Dan Colcer
Deep Ellum Art Park
Dallas, Texas
detail
Dan Colcer
Deep Ellum Art Park
Dallas, Texas
Tag Archives: Photography
Column in Deep Ellum Art Park
I wanna tell you about Texas Radio and the Big Beat
Comes out of the Virginia swamps
Cool and slow with plenty of precision
With a back beat narrow and hard to master
—-Jim Morrison, Texas Radio and the Big Beat
Deep Ellum Art Park, Dallas, Texas
Deep Ellum Art Park, Dallas, Texas
Deep Ellum Art Park, Dallas, Texas
The Control of Nature
“The industries were there because of the river. They had come for its navigational convenience and its fresh water. They would not, and could not, linger beside a tidal creek. For nature to take its course was simply unthinkable. The Sixth World War would do less damage to southern Louisiana. Nature, in this place, had become an enemy of the state.”
—-The Control of Nature, Atchafalaya, John McPhee
Levee strengthening, New Orleans, Louisiana
“The Unites States Congress, in its deliberations, decided that ‘the distribution of flow and sediment in the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers is now in desirable proportions and should be so maintained.’ The Corps was thereby ordered to preserve 1950. In perpetuity, at Old River, thirty per cent of the latitude flow was to pass to the Atchafalaya.”
—-The Control of Nature, Atchafalaya, John McPhee
New Orelans, Louisiana
A Bowler Hat in the Cedars
One featured stop in the DART to Art Rail & Ride that a friend of mine organized a few weeks ago was the Bowler Hat sculpture in the Cedars – just across I30 south of downtown Dallas. I had originally planned to swing by there during my Stop and Shoot the Roses ride earlier – but had to cut it due to length of ride.
Bowler Hat Sculpture in the Cedars, Dallas, Texas
The Bowler Hat was originally commissioned by British upscale furniture purveyor, Timothy Oulton, to grace his new store being opened in Dallas.
Local artist Keith Turman built the thing. He and Keith Scherbarth used a 3d scanner on a real bowler hat to get the shape and curves just right. Then his team set to work with steel, wood, fiberglass, and foam, building up, carving down, shaping, and smoothing until, after six months of sweat, he had a twenty-foot wide, ten foot tall hat.
Unfortunately, like the dancing frogs decades ago, the hat fell victim to Dallas’ draconian sign ordinance and it was never able to make it to the top of the furniture store.
The hat sat unloved and unknown in a warehouse for a long time. Finally, not long before it was slated for destruction, Doug Caudill, owner of the studio the hat was built in, suggested that the hat be donated to the Cedars Community as a piece of public art. Structural Studio provided a very visible location, KNK Concrete Express provided the foundation, and Tony Collins Art built the metal stand the hat sits on.
And now, thanks to many people from an upscale British furniture store to a Texas concrete company – and many in between, there is a cool piece of public art along I30 south of downtown Dallas. Pull off to look at it though, that curve is a doozy.
Message in a Bottle – Shazam!
This weekend I was spending the day wandering around the city on my bicycle. I started out by riding to the DART station with the intention of getting on the first train and riding it until I felt like getting off.
As can happen on days like that, later in the afternoon I found my self wanting to take a little rest. I was riding through Oak Cliff, a little west and a little south of the Bishop Arts District, and spotted a tiny bit of shade graced by a collection of round concrete picnic tables with benches next to a Christian School.
It looked inviting – to sit, polish off a water bottle and listen to some music on headphones. So I swerved off the street and rode the sidewalk under the trees.
The only thing that was there was a wine bottle sticking up on one of the tables. I assumed someone had been there before me – probably the night before – and used the spot for a little public intoxication. Not liking litter – I went over to fetch the bottle so I could find a trash can somewhere.
As I approached the bottle I realized I was wrong. It wasn’t a cheap empty. Someone had replaced the label with a handwritten sign that said “Message In A Bottle,” with a lightning bolt and a couple of stars. There was a missive wadded up in the neck of the bottle. It was wet and torn, but I extracted it and carefully unfolded it on the concrete top of the picnic table.
The message was a Xeroxed mysterious crazy rant ending with Shazam! and a crude picture of Andy Kaufman.
The message bottle on the shady picnic table.
Message in a Bottle
Here’s what the message said:
You are Now! Yes. Is this real? This moment, that you have chosen to co-create? I know not. What I do know is that everything in your life has led you to this exact moment in space and time. Yes your fantastic being of molecular vibrations slipping into the NOW. You, co-creating the awakening of your inner Shazam-Samurai! You, catapulting your nitro-burnin’, fuel-injected, Hootenany, Howlin’ Wolf, Love dance into the future of NOW! Yes! Yes! Yes!
Shazam!
Now, what was so odd about all this is that I had seen that exact same message before. I had photographed it and written a blog entry. Over a year ago, I came across another exact copy of this glued to a boarded-up window in Deep Ellum. I wrote about it here: Text on the Streets.
Stuck on a plywood-covered window. Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
So there is someone that for at least over a year has been going around Dallas putting out these little nutjob manifestos. I found two about six miles apart. I did a search on the text and found nothing (other than my own blog entry).
