Tag Archives: Dallas

Workmen on the Roof

Posted on by Bill Chance

God buries His workmen but carries on His work.
—-Charles Wesley

“Any fool can write a book and most of them are doing it; but it takes brains to build a house.”
—- Charles F. Lummis

“Our house was made of stone, stucco, and clapboard; the newer wings, designed by a big-city architect, had a good deal of glass, and looked out into the Valley, where on good days we could see for many miles while on humid hazy days we could see barely beyond the fence that marked the edge of our property. Father, however, preferred the roof: In his white, light-woolen three-piece suit, white fedora cocked back on his head, for luck, he spent many of his waking hours on the highest peak of the highest roof of the house, observing, through binoculars, the amazing progress of construction in the Valley – for overnight, it seemed, there appeared roads, expressways, sewers, drainage pipes, “planned” communities with such names as Whispering Glades, Murmuring Oaks, Pheasant Run, Deer Willow, all of them walled to keep out intruders, and, yet more astonishing, towerlike buildings of aluminum and glass and steel and brick, buildings whose windows shone and winked like mirrors, splendid in sunshine like pillars of flame; such beauty where once there had been mere earth and sky, it caught at your throat like a great bird’s talons, taking your breath away. ‘The ways of beauty are as a honeycomb,’ Father told us, and none of us could determine, staring at his slow moving lips, whether the truth he spoke was a happy truth or not, whether even it was truth.”
—-Joyce Carol Oates

“For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; as though there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, everything falls apart.”
—-Eugene Ionesco

Making New Friends

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Blessed are they who have the gift of making friends, for it is one of God’s best gifts. It involves many things, but above all, the power of going out of one’s self, and appreciating whatever is noble and loving in another.”
—-Thomas Hughes

friends

“Mr. Wickham is blessed with such happy manners as may ensure his MAKING friends–whether he may be equally capable of RETAINING them, is less certain.”
—-Jane Austen

Messing about in boats

Posted on by Bill Chance

“There is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. In or out of ’em, it doesn’t matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don’t; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you’re always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you’ve done it there’s always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you’d much better not.”

Spoken by Ratty to Mole in Wind in the Willows a children’s book by Kenneth Grahame

Sailboats on White Rock Lake, Dallas, TX

Sailboats on White Rock Lake, Dallas, TX

(Click for a larger and more detailed version on Flickr)

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea…”

– Antoine de Saint Exupery

The Right Move

Posted on by Bill Chance

The beauty of a move lies not in its appearance but in the thought behind it.

—-Aaron Nimzowitsch

… the woman who grows up with the idea that she is simply to be an amiable animal, to be caressed and coaxed, is invariably a bitterly disappointed woman. A game of chess will cure such a conceit forever. The woman that knows the most, thinks the most, feels the most, is the most. Intellectual affection is the only lasting love. Love that has a game of chess in it can checkmate any man and solve the problem of life.

—- Charles Dickens

Dance

Posted on by Bill Chance

Let us read and let us dance – two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.
—-Voltaire

Balloons

Posted on by Bill Chance

The best way of travel, however, if you aren’t in any hurry at all, if you don’t care where you are going, if you don’t like to use your legs, if you don’t want to be annoyed at all by any choice of directions, is in a balloon. In a balloon, you can decide only when to start, and usually when to stop. The rest is left entirely to nature.

—- William Pene du Bois, The Twenty-one Balloons.

balloons

Farmer’s Market, Dallas, TX

who knows if the moon’s

a balloon, coming out of a keen city

in the sky – filled with pretty people?

—-E E Cummings

Set List on the Green

Posted on by Bill Chance

set_list

After having written a “Bad Review” of Klyde Warren Park… I sure seem to find myself going down there a lot.

Thursday night was a fun event planned at the park – it was the first Set List on the Green, where they had chosen six local musicians to play from 6:30 on, a half hour each. I had not heard of or heard any of the artists:

  1. 6:30 Dan O’Connell
  2. 7:00 Michael Mojica
  3. 7:30 CW Ingram
  4. 8:00 Victor Andrada
  5. 8:30 David Lopez
  6. 9:00 Kirk Thurmond

Work has been tough this week and as the end of the day approached I began to have second thoughts. I had plenty of stuff I needed to do at home. It would be a hurried trip on the DART train downtown. It was getting cold outside.

