“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery–isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum
“Youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
“Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
(click to enlarge) Entrance to the Texas Ale Project Brewery, Design District, Dallas, Texas
“His own image; no longer a dark, gray bird, ugly and disagreeable to look at, but a graceful and beautiful swan. To be born in a duck’s nest, in a farmyard, is of no consequence to a bird, if it is hatched from a swan’s egg.”
― Hans Christian Andersen, The Ugly Duckling
David Smith American 1906-1965 Leda 1938 Painted Steel
Museum of Fine Arts
Houston, Texas
From the label text:
David Smith learned the technique of welding steel from working in a car factory, and he applied this skill to the art of sculpture. Leda is based on the Greco-Roman myth about a god who takes the form of a swan and then seduces a woman. Here, Smith offers a witty interpretation of the unlikely act of lovemaking between a bird and a woman.
“Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn’t tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn’t fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds of time, like a reflection in a fun house mirror.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
(click to enlarge) Anish Kapoor (India, 1954) The World Turned Outside In, 2003 Polished stainless steel Northpark Center Dallas, Texas
It’s a giant factory-state here, a City of the Future full of extrapolated 1930’s swoop-facaded and balconied skyscrapers, lean chrome caryatids with bobbed hairdos, classy airships of all descriptions drifting in the boom and hush of the city abysses, golden lovelies sunning in roof gardens and turning to wave as you pass.
—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
― Albert Einstein
Decorative Knot, made by a blacksmith at Frisco Heritage Museum, Frisco, Texas
Last Sunday I made the long drive up north to Frisco. A friend of mine had told me about an open house at the Frisco Heritage Museum and Village. All the historical buildings would be open to the public. It sounded like a bit of fun, so I was there.
As I walked out of the Railroad Station I heard a series of loud metallic clangs. I turned toward the sound and there was a shower of orange sparks from a healthy flame sprouting up in the darkness of a metal shed. I recognized these as the telltale signs of a Blacksmith at work.
I walked down there and settled in, talking to the smithy at work. He was forging square nails by heating and pounding iron rods. He took special pride in his work, talking about how he had placed in some recent blacksmithing contests. Someone asked him about taking lessons and he said that Brookhaven college has a number of blacksmithing courses. After a couple of nails, he said he was done, and went over to sit down. A younger man came into the shop and began to set up his work.
“That’s one guy that learned at Brookhaven,” the original smithy said.
I walked out to see the rest of the buildings on display – the church was especially cool. Then I returned to see what the new guy was doing.
“I’m making decorative knots,” he said. He was heating rods, then bending them into a series of small loops. Finally he’d cut the knot off… and start on another. It was mostly practice in heating, forging, and bending metal – but it was pretty interesting.
He cooled one knot off in a wooden bucket of water and handed it to me. “Here’s a souvenir,” he said.
For some reason, I really like the thing.
Blacksmith fire from coal and coke. You can see a knot heating in the lower left.
Hammering a heated knot.
Hammering a heated knot.
The blacksmiths sitting around, talking shop.
Coal and coke fire, Frisco, Texas. They explained how if you put too many of those irons in there, you would lose the one you needed to work on – thus – “too many irons in the fire.”
Decorative Knot, made by a blacksmith at Frisco Heritage Museum, Frisco, Texas
Bill Chance 