“Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgandy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Painted parking meter and Brooks saddle, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
“When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle
Fixed Gear Bike locked to a parking meter in Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
I think it belongs to the bartender at Pecan Lodge
“The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance
After riding around in the increasingly inclement weather Saturday at the Cedars Open Studio Tour and Ride I was sore in the morning. Riding in the rain always wears me out… I’m not sure why. On Sunday was another bike ride – one I have been looking forward to. It was time for the 2014 Dallas Tweed Ride. The idea is to dress up in nostalgic dress – as best as possible and go out on vintage bicycles – if you have one.
I was one of the brave few that rode in the Tweed Ride last year. It was bitter cold – though still a lot of fun. I have a tweedy beret and a Goodwill jacket that I can wear with slacks and a tie – not historically accurate or as good looking as most others, but at least I can put forth a little effort dressing up. I put together my clothing and thought about my bike. I do have a semi-vintage road bike, but Nick has taken it over and installed clipless pedals so I can’t use it. I decided to take my folder – not vintage at all, but at least it’s efficient.
Thinking about the route I decided to drive down and park in the familiar lot on the west side of the Continental Bridge Park. I knew the ride would start downtown and end at the Turner House in Oak Cliff. I picked that spot because I new the ride back to my car would be mostly downhill.
I rode across the bridge park and through downtown to Dealy Plaza, where everyone was gathering for the ride. The weather was beautiful – it seemed almost impossible after the cold rain which had been falling the night before. If anything, it was a little warm… at least in the sun and out of the wind. I’m not good at counting numbers in a group like this, but I would guess about a hundred. That’s a pretty good group of people wearing odd costumes and wheeling around on outdated means of transport.
I knew a lot of folks from other bike rides – although some were surprisingly hard to recognize. We gathered up and rode up Main Street through downtown, then turned south and rode to Dallas Heritage Village. I remembered riding there once before for a Jazz Age Sunday Social. We stopped for some photos around the gazebo.
The Dallas Tweed Ride 2014
Posing in Dallas Heritage Village gazebo
Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
Dallas Tweed Ride 2014
Dallas Tweed Ride 2014
We rode back through downtown and then across the Trinity River on the Houston Viaduct. Then came the long uphill ride from the river to Bishop Arts and on up 8th Street to the Turner House. I’m afraid that this stretch pretty much wore me out and I was happy and exhausted to reach our destination.
There was a lot of fun – food, beer, (and water), games and great people. I brought my camera, of course, and will put up a few photos – though I didn’t take as many as I intended. I wanted to hang out without the stress of shooting too many pictures. There were a lot of other folks, better than me, taking pictures – you can see some on the Facebook Page and also, the Dallas Observer Photographer was there and put up a page of shots – plus the Dallas Morning News Photographer.
Dallas Tweed Ride
Dallas Tweed Ride 2014
Once the sun began to set everyone started to take off home and I rode by myself – as I had planned, coasting down Edgefield to West Dallas and then Commerce Street into the river bottoms and back to my car. I had a fun time, though I was inexplicably bothered by how hard it was for me to make it up that long uphill. I also wished I had a vintage bike to ride and better clothes. I guess that’s to be expected this time of year – and fodder for upcoming resolutions.
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov
Saturday was the annual Cedars Open Studios Tour and Bike Friendly Cedars had organized a bike ride to the various studios and galleries. I had been looking forward to this for months and was concerned as the day approached that there was a prediction of violent thunderstorms. Still, I was up for giving it a shot.
As a compromise, I did drive down in my car instead of taking the train – that way I had a refuge and means of transport if the weather turned really bad. I also took my commuter bike instead of my folder – the big tires, weatherproof cargo box, and fenders are designed to get through any weather. I parked at Lee Harvey’s, dragged my bike out of the back, and pedaled down to the Bowler Hat to meet up with the other folks.
We gathered together and rode off, touring a large number of artists, their spaces, and their work. It was a big variety, from ceramics, jewelry and paintings to gigantic sculptures and architectural works. Everybody was very friendly and there was even a good bit of food and drink set out too.
