“Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons
I like photographs that I take because I can look at them and they will bring back the sensations and emotions I felt in the instant that I pressed the shutter. In this one I can feel the summer heat still coming off the sidewalk as the evening cools off. I can see the bright “magic hour” preternaturally colored light bouncing off the buildings all around me making the shapes and angles sharper than they otherwise are. I can hear the honking of the Friday evening traffic – office drones desperately trying to get home, delivery trucks dropping off the last loads of the day, the opera patrons heading for the parking garage. I smell the diesel exhaust mixing with the cooking wafting from the local, sidewalk-level restaurants, gearing up for the dinner crowd. I remember the feel of the rough sidewalk under my feet.
I remember the excitement of the workday being over and the anticipation of hearing some live music. I remember the layering of memories as I walked down a familiar street that had changed drastically, completely, since the first day I had set foot – changed almost as much as I had. I remember the slight smile on my face.
Without this photo, these memories are lost in time.
I’ve… seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those… moments… will be lost in time, like tears… in… rain. Time… to die…
—-Rutger Hauer, Blade Runner
With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
“I have neither desires nor fears,” the Khan declared, “and my dreams are composed either by my mind or by chance.”
“Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
I have been putting up photographs I took a few weekends back at the Deep Ellum Art Park near Downtown Dallas. I have a lot more that I can use as I postprocess them to fill in journal entries on days that nothing much happens (or nothing that I want to write about here). The Deep Ellum Art Park is an area of concrete pillars of the overhead freeway connecting I30 and H75 (Central Expressway) plus a series of monoliths of various shapes that have been arranged in the gravelly areas between roadways for the purpose of serving as a canvas.
It’s a fun and interesting use of otherwise wasted space – a recovered area of urban blight.
It’s been growing over a period of decades and now has expanded to include decorative artworks in and around an urban garden and a dog park. It’s sort of officially authorized graffiti. I enjoy visiting the area, walking around looking at the graffiti/ paintings, and (obviously) taking photos of the scene.
One of the things I particularly enjoy is that I’ve been going down there for about twenty years now and it brings back memories. I remember sometime… maybe the early 90’s or so, that I did essentially what I’m doing now – I rode my bicycle (it would have been my Yokota Mountain bike – newly purchased – now converted into a commuter) down there and took some photographs.
That wasn’t really that long ago (in geologic time, for example), but times have changed so much. I would have been using my Pentax 35mm SLR so I would have been a lot more judicious about the number of shots – don’t want to waste film. Do you remember when you would say things like, “If the pictures come out” – “come out” was a common term back when you couldn’t look at the back of your camera and see what you had just shot?
….Or was it only ten years ago and I was using a primitive crude digital camera?
I don’t know which is true – I guess it doesn’t matter – thought it is pitiful and sad when your life stretches out into one featureless plain and one decade is indistinguishable from another.
Yet, a lot has changed.
But most of what has changed is me.
It was going down there and finding a few monoliths newly constructed and being painted for the first time. No more than a slim handful of them. Now there are over thirty, plus the hundred or so column sides. Each had an artist attached to it. Through lucky timing I had arrived during the inaugural event and the artists were at work.
I sat down on a bench to watch the painters paint (that’s another change – the benches are all gone – taken away because they attracted too many sleeping homeless people). There was an older man on a tall upright obelisk, a young man on a rectangular panel, and a young woman next to him on a semicircle jutting out of the earth.
I had so little confidence then – it was so very difficult to take pictures of people. Now, I would walk right up and ask them to pose with their work… they are painting a public monument after all – they would crave the publicity.
Watching the woman paint her bit of whitewashed concrete canvas I was filled with a hollow sense of longing and beauty. I don’t know why the scene of a woman and two men painting had this effect on me. The woman wasn’t especially attractive – and her painting, honestly, wasn’t particularly good. As a matter of fact, only the old man had a great amount of talent and skill – though I don’t remember what any of them actually painted. Their work is long gone now – painted over several times.
I dug around in my files and photographs and the only things I could find are these two small, blurry, edited shots I was using in some silly project.
The only thing that remains, the only thing left, is my memory of sadness that I felt at the time. That is still vivid and clear… even as all the other details have faded into obscurity.
He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
When I was a little kid, I had a paint-by-number kit… you know, one of those bilious hunks of cheap canvas board with numbered areas printed in blue ink that corresponded with little plastic tubs of oil paint. Now, I imagine they come with some sort of water-based acrylic – safer and easier for children – but this one had real slow-drying artists’ oil paint.
I might have been six years old… maybe seven. Fifty years ago.
I sat at the kitchen table, wielding the cheap brush that came with the kit, carefully cleaning it after each color and moving across the canvas matching the numbers with the proper paint. It amazed me… that I could create an actual work of art (unfortunately, my skills have advanced little since).
It didn’t seem too hard to me to make the leap beyond the preprinted canvas – surely it wouldn’t be that hard to do yourself. I was a little kid, what did I know? Nothing about composition, blending… and nothing about mixing colors.
