Tag Archives: Dallas

The Judy’s are on YouTube

Posted on by Bill Chance
1982 – I was excited. A bunch of cow-orkers and myself had tickets to see the B-52s. The venue for the post-punk, new wave show was a strange place called the Wintergarden Ballroom on John West Road in East Dallas. The cross street was Dilido – the worst name for a street, ever. The building is still there, it’s a factory that makes raised flooring for datacenters now.  I had seen Devo at the Wintergarden a few months before.  If memory serves, there were only a few rows of seats, almost everybody stood – which added an intensity to the shows.
A ticket to Devo at the Wintergarden

A ticket to Devo at the Wintergarden

We were all there, I was very excited. The B-52s had really meant something very special to me after I had had an epiphany while hearing Private Idaho on a car radio at three in the morning driving hell bent for leather somewhere in the vast expanse of the Kansas Flint Hills.

The warm up band came out. It was a Houston based trio named The Judy’s. I had never heard of them. They started to play.

I can’t remember anything about the B-52s that night. But after almost thirty years I think I know and remember every song in The Judy’s’ set.

They simply blew everybody away. It was incredible.

They might have seemed like a novelty act. Dressed in some sort of obscure uniforms (Milkmen?) they played strange instruments. The keyboard player used a child’s toy piano, often holding it on his shoulder. The drummer mostly beat on a string of pots and pans hanging from a stand. They made use of a static filled television to provide an odd harmony.

But they were not a novelty act. The music was unlike anything anybody had heard before (or since), but it was unquestionably great. The audience didn’t leap about or dance (much) – they stood there stunned, swaying, enthralled by what we saw on the stage.

It was special. The funny thing is, talk to anybody who saw The Judy’s back then, they will tell you the same thing.

I guess the Judy’s were the prime example of a local hit. They were worshipped in Texas. The Talking Heads opened for them in Houston.

They got a lot of airplay on George Gimarc‘s seminal radio show back in the day. I remember waiting on line at the Granada Theater for a midnight showing of Shock Treatment (the awful sequel to Rocky Horror) when The Judy’s’ Guyana Punch came on somebody’s cassette boom box. The line went nuts and made him rewind and play it over and over.
Washarama

Washarama

I bought vinyl copies of Washarama and Moo.
Moo

Moo

Everyone assumed they would be a big hit – but they slowly drifted into obscurity. They pretty much disappeared, except in the minds of their fans from back in the day. I guarantee that none of us ever forgot them.

And now they are on YouTube. And their music has been pressed into CDs. Now, where’s my wallet, where’s my credit card.
The Judy’s live in 1981 singing their quintessential number – Guyana Punch
My favorite Judy’s song has always been Her Wave. Here is that song from the same 1981 show.
I don’t know how I missed this: they played at SXSW in 2008. Man, I wish I could have been there.

This is truly the best of all possible worlds.

Taqueria – La Marketa Cafe

Posted on by Bill Chance

Lee and I were driving downtown yesterday, later than I had wanted to go, it was Texas nuclear hot, and nobody had eaten. Lee announced that he had to have something to eat before we went to the Nasher. When a college boy says he has to eat, he has to eat.

I threw the criteria in to my head…

-We were headed downtown (not a lot of action downtown on the weekends – shame on Dallas)

-We were in a hurry (no sit down restaurants)

-No chain-type fast food (general rule of mine, whenever given a choice, I choose local, privately owned – have to support the peeps)

I did not have much of an idea until an old, musty memory came bubbling up. I was at the Dallas Farmer’s Market, buying vegetables, and I saw a Taqueria in a run-down stand right in the middle of things. I remember wanting to eat there in the worst way, but we had other plans that day.

Tex-Mex is not my favorite, but I love Taqueria food. Incredibly unhealthy, probably not too sanitary – but fast, spicy, and good. What can be better?

“I think there’s a taco stand in the Farmer’s Market, Lee. It’s not too far from the Nasher, can you handle that?” I said to Lee.

“Go for it,” he said. So I exited on Good-Latimer and threaded my way through the giant glass canyons of downtown to the Farmer’s Market.

The place was hopping. The ragged field that serves as a parking lot was filling up – groups and families were wandering around with bags of vegetables, flats of bedding plants, and carts with Mexican clay pots and sculptures. A street musician was playing wildly inappropriate music (I have never heard Steve Miller’s Swingtown done by a busker before) and they were setting up a stage for a cooking demonstration.

