Dallas gallery hopping

I prowled the scene this afternoon. Here's what I saw and thought.

At Barry Whistler Gallery, Lawrence Lee is still up and shining with some of the most elegant lines I've gazed upon since I first got acquainted with Fragonard's tree drawings back in the days of Bush I. Lee mines old racist depictions of African Americans and his supple imagination to produce some truly witty narrative-based graphite and ink and tea and who knows what drawings of crazy-assed tall tales that probably make sense only to him. So why tell the stories? Because they look great. And there's always that astonishing line of his.

The image above is from Lee's show at the now-defunct Clementine Gallery in Chelsea a couple of years ago. He's getting better.

Road Agent may or may not be defunct also. It still has the "Installation in Progress" sign on the door from last month. As I understand it, gallery owner Christina Rees has accepted a position as director at TCU's off-campus exhibition space over in Fort Worth.

Fort Worth 1, Dallas 0.

Dunn and Brown is offering Dale Chihuly glass stuff to discerning folks in the Metroplex. Why? I don't know. Maybe the bills are coming due. Still they had a kickass small group show in their "project" space with works by Trenton Hancock (whom I love and not just because he once speculated that everybody's soul looks like a pre-teen Caucasian girl), Jeff Elrod, Erick Swinson, Vernon Fisher, etc.

Swinson's savagely trompe l'oeil sculptures of a pre-hominid creature and a stag shaking off the bleeding"velvet" from its new antlers take the Halloween prize for amazingness and craft.

Down in the Design district, Conduit offered Michael Tole and Joe Mancuso. Too many flowers on one picture plane (yes, that's the point) and painstaking renderings of Chinese decor. Cool, but why? I can't say. Somebody tell me.

I tried to see the new stuff by Dornith Doherty at Holly Johnson, but the place was temporarily shut when I dropped by. Should have called first, I guess.

Over at Marty Walker, I caught a sneak peek of William Lamson's new work, and it was a pleasure. Building on his videos from last year, he set up several ad hoc machines designed to use wind and waves to make drawings during his recent tour of South America. The Chilean coast wave works were delicate and appropriately atmospheric. Others were bolder and more aggressively "expressionistic." Whatever that might mean when a kite is doing the expressing.


Above: William Lamson, Kite Drawing Jan. 31, 2009. 740-915 PM. Colonia Valdense, Uruguay.

The Goss Michael Foundation offered a small Mark Quinn survey. He's the dude who cast his own head in his own blood. If he makes it, he means it. Got it?

Quinn's Mother and Child (Alison and Parys), 2008, a marble sculpture of a nude woman and her baby, was an extraordinary thing to behold. Handsome and at peace with her body, Alison was born without arms and with improperly formed legs. Gallery literature quotes him as saying "She's very beautiful, she just looks different."


He's right.

Cow Hill tonight

(Image from Keri Oldham's Web site)

I'm just back in from the front porch, the coyotes are howling out on the prairie and the street out front is damp. It shines under the lamps.

Last night we attended an opening for Peter Barrickman and Keri Oldham at Centraltrak in Dallas. Keri used to be a gallery manager at the now defunct And/Or Gallery. I reviewed a show they had last spring. Keri's watercolors are endearingly creepy, a blend of fashion illustration and automatic drawing where somatotype and psyche meet on an uncomfortable picture plane.

Barrickman's work is all over the map, but the fractured and squashed pictorial space of a landscape and idiosyncratic expression would seem to be his interest. Not surprisingly, collage enters into the mix often. Collage can do that to space.

At present, I'm imagining a review of Amy Blakemore's show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The magazine's deadline is Tuesday, and it's not yet written. Tonight I'm thinking of remembering the times I was disabused of comforting, but false, notions of how the world is. Amy's pictures are like that. Hard as stone and sweetly, achingly melancholy. Here's a beautiful picture. You loved him. He's dead. But still you love him. Let this picture's beauty comfort your loss. It's not love, but beauty is at least something.

Ted Kennedy

Here's a bit from an admittedly liberal blog. When he attended the funeral of murdered Israeli PM Rabin, Ted Kennedy quietly placed earth from the graves of his brothers on the grave of the slain peacemaker. His brothers were known to us all as political figures which we associated with certain ideals, but he knew them as his brothers. Blood kin. The dirt was not just dirt. It meant something, if only privately

Ted Kennedy's sins and transgressions were very public. His position of privilege got him out of some really bad situations that none of us could have hoped to escape, and these situations were largely of his own making. These facts offend the small d democrats of America. We hate class privilege. It isn't right. Well it isn't.

