“Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.”
― Wall and Piece
Fabrication Yard, Dallas, Texas
The odor of drying alkyd is overpowering. Almost as strong as the smell of burning weed.
“I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.”
― The Kindly Ones
Graffiti on the wall across the street from Lee Harvey’s, Dallas, Texas
“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.”
―
Mural, Dan Colcer, Bowls and Tacos, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
“Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.”
―
Fabrication Yard, Dallas, Texas
It’s not a gentle woodland breeze wafting the smells of nature – it’s the sour bite of drying spray paint. Not the rustle of a leaved canopy – it’s the pulsing of a rap song from a nearby video shoot. Not a copse of ancient forest – but an abandoned set of corrugated steel shacks covered with crude graffiti.
But still the sun splashes. The same sun.
“I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing-for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible to see your opponent is you …”
― On Boxing
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
“I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.”
―Mural by Sour Grapes Crew (detail) Oak Cliff, Dallas, Texas (taken from Dallas Streetcar window)
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.”
― Gravity’s Rainbow
Fabrication Yard, Dallas, Texas
