“Even the memory of cradling her in my arms is pure euphoria. And all that I ask out of life is that it be constant and unending euphoria.”
―
Back side of bronze, Grapevine, Texas
Constant and Unending Euphoria
Tag Archives: Photography
But the Fighter Still Remains
In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of ev’ry glove that laid him down
Or cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
“I am leaving, I am leaving”
But the fighter still remains—-Simon & Garfunkle, The Boxer
Grapevine, Texas
The Color Of Love And Spanish Mysteries
“Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgandy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”
― On the Road
Water Tower, Grapevine, Texas
The Dawn Remaking the World
“Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.”
― The Picture of Dorian Gray
A duck at dawn, Bachman Lake, Dallas, Texas
Explicit In This Colliding Metal
“He dreamed of ambassadorial limousines crashing into jack-knifing butane tankers, of taxis filled with celebrating children colliding head-on below the bright display windows of deserted supermarkets. He dreamed of alienated brothers and sisters, by chance meeting each other on collision courses on the access roads of petrochemical plants, their unconscious incest made explicit in this colliding metal, in the heamorrhages of their brain tissue flowering beneath the aluminized compression chambers and reactions vessels.”
― Crash
LBJ Freeway and TI Boulevard, Dallas, Texas
Fall Like a Thunderbolt
“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”
― The Art of War
Mural, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Shifting Landscapes
“Sometimes, when one is moving silently through such an utterly desolate landscape, an overwhelming hallucination can make one feel that oneself, as an individual human being, is slowly being unraveled. The surrounding space is so vast that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep a balanced grip on one’s own being. The mind swells out to fill the entire landscape, becoming so diffuse in the process that one loses the ability to keep it fastened to the physical self. The sun would rise from the eastern horizon, and cut it’s way across the empty sky, and sink below the western horizon. This was the only perceptible change in our surroundings. And in the movement of the sun, I felt something I hardly know how to name: some huge, cosmic love.”
― The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Shifting Landscapes, Shawn Saumell
Shifting Landscapes, Shawn Saumell
In November, on a bike-ride version of the Cedars Open Studio tour we stopped at an exhibition called Hyperlocal, by The MAC. There was a lot of good stuff there – but one in particular stood out. It was by Shawn Saumell and was called Shifting Landscapes. A small diorama of dried moss and flowers sat on a pedestal. An IV bag hung from the ceiling – slowly and steadily pouring out, not liquid, but a stream of sand. This was building up on the tiny landscape until, eventually, it would drown it in dryness.
Pretty cool stuff.
Creepy Snowman
“It snowed last year too: I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.”
― A Child’s Christmas in Wales
Grapevine, Texas
At the Grapevine Christmas Festival they had these crude animatronic snowmen – where a moving face was projected inside a frosted glass globe when the snowmen talked. They told some sort of winter/Christmas story. The kids were fascinated. I thought it was creepy and didn’t stick around long enough to figure out what they were talking about.
Two Dreams About Him After He Died
“I had two dreams about him after he died. I don’t remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin’ him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin’ through the mountains of a night. Goin’ through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin’. Never said nothin’. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin’ fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and that he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.”
― No Country for Old Men
Nightwatchman, Grapevine City Hall, Grapevine, Texas
Nightwatchman, Grapevine City Hall, Grapevine, Texas
As we walked down Main Street in Grapevine taking photographs for the Winter Dallas Photowalk I couldn’t keep from looking ahead at a giant statue, The Grapevine Nightwatchman, on top of the Grapevine City Hall. It was a giant bronze man in a cowboy hat holding a lantern in the night. By the time we arrived at that part of the street the sun had long set and I couldn’t get a good photo of it – couldn’t do justice anyway. Sometimes it’s like that… you know you have to see it live – but you snap that shutter anyway.
For some reason I kept thinking of that quote at the end of No Country for Old Men (the book and the movie) about the sheriff’s dream of his father going ahead on horseback carrying fire in a horn. I know the statue had a lantern… not a horn of coals and wasn’t on horseback, but he had that same look of ancient burden and longing – of stoic hopeless responsibility – that I imagine the sheriff’s father had in the dream.
Cosplay – Placed in Unaccustomed Clothes
“His gray suit makes him seem extra vulnerable, in the way of children placed in unaccustomed clothes for ceremonies they don’t understand.”
― Rabbit Is Rich
Grapevine, Texas
Grapevine, Texas
Bill Chance 