And yet he did accomplish some really good things in his many years in the senate. At least I think much of what he did was good. He was a major influence on the laws of our country, shaping them in ways that served to uplift and make better the lives of people who were decidedly not privileged. Here's some of what he did: Title IX (gender equality in college athletics), the ADA, race-blind immigration legislation, bilingual education, Meals on Wheels, the National Commission on the Protection of Human Subjects (in med/sci experiments), stopping military aid to the fascist Pinochet regime in Chile, education for children with disabilities, expanding the civil rights act to protect persons with disabilities, the Civil Rights for Institutionalized Persons Act, the Refugee Act of 1980 (asylum for persecuted persons), Employment Opportunities for Disabled Americans Act, the National Military Child Act, Civil Rights Act of 1991, Americorps, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, voted no on war with Iraq (one of 23 senators who did so).

Most of what he accomplished, he accomplished after that evil night at Chappaquiddick when Mary Jo Kopechne died. It is as though he had begun as the callow, drunken libertine his enemies call him -- a selfish irresponsible glutton who was rich enough and Kennedy enough to buy his way out of anything with money and social connections. But then something else emerged, something with a will and a capacity to make our nation better. In working to make America better, I think, he may have also worked to make himself better.

I am fully aware that some amongst us do not share my belief that he made our country better, and that is what it is. We will certainly disagree about many other things. It was always so. But the Americorps program has had a very real and beneficial effect on some of the little towns that dot this run-down portion of NE Texas. I've seen it. And allowing people from India and China and Jordan and Mexico to immigrate legally to the US the same as people from Western Europe has truly benefited this nation. Look what's happened to our national cuisine alone. I mean jeez!

Ted Kennedy did that for us. And he came to embody a certain attitude -- love it or hate it or whatever -- which may have died with him. He stood for something. He meant something.

Add to that the fact that he was a Kennedy. He was the son of Joe Kennedy, ambassador and alleged bootlegger millionaire. He was brother to Joe, Jr who died on an Air Corps mission in WWII, and brother to Jack who skippered PT 109 and survived to become a senator and later President of a Camelot White House before his murder. He was brother to Robert, murdered on the night of his triumphal victory in the 1968 California primary -- that terrible year of political murders. He was their blood kin, of their generation. My parents' generation.

And it passed with him.

I recall the November day in 1963 when John Kennedy as killed. We lived in a Dallas suburb at the time. I remember my mother sobbing on her bed. I remember not knowing what to do because I was still just a boy. And now the question arises. Why did she cry? She didn't know him. He was unrelated to her. He was a stranger. He was a glamorous, powerful man with a glamorous wife who lived a life so disconnected from the suburban reality of my mother's existence that they may as well have been separated by an ocean. But she sobbed that November afternoon for what had happened to him. And for what had happened to us. He meant something to us.

I once wrote a review of a show of Warhol's Jackie paintings which was presented in the building Lee Harvey Oswald used for his sniper's perch that awful day. My editor cut a line I'd written about our all being widowed after the killing of our President. But it was the memory of my mother sobbing that led me to write it. How can you explain that to an editor?

When Jackie died years later my mother bought a ticket to Europe. She had to get away even though she was retired and not flush with disposable cash. "That woman was too young to die" she explained. Jackie meant something. True or false, she meant something.

Ted wasn't John. Everybody knows that. He wasn't Bobby either. But he was ours. He was a Kennedy. And he was the last of them.

Greening Dallas?

Dallas used to look like the future. Parts of it did, anyway. Logan's Run (released in 1976) was filmed there (also in Fort Worth, Houston, a sewage treatment plant in El Segundo, CA, and other locations). The 1980 PBS TV movie based on Ursula K. Leguin's excellent novel The Lathe of Heaven was shot largely in Dallas, as well. Something about Dallas' sun-baked, concrete public spaces and impersonal, corporatist architecture appealed to filmmakers of the time when it came to imagining, say, the 23rd century. This likely says a lot more about the filmmakers and their audiences than it says about the 23rd century.

It certainly says a lot about Dallas, where the future used to go to get strange.

Another future Dallas was revealed near the end of last month when the winners of the Re:Vision Dallas architecture/urban design competition were announced. The contest invited architects and collaborators in the fields of urban farming, sustainable land use, etc. to create a city block that:

encourage[s] and value[s] relationships, while fostering respect for nature and our neighbors, privacy and resources, economy and consumption.

One of the three winning designs came from the San Francisco-based firm of David Baker and Partners. It looks like this:

The image is via the architect's Web site, where several others are available, as are some words which expand on the images:

Rather than simply placing a single building in the middle of a neglected space, the design team's conceptual reach extends beyond the property line into the larger city. The team proposes creating intersecting greenways pieced together from open space and disused lots to set up a framework for future development and to connect existing but disparate public amenities, such as the Farmer's Market and the Trinity River.

