Tag Archives: Photography

Bike Crawl

Posted on by Bill Chance

I was checking my facebook ticker when I came across this event. It kept showing up posted by various local organizations from The Dallas Arts District to Bike Friendly Richardson. The event was A Bike Crawl through the Arts District on Thursday, hosted by Biking in Dallas. I was off work for the whole time between Christmas and New Year, so I had no excuse not to go.

Let’s see, Dallas Arts District, check… bicycles, check…, Crow Collection museum of Asian Art, check… taking photographs, check… and food trucks, check, check and check. There was absolutely no reason for me not to go. You could not design an event that had more stuff in it that I was interested in.

But I felt anxious. I’m in terrible shape and, even though we would not be riding very far or in any sort of difficult terrain, there would be some talented and experienced bicyclists there and I felt really nervous. I used to be a good bicycle rider, but that was many years ago and it will probably take me a year to get back into anything close to riding condition, shape, and ability.

So I had mixed feelings. Then I realized that what I was feeling wasn’t fear, it was Resistance.

So I went, and I had a great time. I thought about taking the Dart Train but ended up driving and took about twenty minutes trying to fold three dollar bills up into small enough packets to fit through the tiny slot in the parking lot thing. I packed all sorts of warm clothing but the killer Texas sun had everything so warmed up that I ended up in a T-shirt.

Everyone met down at the fountain on the end of Flora street by the museum of art. We didn’t really do a lot of bicycle riding – the Arts District is only seven block long after all. We walked through the Crow Collection – I’ve been there quite a bit lately and had sat through the entire animated film by Qiu AnXiong – but you always find something new in a museum. After that is was on to the food trucks. There were four: Gandolfo’s, Ssahm, The Butcher’s Son, and at the end, Easy Slider – a new truck. When given a choice, I always like to try the truck I’ve never tried before – so I bought some tiny hamburgers and they were very good.

Then we rode down to the end – my bike slipped a gear going up a driveway – a nasty clunk! and my pedals spun, I think I need a new chain. The dark, raked gravel from the Transcendence art installation across from the Wyly theater was still there – now all fenced in (the ice was long melted, of course).

Then we stopped at the Opera House to take some pictures, rode around a bit, and stopped off at The Nasher for a look at the sculptures. I’m always up for a trip to the Nasher.

So I had a good time, great people, and it was fun to get out. I have got to work hard on my cycling and my fitness – there is so much to do with a pedal, chain, and two wheels. I remember when it was easy.

A few more photos from the crawl on my Facebook Album

Biking in Dallas Blog Post

Bike rider in front of the Winspear Opera House. If you are wondering, the photo is cropped and upside down.

Snuff bottle from the Crow Collection

Waiting for some Kimchee Fries at the Ssahm Korean BBQ Gourmet Food Truck

A bike rider in front of the Winspear Opera House

An elderly couple at the Nasher Museum.

These two were very interested in the “Bronze Crowd” by Magdalena Abakanowicz. From the Nasher Web Site:

As a child in Poland during World War II, Magdalena Abakanowicz lived through the German and Soviet invasions, experiencing firsthand the horrors perpetrated by dehumanized masses under the sway of evil leadership. Frequently addressing the theme of the crowd in her sculpture, she has said “A crowd is the most cruel because it begins to act like a brainless organism.” From a distance, the thirty six over-life-size figures of Bronze Crowd look identical, but a closer view reveals their individuality. The spaces between figures become as important to the overall composition as the figures themselves. Viewers can walk between and among the figures, penetrating the imposing solidarity of the group and, simultaneously, stepping into the profoundly solitary experience of being alone in a crowd.

Since this work is widely associated with the Holocaust – whenever I see an elderly couple looking at it I wonder if they could be survivors. At any rate, I would love to hear their story.

At the Nasher. The sculpture is "Gradiva's Fourth Wall" by Diana Al-Hadid. Yes, that is my bicycle locked up to a tree outside.

Alberto Giacometti, some large sculptures and some tiny ones.

Sculptures at the Crow Collection of Asian Art

Posted on by Bill Chance

A couple of photographs I took the last time I was at the Crow Collection of Asian Art in the Dallas Arts District.

 

Ramune

Posted on by Bill Chance

When I was in the Soda Gallery in the Bishop Arts District I noticed a notice posted inside extolling the virtues of Ramune Soda. I thought about buying a bottle, but the cap looked intimidating – plus I had a hankerin’ for some Root Beer.

The Ramune was stuck in my head, though. I know I had seen it before, and thought about where. One place was in the Anime, Rahxephon, that I worked my way through a couple years ago.

———————-

So I did some web searches on Ramune.