I love the Dallas Farmer’s Market and am glad that it has become so popular (at least on a Saturday morning). I’ve been going there ever since I worked downtown twenty years ago and would walk over for a bag of tomatoes before taking the bus home to Lower Greenville.

It has grown quite a bit since then – the area is now surrounded by condominium urban-hipster type developments and the city has built a new air-conditioned “shed” to accommodate more retailers than the traditional farmers and wholesalers that still line up in the lines of stalls in the old open sheds.

La Marketa Cafe in front of Shed 2 at the Dallas Farmer's Market

La Marketa Cafe in front of Shed 2 at the Dallas Farmer's Market

We walked up and in front of the new “Shed Number 2” was, sure enough, a run-down, rounded, concrete building with a sign that said, “La Marketa Cafe” and a big, hand-lettered menu board.

I asked if it was still early enough for breakfast and it was. The menu was complex, but we quickly settled on tacos and burritos – corn and flour – and the options:

chorizo
potatoes
ham
sausage
bacon
beans&cheese

“Two tacos, one corn, one flour, one sausage, one beans&cheese, one burrito…, bacon and two bottles of water.”

I had to repeat it twice, but I didn’t really care if they got it right. It’s all good. They asked if I wanted “everything?” and I said, of course, “Sure.”

The food wasn’t very fast (there were a lot of people ordering and waiting), but it was very, very good. Large, full of eggs, onions. and peppers and “everything.” The best was the sauce (that’s the most important thing isn’t it?). Two paper ramekins – one with a hearty red, the other a wonderful spicy guacamole (I hate wimpy guacamole).

Lee getting ready to attack a breakfast taco

Lee getting ready to attack a breakfast taco

La Marketa Cafe (I have no idea where the Cafe come from) has now risen to the top of my extensive list of approved taquerias.

Now I want to go back, early, when there is a little cool morning air left wafting around, have some tacos, watch some people. I might even pick out a bag of tomatoes before I go back home.

Eating al fresco in front of the taqueria

Eating al fresco in front of the taqueria - HDR

Make it or Break it

Posted on by Bill Chance
45

45

What you got back home, little sister, to play your fuzzy warbles on? I bet you got little save pitiful, portable picnic players. Come with uncle and hear all proper! Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones. You are invited.

—– A Clockwork Orange

When I first started to listen to music, a 45 RPM record cost ninety-eight cents. I had a dollar a week coming in and would eagerly await a trip to the record store to buy my music single. They had little booths that would let you listen to your prospective purchase, but I never would. I had been listening to the top-40 all week and would already have my mind made up. . Actually, the new national top-40 came out on Friday. Every night would be a local top-ten. I was fascinated by how much more volatile and responsive the nightly list would be – dominated by call-ins. That nightly snip would whet my appetite for the Friday countdown. Friday night, I’d think about it and make my choice.

On Saturday I would march right up to the big display – four columns horizontal, ten rows vertical, forty numbered slots – and snatch out my selection – march right to the counter and pay.

These were the days of battery-powered record players. The days of taping pennies to the tone arm to keep a scratched, overplayed, worn-out, favorite record from skipping.

Somehow, from somewhere, maybe a garage sale, we bought for a couple of dollars a huge stack of used, abandoned forty-fives – old stuff, no sleeves, just a stack-o-wax. We spent a day down in an unfinished basement with those platters and a pitiful, portable picnic player. One by one, we would cue up a record and within a few seconds after the tinny music began to eke out of the cheap speakers we would shout, “Make it or Break it?!” Inevitably, the choice would be “Break it!” and we would sling the sub-par disk against the concrete wall, shattering it into sharp shards of useless grooved vinyl. By the end of the day we had an impressive pile of ex-music.

The only platter that survived was 96 Tears, by ? and the Mysterians. It was addicting right from the start, so it survived. That heroin Farfisa organ.

Over time, later,  I played the hell out of that record.

I would see that band live decades later (1984) in a reunion double-bill concert with Joe King Carrasco at the Arcadia in Dallas. It was an evening of absolute off-the-hook greatness. I think that may have been the high-water mark of Western Civilization.

