Over a month ago, I drove south of Dallas to meet a friend and take some pictures of Sunflowers (some more here). The field of yellow faces was spectacular and beautiful – can’t wait for next year to go back.
But while I was setting up a shot I looked down and saw a mess of smaller, but more colorful and every bit as beautiful, blooms.
I’m glad I noticed them.
Wildflowers south of Dallas.
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
Trinity River Bottoms, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
(click to enlarge)
“Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes — I mean the universe — but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.”
― Galileo Galilei
Trinity River Bottoms
Dallas, Texas
Trinity River and Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, Dallas, Texas
There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.
—-Pythagoras
Downtown Dallas, Texas
The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.
—-Federico Garcia Lorca
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.
Friday, I was driving home from work along the same route I drive twice every day. A quick calculation – I’ve driven past that point in the neighborhood over six thousand times. This is a little stretch of road through what used to be the independent town of Buckingham. When I first moved to Dallas, Buckingham was a rectangle of small farms hanging on in the northern reaches of the giant exploding Metroplex. A developer bought the entire city, making all the property owners rich, with the single requirement that all the residents hold a vote before they left – and that vote would make the town “wet.” All the suburbs in the area were “dry” at that time – which meant that there was no sales of alcoholic beverages. His idea was to create an island of legal booze and open up an upscale entertainment, lodging, and destination district… thereby raking in the cash.
It might have worked, but there was one of the too-periodic economic collapses in the late 80’s – and his plans fell to dust. Some of the former landowners bought back their properties for pennies on the dollar at the bankruptcy sale. In the decades since the liquor laws in North Texas have become much less draconian and the City of Buckingham faded away – eventually adsorbed into the larger suburb of Richardson. It has since been mostly developed into zero-lot homes and large apartment complexes – along with a couple of liquor stores to keep the traditions of the area alive.
This stretch of road wound between complexes and is the sort of place where people drive faster than they should. There is often a police cruiser lurking in a hidden speed trap by a tiny city pocket park. I would guess on a typical day every car (except me) is going faster than the speed limit. Yet, because of the traffic leaving the complexes, the subtle blind curve in the road, and the iffy intersections at each end – it’s pretty dangerous and I wish folks would slow down.
So, on Friday, I felt a twinge of Schadenfreude as saw the red and blue flashing LEDs of a Police SUV angled into the parking lot at a complex. “They’ve caught somebody, good. At least it’s not me,” was the thought that involuntarily flashed through my mind. I’m not proud of that, but it is what it is. I couldn’t help but steal a quick glance sideways as I drove by.
I didn’t see what I expected. I only saw the little tableau for two seconds, at most, but I’ll always think about it. The police SUV had a dark sedan trapped in the corner of the little lot. The uniformed officer had a beautiful young Asian woman over the hood, one hand on her back, and the other reaching around his back to pull his cuffs off his belt. She was dressed in a short blue and white striped cocktail dress – obviously on her way out on a Friday evening. She was looking back over her shoulder at the officer and I had a good quick look at her face.
I’ve seen plenty of people get arrested. I think most people that are taken into custody have been hauled in before and know what is going on – what to expect. Some are angry, some are indignant, but most are resigned. This woman wasn’t like any of these. She was scared to death. She did not look like a criminal.
I’m not being anti-cop here. I don’t know the full story – I don’t know any story at all, really. The officer, as far as I could see, was by himself and if he ran her license and it came back with warrants – he didn’t have much choice but to cuff her. That’s what I assume happened – she was caught in the speed trap, pulled over, and something was wrong. Either her license came back or there was a problem with the car.
The young woman had made a mistake. She might have ignored a ticket until an arrest warrant was issued or maybe she was driving a friend’s iffy car.
But I’ll never forget the look on her face. I can see her driving along, music booming, in a great mood, looking forward to a Friday evening on the town and then, within seconds, it all went south. Her fear, shock, maybe layered with some embarrassment. Across the street is a big field that is owned by a girl’s elite soccer club – there were maybe two hundred girls from eight to eighteen out practicing – though I didn’t have time to swivel my head that way, I’m sure a lot of them were looking up from their drills to see the woman hauled away.
I feel so sorry for the woman. I’m sure, no matter how it all turned out, she will remember this day with shame and dread the rest of her life.
I feel helpless – though I don’t know her and only saw her for two seconds – I wished there was something I could have done. I didn’t even want to turn around and see what happened. I could only make things worse.
Most of all I feel guilty for the moment of Schadenfreude I felt when I first saw the red and blue lights.
Off Lamar Street,
Dallas, Texas
Retink Reality
“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
Trinity River Audubon Center
Dallas, Texas
Cattails
“In a room the size of a ballroom the Pattern was laid. The floor was black and looked smooth as glass. And on the floor was the Pattern.
It shimmered like the cold fire that it was, quivered, made the whole room seem somehow unsubstantial. It was an elaborate tracery of bright power, composed mainly of curves, though there were a few straight lines near its middle. It reminded me of a fantastically intricate, life-scale version of one of those maze things you do with a pencil (or ballpoint, as the case may be), to get you into or out of something. Like, I could almost see the words “Start Here,” somewhere way to the back. It was perhaps a hundred yards across at its narrow middle, and maybe a hundred and fifty long.
It made bells ring within my head, and then came the throbbing. My mind recoiled from the touch of it. But if I were a prince of Amber, then somewhere within my blood, my nervous system, my genes, this pattern was recorded somehow, so that I would respond properly, so that I could walk the bloody thing.”
― Roger Zelazny, Nine Princes in Amber
Vines
“To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.
We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.”
― Oliver Sacks
The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction in the life of the nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose – and it is the test of the quality of a nation’s civilization
—-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Mural on a liquor store, Lamar Street south of downtown, Dallas, Texas.
(click to enlarge)
I saw this from the window of a train travelling south through the city and returned a week later to get a closer look. And a photograph or two.
Trinity River Bottoms
Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
My Xootr Swift folding bicycle leaning against a railroad trestle in the Trinity River Bottoms, Dallas, Texas
There is a contrast between the forlorn forgotten floodplain muddy muddle given a little shade in the brutal Texas heat by a rusty rundown railroad trestle bereft of train, ties laddering the sky… and beyond the levee the glass crystal spires of giant office buildings bustling with city office workers invisibly moving in automated cubicles of air conditioned atmosphere.
Bill Chance 