“Rumour is a pipe
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures
And of so easy and so plain a stop
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wavering multitude,
Can play upon it.”― William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2
Plano, Texas
“Judging from the spiderwebs clinging to it, the emergency stairway was hardly ever used. To each web clung a small black spider, patiently waiting for its small prey to come along. Not that the spiders had any awareness of being “patient”. A spider had no special skill other than building its web, and no lifestyle choice other than sitting still. It would stay in one place waiting for its prey until, in the natural course of things, it shriveled up and died. This was all genetically predetermined. The spider had no confusion, no despair, no regrets. No metaphysical doubt, no moral complications. Probably. Unlike me.
I move,therefore I am.”― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Trinity River Levee
Dallas, Texas
“They swore by concrete. They built for eternity.”
― Gunter Grass
The Horseshoe, Trinity River Bottoms, Dallas, Texas
“When Armageddon takes place, parking is going to be a major problem.”
― J.G. Ballard, Millennium People
“You clearly don’t know who you’re talking to, so let me clue you in. I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the danger. A guy opens his door and gets shot, and you think that of me? No! I am the one who knocks!”
—-Heisenberg, Breaking Bad
Trinity River Bottoms
Dallas, Texas
“There was a wish to get something exceptional, … I also wanted to deliver something technically unique.”
—-Santiago Calatrava
The arches of a second Calatrava designed bridge rise in the river bottoms. The Horseshoe, Dallas, Texas
Masses of construction equipment in the Trinity River Bottoms are roiling the mud with steel and concrete. The work area, like a giant’s anthill, is called The Horseshoe.
A second Calatrava designed bridge arcs up into the air. I’m a bit confused – this one is in one sense only window decoration – the cars will be relegated to the conventional concrete causeway. On the other hand, the arches will support bicycle and pedestrian spans. That is a cool thing, in my mind.
I only wonder how people on foot or on pedaled wheels will reach the bridges. I guess we’ll all wait and see.
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias
“I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.”
― J.G. Ballard
The Horseshoe, Under Construction, Dallas, Texas
While in New Orleans for Lee’s Tulane Graduation I rode my bicycle to Bayou St. John for the Bayou Boogaloo. There is always a festival going on in The Big Easy and they are always fun. This was a particularly good one.
I bought a beer and found a shady spot on the shore of the Bayou. I sat there chatting with the locals about cycling, music, and aging hippies. We watched the watercraft plying the waves. It was a beautiful day.
A small group of people arrived on the far shore (not very far away) towing something on a trailer. They proceeded to extract a large, homemade barge consisting of a wooden platform with plastic barrels strapped underneath for floatation. We wondered how they were going to launch the ungainly contraption.
The guy had it going on. He directed his motley crew with efficiency and before you could swallow your gumbo they flipped it neatly into the water – using ropes to control the weight.
Then the guy proceeded to start hauling out prefabricated railings, benches, and an umbrella – screwing everything into place with a portable drill. It was an efficient and impressive display of carpentry. He soon had his own portable floating party barge, right in the middle of the bayou.
“Get that guy’s name,” one of the folks sitting next to me said between gulps of Abita Amber and bites of muffuletta. “I need a new deck and that’s the best carpenter I’ve seen in New Orleans.”
As I watched he extracted a full-blown steel anchor and dropped it into the mud at the bottom of the bayou.
The barge arrives and is flipped
over into the Bayou St. John.
Pretty bare bones at this point – but it floats.
Adding benches and railings.
Dropping Anchor.
Laissez les bons temps rouler
He stands erect by bending over the fallen. He rises by lifting others.
—-Douglas Horton
I rode the DART train into Downtown Dallas for the last Dallas Writing Marathon and as the short line of yellow electric cars climbed out of the tunnel under Central Expressway I could hear a distinct WUP-WUP-WUP sound. Looking out the window, I saw a gigantic lifting helicopter delivering a load to the top of the Chase Tower (the skyscraper with a big hole in it). By the time the train pulled into the station, it had already settled into a parking lot behind the Plaza of the Americas.
A few hours later, after we had finished writing, I returned to the station and discovered the skycrane was taking off again. I ran around, up to the police lines, and watched it carry a load (it looked like electrical equipment) up to the notch in the top of the vaulted cap of the skyscraper.
The helicopter was a Sikorsky S-64, modified by Erickson Air-Crane. It had a plastic bubble facing backward into the cargo area where a crewman could sit and direct a precision lift. The whole operation was extensive – from police security to a line of trucks delivering cargo to be lifted to a tanker truck of jetfuel to keep the copter going.
It was all pretty cool. I took some pictures.
Sikorsky S-64 delivering a load to the top of the Chase Tower, Dallas, Texas
Music has generally involved a lot of awkward contraptions, a certain amount of heavy lifting.
—-Tom Waits
Erickson Air-Crane and the Dallas Skyline
As I get older, the present and the past shift and become the past and the future… A lot of it is a new awareness of time and life and the wheel of fortune crushing you and lifting you and crushing you and lifting you.
—-Feist
Erickson Air-Crane
Another mode of accumulating power arises from lifting a weight and then allowing it to fall.
—-Charles Babbage
Texas Sculpture Garden,
Frisco, Texas
James Surls
American (Colorado/Texas)
Again in the Meadows
2002
“There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face”
― William Shakespeare
Photographs manipulated with Corel Painter and The Gimp.
James Surls, Again in the Meadows
“I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”
― Glenn Gould
James Surls, Again in the Meadows, plus a construction crane, a pile of dirt, and a stop sign
The whole difference between a construction and a creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.
—- G. K. Chesterton
Bill Chance 