Saturday, March 25, 2006

Alive


Another photo I took during my Magnolia Street jaunt. It may be immodest to say, but I love this picture.

Donald Judd Auction Scheduled

Donald Judd’s children work hard to preserve their father’s legacy.

On May 9 the Donald Judd Foundation, established after Judd's death at 66, in 1994, will put 35 sculptures up for sale at Christie's in New York, in an effort to create a $20 million endowment for the support of its properties in New York and Marfa, where Judd owned 3 ranches and 15 buildings.

Friday, March 24, 2006

Update on the Kinkster

A thoughtful write-up on Kinky Friedman inthe Dallas Morning News (registration required).

255-Year-Old Tortoise ... Dead

A 255-year-old giant tortoise named Adwaitya died at the Calcutta Zoo on Wednesday. The animal had been brought to India from the Seychelles Islands in the mid-18th century as a gift to the British colonial ruler Robert Clive.

What to do now? Make one big, nasty bowl of turtle soup. Yum.

What's the Coolest Thing in the World?


That would be a Lego Aircraft Carrier, of course.

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Neko Case Esta Bueno


Neko Case. Is there anything more to say? Her voice is amazing, clear and haunting. Her new album, Fox Confessor Brings Flood is my album of the year pick. But, my, she has a little bitterness toward her parents. But don't we all.

Must I Paint You A Picture?

I love me some Billy Bragg and always have since the 80s. There's an interesting interview with him on the Onion's AV Club. Couple of interesting things about it.

Says Billy: "I think the politics that we had in the 1980s in America and in the UK were a lot more ideological than they are now. Reaganomics and the essence of what Margaret Thatcher was trying to do was a lot more aimed at pushing back at what had been achieved in the 1960s." Wow. I remember the 80s, too, and I think this is most poisonous political climate in my memory. Not only are there many in the U.S. interested in undoing the Sixties, they want to undo the New Deal. And they're doing it. That is much more frightening.

However, one thing he said that I completely agree with:

"One thing that's always impressed me about America is your ability to do things when you set your mind to it, even if it is something fucked-up like invading Iraq. You know, you guys logistically are right up there. None of us have got that capacity for moving shit from A to B. It's very powerful. And I would like America per se really to get back in touch with what you Americans refer to as "barn-raising." You know what I'm talking about? When someone in a community wants to build a barn or a house, everybody in the community gets together and spends an entire weekend to help the person to raise the A-frame of their house or their barn. That ability to go out and help people.

"You know, if everyone in the Middle East who met an American met one who had come to help them, rather than an American armed to the teeth who had come to police them, I think we could begin to move away from the situation we've found ourselves in. There's a great film to be made, or maybe a book to be written, called Go Home, Yankee, And Take Me With You. So many people out there look to the United States as a place of great opportunity. And I think that maybe your manifest destiny is to help people rather than to hinder people. I would like to see the American people live up to that."

Monday, March 20, 2006

Readymade Art


I love old signs. I look at them as little pieces of readymade art. Here's one of my local favorites, across from Benito's on Magnolia.

Another Award

My friend Johnny D. Boggs is my hero. He's a guy who follwed his dreams and has had things work out nicely. He quit his day job wrestling with the elements of style in daily newspapering and became an award-winning writer of western fiction. He just won his second Spur Award this weekend for his book, Camp Ford. Check him out and buy a book.

Friday, March 03, 2006

A Picture of Jim

I like taking pictures of people painted on walls. This is Jim. I snapped this back in January down on Magnolia.

Thursday, March 02, 2006

Not Staying On Top of Things

Today is Texas Independence Day, which I usually celebrate by not celebrating at all. It's usually something along the lines of, "Oh, today is March 2. Texas Independence Day."

Anyway, I wanted to write about Black History Month, not Texas Independence Day, so bear with me. My daughter read the following poem from Robert Hayden poem "Frederick Douglass" at her school assembly. She's a very articulate, confident reader for an 8-year-old, which is why they asked a blonde-haired white girl to read a poem for Black History Month. And this poem is amazing:

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

For a thoughtful examination of this poem, read the Say Something Wonderful Blog.