The weather held out until the middle of the afternoon when it turned cold and rainy. I bailed on the bike tour and hid out under the awning at Lee Harvey’s for a bit. It helped that there was an excellent band, Shoot Low Sheriff, finishing out a set. Clay Stinnett – the artist that painted the work I bought at For the Love of Kettle – was there showing off some paintings.
About that time the sun was setting and the heavens really opened up. I wanted to go to the finale of the evening at Bowman Hot Glass, so I unpacked my rain gear and headed out.
Despite the weather, there was a big crowd at Bowman. A lot of the folks I had seen here and there during the day also ended up at Bowman. I bought a glass Christmas Ornament and carefully packed it into an extra pannier that I brought along.
The highlight was the molten glass Christmas tree. A large structure of wood and iron was brought out and placed in the rain, surrounded by a safety zone demarcated by yellow police tape. A sound system boomed out an appropriate accompaniment. Two women dressed as glow-in-the-dark angels came out and garnished the structure with rolls of paper tape. Then a man in a silver heat suit and a torch lumbered from the building and set the paper and wood on fire.
The glass furnaces inside the building were opened and the bright orange glow bathed the cold and wet crowd outside. Then three glassblowers began grabbing giant blogs of glowing glass on the ends of long blowpipes, carrying them out to the tree, and dribbling the thick liquid all over the tree. In an intricate and dangerous hot dance they took turns running out with their molten burdens, holding them over the tree, then returning for another load.
The hot glass ignited all the remaining unburned wood, flooding the entire sculpture with flame. After a number of trips, the iron armature within was completely covered with strands of glass. It really did end up looking like a Christmas tree – festooned with a thick layer of crystal icicles.
Finally, they finished and everyone cheered. I packed my bike up and set out in the rain and dark to ride the few blocks to my car. I was very grateful for my fenders and Gore-Tex rain gear.
As I pedaled out I took one last look at the tree. Unfortunately, the falling rain was too much of a thermal shock and it shattered most of the glass tree – but it was incredible watching its creation.
Christmas tree made of fire and glass, Bowman Hot Glass, Dallas, Texas
I actually knew about all but three of these, but an interesting list anyway.
Grave of Clyde Barrow and his brother, Buck.
When I was nothing more than a sprout (or in this case, an offshoot) and lived in the Canal Zone, I was fascinated by the bananas that grew everywhere. Although everyone grew a little tired of eating them all the time, it was really cool to watch them grow and develop – and to realize that there are many types of bananas – most superior to the Cavendish that we buy in our supermarkets.
But now, disaster. Something else to worry about.
Did you know that all bananas are slightly radioactive?
I stayed up too late last night to watch most of what is one of the best movies ever made.
I’ve always found this to be one of the most frightening scenes in any movie. Starting with Lundegaard hoplessly struggling with the list of VIN numbers and then having Marge figure out that something is very wrong – you see the end of a person’s life right here. It’s awful – even if it’s somebody as reprehesible as Lundegaard. Ya, Darn tootin’.
An oh ya, this scene. I actually Googled Normandale Community College (seems like a nice enough place) after I watched it. It must be a short path from Juco to turning tricks in a snow-bound truck stop. Go Bears.
If you were to ask me (But why would you do something like that?) I would tell you I’m not a particular fan of action movies. However, looking at this list, I’ve seen all but about five of them. The others I liked (mostly) – so maybe I should try and finish it off.
If we do see all of them, or if we want more (I’ve been thinking I should write in first person plural more often) there there is always this:
The start of the Denton Katy trail off of Swisher Road, in Lake Dallas.
The new bridge from the Santa Fe trail into The Lot
This is truly the best of all possible worlds.