I carefully folded and rolled the worn paper and stuck it back in the bottle. Now I want to keep my eyes open – see if I find it again.
Secret Mural
How can a mural be secret? Isn’t public viewing part of the very essence of a mural?
I like to think I know a lot about the various murals painted around Dallas. I see a lot of them when I ride around on my bicycle (there is no better way to see a city), I take photos of them, and put them on my blog. Sometimes I feel that it’s cheating – a cheap way to get an entry up – but if you decide to post something every day, it’s necessary to find something to post when you are too tired, busy, or beat down to work on something more substantial or entertaining.
Richard, a friend of mine, spoke of a “secret mural” he knew about that I didn’t. I wondered if he was right; if there was a mural that I had never seen. I knew the general area that he was referring to – and it was a swath of space I had traversed many times. I thought that I had covered all wall paintings in that stretch – but I know how wrong I usually am.
My friend organized a ride, sort of a sequel to the Stop and Photograph The Roses ride I helped out with a while back. I had originally had his stops on my ride, but had to cut them out. I have learned that organized rides, especially ones with planned stops, can get too long very easily. I felt bad about cutting these out and was looking forward to his ride.
He promised we would stop at the “secret mural” on the way back.
Unfortunately, it was a bit of a scorcher of a day and I became overheated and dehydrated. I bailed and took the train home. I know that feeling and knew it was time to give up before something bad happened. But I missed the secret mural – which the rest of the group visited.
He put a photo of the mural on his facebook and… he was right, I had never seen this one and had no idea where it was.
But he also put some photos of other riders at the mural site up on facebook, and I began to look at them closely. I identified the Bank of America Plaza tower (the tallest building in Dallas) in the background, and by its orientation was able to determine that the secret mural was on a forty five degree angle from the tower.
That still left a lot of country to cover. However, looking at the shots more closely, I noticed a giant Texas flag that I recognized in the photo. By taking the angle of this flag and triangulating it with the skyscraper I was able to pinpoint the location. Then by using Google Maps Street View and a distinctive pattern of windows on a building down the street…. in five minutes I had it.
The mural even shows up on Google Maps.
I was surprised because this is a road that I have ridden many times and never noticed the mural off to the side, behind a liquor store.
So today I rode down to get some shots to prove I was there. It’s not the nicest of places, so I took my photographs quickly. As I was packing up a homeless alcoholic-looking man said, “Hey, I saw you clear across town.”
“Where was that?”
“Over on Lamar, by the beer store,” he said. He was right, I had been there earlier to look at another mural I had spotted from a train.
“Lamar isn’t across town,” I said, “I came all the way from Richardson.”
“On that thing?” the man said.
My Xootr Swift bicycle next to the Secret Mural, Dallas, Texas
The Secret Mural, Dallas, Texas
Bodacious Bar-B-Q
When our kids were little we had a little popup tent camping trailer. It was pretty cool – we would keep it loaded with all the stuff we would need for the weekend. All we would have to do is buy some food and head out to one of the wide selection of Texas State Parks within a few hours drive of the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex. It was worth it even for a single night – we could go to a soccer game on Saturday morning and be in the woods for Saturday night. It was a good thing… until the trailer was stolen from in back of our house… but that’s another story.
One of the places we would go was Tyler State Park – outside of the eponymous East Texas City. It was a large park – held a lot of people in a whole series of camping areas around a resplendent sylvan lake. When we drove to and from we would pass a Bar-B-Q restaurant off the exit from Interstate 20. It always looked delicious and the associated smoke smelled even more so. But in keeping with the whole camping thing we never visited.
That was many years ago but I remember it.
On our last trip to New Orleans (for Lee’s Tulane Graduation) we left early in the morning, but not too early. We would be going past Tyler right at lunch time – and I decided to finally try out Bodacious Bar-B-Q.
There are four major types of Bar-B-Que – Kansas City, Memphis, Carolina, and Texas. Bodacious is, of course, Texas. Texas BBQ is actually a dry, slow cook – with most sauce added after.
The food was great, of course. The place was exactly like you would expect – a little dusty, a little cluttered, a lot of local workers on their lunch hour.
And then it was time to get back on the road.
Bodacious Bar-B-Q
Tyler, Texas
The sculptor carves because he must
Barbara Hepworth
Sea Form (Atlantic)
Bronze, 1965
Dallas Museum of Art, Sculpture Garden
Dallas, Texas
Sea Form (Atlantic)
Barbara Hepworth
(click to enlarge)
“The sculptor carves because he must. He needs the concrete form of stone and wood for the expression of his idea and experience, and when the idea forms the material is found at once. […]
I have always preferred direct carving to modelling because I like the resistance of the hard material and feel happier working that way. Carving is more adapted to the expression of the accumulative idea of experience and clay to the visual attitude. An idea for carving must be clearly formed before starting and sustained during the long process of working; also, there are all the beauties of several hundreds of different stones and woods, and the idea must be in harmony with the qualities of each one carved; that harmony comes with the discovery of the most direct way of carving each material according to its nature.”