The most famous aspect of this Japanese soft drink is the bottle. The container is sealed with a glass marble jammed up into the neck and held in place by the pressure of the carbonation in the drink. To get at the precious fluid you have to knock the marble down, presumably with the plastic plunger tool that is attached to the plastic cap. Once this trick is accomplished, you have to hold the bottle, just so, in order for the marble to be caught between two little glass ears inside the neck, or else it will fall back and jam the opening.

Sounds like fun!

I was thinking about it and realized that they probably had Ramune at the Saigon City grocery store down in my neighborhood. They specialize in South Asian products, but have enough Japanese items that surely a few bottles of Ramune would slip in. I walked down there and, sure enough, they had a little section of Ramune.

Their selection of flavors wasn’t great, especially since I wanted to restrict myself to the glass bottles (plastic Ramune bottles? Oh, that’s just not right). I gathered up some Orange, Melon, and Lychee flavor and lugged it home. I drank a couple, and gave the rest out as Christmas Stocking-Stuffers.

Ramune

The Ramune Cap, with instructions. If you've never opened one before... your gonna need this.

The Ramune bottle is fun – cool to look at, interesting to open, and, best of all, the marble that rattles around in the neck of the bottle is an entertainment even after all the sugar water is swallowed.

The history of the bottle is as cool as a rattling marble. It began with an Englishman, Hiram Codd, in 1872. He came up with the idea of using a marble to plug the neck of a bottle of carbonated beverage. For many years, this was the standard in Europe for bottled soft drinks. Because children would break the bottles to get at the marble inside – these old Codd bottles are collected and rare types are very valuable.

Apparently, the Codd bottle was never very successful in the United States, because the filthy Americans couldn’t follow instructions and would push the marble down with their filthy American fingers – thereby contaminating the beverage.

Eventually, the crown cap was invented and took over the industry. Except in Japan, where there was some resistance to changing over – the new automated bottling lines were expensive and the children were attached to the bottle with the marble in the neck.

The Codd neck bottle died out in Europe, but has continued to be popular in Japan. There are Codd neck bottles produced in India too, to support a cottage industry production of a drink called Banta. Now there is an American version of Ramune in Codd bottles, called Marble Pop.

I’ll have to get a bottle of this.

Oh, and here’s a link to another youtube video that has disabled embedding (some of you guys might prefer this one).

Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge

Posted on by Bill Chance

(click to enlarge)

An HDR photograph of the Calatrava designed Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge across the Trinity River near downtown Dallas. I was setting up the tripod when the train came steaming along over the trestle between me and the cable-stay bridge. I had to rush the picture before the train went by and didn’t get the focus right… better luck next time. This is a tone-mapped image taken from a single RAW exposure. Since the train was moving at a pretty good clip, I couldn’t use a three-exposure HDR image – I tried it and there were too many strange effects around the train because it was in different spots in each exposure.

Grazing in the River Bottoms

Posted on by Bill Chance

(click to enlarge)

HDR photograph taken in Trammell Crow Park in the river bottoms, Dallas.

This is the spot where, years ago, Lee and I came down to do some sketching in the river bottoms. We walked to the levee in the background of this picture to draw the downtown skyline. Lee was a bit distracted, but I managed to sell my drawing to a local magazine – so all was not lost. It took me a while to get this picture – it’s not the most savory area and a young couple were drinking heavily and stumbling around between the cows and getting in the shot. Since this HDR is a three shot combination – I needed stationary subjects – like the concrete cows.

As I was leaving, I was lugging my camera and tripod back to the parking area when a group of three – an older photographer (walking with a cane), his assistant (carrying a folding reflector and a camera), and a model (wearing a long dress, but wrapped in a large thick shawl – it was cold) walked the other way. They were obviously going to get the last bit of light as the sun set. The man said Hi in a nice conspiratorial way, making me think I was actually also a photographer, instead of simply an idiot with a tripod.

I thought they were going to head to the cow sculptures, but they walked right out into the open area…. I’m not sure what sort of shot they were working on.

I sort of wanted to sit in my car and watch them work – I like watching fashion shoots – but I had things to do… so off I went.

Under a Trinity River Bridge

Posted on by Bill Chance

(click to enlarge)

 
I drove down to this little roadside observation park on the Oak Cliff side of the river to take pictures of the new Calatrava Bridge that is nearing completion. I couldn’t resist a little stroll in the river bottoms and took this 3-shot HDR image of the underside of the Commerce Street Bridge. It is amazing how quickly polite society and organized civilization disappears in places like this. 
 
The top side of the bridge.
An article and slideshow on the graffitti.
 

Matilda

Posted on by Bill Chance

I was walking through downtown on my way to take pictures of a giant naked man when I walked across Akard street. Peering down the canyon between edifice walls of glittering glass I spotted an ancient little machine shaking on its set of steel rails. The sign under its cyclops eye of a light said “Matilda.” It was an M-Line trolley car I have not ridden yet. So I detoured and climbed on board right before it took off for its route down McKinney and around uptown.