Stylish bike rider, French Quarter, New Orleans
Magazine Street, New Orleans
Klyde Warren Park,
Dallas, Texas
I ate lunch at a splashy new dining spot at the edge of Klyde Warren, Lark on the Park, and chatted with the owner, the longtime Dallas restaurateur Shannon Wynne. When he commented, “Dallas has matured more in the last five years than in the past 25,” I asked him why this was. He guffawed in reply, “Well, it certainly can’t be the locals.” He added that the city had benefited greatly from new blood, and that they in turn had emboldened establishment Dallasites to reconsider the city’s possibilities.
While Mr. Wynne talked, I looked over his shoulder at the restaurant’s walls, which were covered with intricate chalk drawings that rotate quarterly: one by a local tattoo artist, another by a medical illustrator, a third depicting the University of Texas at Dallas’s top-ranked chess team. Meanwhile, outside, dozens of residents were tossing Frisbees, or ice skating. It occurred to me that while Dallas has always exhibited the capacity to surprise others, it had now succeeded in surprising itself.
Abby Magill, of
Home By Hovercraft
Klyde Warren Park
Dallas, Texas
Milk Crate Bike in the reading area in Klyde Warren Park.
“For one wild, glad moment we snapped the chain that binds us to earth, and joining hands with the winds we felt ourselves divine.”
― Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
Magazine Street
New Orleans, Louisiana
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet
an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says
“Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a
bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes
“What the hell is water?”
—-David Foster Wallace, from the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address
The other day I stumbled across a blog entry that posed the question, “What Book has the Most Page-for-Page Wisdom?” I had read most of the links on the page – but one that I was not familiar with caught my eye. This is Water, by David Foster Wallace.
It’s a short work, actually a transcription of a commencement address, and readily available in book form or online.
There are a lot of good ideas here, but I want to look at one piece of text – a description of the hell everyone’s life can become if we give in.
By way of example, let’s say it’s an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired, and you’re stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home — you haven’t had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job — and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the workday, and the traffic’s very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store’s hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can’t just get in and quickly out: You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store’s crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough checkout lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day-rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can’t take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.
Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn’t fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etcetera, etcetera.
—–David Foster Wallace, This is Water
The excellent piece goes on to explain how important it is to not let this sort of thing get to you, to realize that we are all in the same boat, that we need to look at life in a non-selfish way and go with it – or else we will go mad.
All good advice and interesting thought provoking… but I want to present an alternative. Find out about this shit and simply don’t do it… or rather, figure out something else.
For example, I know all too well the hell of exhausted grocery shopping. So I decided not to do it.
My goal for this year… and probably for next year too, is to never drive my car to the grocery store. My commuter bike has room for a pair of big, cheap panniers I found at Wal-Mart of all places. With those and a backpack I can carry a goodly bit of groceries – enough to get by for a few days.
This has transformed my grocery shopping from a gas-fueled frustration fest into a series of fun little mini-adventures, complete with fresh air and a little exercise.
It helps that I have five grocery choices within easy cycling distance from my house. I define that as less than, say three miles… and no killer streets.
First is the Super Target – good for general shopping. They have bike racks sort of hidden in little alcoves near the entryways. This is the closest place to the hell described in Wallace’s speech. But, somehow, when you have ridden a bicycle to a store, it’s impossible to be overly frustrated at the inevitable delays. You simply feel too silly.
Bike racks tucked away at the Super Target store.
Then there is the Fiesta Mart – a Hispanic slanted grocery store. It’s the farthest away – maybe two miles – but a nice route, mostly bike trail. It has a beat-up but serviceable bike rack around by the propane cylinders.
My commuter bike, with panniers, waiting at the Fiesta Mart bike rack.
Those are the only two groceries with bike racks near where I live. No big problem – they all have cart racks, which can be locked to as well as a dedicated rack. In the other direction – in Garland, actually – is the Saigon Market Mall – a big, cool Asian Market – good for noodles, fresh vegetables, and fish.
Then, very close to where I live is an Aldi – great for staples like milk and eggs. It’s nice to buy milk there since it is uphill from my house and I can ride up there light and coast home heavy.
Finally, there is an India Bazaar in the same center. Great place for rice, beans, and, especially spices. Their spice aisle is a wonder – I love to stand there and simply smell.
