“I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard sign that I don’t remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is ‘Disappear Here’ and even though it’s probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little and I step on the gas really hard and the car screeches as I leave the light.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero
Invasion Car Show
Deep Ellum
Dallas, Texas
“She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her… I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little stratagems. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her…”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Deep Ellum Art Park
Dallas, Texas
Deep Ellum Art Park
Dallas, Texas
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
Something
In front of
Braindead Brewing
Deep Ellum
Dallas, Texas
“A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne’s theorem that ‘No man is an island,’ but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Dark-Haired Girl
Rusted with Gun
Deep Ellum
Dallas, Texas
“Oh it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Deep Ellum
Dallas, Texas
When looking at street art – murals especially – there is a thin line between art and graffiti and advertisement.
For example, this one – is obviously an advertisement for the band The Orange and their new album, Sharing Vitamins.
But it’s still cool – first, because it is cool. Second, because it is actually painted by the leader of the group, Scott Tucker, and he is a second generation professional mural painter, as well as a musician.
It doesn’t get an better than that… now does it my droogs.
Rodeo clown vibrations are crackin’ the skulls of false gods.
—-written in blue Sharpie on the side of an abandoned computer monitor
I am, of course, a fan of street art – the odder the better – and of guerrilla publishing. In my wanderings around town, I once stumbled across an interesting piece of text plastered up on a wall in Deep Ellum – Text on the Streets.
Stuck on a plywood-covered window. Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Then, over a year later, I found the same work stuck in a bottle on a park table in Oak Cliff – Message in a Bottle – Shazam!
Message in a Bottle
I have wondered about the artist – and wasn’t able to find out much. Some other folks were looking too, and I found a few examples of his work photographed and posted on the internet.
Here
Here
Here
Here
Then, this weekend, another year later, I found more of the artist’s work in Deep Ellum.
First, I stumbled across a pink decorated metal box on an out-of-the-way stoop.
Box found
Deep Ellum
Dallas, Texas
Inside the box was a Xeroxed art work, with writing on the reverse.
Fantastic Cosmic Kismet Vibrations are flowing to you and through you NOW!
Obviously the same person. Walking onward, I found that he had kicked his stuff up a notch. In front of Braindead Brewing I found an old decorated computer monitor. It is good to see that in the last few years he has learned how to spell Hootenanny.
The Future is Now
Deep Ellum
Dallas, Texas
The Universal Flow has led you to this exact moment in time and space.
Rodeo Clown Vibrations
Really cool stuff. I bow down.
Oh, and by the way, on the piece of paper found in the box, I discovered a clue that led me to find the artist… they even have a Facebook Page.
So who is it? I don’t think I’ll let on. Find it yourself. The clues are there.
“Any startling piece of work has a subversive element in it, a delicious element often. Subversion is only disagreeable when it manifests in political or social activity.”
—-Leonard Cohen
Rat Fink – painted on a firewall
Invasion Car Show
Deep Ellum
Dallas, Texas
When I was a little kid – I used to put together plastic models of airplanes. I really enjoyed it – and I couldn’t imagine buying any kits other than aircraft. Then I met some guy, my age, that bought these weird little Ed Roth car kits – Rat Fink and that sort of stuff. At first it seemed uselessly weird to me, but the more I paid attention to the style and attitude, the more I liked it (though I was not then and never would be – a car person).
Now, I realize that it was my first exposure to subversive ideas – the first, but not the last.
“For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.”
― Kahlil Gibran
Deep Ellum
Dallas, Texas
If you go down to Deep Elem
Just to have a little fun,
You’d better have your fifteen dollars
When the policeman come.
“If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
If you go down to Deep Elem,
Keep your money in your shoes;
The women in Deep Elem
Got those Deep Elem blues.
Glass from Wine Walk
Deep Ellum
Dallas, Texas
One of my favorite things is the Deep Ellum Wine Walk – you should check it out.
If you go down to Deep Elem,
Take your money in your pants;
The women in Deep Elem
Never give the men a chance.
“And I thought about how many people have loved those songs. And how many people got through a lot of bad times because of those songs. And how many people enjoyed good times with those songs. And how much those songs really mean. I think it would be great to have written one of those songs. I bet if I wrote one of them, I would be very proud. I hope the people who wrote those songs are happy. I hope they feel it’s enough. I really do because they’ve made me happy. And I’m only one person.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Now I once knew a preacher,
Preached the Bible through and through,
He went down into Deep Elem,
Now his preaching days are through.
“People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands – literally thousands – of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
Now I once had a sweet gal,
Lord, she meant the world to me;
She went down into Deep Elem;
She ain’t what she used to be.
Her papa’s a policeman
And her mama walks the street;
Her papa met her mama
When they both were on the beat.
I wanted an electric train for Christmas but I got the saxophone instead.
—-Clarence Clemons
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Bill Chance 