I feel guilt, to this day, over our lunatic day of Make it or Break it. I took so much from the single survivor. Looking back, I wonder what wonders were in those records we smashed. How much early rock or rockabilly or other classic stuff. Oh well, easy come, easy go.

Ozymandias

Posted on by Bill Chance
ozzy by chancew1
ozzy, a photo by chancew1 on Flickr.

And on the pedestal these words appear:
`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 have always had a soft spot for abandoned sculpture. Something about the idea of an expensive, large, conceived, funded, designed, constructed, dedicated, photographed, and ballyhooed public work of art forgotten, gone to seed, abandoned – yet still there for all to see – stirs something primeval, prevalent, and tragic in my heart and pen.

For a decade or so in the boom times of the waning years of the last century, there was a luxuriant development in North Dallas near the intersection of Highway 75 and the LBJ 635 Interstate loop called Park Central. It rose up on the land of a long-abandoned WWII airbase – yes, really – I discovered that the beloved Olla Podrida was a re-purposed aircraft hanger. There was an outdoor concert venue that everyone remembers and a spate of modern office towers scrambling toward the sky.

It also boasted a serious outdoor sculpture collection. I actually remember breathless news stories when the newest hunk of abstract steel rose into the summer heat. It was all pretty darn cool.

Then the economy cycled one of its many downturns (don’t remember which one) and it all went to crap.

The concert venue closed, the buildings began to gain coats of peeling paint and discolored concrete as everything expensive moved north to the far exburgs and Park Central was pretty much forgotten. Especially the sculptures. They do not bring in very much income in tough times. The artworks quickly disappeared, swallowed up by parking lots. I don’t know where they went. Were they sold off for scrap metal?

They went quickly, except for one. For a decade a lone piece of artwork stood stoutly in a weedy field, right off the interstate. A dark, twisted monolith – I almost expected to see primitive apes waving jawbones at each other around it. Literally, a million people drove by it every day – but I think I was the only one to notice it still standing there. I drove down one day to look for a plaque or some indication of what it was or who the artist was, but could find nothing, even though I worked up a good sweat and fed a thousand mosquitoes digging around in the scrub prickles trying to find some information.

The sculpture disappeared a couple years ago – swallowed up by the parking lot of a brand-spanking-new megachurch. I don’t know where it went. I suppose it was broken down and crushed into a landfill somewhere.

I wonder if I’m the only one that misses it.

Dallas N

Posted on by Bill Chance
Dallas n by chancew1
Dallas n, a photo by chancew1 on Flickr.

A helicopter flyi*g across the Dow*tow* Dallas Skyli*e. It’s o* a quest to fi*d a place to place its letter. O*ly o*e letter, a red letter, a gia*t letter. But Where, Where does it go?

Walking Tall

Posted on by Bill Chance
walking_tall by chancew1
walking_tall, a photo by chancew1 on Flickr.

Another HDR picture of the “Walking Tall” version of the “Travelling Man” series of sculptures down in Deep Ellum here in Dallas.

I had a little accident taking these photos. One of his feet is on a bit of an elevated platform – it looks like a green disk. Do you see it?

I didn’t.

Stepped off and backwards – did protect my camera, though, as I tumbled into some gravel.

You can see one of the new DART stations across the street. I should have waited until a train was going by. Sometime, I’ll go do that.

Dart Mirror

Posted on by Bill Chance
Dart Mirror by chancew1
Dart Mirror, a photo by chancew1 on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
The Dallas DART train, Red Line, reflected in the mirrored walls of an office building (actually the parking garage) at NW Highway and Central.

When I first moved to Dallas, thirty years ago, one of the places that I liked was the twin gold towers of Campbell Center. They were featured in the opening montage of Dallas (the television show – J.R. Ewing and all that, remember) and were an obvious feature at Highway 75 and Loop 12 – two gold reflecting office towers, shining in the setting sun, flanking a fancy hotel.

Watch it here.

Now that I watch the opening credits, I can’t help but notice the Doubletree Hotel is not there. I have no idea when it was added. Anyhow…. Man, Dallas (the city) has grown.

I hired a secretary in one of the towers to rewrite and copy my resume – which must have worked because I was able to get a couple of job offers in a few days. That was not an easy feat in 1981 – the economy felt a lot like it does right now.

Over the decades, a lot of office towers have grown up in Dallas, overshadowing the twin gold towers. Nobody really thinks of them much anymore. I’ve been to a few wedding receptions in the hotel, had a fun New Year’s Eve at a party there once.

