Tag Archives: postaday

Is That A Light In the Sky Or Just A Spark In My Heart

Posted on by Bill Chance

We’re dying to be invaded and put the blame on something concrete

Waiting for the ufos.. waiting for the ufos
We are waiting for the ufos we know that they’re there

We’re just a joke they sometimes crack, they’ll get away with anything
The government is holding back, they won’t say a word
Now is that a light in sky or just a spark in my heart?
—-Graham Parker, Waiting for the UFOs

Bike riders waiting for the moon to rise, Trinity River Bottoms, Dallas, Texas
Click to Open

I took this picture, a thirty second timed exposure, on this month’s Full Moon Ride along the Trinity Skyline Trail near downtown Dallas.

The white Calatrava bridge is the Margaret Hunt Hill bridge.

The red lights to the left, reflected in the pond (there wasn’t much water – Dallas in late August is very dry) are the other bike riders waiting for the full moon to rise. The white streak to the right is the smeared-out headlight of a bike rider coming around the trail to where I was.

One thing I didn’t notice – click on the image to view it full size – is that there is a subtle slightly curved line across the sky… with a series of evenly spaced dots caused by a blinking light in the long exposure.

Is it a UFO? Of course not. The extremely busy DFW airport is only a few miles to the left of the photo – it’s an airplane circling to land. Still, I never noticed it when I took the photo… it could be anything… now preserved in pixels.

We’re just waiting for the ufos – dying to be invaded.

one more song from the same album – always loved this one.

We Ran As If To Meet the Moon

Posted on by Bill Chance

“We ran as if to meet the moon.”
― Robert Frost

Moon rising over the skyline of Downtown Dallas.

The Full Moon rising over downtown Dallas. The white streaks at the bottom are the other riders in the Full Moon Ride leaving. Thirty second exposure. Need to work – should have used a higher ISO – the long exposure caused the moon to smear. Next time. — at the Trinity Skyline Trail.

One of my favorite local bike rides is the Full Moon ride. Every month a friend of mine organizes a ride through the Trinity River Bottoms near downtown Dallas at sunset on the night of the full moon. I lug my camera along and try and get interesting photographs – still a lot to learn.

Better To Glimpse the Sky And Perish

Posted on by Bill Chance

“So through endless twilights I dreamed and waited, though I knew not what I waited for. Then in the shadowy solitude my longing for light grew so frantic that I could rest no more, and I lifted entreating hands to the single black ruined tower that reached above the forest into the unknown outer sky. And at last I resolved to scale that tower, fall through I might; since it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without even beholding day.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Outsider

Wise County Courthouse
Decatur, Texas

One of the cool things about Texas… the unimaginable vast rural Texas… are the county courthouses, all 254 of them.

Change Is Only Possible Through Movement

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Art of Seeing

Octet
Lin Emery, Louisiana, 2014, Polished Aluminum
Poydras Street, New Orleans

In the City of New Orleans there is a fantastic arrangement of sculpture along Poydras Street. Walking down and back from my son’s apartment to the Running of the Bulls I took photos of a few of them that I’ll share with you.

“My sculpture is kinetic, meaning that it moves. The elements are derived from nature, and I borrow natural elements — wind, water, magnets — to set them in motion. The rhythms are influenced by infinite variables: the points of balance, the normal frequency of each form, the interruption of the counterpoise. I juggle, juxtapose, and adjust to achieve the dance or pantomime that I want. Then the sculpture takes over and invents a fillip of its own.”
—-Lin Emery

Locked in What Cage

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.”
― Ray Bradbury

Unnamed Sculpture
Ed Carpenter, Richardson, Texas

Unnamed Sculpture
Ed Carpenter, Richardson, Texas

Workers installing glass bits,
Unnamed Sculpture
Ed Carpenter, Richardson, Texas

Richardson, where I live, has an ambitious trail that bifurcates the city from North to South roughly along Highway 75 and the DART Red line – the Central Trail. However, one key spot near the north end of the trail has been pretty much useless for over a year due to all the construction at Alma and Greenville. Now all of that is headed into the home stretch (until something new pops up) and now, something really new is growing up out of the ground.

