“If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”
― Ray Bradbury
(click to enlarge)
Book With Wings
Anselm Kiefer
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
“The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.
To explain — since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula — for that was his name — was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her.And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”
Douglas Adams, The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe
inside of:
Vortex
Richard Serra
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
“Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist–a master–and that is what Auguste Rodin was–can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is . . . and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be . . . and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body.”
—-Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
“…and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?”
― Vincent van Gogh
Vortex
Richard Serra
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Fort Worth, Texas
“She spent an astonishing amount of time in attending lectures and demonstrations, distributing literature for the Junior Anti-Sex League, preparing banners for Hate Week, making collections for the savings campaign, and such-like activities. It paid, she said; it was camouflage. If you kept the small rules you could break the big ones.”
― George Orwell, 1984
Trinity River Park
Fort Worth
Texas
Unless you live in North Texas – you have no idea how horrifically big the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex is. The entire complex of cities is seventy miles across… side to side or top to bottom… from Rockwall to Benbrook, or McKinney to Cleburn, or Denton to Waxahachie.
That’s a lot of territory. Miles and miles of Texas. That’s almost five thousand square miles of urban landscape.
That’s too much city to cross by bicycle. Or at least by bicycle alone. So, as always, I combined the bike with mass transit – specifically the web of train tracks that once took cattle back to the eastern slaughterhouses… but now shuttle city denizens around the concrete vastness.
Last week, I was surfing the web, checking out facebook, when I was confronted by a photo of a restaurant menu. The restaurant was Brewed – a craft beer/coffee/gastropub in Fort Worth – and they were offering a Temptress-Topped Waffle, paired with a special keg of French Quarter Temptress Stout.
Tempress is a milk stout produced by the Lakewood Brewing Company, located only a couple miles south of my house. I consider Temptress to be one of the best things on earth. Not beers… Things.
So on Saturday I set up my Xootr Swift Folding bicycle and set off for Fort Worth. That is too far for me to ride, so I would combine the bicycle with the local trains. My departure was delayed for an hour after I discovered a thorn in a tire – but I set off nevertheless for the nearest DART station and took the Red line to downtown Dallas. There I boarded the TRE Line for distant Fort Worth.
The only problem was that they were doing some bridge maintenance west of the airport, so the train stopped, everybody piled off and onto a brace of waiting buses, and rode to the next stop where we reboarded another train. The bus had a bike rack on the front; I had never used one of those before. It worked fine, but I felt a nervous jolt in my stomach every time the bus bounced over some pothole or ditch. I could imagine my bike bouncing off, crushed under the wheels.
Of course, the people that designed and built the rack knew much more than me and the trip was fine. Still, the unboarding, boarding, moving, and reboarding took a lot of time and it seemed like forever before I left the train at the T&P station in Fort Worth.
I used Google Maps bicycling directions to find a route to Brewed, locked my bike up outside, and found a seat at the bar.
My Xootr Swift locked up outside Brewed, Fort Worth, Texas
Lakewood Brewing Company, French Quarter Temptress, Special Glass, Brewed, Fort Worth, Texas
Temptress-Topped Waffle, Brewed, Fort Worth, Texas
The French Quarter Temptress was excellent – the waffle with Temptress laced syrup and whipped cream was even better. I really like Brewed – coffee, craft beer, and good food – what can be better than that? The restaurant has a fun, eclectic décor (including a “Seventies Room”) and would be a regular place for me, for sure, if it wasn’t so darned far away. I sat at the bar, chatting with the staff and customers for a lot longer than I intended, but it was fun.
We talked about local beer, about coffee, about New Orleans, and about the asymmetrical rivalry between Dallas and Fort Worth.
I left the restaurant later than I had planned, but still wanted to get a few miles of bike riding in before I headed home. The French Quarter Temptress came in a special souvenir glass – I carefully wrapped it up so I could get it all the way back unbroken. Again, using Google Maps I wound my way to the west, past the Fort Worth Zoo, and along the trails along the river back into downtown.
I wanted to visit the Water Gardens and get some photographs but I felt the pavement grow ragged under me and I realized I had another flat (another thorn) and had to take the time to fix the leak. As I sat on a bench and worked the tire irons and portable pump I kept glancing across the street at something on the sidewalk. It looked like a photorealistic sculpture of a homeless man standing there, holding his shoes, staring into the distance.
During the entire time, maybe twenty minutes, I worked on my tire, the thing never moved, not a fraction of an inch. It must be a sculpture, I thought, I even kept an eye on one little stray lock of hair – which never budged. Testing out my new tire, I rode across the street, and the sculpture turned and looked at me. It was a real homeless person, semi-catatonic, standing stock still until something moved near him.
That shook me a bit – and it was time for a train, so I rode into the T&P station. The trip back included the same train-bus-train dance. So it was TRE train-bus-TRE train-DART Red Line Train-three mile bike ride to get back to my house. I was well after dark when I reached home.
A fun day – but a long way to go for some waffles.
Lead them beside still waters because you know how badly they need still waters.
–Tennessee Williams, The Night of the Iguana
Fort Worth Zoo
Fort Worth, Texas
People from the Seersucker Ride at Klyde Warren Park, Dallas, Texas
Don’t let the spandex-clad iron men scare you off! Here are seven reasons why all types of people are biking to work—and why cities are encouraging them.
French Quarter, New Orleans
Waiting for a flat to get fixed.
Dallas’ downtown has improved so much over the last few years – it’s become a cool place. It still has a long way to go, and it still has a bad reputation as a giant desert of concrete, steel, and glass. However, the “best” downtown isn’t very far away.
On the other hand….
sad
I have written before about how beautiful old homes get torn down for awful modern mansions.
4320 Arcady, Highland Park, Texas – a few months ago
4320 Arcady, now
A familiar buddy from Deep Ellum made the list of weird and interesting public art. Cool.
http://youtu.be/BKorP55Aqvg>
Here are the opening credits to the movie Forrest Gump if Wes Anderson had directed it.
Music by Mark Mothersbaugh
Magazine Street, New Orleans
A very interesting article, although I disagree with his conclusion. I am opposed to mandatory helmet laws but I personally (almost) always wear a helmet.
His argument that ten times more head injuries occur in cars is not a valid one – because there are probably a thousand times more miles driven in cars than on bikes. Also, the argument that helmets reduce the cycling rate is valid from a public policy perspective, but not a personal one. Once you are used to wearing one, it is not a detriment. The argument that a helmet increases risky riding – I think it’s the other way around. Cyclists that engage in risky riding (fast, extreme off-road, heavy traffic) tend to wear helmets, not the other way around.
Now, the idea that cars will come closer to a cyclist with a helmet is interesting – but not strong enough for me to offset the 85% reduction in head injuries. Personally, I made the decision to always wear a helmet thirty years ago. At that time, I had a cyclometer on my bike and I was going down a long, steep hill on a light narrow-tired road bike and the reading hit forty-five miles per hour. I realized that a pebble in the road would be a fatal accident. Now that I think about it, I wear a helmet not so much as protection from cars (those will be bad no matter what) but as a protection from simply falling and hitting my head on a curb or something.
Now, the idea of wearing a helmet while driving or riding in a car is an interesting one. That’s something I could support.
Martin House Brewing Company
Fort Worth, Texas
Bill Chance 