One cool thing now… at least cool to me… is that the DART Red Line train, going south from Park Lane along Greenville rises up onto an elevated track right behind Campbell Center. I always try and sit on the West side of the train so I can watch the reflection in the gold cladding of the buildings.

Always look for small enjoyments.

Lives of folks like you

Posted on by Bill Chance

AS THE FLOWERS ARE ALL MADE SWEETER BY THE SUNSHINE AND THE DEW, SO THIS OLD WORLD IS MADE BRIGHTER BY THE LIVES OF FOLKS LIKE YOU.

—-Epitaph, Bonnie Parker, Oct. 1, 1910 – May 23, 1934

I was driving around in an unfamiliar part of town, more lost than not, when I noticed on my right, the Crown Hill Memorial Park Cemetery. I had been there once before, many years before, following the directions on some Find-A-Grave website. I had driven over there guided by some morbid curiosity – I wanted to see Bonnie Parker‘s gravesite.

Bonnie Parker's Gravesite

Bonnie Parker's Gravesite

It is always peaceful to visit the grave site of someone you don’t know. I wonder who puts the flowers out for Bonnie after all these years.

The grave is in a nondescript spot.

The area around Bonnie Parker's Grave

The area around Bonnie Parker's Grave

Her mother is buried to the right of her. I’ve wondered about the recent family plot that is to the left, the Tyner plot. Do you have to pay extra to get a plot next to someone infamous? Or did people avoid it all these years. I think it would be cool to be buried next to Bonnie, simply for the kick of having people come visit and say, “Jeez Honey, look who’s right next door.”

What about Clyde? He’s buried across town, I’m afraid. Her family didn’t want him buried anywhere near Bonnie. There was some interest in having him moved next to her, but nothing came of it.

I tried to visit Clyde’s grave once. It’s in a particularly unpleasant part of town and when I walked up the gate to the small overgrown cemetery was locked. While I was contemplating hopping the fence, a transvestite prostitute appeared and asked me for some smokes. I decided it best to call it a day. Maybe I’ll try going back there again, some redevelopment has improved that area in the last decade.

I’m sorry, this is all too morbid, isn’t it. So watch this video, it’ll make you feel better.

Notes from the Underground

Posted on by Bill Chance

I AM A SICK MAN…. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.

—Dostoevsky, Fyodor . Notes from the Underground

Another long day, like the one before, like the one after, I don’t know when it will end. Looking at my calendar… maybe March of next year? Looking at my 401k… never.

It was so hot today… Summer won’t be here for another two weeks or so but it’s already smothering, baking. I had to drive all over the Metroplex, all the way from Bachman Lake (I remember when this was one of my favorite slices of the city… now, yikes!) out to the suburbs around Allen. Accidents everywhere, I had to navigate by GPS traffic reports, winding around avoiding the sections of red lines on the map.

I’m still further behind than I was the day before.

Oh, wait… I have to go to the kitchen and make my lunch for tomorrow. Maybe a nice piece of fish and some stir-fried vegetables. I’ll be back in a few minutes.

While you’re waiting. Here’s something to watch… a little entertainment.

OK, now I’m back.

Still here? Had fun watching the video? I thought so.

Well, let’s see, where was I?

Oh yes, Notes from the Underground

I write only for myself, and I wish to declare once and for all that if I write as though I were addressing readers, that is simply because it is easier for me to write in that form. It is a form, an empty form — I shall never have readers. I have made this plain already …

I don’t wish to be hampered by any restrictions in the compilation of my notes. I shall not attempt any system or method. I will jot things down as I remember them.

…..

 I shall perhaps obtain actual relief from writing. Today, for instance, I am particularly oppressed by one memory of a distant past. It came back vividly to my mind a few days ago, and has remained haunting me like an annoying tune that one cannot get rid of. And yet I must get rid of it somehow. I have hundreds of such reminiscences; but at times some one stands out from the hundred and oppresses me. For some reason I believe that if I write it down I should get rid of it.

Why not try?

—Dostoevsky, Fyodor . Notes from the Underground

Oh, shoot! Look at the time. I keep reading that a good night’s sleep is important to health, well-being, and a happy life. Too late already for that tonight… but must do the best I can.

Toodles.