Matilda was built in 1925 in Melbourne, Australia, for the Melbourne & Metropolitan Tramways Board. It operated in Australia for sixty years until it was purchased for use in Dallas. It still ran great and only needed cosmetic modifications (it looks like these were new paint and added air conditioning).

It’s a long car, with an unusual configuration. It is divided up into three sections, with longitudinal red velvet benches on each end, and ordinary wooden seats in the center. It’s a beautiful streetcar with a gorgeous interior. Matilda runs a lot smoother than the older (by only a few years), shorter car, Rosie, I rode a couple of weeks ago.

It was bitter cold outside and very few people were out and about. A couple of commuters were on the car, plus a mother and her five sons. Yes, five boys – the oldest looked about twelve. They were good kids… but… man! Five! The youngest was a toddler and he had that devilish smile. Whenever they looked away from him he would take off running down the aisle.

When we reached the end of the line I was talking to the boys about the turntable under construction (it is almost finished) when one of the boys said, “You know we’re going to have a sister,” and pointed to their mom.

Man… five boys and a girl. I don’t know if I could do that.

The M Line Trolley in Dallas

Dallas M Line Trolley

Car 636, “Petunia” coming back the other way. I’ll have to get down there and ride that one soon.

A Week and a Day

Posted on by Bill Chance

Saturday – It’s been eight days since I saw the art installation Transcendence downtown. The ice sculptures have been melting all this time.

First Night

Next Day

The Day After That

A couple days after that

I had to see what has happened in the meantime. Would the ice be completely melted? Would the installation still be there?

I drove down and parked down the street. It was still there, the gravel was still raked, and there was a lot of ice left in the two big blocks. The taller block had fallen over and broken in two, but the large horizontal block was not noticeably smaller.

The two human forms were nothing other than small irregular pieces of ice. The stone from one of them was missing. I remembered the story the woman from the Dallas Center for Architecture had told me.

She said that she had heard that one of the stones in the human forms was from the parents of a childhood friend of the artist. This friend had passed away and after the ice is melted and the artwork is closed the stone will be given back to the parents to be placed in their stone garden on their rural home as a memorial. A nice story.

Maybe that one stone is now in a garden on the Oklahoma border. I’d like to think so.

While I was taking pictures I could hear a lot of noise – a metal grinding sound with a series of loud clacks – coming from behind a wall surrounding an unfinished building next door. I realized that some kids were skateboarding over there. After a few minutes a couple boards came flying over the wall and then their owners scampered through a gap in a fence after.

“What is this?” they asked, “Is that ice?”

I explained that it was an art work, that there had been large sculptures of ice that have been melting for a week. They had never heard of a Zen rock garden, so I explained as best as I could. They seemed to think it was cool.

“I’m glad we didn’t walk around in there,” one of them said.

So am I.

The two human form sculptures, what is left of them

A reminder of what one of these looked like at the unveiling

The large upright block fell over - you can see the light-colored gravel it rested on.

What it looked like at the unveiling

A group of women walked by after leaving the Opera House.

Borg Cube

Posted on by Bill Chance

(click to enlarge)

This HDR picture of the top corner of the Wyly theater was taken from the same spot that I took yesterday’s photograph of the Winspear Opera House.

I have always been amazed at the strange appearance of the Wyly, of its clockwork like theater machine interior, and was very happy and impressed when I saw The Tempest there. It is surprising how inexpensive the productions are (if you are willing to go for the cheap seats – which are still pretty damn close) and I can’t believe that the shows aren’t selling out.

It’s probably the economy… and people simply don’t think of doing stuff like that. I’ll tell you, it’s hard to find folks that want to go to plays, live plays, even if they cost about what the newest 3D Googleplex Shopping Mall crap does.

Opera House

Posted on by Bill Chance

(click to enlarge)

Ever since I moved to Dallas thirty years ago, I have yearned for the city to have a center, a heart, a place where people gathered. The city planners and developers, such as they are, want that too – but there are the challenges of weather, history, and the city’s car-based culture to do battle.

Now, with the emergence of the city’s Arts District with it’s line of award-winning buildings there is some hope that the vision might be completed. I have been going down there a lot lately (sometimes to simply watch ice melt) and it is a place of varied and interesting attractions.

The heart of the district may be the plaza outside of the Winspear Opera House. The huge elevated grid of aluminum louvers is surprisingly effective at suppressing the roasting summer sun while still allowing a breeze and light to penetrate.

This HDR tonemapped image shows the opera house plaza with a couple of the melting blocks from the transcendence art project.

It is depressing though – most of the times I go down there, in the midst of billions of dollars worth of buildings and artwork, carefully planned, constructed, arranged and maintained – I have the place to myself. It can be a gorgeous, lonely world.