7:00PM sharp.
I have gone to this event every year since 2014 – I’ve written about it a few times:
The Weird and Wicked World of the Singing Cowboy
2019 was a difficult year and I’m trying to spend as little money as possible to recover. Even fifty bucks for a painting was more than I wanted to spend – so I was thinking about not going (why go if I’m not going to buy anything?). But then I remembered that I have an envelope stashed away that I put extra cash in every now and then – saving to buy a fountain pen. I checked the envelope and I had the fifty bucks I needed already saved – so off I went.
In years past, I arrived at the event a little over an hour early and was usually the fifth or sixth person in line. The Transit Gods were good to me this year and the train deposited me in Deep Ellum a good two hours plus ahead of time. I was shocked to discover folks already in line. So I joined in. One of the things I like best about the “competitive shopping event” is talking to people in line – especially about strategy on getting the painting you want and looking through the windows at the art on display.
An hour before the doors open, the line on the sidewalk outside Kettle Art Gallery grows. It eventually reaches around the block.
I picked up a new technique this year. I had brought a mild telephoto lens and was able to take photos of the art on the wall – then blow the pictures up on the camera screen to read the numbers under the artworks. This is key so you can write down the numbers of the art you want – dash to the desk and order it before someone else does.
This is the actual shot through the Kettle Art Gallery window used to get the number of the artwork I wanted – 130. Actually I liked all three of these and wrote the numbers on a card.
So I wrote five numbers (130, 128, 129,133, 2, 156) down on a 3×5 card and decided to rush to the front desk as soon as the door opened. I know that limited my choices and there were so many good things there – but I could only buy one and I have this very bad habit of overthinking and getting too excited when those doors open. I need to make a choice and stick with it. With five numbers I was sure to get one of them – there were only six folks in front of me in line. A seven sharp the doors opened and I rushed right to the desk. The folks in front of me were buying multiple artworks, but the number highest on my list – 130 – was available, so I bought it.
Artwork on the wall at the “For the Love of Kettle” event at the Kettle Art Gallery.
Artwork on the wall at the “For the Love of Kettle” event at the Kettle Art Gallery.
The line to buy artwork immediately grows to fill the gallery.
As the art is purchased, the numbers are crossed off the board. You can see the one I bought, 130, is crossed off.
The work I purchased was hung near the main desk, I kept an eye on it until I could pick it up. I liked it even better when I saw it up close.
I love walking around, pushing through the crowd, looking at the art, talking to folks about what they bought and what they wanted and didn’t get.
Looking at the art at the “For the Love of Kettle” event.
One of the cool things is that a lot of the artists are there. I ran into David Pech, who painted the skull painting I bought last year.
David Pech, at Kettle Gallery.
Day of the Dead skull by David Pech.
The event doesn’t last too long, the art starts disappearing from the walls and moving out the door. I picked up my art and headed out – running into the artist on the sidewalk outside. I realized that I had met her before at a poetry reading for the White Rock Zine Machine at Deep Vellum Books.
I carefully lugged my assemblage through the Saturday Night Deep Ellum crowd of drunken millennials and darting rental scooters to the train station. It’s always weird riding home late at night on the DART train with all the crackheads while cradling an artwork.
I love the piece I purchased. It’s an assemblage by Lisa Huffaker named “How We Measure Our Days.” It’s made from various pieces of mechanical and electrical equipment, lenses, and insects – decorated with gold paint. I tried taking a photo of it – but can’t really do it justice.
“How We Measure Our Days” by Lisa Huffaker
“How We Measure Our Days” by Lisa Huffaker, detail
“How We Measure Our Days” by Lisa Huffaker, detail
So I smiled as I rode the Saturday late-night train back to Richardson, sitting there in the miasma of crack and weed smoke floating off the denizens slumped over in their seats. I was worried that my collection of strange items looked vaguely bomb-like – but nobody seemed to give a damn – lost in their own private disasters. There was also a healthy gaggle of families returning home from a cheerleading competition in my rail car. The DART train late at night is a weird agglomeration of groups representing wildly divergent aspects of the evil city. The cheerleaders were especially sullen and teenagery-angsty – they must have lost their competition. I, however, wasn’t. I was just happy that I had found those two twenties and one ten in that forgotten envelope and gone downtown after all.
You should ride for meditation for 1 hour per day – if you’re too busy, then ride for 2 hours
—- Old Zen Saying
My 1987 Cannondale road bike at Trammell Crow Park.
I have read that one thing that I can do to help achieve my goals is to share them. This isn’t easy – important goals are, by nature, personal and can be embarrasing. Plus, there’s the problem that nobody else really gives a damn and they (you) will be terribly bored. But by sharing them, against my better judgement, I hope to:
A primary goal I had this year is related to fitness – and I’m sure you won’t be surprised to read that it is a cycling mileage goal. The basic goal is ten miles a day. That works out to, what? Three thousand six hundred and sixty (leap year, remember?) miles for the year. That sounds like a long way. I used to have a spreadsheet to track my mileage, but now I use Mapmyride.com.
