“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
― Albert Einstein
Downtown Dallas, Texas
“When I ask how old your toddler is, I don’t need to hear ’27 months.’ ‘He’s two’ will do just fine. He’s not a cheese. And I didn’t really care in the first place.”
― George Carlin
Sculptureson the exterior of the Adolphus Hotel, Dallas, Texas
Photograph taken during the Dallas Photo Walk.
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
Something
In front of
Braindead Brewing
Deep Ellum
Dallas, Texas
“A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne’s theorem that ‘No man is an island,’ but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Dark-Haired Girl
Rusted with Gun
Deep Ellum
Dallas, Texas
“Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It’s going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.”
― J.G. Ballard
Invasion Car Show
Deep Ellum
Dallas, Texas
“When I opened my eyes I saw nothing but the pool of nocturnal sky, for I was lying on my back with out-stretched arms, face to face with that hatchery of stars. Only half awake, still unaware that those depths were sky, having no roof between those depths and me, no branches to screen them, no root to cling to, I was seized with vertigo and felt myself as if flung forth and plunging downward like a diver.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars
Sculpture and Building
Downtown Dallas, Texas
Near the Pearl, Arts District DART Station
“Life is too short to be living somebody else’s dream.”
― Hugh Hefner
Playboy Dallas
Design District
Dallas, Texas
Over the last year or so, the Dallas Design District has become one of my favorite destinations – especially for riding my bicycle.
Right off Riverfront, in the heart of the district, appeared a huge steel replica of the Playboy Bunny logo, alongside a black-painted muscle car on a tilted slab of concrete.
On group bike rides there was some snickering and snide snarky sermonizing about these incongruous objects. I, on the other hand, never really gave it much thought – except to get out my camera and take some snaps.
Today, I was surfing around this internet-thing, and stumbled across the story of the Playboy Marfa. The mystery was solved.
Marfa is this strangely cool West Texas town – half old-school West Texas ranchland, a throwback to the old wild west – and half postmodern hip art colony. A mix that doesn’t always agree – but somehow gets along to the betterment of both.
One thing that both groups don’t like at all is crass commercialism.
So when the Playboy Corporation rented some space and erected this faux-artistic giant steel advertisement the locals were appalled. They resented the use of their wilderness artistic tradition for advertisement. Everyone was up in arms, including the Texas Highway Overlords.
Playboy Marfa
now moved to Big D
Marfa, Texas
It didn’t take long for the site’s permit to get itself yanked – Playboy Marfa had to go. The locals were happy.
But, What is Art?
Luckily, there is Dallas. You see, Dallas doesn’t care about crass commercialism. The crasser, the better. As Dallas updates itself it is careful not to fully abandon its past – its history of tackiness, moneyed kitsch, and big everything. And I like it.
It is embodied in the phrase I’m starting to see – partially in response to the popular “Keep Austin Weird” campaign down I35 a few miles…
“Keep Dallas Pretentious”
…which is interesting on several levels – once you think about it and embrace it.
So Dallas gets a new sculpture – Playboy Marfa becomes Playboy Dallas (at least for as long as the exhibition lasts).
Good.
Design District, Dallas, Texas
Design District
Dallas, Texas
Design District
Dallas, Texas
Into the distance, a ribbon of black
Stretched to the point of no turning back
A flight of fancy on a windswept field
Standing alone my senses reeled
A fatal attraction is holding me fast,
How can I escape this irresistible grasp?Can’t keep my eyes from the circling sky
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
—-Learning to Fly, Pink Floyd
Pocket Park
Downtown
Dallas, Texas
“You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
“The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the labor for? What would be its fruits? These were irrelevant and idle questions.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
(click to enlarge)
Dallas Museum of Art
Dallas, Texas
One of my favorite things is the Chihuly Glass window at the Dallas Museum of Art. I know I’ve posted photos of it before (here and here – for example) – but one of the things I like is how it changes with the light. Day and night. It’s always the same, but a little different.
Bill Chance 