Tag Archives: city

The Best Places to Live

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that.”
― J.D. Salinger, A Girl I Knew

Dallas Skyline at Night

I know very well not to take an article that lists “The Best Places to Live” very seriously.

However, I did stumble across one that caught my eye. I saw an article in the Dallas Morning News that referred to another article in the New York Times.

The times noted that, EVERYONE IS MOVING TO TEXAS, and said that of the top ten best places to live in the United States, seven are in North Texas.

The list (North Texas Cities in Bold):

  1. Euless
  2. Woodlawn, Ohio
  3. Edgecliff Village
  4. Garland
  5. Grand Prairie
  6. Mesquite
  7. DeSoto
  8. Cedar Hill
  9. Brooklyn Center, Minn.
  10. Forest Park, Ohio

My wife is from Grand Prairie, I worked in Garland (and now live almost on the border) for a couple decades, and lived in Mesquite for a while. So, I know a bit about the Texas cities on this list and feel free to comment.

The interesting thing is that, for someone that lives here, these are not the best cities in North Texas. Most people would list Plano, Frisco, or some of the other more outer-ring suburbs. I am a big fan of Richardson, where I live, and cite its extreme diversity, high tech industry, and cycling infrastructure (of course) as small, but important, items that set it above its neighbors.

When I look at this list, the biggest thing that jumps out at me are the cities listed are generally not built out. That means that on at least one side, there are cotton fields waiting to be plowed under and concreted over. That tends to drop the cost of housing somewhat. Cedar Hill, DeSoto, Mesquite, Grand Prairie, and Garland all are considered a bit less expensive and a bit less desirable that their neighbors.

Euless is next to the massive DFW airport – the article mentions that the city boasts large numbers of Tongan residents – many immigrated to work at the airport and contribute to the dominant High School Football teams in that area.

I know little about Edgecliff Village – a tiny enclave in Fort Worth – may visit the next time I’m in those parts.

All in all, an interesting take… but I’m sure there are a few people who still manage to be happy even though they live somewhere that the New York Times doesn’t think is in the top ten.

Accidence

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Every balcony is a poem, a chant — a muscle! But whoever lives with that extra blueprint luxury of a balcony lives on the wrong side of a cross-section, on the busy, narrative-addled side of something like an ant-farm window, a brazen architectural arrangement selling cheap peeks into the naked sideshows of the quotidian — even the grisly. Step right up! Behold! A ten story wall of solid twitching muscle!”

—-Director Guy Maddin in Paste Magazine on his short film Accidence

Manor House Balcony, downtown Dallas, Texas

After watching and enjoying The Forbidden Room I was working through the selection of Guy Maddin films streaming on The Criterion Channel. And I now have a new favorite movie.

It’s a nine minute short called Accidence. It is an obvious homage to Hitchcock’s Rear Window. The entire film is a continuous take (zoomed in and out with a bit of panning) of the side of an apartment block – thirty units in all. There is a view of the balconies, some windows into the apartment interiors, and a glimpse of things moving up and down the stairs.

Ok, so it’s only nine minutes long… but you can’t watch it only once. On first viewing it is a confused ant-like cacophony of people on and off of their balconies. But as you watch it again and again, patterns emerge and a story is created. It is a story of doppelgangers, violence, families, boredom and drama. And a fuzzy white dog.

Who is the murderer? Who is the victim? Are they the same person?

I have watched it maybe forty times and will watch it many more. I still see new things. Watch the balloon for example. There is a red ghost that appears against the brick a couple of times – I think I figured out who that is.

Weird, wild stuff.

Short Story Of the Day, “anatomy of a burning thing” by Monica Robinson

Posted on by Bill Chance

The city at night sounded like his ribs when they broke, his body as it caved in on itself and snapped in half so loudly they heard it downstairs and thought it was a gunshot, another bullet hitting its mark, eating into the flesh of another broken soul, unwanted — unwanted, yes, disowned, in a room no warmer than the frigid air outside, shivering under layers, skin stretched too tight across bones.

—-Monica Robinson, “anatomy of a burning thing”

Time Exposure, Night, Downtown Dallas, Ross and Olive

Point of View – Stream of Consciousness – Reliability of Narration

You can play with this stuff… if you have the chops.

Read it here:

“anatomy of a burning thing” by Monica Robinson

from Blanket Sea

Monica Robinson

 

Earthly and Mechanical Paraphernalia

Posted on by Bill Chance

“She glided away towards the lift, which seemed hardly needed, with its earthly and mechanical paraphernalia, to bear her up to the higher levels.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 3rd Movement

Helicopter shadow, Pacific Plaza Park, Dallas, Texas

Short Story of the Day, The 37, by Mary Miller

Posted on by Bill Chance

I was living in a city now, a city with many buses that could take you many places you might want to go and many places you would not want to go and I had to figure them out because I was afraid to drive for the same reasons and some additional ones: I didn’t know how to get to where I was going or where to park once I got there or if I’d have the right parking pass, if one was required, or whether the meters were active, if there were meters, and whether they took coins only.