—- ‘Barbara Hepworth – “the Sculptor carves because he must”‘, The Studio, London, vol. 104, December 1932
“I have always been interested in oval or ovoid shapes. The first carvings were simple realistic oval forms of the human head or of a bird. Gradually my interest grew in more abstract values – the weight, poise, and curvature of the ovoid as a basic form. The carving and piercing of such a form seems to open up an infinite variety of continuous curves in the third dimension, changing in accordance with the contours of the original ovoid and with the degree of penetration of the material. Here is sufficient field for exploration to last a lifetime.”
“Before I can start carving the idea must be almost complete. I say ‘almost’ because the really important thing seems to be the sculptor’s ability to let his intuition guide him over the gap between conception and realization without compromising the integrity of the original idea; the point being that the material has vitality – it resists and makes demands.”“I have gained very great inspiration from Cornish land- and sea-scape, the horizontal line of the sea and the quality of light and colour which reminds me of the Mediterranean light and colour which so excites one’s sense of form; and first and last there is the human figure which in the country becomes a free and moving part of a greater whole. This relationship between figure and landscape is vitally important to me. I cannot feel it in a city.”
—-Barbara Hepworth ‘Approach to Sculpture’, The Studio, London, vol. 132, no. 643, October 1946
The Return of the Dancing Frogs
Even though it was over thirty years ago, I remember the first time I walked into Tango like it was yesterday. I had been living in Dallas for a couple years – living just off Lower Greenville in the Turtle Dove apartments behind the Granada Theater. Farther down the street, in Lowest Greenville, Shannon Wynne built a new nightclub.
It was a huge converted bank building – and it was something else. There was the big main room with a balcony all around – a great place for live music. There was a terrible restaurant in an unbelievably loud room off the balcony. The walls were lined with televisions, all screaming nasty early 80’s rock videos. Then, down a back stairway, was my favorite spot – the Aquarium Bar. This was an elevated dance floor – sort of like a big, rectangular boxing ring, that filled all but a narrow strip around the edge of the room. All night extremely loud dance music would boom from speakers only a couple feet over your head – while the lights spun and flashed. Behind some sort of glass wall costumed dancers would sometimes perform in fish suits… I think.
You had to be there.
I think the wildest night I was there was one concert – Brave Combo opened up for Joe “KING” Carrasco and the Crowns, with Johnny Reno and the Sax Maniacs playing backup. Believe it or not – the last set was filmed (badly) and is still available on blurry Youtube.
(If you have time to watch this video – check out the interviews – a young Mike Rhyner at 5:55 and a very, very young Lisa Loeb at 11:10)
The place was fantastic, but it lost money hand over fist and closed after little more than a year. The bank building was torn down and a Taco Cabana Mexican Fast Food restaurant went up in that spot.
But what most people remember Tango for was the frogs on the roof. While the bank building was being renovated Bob Daddy-O Wade was commissioned to make a half-dozen giant frogs to be placed on the roof. Dallas (at that time, especially) had no sense of humor and the city decided, in its infinite bureaucratic wisdom, that the frogs (two dancing, one each playing the guitar, saxophone, trumpet and maracas) were in violation of the city sign ordinance and had to come down.
The court battle made the national news:
New York Times Article on Tango’s Frogs – DALLAS SIGN PANEL BANS 6 GIANT PERFORMING FROGS
and after much hullabaloo they were exonerated and allowed to stay. Not long after that, the place went belly-up and the frogs were sold off.
Three went to the roof of a mega-gas-station south of Dallas. I used to see them down there whenever I drove to Austin and meant to stop and get some pictures (for old times’ sake) but never pulled it off. The other three (guitar, sax, and maracas) went to Chuy’s Mexican restaurant in Austin – then on to the Chuy’s in Nashville, where they still are.
Googlemaps Street View of Nashville – there are the frogs!
So now, after all these years, I read in the paper that the three frogs (the dancing pair and the trumpet player) have returned to town and have been placed on top of the Taco Cabana at the same spot were Tango used to sit. They even seemed to get permission from the city first.
I had to see this. I rode my bike down to the DART station – took the train to the underground CityPlace station and rode the extreme escalators up to the surface. It was a short bike ride on to Lower Greenville where, as clear as could be, were the three frogs up on the roof.
They had hired a talented local mural painter, Stylle Read, to repaint the frogs and bring them back to their state of glory, then mounted them up on the roof.
A lot of people were stopping and taking pictures of the frogs. Talking to them, I was the only person old enough to have actually been in Tango when it was open (most had never seen or heard of the frogs, a few had seen them at the gas station).
It’s sort of a silly thing, but I feel good that they have come home.
Dancing frogs on the roof of Taco Cabana
Artists’ Signatures – Bob Wade, and Stylle Read
Dancing Frogs and a 5 Dollar Chicken Fajita Bowl.
Frog Playing Trumpet.
They’re Back!
Stevenson
Tony Cragg
Stevenson, Bronze, 1939
Tony Cragg, Stevenson, Dallas Museum of Art
(click to enlarge)
I’ve been a big fan of Tony Cragg ever since I visited his exhibition at the Nasher. It made me happy to discover this fantastic bronze in the garden of the Dallas Museum of Art.
Bill Chance 