“The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen”
― Milan Kundera, Immortality
Column Capital, Ellis County Courthouse, Waxahachie, Texas
“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country
Artwork in window, Waxahachie, Texas
I think I recognize the white glove-things in the photo I took. I watch too much television – and I watch too much “How It’s Made.”
One episode showed how they made latex surgical gloves. These ceramic hand-molds are dipped in a latex solution on a long assembly line. The solution dries on the ceramic hands and the gloves are then blown off with a jet of air. The scene of hundreds of hands moving along the manufacturing process was odd and hypnotic.
I think those things in the window, in front of the painting, are ceramic latex glove-molds.
Maybe.
“Every young sculptor seems to think that he must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of decent clothing. I am weary, even more than I am ashamed, of seeing such things. Nowadays people are as good as born in their clothes, and there is practically not a nude human being in existence.
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun
Antique Store Window, Waxahachie, Texas
“It isn’t running away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
The best advice… the only advice you really need, is to find the light first.
Fountain in Waxahachie
Photo taken on a Photowalk. At a child’s waterpark, a new splash pad, near downtown Waxahachie, Texas… you push a button and the various water things come to life, designed to sprinkle youngsters on hot Texas summer days. Here, two streams cunningly combine to form a disk of water, suspended in air, ephemeral as water can be.
Everything on the earth bristled, the bramble
pricked and the green thread
nibbled away, the petal fell, falling
until the only flower was the falling itself.
Water is another matter,
has no direction but its own bright grace,
runs through all imaginable colors,
takes limpid lessons
from stone,
and in those functionings plays out
the unrealized ambitions of the foam.
—-Water, by Pablo Neruda
[Strangelove’s plan for post-nuclear war survival involves living underground with a 10:1 female-to-male ratio]
General “Buck” Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn’t that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious… service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
Ambassador de Sadesky: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor
—-Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
You don’t see very many of these anymore.
Waxahachie, Texas
The Federal Government is moving forward to bring into operation fallout shelter space for large groups of people under very austere conditions. Many homeowners, communities and business firms can and will provide more adequate and better located shelter space for their own needs. The Federal Government is backing this effort with a massive dissemination of technical information. In addition, we will inform those who cannot afford costly structures on low-cost methods of improvising shielding against fallout radiation. The people of this country will be urged, by me, by the Governors and by other leaders to do what is within their means.
…
I look forward to the closest cooperation between all levels of government in the United States to move rapidly towards this goal. Your committee is making a major contribution in stimulating participation by the state governments in the nationwide civil defense effort.
Sincerely,
JOHN F. KENNEDY
Letter to the Members of the Committee on Civil Defense of the Governors’ Conference. October 6, 1961
Someone younger than me would find it very hard to imagine how ubiquitous the “Fallout Shelter” sign was during the time of my youth. They were everywhere.
This was the time of “Duck and Cover” films being shown in school. Even at that young age I remember looking down at a puddle of sweat on the floor where it had dripped off my forehead as I crouched under my school desk in an air raid drill and thinking, “What the Hell? We are all going to roast!” I had recurring nightmares of Russian nuclear strikes, air raid sirens, and the end of mankind.
But times have changed… if not improved, and I haven’t seen a Fallout Shelter sign in decades. Until we stumbled across one on a photowalk in downtown Waxahachie.
So, if “Rocket Man” fires off his missiles in anger and insanity I guess you better get in your car and haul ass to Waxahachie, Texas, and hope there is room in their fallout shelter. It’s right off the town square, across from the statue of the Confederate Soldier. There should be plenty of room.
I won’t be there.
Major T. J. “King” Kong: Survival kit contents check. In them you’ll find: one forty-five caliber automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days’ concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; three pair of nylon stockings. Shoot, a fella’ could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.
—-Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Bill Chance 