I knew that I wanted to be an artist and it started out as a solution to making work at the beginning. I was a literature student, but I knew very well that I didn’t want to be a novelist.
—-Mai-Thu Perret
from Sightings, by Mai-Thu Perret, 2016, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas
“Keep on acquiring a taste for what is naturally repugnant; this is an unfailing source of pleasure.”
― The Book of Lies
I’ve stolen something. There is a bar that I visited last year, one that had an old fashioned photo booth back in the back, next to the filthy bathrooms. On the wall by the booth was a torn up cork board. A lot of people thumbtacked their strips of four photos into the cork, leaving them for posterity. I picked up a handful that looked interesting and stole them.
I’ve scanned the strips and I think I’ll take them, one at time, four photos at a time, and write a few words about the people in the photographs. Or, more accurately, what I imagine about the people. This is the last one I have (for now).
Previous:
A Guy, His Girlfriend, and His Uncle
Found by a photobooth,
Molly’s At the Market, French Quarter, New Orleans
They were so excited – the drink had been so ballyhooed they even decided to throw it down in a photobooth and record the wondrous moment for posterity.
Unfortunately the stuff, despite its fame, sucked.
“And here …” Now the orange became Tejas: “In the middle of this mess, Tejas, Spanish to the core, God’s bastion, just as in Europe.” He patted the orange, reveling in its security, and said: “God arranges these things according to His grand design. Believe me, Trinidad, Tejas is not where it is by accident. And you’re not in Tejas by accident. Your destiny is to rear Spanish sons who will build there cities much finer than New Orleans.”
― Texas
Four Corner’s Brewing, Dallas, Texas
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
―
I’ve stolen something. There is a bar that I visited last year, one that had an old fashioned photo booth back in the back, next to the filthy bathrooms. On the wall by the booth was a torn up cork board. A lot of people thumbtacked their strips of four photos into the cork, leaving them for posterity. I picked up a handful that looked interesting and stole them.
I’ve scanned the strips and I think I’ll take them, one at time, four photos at a time, and write a few words about the people in the photographs. Or, more accurately, what I imagine about the two people.
Previous:
A Guy, His Girlfriend, and His Uncle
Black and White love
They were in Love. Mad and passionate, unbelievable love – like being lost in a world unimaginable, but with someone else there. There had been a lot of madness and passion and even a little bit of love in that French Quarter bar, but they felt like they were the first and last. Everybody does.
They were both afraid to take the photos. Maybe photographs can’t steal your soul, but maybe they can steal your love. Especially black and white photos, especially machine-made photos. This is dangerous ground.
So they abandoned the little strip after it fell out, threw it on the dirty floor right outside the bathroom. Someone found it and thumbtacked it to the wall. If you could find the person that tacked it up (and you can’t) they wouldn’t be able to tell you why they bent over and picked it up, or why they pushed the rusty old pin through the paper. It fell five more times, the cork was old and brittle, as if it was trying to escape, but someone always put it back.
They shouldn’t have worried. Photographs, especially black and white ones, do steal your soul and do steal your passion. But there is plenty more left – an unending fountain, really, if that is what you want. The photos are only gifts, bits thrown out into the cold night, given away, but never really lost. Never lost.
Time is the real villain – the relentless thief. Time will steal your soul and your passion and your love. Though defeat is inevitable, a photo or two cast out into the pond of the world is one weapon against that inevitable doom of chaos. A small and fleeting victory – but maybe the best you can do. The best they could do.
Margarita está linda la mar,
y el viento,
lleva esencia sutil de azahar;
yo siento
en el alma una alondra cantar;
tu acento:
Margarita, te voy a contar
un cuento:
—-Rubén Darío, A Margarita Debayle
(trans)
Margarita, how beautiful the sea is:
still and blue.
The orange blossom in the breezes
drifting through.
The skylark in its glory
has your accent too:
Here, Margarita, is a story
made for you:
Forty dollars worth of Margaritas, Cozumel, Mexico
Ooh baby, watchful lines vibrate soft in brainwave time.
Silver pictures move so slow.
Golden tubes faintly glow.Electric faces seem to merge.
Hidden voices mock your words.
Fade away and radiate.—-Blondie, Fade Away and Radiate
Car Show, Texas
“One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver—not aloud, but to himself—that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at.”
― Life on the Mississippi
Mississippi River, New Orleans
“The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.”
― Catch-22
Decatur, Texas
And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark Satanic millsBring me my bow of burning gold
Bring me my arrows of desire
Bring me my spears o’clouds unfold
Bring me my chariot of fireI will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
‘Til we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land”― The Complete Poems
P51 Mustang, Wings Over Dallas
“Our house was made of stone, stucco, and clapboard; the newer wings, designed by a big-city architect, had a good deal of glass, and looked out into the Valley, where on good days we could see for many miles while on humid hazy days we could see barely beyond the fence that marked the edge of our property. Father, however, preferred the roof: In his white, light-woolen three-piece suit, white fedora cocked back on his head, for luck, he spent many of his waking hours on the highest peak of the highest roof of the house, observing, through binoculars, the amazing progress of construction in the Valley – for overnight, it seemed, there appeared roads, expressways, sewers, drainage pipes, “planned” communities with such names as Whispering Glades, Murmuring Oaks, Pheasant Run, Deer Willow, all of them walled to keep out intruders, and, yet more astonishing, towerlike buildings of aluminum and glass and steel and brick, buildings whose windows shone and winked like mirrors, splendid in sunshine like pillars of flame; such beauty where once there had been mere earth and sky, it caught at your throat like a great bird’s talons, taking your breath away. ‘The ways of beauty are as a honeycomb,’ Father told us, and none of us could determine, staring at his slow moving lips, whether the truth he spoke was a happy truth or not, whether even it was truth. (“Family”)”
― American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940’s Until Now
Construction, Downtown Dallas
Bill Chance 