“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
― Alfred Hitchcock
Mural on Construction Fence Farmer’s Market Dallas, Texas Chris Hoover
I couldn’t sleep last night, so I turned on the television. Tuning around I came across the start of an old Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It caught my eye because it featured a very young Burt Reynolds. It also had Harry Dean Stanton (- who looked like he always looks) and Murray Hamilton (don’t worry, you don’t remember the name but you’ve seen him). The show was from 1960, season 5, episode 37 – “Escape to Sonoita.”
The thing wasn’t perfect, but the story was crackerjack with a nice twist ending. The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, and the woman in distress was beautiful. What more can you ask for?
“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“Without knowing it, he had constructed a gigantic vertical zoo, its hundreds of cages stacked above each other. All the events of the past few months made sense if one realised that these brilliant and exotic creatures had learned to open the doors.”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise
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
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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.
“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
“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.
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
“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.
“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Decatur, Texas
I remember when I was a little kid loving the Texaco commercials on TV. The TV was small, full of static (with rabbit ears and bits of foil on top), and only black and white – but it had an amazing effect on my tiny self. “You can trust your car to the man who wears the star.” I barely can remember my PIN number now but I remember that jingle from more than a half-century ago. I would bug my father to buy some gas from Texaco, but he never would. He said it was more expensive than his brand (not sure what it was, but I do remember getting a big green inflatable dinosaur from Sinclair). Now, of course, it seems silly to get excited over a stupid commercial, but I was only a little kid. What did I know?
“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
Bill Chance 