“Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It’s going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.”
― J.G. Ballard
Invasion Car Show
Deep Ellum
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
Deep Ellum
Dallas, Texas
“I knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldn’t identify with any of the guys at all. None of them liked art or music. They just wanted to fight and get laid. It was many years ago but it gave me this real hatred for the average American macho male.”
― Kurt Cobain
Design District, Dallas, Texas
James Dean in a Mercury ’49
Junior Johnson’s runnin’ in the woods of Caroline
Even Burt Reynolds in a black Trans Am
All gonna meet down at the Cadillac ranch
—-Bruce Springsteen, Cadillac Ranch
Old Guys Rule
Cadillac Ranch
Amarillo, Texas
Cadillac, Cadillac
Long and dark
Shiny and black
Open up your engines, let ’em roar
Tearin’ up the highway like a big ol’ dinosaur
—-Bruce Springsteen, Cadillac Ranch
“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
Dallas Heritage Village
Dallas, Texas
Dallas Heritage Village
(click to enlarge)
Exposition Park, Dallas, Texas
Exposition Park, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
“The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam…”
— J.G. Ballard
I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car. It sums up everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising and consumer goods with the technological landscape. The sense of violence and desire, power and energy; the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape.
We spend a substantial part of our lives in the motor car, and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being…, the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. I think the 20th century reaches its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there: the speed and violence of our age; the strange love affair with the machine, with its own death.
—-J.G. Ballard, Narration for Crash! (1971), a short film by Harley Cokeliss
(click to enlarge)
“In a sense life in the high-rise had begun to resemble the world outside – there were the same ruthlessness and agression concealed within a set of polite conventions.”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise
“The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world ‘picturesque.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography
Car Show, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography
“Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don’t know, and we don’t really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.”
― Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints
“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
Car Show, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas. This is attached to a “Rat Rod” – that looks like it might still be incomplete.
“A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Bill Chance 