—–Mary Miller, The 37

Downtown Dallas at Night, (Click to Enlarge)

Another Short Story available online:

The 37, by Mary Miller

From Joyland Magazine

The Author:

Mary Miller grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. She is the author of two collections of short stories, Big World (Short Flight/Long Drive Books, 2009), and Always Happy Hour (Liveright/Norton, 2017), as well as a novel, The Last Days of California (Liveright/Norton, 2014).

Her stories have appeared in the Oxford American, New Stories from the South, McSweeney’s Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Mississippi Review, and many others. She is a former James A. Michener Fellow in Fiction at the University of Texas and John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at Ole Miss. She currently lives on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and is on faculty at the low-residency MFA program at Mississippi University for Women.

The Story:

A woman from Mississippi quits her PhD program and starts anew, alone, in Austin. A common story. It isn’t easy for her – transportation seems to be a particular monster.

I remember when I first moved to Dallas. I was about the same age, I suppose, as the narrator in the story… I never went to graduate school and had been working at a salt mine in Kansas for three years. This was 1981 – the economy was in the dumpster and the only place in the country where you could get a job was Texas.

I stayed with friends until I had enough money for an apartment. I moved into a cool, but extremely dated small apartment complex off of Lower Greenville (The Turtle Dove – it’s still there today). When I wasn’t on the road (Superfund toxic waste sites, chemical spills) I worked downtown. I rode the bus to work.

It was the Belmont #1 bus. Very easy to recognize. I could go to happy hour downtown (this was before the happy hour laws and they could offer three for one) and all I had to do was recognize the #1 bus and I was home. One evening I looked up as saw the Belmont #1 bus on its way. I looked down, fished my pass out of my wallet and made sure I had some punches left. When I looked up, the open door of the bus was right in front of me. I boarded and slumped into the seat.

Unfortunately, it was the wrong bus. Some other mystery bus had passed mine and stopped, with the number out of view overhead. By the time I realized it, I was somewhere in far East Dallas and I didn’t recognize anything. I waited for a while to see if it entered a familiar neighborhood but things kept getting sketchier and sketchier. I had no choice but to get off and wait at the stop across the street, going back the other way. This was decades before the internet and smart phones and definitely before Uber, and there wasn’t a pay phone in sight and it didn’t look like the kind of place I wanted to go exploring especially now that the sun was setting.

It took about an hour (which, of course, seemed like days) for a bus to come and take me back downtown. By then all the buses had stopped running and I had to find a pay phone and order a cab. Luckily, I had the cash on me.

From then on, I learned to be careful about the bus that I jumped on. You learn something every day.

He Saw In That Moment the Whole Dim-lit City

Posted on by Bill Chance
“So he bought tickets to the Greyhound and they climbed, painfully, inch by inch and with the knowledge that, once they reached the top, there would be one breath-taking moment when the car would tip precariously into space, over an incline six stories steep and then plunge, like a plunging plane. She buried her head against him, fearing to look at the park spread below. He forced himself to look: thousands of little people and hundreds of bright little stands, and over it all the coal-smoke pall of the river factories and railroad yards. He saw in that moment the whole dim-lit city on the last night of summer; the troubled streets that led to the abandoned beaches, the for-rent signs above overnight hotels and furnished basement rooms, moving trolleys and rising bridges: the cagework city, beneath a coalsmoke sky.”
― Nelson Algren, Never Come Morning

Mockingbird Station, Dallas, Texas

Pointed Blasphemously At Heaven

Posted on by Bill Chance

“This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.”
― Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

Downtown Dallas, Texas

A Forest Wilderness

Posted on by Bill Chance

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
― John Muir

Bald Cypress stump, Downtown Dallas, Texas

Like all big evil cities – Dallas, in an attempt to add a little more “green” scatters trees along it downtown acres of concrete – mostly bald cypress – poking out from metal grates set in the sidewalks. But a city center is not a lush swamp – where the cypress feel at home – and they will eventually fail. Hopefully, this happens because the tree outgrows the little metal hole it is cursed to live in. The men will come along and break out pieces of the grate – but eventually the tree grows too big and has to be cut down.

I have mixed feelings about this. The trees do make the city more liveable. And you can’t really mourn a tree – it is only a plant. And the stumps do have an interesting look – sort of a mini-history of man’s failure to corral nature.

A nearby tree still growing, but doomed to be cut down soon.

Wait For His Neighbours To Make A Mistake

Posted on by Bill Chance

“A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere. This was the sort of resident who was content to do nothing but sit in his over-priced apartment, watch television with the sound turned down, and wait for his neighbours to make a mistake.”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

Arts District, Dallas, Texas

Iron And Coke, And Chromium Steel

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Well we’re waiting here in Allentown,
For the Pennsylvania we never found,
For the promises our teachers gave,
If we worked hard,
If we behaved…
So the graduations hang on the wall,
But they never really helped us at all,
No they never taught us what was real,
Iron and coke,
And chromium steel,
And we’re waiting here in Allentown…
But they’ve taken all the coal from the ground,
And the union people crawled away…”
― Billy Joel

‘Tatlin’s Sentinel’ by John Henry, Arts District, Dallas, Texas