What I especially remember is the sky above the sailboat. The scene had the boat fighting against a headwind on a dramatic tumbling, mostly overcast day – with the heavens filled with irregular patches of brown, beige, gray, and a little blue peeking through here and there. It was beautiful to me.
Now, whenever I have a sky like that… like this, my subconscious conjures up the by-the-mumbers painting of the sailboat from the distant cobwebby recesses of the past. Before I realize what I am thinking about, weather like this, fills my nose with the unmistakable odor of linseed oil and turpentine. Only then do I pause, look up, and remember the sailboat.
Our government, I am more and more convinced, has degenerated into a mechanism whose most palpable effect (not its purpose, of course) is to irritate citizens by wasting their time and requiring their collusion in an endless bureaucratic paper chase.
My Tech Top 10
An interesting list – Actually, I only agree with one of his choices. Bet you can guess which one.
The only way to drop into Rio. I’m glad I was able to watch this on youtube – now I don’t have to do it myself.
The entire process seems to have started in 1923, when a biologist named Walter Finkler reported that he had managed to successfully transplant the heads of insects. He’d been working with water boatmen, meal worms, and common butterflies – both in adult and grub form. The transplantation process was not complex. He’d grab two insects, cut off their heads with sharp scissors, and switch them. The fluid that the insects themselves leaked cemented the new heads in place. After a little time — a 1923 article says a few weeks — the insects were healed up and doing whatever their new heads told them to do. Finkler claimed that the heads of female insects on male bodies continued female behavior, and the head of one species of butterfly kept the habits of its own species, even when its body belonged to a different species.
I was talking to Nick and Lee about digital technology, history, and advancement, trying not to be so much of an old fart – “When I was a kid we had to walk fifty miles to school through twenty feet of blowing snow….”.
They were messing with their IPhones and imagining what the state of digital electronics would be in ten, twenty years from now; when the IPhone will be as clunky and obsolete as a hand-cranked telephone. I talked a bit about when I was young – back then you were not allowed to own your own phone – you rented it from the phone company. They were usually hard-wired into the wall (when I was in college, our city of Lawrence, Kansas, was a pilot program for the now-ubiquitous cube taps – it seemed revolutionary [which it was, more than we imagined at the time]) and very, very few folks had more than one phone in the house.
The kids said that the smartphone was the most important digital invention in their lifetime (so far) and that it had changed the way they lived. They are right – the fact that you are now able to tap into the far-flung digital word from any spot (pretty much) on the planet at any time. They were especially adamant about being able to access the web at a moment’s notice is revolutionary – not only communications, but information, maps, social networks…. it really is amazing… here in this, the best of all possible worlds.
I think of going to high school in Central America…. I felt so isolated and out of touch. If the Internet existed then (forget about smart phones) I would have been able to stay up with things…. A few years later – single, back in the US, it was so easy to lose contact. Social Media, a smart phone – what a difference that would have made. I think of all the time I spent searching for pay phones, trying to keep up.
I started thinking of the moments of digital history that affected me. Not so much the technology itself, but the split seconds, the flashes of epiphany, when I realized that things were changing irrevocably – that new worlds of possibility were opening up.
Nick and Lee really didn’t understand what I was getting at, but I still thought about it-
I remember when I first understood the power of using a computer with a graphical interface. I’d been using the early Windows programs and the mouse and all was cool – but I didn’t see what the big deal was. Until one day, sort of at random, I realized I could cut from one program and paste the data, pretty much intact, into a completely different application…. I could do complex calculations in a spreadsheet, for example, and simply cut the whole mess out and paste them into a word processing document without any extra typing. And do that again and again and again until the report was done in a tenth of the time it would have taken me before.
That was a moment when I knew things had changed.
I remember, long before that, before the Internet, even when I discovered digital bulletin boards. I’d stay up late and use my computer to dial in (remember the sounds of dialup and modem negotiation, the tones, the hissing – like Pavlov’s dogs my fingers would itch whenever I heard that sound) and trade ideas and information with total strangers over the phone lines. Once the Internet arrived a couple years later, I was ready for it – it seemed like a single world-wide bulletin board (which it was).
There are hundreds of such moments… all clear as a bell with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia.
One moment stands out for me, however. In and of itself, it wasn’t a big deal, but something about it…. It was the first time I saw a laser printer spit out a document. I had been working for years with Daisy Wheel Printers and then with the Dot Matrix ones. The loud buzzing of the print heads, whopping of the paper, and the crash of the carriage return were ingrained in my ears, brain, and soul.
Of course, I had heard of Laser Printers, but they were somehow an exotic vision of expense and extravagance, something that worthless peons like myself would never have access to. I was visiting another company, one significantly more advanced than mine, and working on some joint reports. When we finished, the little box started spitting out documents with nothing more than an insignificant little whir. That is what amazed me, the silence. You want it? Here it is. No big deal.
My jaw dropped.
Things had changed; things would never be the same again.
Bill Chance 