Sitting at my desk, I decided to make my decision right when I walked into the parking lot. If it felt cold, I would take my car home, otherwise – off to the train station and a ride downtown.

The air temperature was right on the edge, so I hesitated. I’m am trying to live my life outward, so, if in doubt… I go. I went.

I’m glad I went. I had some sliders from The Butcher’s Son and sat down on a little green table to watch and listen. What I enjoyed was the variety of the performers. You really didn’t know what you were going to get – from someone playing Coldplay covers on a solar powered piano to folk music to cool jazzy vocals to complex emotional original stuff to some real banging on the guitar.

I really liked a few of these guys and will make a note of trying to catch them as they appear hear and there in the Metroplex. There is nothing better than local live music.

next_week_set_list

They will do this the next couple of Thursday nights, and I’m going to give it a shot. Then they will hopefully start up again in the spring – I’m not sure if this will conflict with the Patio Sessions… but at least Dallas is moving in the right direction.

I did not bring my camera, so no original photos – but here’s some youtube videos of the performers.

What I learned this week, November 30, 2012

Posted on by Bill Chance

 

D Magazine: Why Does Dallas Hate Cyclists?

Bicycling in Dallas is too difficult and too dangerous. Bicycling magazine called Dallas the worst city for cyclists—twice (in 2008 and 2012). As a result, only heroes do it. And the solution is simple. We need only change the way we think.

When the story you are reading is published online, there will appear, without question, comments from people who will assail Mike McNair and hurl insults at cyclists of every stripe for getting in the way of their cars. A number of years ago, golf commentator David Feherty wrote a story for D Magazine about getting run over on his bike by a car in Dallas. He did a turn with Krys Boyd on 90.1 KERA to talk about the experience and his long rehabilitation. Online and on air, a sizable number of people said: “Screw the cyclists! They are a hazard and should get off the road!” Words to that effect.

That attitude is the first thing that must change if Dallas is ever to achieve its world-class ambitions. Bicyclists are like children. They are slow. They are sometimes unpredictable. They weave and wander and clearly think the world revolves around them. They infuriate. But they are our future. So we should not only tolerate them, we should encourage and coddle them.

Great News. The Dallas Museum of Art had free admission when it was first opened, and I was working downtown. While it is worth the paid admission, making it free enables a person to enjoy the place on a more informal basis. I used to go there and look at one piece of art only – really think about it. Hard to do that when you pay ten bucks to get in.

Museum Tower is an “attack” on the Nasher Sculpture Center’s garden, building and art

As Nasher Sculpture Center landscape architect Peter Walker sees it, the intense light reflecting off Museum Tower, the 42-story, $200 million condominium complex across from the center, is an “attack on the garden and on the building and on the art.” According to Walker, “What the reflection does is very much like putting light through a magnifying glass, it essentially burns everything that it sees.”

Writing in my Moleskine Journal outside the Mojo Lounge, Decatur Street, French Quarter, New Orleans

Anyone with free time in North Texas tomorrow, Saturday, December 1st, think about coming down to Deep Ellum for the first

Dallas Writing Marathon

Taps for growler filling behind the bar.

Craft and Growler, down on Exposition near fair park, is open and it’s a cool place. A long way for me to drive for a growler full of beer…. but it’s worth it (my car gets great mileage).

An Idea Pomodoro – timer, pen, composition book.

A freelance writer shares his thoughts and experiences using the Pomodoro Technique to cut down on distractions and squeeze more productivity out of his day.

How a tomato helps me get stuff done

Balls

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Baby,” I said. “I’m a genius but nobody knows it but me.”

—- Charles Bukowski

Jenga

Posted on by Bill Chance

The Jenga Master

She spent a decade of deprivation, dedication, and study at a monastery in the mountains of Bhutan, high on the slopes of unclimbed Gangkhar Puensum, studying the game under the mysterious monks until she returned a Jenga Master.

Now she earns a meager living hustling the game in the city park.

The children are amazed at her skill, but they will never have the patience nor the passion to become a Jenga Master.

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