Dallas Arts District Architecture Tour

Posted on by Bill Chance

The guide for our walking tour in the Dallas Arts District, standing at the end of the barrel vault at the Dallas Museum of Art, gestured toward the towering spire of Postmodern granite, the Trammell Crow Building, and said, “in the eighties there was a building boom in downtown Dallas.”

That simple sentence brought the memories tumbling out of the cowbwebby recesses of my creaking old head. At that time, I was working at the old Cotton Exchange building, only a few blocks away, and I would look out of my office window every day and watch the progress of the Trammell Crow tower as it rose out the enormous hole where a cracked parking lot used to be. It went up fast, it grew like a weed. I was young then, I still gave a shit, and was fascinated with the construction techniques – pouring the concrete floors and support columns, the utilities, the dark glass, and the polished granite cladding. I did not know what it would look like when finished and watching it grow was like a slow-motion puzzle being solved right in front of me. The building was assembled inside-out and looking at it now, almost thirty years later, I still know its innermost secrets.

Trammell Crow Center and the Winspear Sunscreen

The Winspear Opera House is surrounded by a massive sixty foot high sunscreen made of aluminum louvers.It is amazing how much cooler the killer Texas heat is under this high-tech shade. The picture shows a small section of the slats with the tip of the Trammell Crow Center beyond.

The Dallas Museum of Art was also built while I worked down there. Admission was free when it was new and I would walk over there almost every day at lunch and pick out one single painting or sculpture and stare at it until I felt that I possessed it completely.

Yesterday, I checked the Friday Newspaper (online, of course) to see if there was anything interesting to do over the weekend and I found a notice about a walking tour of the architecture of the Dallas Arts District at ten AM on Saturday. That sounded like a plan.

A pole-sitting sculpture in front of a new Condo Tower going up.

A pole-sitting sculpture in front of a new Condo Tower going up.

It was interesting… and although I’m pretty familiar with the Arts District, I did learn a few things.

At the turn of the century or so (1899, not Y2K) Ross Avenue was the street where all the wealthy scions of Dallas built their mansions. The only one remaining, The Belo Mansion was purchased and rebuilt by the Dallas Bar Association. Prior to that, for many years it was leased to a funeral parlor. In 1934, Clyde Barrow’s bullet-ridden corpse was displayed and attracted a crowd of thirty thousand macabre curious onlookers.

I was a little disappointed that the wonderful European sculpture was gone from the walk around the base Trammell Crow Building. Our guide said it had been moved to the Old Parkland Campus and that it would soon be replaced by a garden of Asian sculpture. That will be cool.

Of course, it’s common knowledge that the district features public buildings designed by four Pritzker Prize winning architects – I.M. Pei and the Morton Meyerson Symphony Center, Renzo Piano and the Nasher Sculpture Center, Norman Foster and the Winspear Opera House, and Rem Koolhaas and the Wyly Theater. At the east end of Flora street is the City Performance Hall (under construction) and the One Arts Plaza mixed-use development. It’s a bit sterile sown there on the east, but there is still a lot of construction.

Guadalupe Cathedral

The Bell Tower of the Guadalupe Cathedral framed by skyscrapers. Taken next to the construction site of the new City Performance Hall.

We ended the tour there on the east end of Flora. I walked back taking some pictures. The Nasher was open for free, and I couldn’t resist a visit. The Trammel Crow Collection of Asian Art across the street is often overlooked – but it is always free and although it is small, there is always something wonderful to be found there. This time it was the art of Tenzin Norbu and Penba Wandu – they combine ancient techniques with a modern spin – the results are stunning. Norbu‘s painting, “Story of the Northern Plain” was the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in a long time.

The tour was fun. I guess they do these every now and then, if you find yourself in the Big D, I highly recommend it.

Aluminum Tube Skin on the Wyly Theater

Aluminum Tube Skin on the Wyly Theater

Calder, Rodin, and Yoga

Eve, by Auguste Rodin, Three Bollards, by Alexandre Calder, and a yoga class.

Worshipping a New God.

Worshipping a New God.

Headless Construction

Headless Construction. Magdalena Abakanowicz, Bronze Crowd, and the Condo Tower being built next door.

Balloon Room

At the Nasher, they had a room full of balloons. It was an installation by British Artist Martin Creed. Children were queued up for a chance to get inside.

Inside the Nasher’s Balloon Room