Locked up on the cart rack in front of the India Bazaar
I know that the Wallace speech deals with much larger and more subtle issues than how to get your groceries. But in this tough world we need all the weapons we can muster and being able to roll out of the garage on a cheap, used, crappy bicycle instead of a smoke spewing SUV makes life a little bit easier to bear. For everybody.
We have just folded space from Ix
Many machines on Ix
New machines
Better than those on Richese
You are transparent—-The Third-Stage Guild Navigator to the Emperor Shaddam IV, Dune (the movie)
My Xootr Swift folding bike, folded up against the wall of Four Corners Brewing Company, Dallas, Texas
Sometimes I fold my bike when I’m locking it up. I’m not sure why – it certainly doesn’t make it any harder to steal – you could simply pick it up and throw it into a trunk. Maybe I hope it makes it look less like a bicycle and more like a random pile of pipes and parts.
I was thinking about David Lynch’s surreal, preposterous, and insane version of Dune, the movie from 1984. I read some old reviews – everybody hated it. A lot of people walked out. Someone said, “It sure isn’t Star Wars.”
Now, after all this time, I realize that (although I can’t even say Dune is a good movie) I actually like Dune better than Star Wars. It has certainly had more of a lasting effect on how I look at the world, that’s for sure.
I mean, what other movie ends with a real WTF knife fight to the death between Sting and Agent Cooper with Captain Jean-Luc Picard watching.
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
― Albert Einstein
Continental Bridge Park, Dallas, Texas
“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”
—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
I had signed up (paid ahead of time online) for a bike ride at six this evening, starting and ending at the Four Corners Brewery in West Dallas. It was a guided ride with two beer tickets for well-earned refreshment at the end. My original idea was to ride to the DART station, take the train downtown, and then ride across the Continental Bridge Park to the brewery. But as I prepared to leave I noticed a sudden violence in the sky – a gathering of thunderstorms as the daily Texas humid head collided with some early cooler air floating down from up north.
I didn’t want to get caught in a sudden deluge without my car as refuge, so I folded my Xootr Swift and plopped it into the trunk – then drove down to the brewery.
Because of this, I arrived a bit early and was able to hop over to the bridge park and get some photographs of the evening clouds building behind the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge and the downtown Dallas skyline.
Downtown Dallas and the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge from the Continental Bridge Park
(click to enlarge)
A good group gathered for the ride. I didn’t know anybody – which was cool, there rides are always a fun way to find new folks. Everybody talked about the gathering storm – dark clouds were building to the West and to the North. We all agreed to risk the rain and took off. We rode across the Continental Bridge into downtown, through the infamous Triple Underpass and then back across the river on the Jefferson Viaduct Bridge.
At that point the group continued on to Bishop Arts, but I was a bit out of breath and the clouds were really threatening so I decided to turn off on my own. I rode back north and then hopped the levee down into the Trinity River Bottom trails. I stopped to drink some iced water from my bag, eat an orange, and catch my breath.
At that point the sky exploded. I sped off, took shelter under the Interstate 30 Bridge, and ate another orange. When the deluge cleared a bit I rode on to the Margaret Hunt Hill bridge (yes, the one in the photo above) and again took shelter from the storm. The relatively dry area under the bridge was populated with some families and a group of fishermen that had been caught by the rain.
As we waited, I heard a loud roar and suddenly a full-blown Airboat came careening up the
Trinity, going fast through the falling water – pilot and passenger hunched forward against the stinging rain. It was an odd sight – the first powered craft I’ve ever seen on that stretch of the river.
After a bit, I gave up waiting for the rain to end (once you are soaked, you can’t get any wetter) and headed out. The hardest part was getting through the Trinity Groves parking lot – the water was a foot deep there.
As luck would have it, I arrived back at the exact time as the rest of the riders that I had split away from a few miles to the south. The folks that had decided to stay behind and wait – through either a lack of courage or an excess of good sense (or both) – cheered everyone as they rode up, soaked to the skin.
The beer was very good, by the way, and well earned.
Bill Chance 