I do cheat in two ways. I know that sometimes the weather is simply too awful to ride. If I ride my spin bike at home I count one hour as ten miles. That seems fair – ten miles per hour is pretty much how fast I usually ride (though I average a lot less – in the big evil city I spend as much as a third of my time waiting on traffic) plus on the spin bike I never coast. The other cheat is a little more controversial (in my own mind). When I take the bus to work, I have to transfer, usually at the Spring Valley DART station. It’s about 1.3 miles from my office – which I can walk in thirty minutes (if I walk fast). If I do that – walk instead of taking the second bus route – I give myself five miles biking credit. It feels about right, the mile plus walk is about as tiring as five miles on the bike – it takes thirty minutes, so I’m sticking with an hour or so of exercise a day.
Is that fair? It seems OK to me and gives me another option and a little flexibility.
So… Accountability… how did I do in January.
My total in January was 314.02 miles – so I beat my goal by four miles. Good enough.
The breakdown:
31 Bike Rides – 199.02 miles
9 Spin Rides – 90 miles (eight episodes of The Witcher and one hour of watching music videos)
5 Walks – 25 miles
Looking at my Calendar – I had 7 days that I did nothing. That would be another goal – reduce those days.
January Map My Ride, Calendar – Click to Enlarge
One other interesting fact. I thought about a goal of, for the year, riding my bike more miles than driving my car (excluding long trips). I didn’t decide on that goal because it seemed impossible, especially in Dallas.
Well, as I think about January – I drove a car three times, twice to Love Field (once for work, once to pick Candy up) and once to Home Depot (to buy something too big for my bicycle). That’s a total of what? Maybe fifty miles? Everywhere else I went I either cycled, took DART (one other goal of mine for this year was to utilize the bus system – which I have been doing), or rode with someone else driving. I never drove myself to work (not always by choice). So I rode my bike two hundred miles and drove fifty. I didn’t think that was possible, and it probably won’t be for the rest of the year… but there it is.
My bike commute – the bike riding itself – is getting really easy. I told someone that, unless the weather is horrible, usually my bike ride to/from work is the best part of my day. They said, “How many people can say that their commute is the best part of their day.” I nodded, although I thought to myself that a big part of that is how unpleasant the rest of my day is. Unfortunately, changing clothes and such at work is the worst part of my day. My employer blathers on a lot about work/life balance – but it is all bullshit. They make it as difficult as they can to commute without a car.
Also, I have to be careful – when you don’t drive very much and live in a car-obsessed city like Dallas – on a tiny bicycle dodging giant killer hunks of steel that spew toxic fumes in your face even if they miss you or standing by the road waiting for a bus as the traffic roars by inches away – you begin to hate cars. You begin to hate the people that drive them, especially people that drive fast/aggressively, yak on their phones, and honk their horns. It’s a good opportunity to practice mindfulness and forgiveness.
So, sorry to bore you with my stupid little story – one month down, eleven to go.
Better finish this off and go for a bike ride – get my ten miles in. Don’t want to start February off behind.
“At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only,—when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.”
― Walking
Denton, Texas
“You wake from dreams of doom and–for a moment–you know: beyond all the noise and the gestures, the only real thing, love’s calm unwavering flame in the half-light of an early dawn.”
― Markings
Paths, Steinunn Thorarinsdottir, Arts District, Dallas, Texas
“Philosophy is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes — I mean the universe — but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.”
―
Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, Dallas, Texas
“Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.”
― After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away
Cable Anchors, Mockingbird Pedestrian Bridge, Dallas, Texas
“But you’re out of another world old kid … You ought to live on top of the Woolworth Building in an apartment made of cutglass and cherry blossoms.”
―
Downtown Dallas, Texas
The cowboys cry, “Ki yippee yi!”
Deep in the heart of Texas
The dogies bawl and bawl and bawl
Deep in the heart of Texas—-June Hershey, Deep in the Heart of Texas
Heart of Texas Red, Craft Beer Logo, Four Corners Brewing, The Cedars, Dallas, Texas
Four Corners Brewing in the Cedars has some great graphics/logos to represent their flagship beers. They are based on the concept of images from the Lotería – it makes me want to buy a card (or a few), frame it, hang it as art.
loteria card
Above the hall in that house with a skylight was another mysterious home, and through the glass you could see a family of feet, surrounded by halos, like saints, and the shadows of the rest of the bodies to which those feet belonged, shadows flattened like hands seen through bathwater.
—- Silvina Ocampo, Skylight
Damian Priour, Austin
Temple (detail)
2000 fossil limestone, glass, steel
In Memory of Buddy Langston 1947-2004
Frisco, Texas
Today’s short story is a piece of surreal horror:
From The New Yorker
This story was translated from the original Spanish by by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan. I’ve never understood why, but fantastic stories written in Spanish have a certain something that allows them to get away with words that English doesn’t – and, somehow, that certain something even comes through in translation. That is usually illustrated in works of magical realism (which are genius in Spanish but often twee and silly in English) but here is true in a story which… well, I’m not sure what is real and what is not – but it could be all real – relates to the horror of almost everyday life.
Bill Chance 