At first, most folks assumed it was a cell phone tower or other piece of infrastructure – but it actually is a huge work of art.

From the city’s description:
An iconic art piece celebrating the history of the technology in Richardson will be installed late this summer just south of the Eastside development. The site at Greenville and Alma was specifically selected for a unique public art opportunity since it is a highly visible location, located at the center of the community and Telecom Corridor® area and is in close proximity to the Central Trail for pedestrians to enjoy. This public art installation corresponds to the goals set for the City’s Public Art Master Plan adopted in 2015.

….

The art piece features a lattice of crossing diagonal stainless steel cables on a galvanized carbon steel main structure supporting laminated dichroic glass elements. The glass elements suggest abstract ones and zeros, the basic building blocks of all things digital, which the artist and committee felt was fitting for a city with a high-tech identity.

At first, I thought it looked like a giant frisbee golf goal. Now, I realize it looks more like the world’s largest set of tomato cages.

An now the vines are starting to climb up. Workers are out on a lift in the late summer stifling heat installing strings of colorful glass over the armature. I have no idea how much they will hang up – what it will look like when it is finished. At that point they will put in some landscaping (hopefully, a nice rest stop with some benches, shade, and water along the Central Trail). Eventually, all will be revealed, including the sculpture’s name.

We’ll see – if you are interested, stay tuned.

A Trance Bepopulate With Chimeras

Posted on by Bill Chance

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

Gridman 3
Stephen Daly
2007 Sandblasted Aluminum
Dallas, Texas

The Key and Guardian of the Gate

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth’s fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

The Guardian
Horton Humble
2017 Louisiana, Welded Steel
Poydras Street

In the City of New Orleans there is a fantastic arrangement of sculpture along Poydras Street. Walking down and back from my son’s apartment to the Running of the Bulls I took photos of a few of them that I’ll share with you.

The Guardian is a giant figure, a hybrid of a man and a bird, standing for the inhabitants of a great city. It represents a creature activated by fear capable to rise up each time humanity doubts its own powers to overcome injustice and inhumanity.
—Horton Humble

Across Poydras and down a few doors from my son’s apartment is the Le Pavillon Hotel – originally named the Denechaud, then for generations was the De Soto Hotel. – which boasts an ornate entrance with huge classical statues flanked by massive Corinthian columns. I loved the contrast with the modern sculptures scattered along the median of Poydras.

From my son’s apartment pool, look up, I could see the bleached white back of a statue on a wall against the sheer drop down to the street. I found out this was a sculpture at the Le Pavillon’s pool. I was oddly fascinated by this – and one day want to visit.

The pool at Le Pavillon, from TripAdvisor. You can see the sculptures against the wall. The blue-gray building with vertical windows behind and to the left is my son’s apartment building.

The Guardian
Poydras Street
New Orleans

Pointed Blasphemously at Heaven

Posted on by Bill Chance

“This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.”
― Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

Waggoner Mansion in Decatur, Texas

There is an abandoned palace in Decatur, Texas – The Waggoner Mansion, also called El Castile, is a sixteen room mansion built in 1883 by the Waggoner Family. The Reata Ranch House in the movie “Giant” is inspired by this building.

But now it stands, abandoned and rotting… and beautiful still.

Black Butterfly

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

Black Butterfly
John T. Scott, Aluminum, 1996
Poydras Street, New Orleans

In the City of New Orleans there is a fantastic arrangement of sculpture along Poydras Street. Walking down and back from my son’s apartment to the Running of the Bulls I took photos of a few of them that I’ll share with you.

“Black Butterfly” is an abstract aluminum sculpture completed four years after John T. Scott was awarded the MacArthur Genius Award. Scott’s work frequently displayed themes related to African-American life, particularly the rich Afro-Caribbean culture and musical heritage of New Orleans. See this sculpture on Poydras Street at O’Keefe.

The True Lives Of Other People

Posted on by Bill Chance

“The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding, even if, as Proust warns is, ‘when we discover the true lives of other people, the real world beneath the world of appearance, we get as many surprises as on visiting a house of plain exterior which is full of hidden treasures, torture-chambers or skeletons.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

McKinney, Texas