At the center of the greenways’ "X", Lone Star Square will function as the public heart of the new food/agriculture district, with orchards, garden plots, and historical elements from the city's past. Running through the system of greenways are a series of water features that filter harvested rainwater and convey it in a stream to the agricultural fields to be used for irrigation.

It's good that people in Dallas and elsewhere are looking into future green buildings and alternatives to the dystopic present in which a paucity of shops and amenities, multiple days of unsafe air quality, and oppressive summer heat make the urban experience just plain bad. Like the impossibly strange Dragonfly Building proposed for New York, the project arises from a good heart and good intentions, even if it is a latter day Hanging Gardens of Babylon. And I'm most hopeful for the idea of harvesting rainwater, even though we're now at the beginning of the dry season in this part of Texas, and some parts of the state to our south are well into a drought. But somehow the whole bigass shebang strikes me as just so very Dallas in its scale and structure and attitude. Consultants and experts and government workers decide solutions to problems that earlier consultants and experts and government workers inadvertently created via their solutions to earlier problems.

Meanwhile, up in Milwaukee, a guy named Will Allen -- who last winter was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Grant -- has worked patiently and persistently to create an urban farm in a blighted neighborhood. He's featured in the trailer below.



(The trailer is from the film Fresh, the Movie, which I have not seen) What I find admirable and encouraging about his project is that it is not the work of designers, but of a man and his compadres who want to make a place to live and live well. There is a connectedness both to a community and to an idea of living with the means of feeding ourselves that really good designers sometimes miss and Dallas implementers of designs have consistently missed.

I mean he's the author of the sentence "And believe in what the worms will do for you."

Where did those pig lips get off to?

There they are! I need them for Congressman Pete (I used to be district manager for marketing at Southwestern Bell so I'm an expert on economic realities) Sessions from Dallas. The Dallas Morning News reports Pistol Pete flapping his yap today:

Sessions told The New York Times that the administration intends to “diminish employment and diminish stock prices” as part of a “divide and conquer” strategy.

And he asserted that the Obama agenda is “intended to inflict damage and hardship on the free enterprise system, if not to kill it.”

Precisely how a nefarious divide-and-conquer strategy will arise from staggering unemployment numbers and slumping equity values I don't know. Just why an administration with Obama's very high approval ratings would want to divide and conquer anybody I don't know either. Nor can I know the congressman's ability to divine the President's intentions to undermine capitalism, given all the gigabucks he and his have poured into our ailing financial institutions in an effort to save capitalism.

Moreover, blaming current employment numbers and stock prices on an administration which has been in power for less than four months is patently bad faith partisan posturing in a recession that's a year older than that. Below is a screen grab of a chart for the S&P 500 during the previous administration.


Note the precipitous decline at the end of 2008. That stomach-churning drop at the right begins in September, when Bushman Hank Paulson let Lehman fail. And it is most important to remember that in the several years before that fall as much as 40% of all profits reported by US corporations came from financial institutions, companies whose earnings statements we now know involved magical thinking about the valuations of the derivatives like CDOs, CMOs, and CDSs they had on their books. This made their stock valuations a fraud and unreasonably inflated the whole index. That boom in '06 and '07 was made of air. Talk about inflicting damage on the free enterprise system.

So I just visited Pistol Pete's Web site and left him a message about his utter ignorance. I doubt he'll read it, but I had to say something.

The pig lips I reserved for my blog.

Another one shuts down

The latest e-missive from young Dallas artist/gallerist Paul Slocum reports that his And/Or Gallery is closing when the next show (his 23rd in a little over three years) closes. The reason given is that he's going off to New York to pursue other plans. Slocum writes: "most of the artists that I personally work with are in New York, and I've decided that I need to be in closer contact to reach my full potential."

Slocum's Web site features some serious seizure-inducing wall paper, but more than that he's very carefully documented his art and culture activities over the past few years on it. He took a painting class from me back when I taught at UT-Dallas and successfully managed to vault far beyond it after graduating (computer science, summa cum laude). No wonder his Web site offers links to (among other things) numerous Atari hacks, a project to convert 1985 Epson dot matrix printers into musical instruments, and other nerdly items like a stop motion animation made of thousands of screen captures of found homepages.

Over the years, And/Or has featured works by Tom Moody, Cory Archangel, and many other edgy, intelligent artists. The last And/Or show will feature works by Austin artist Chad Hopper.

Image via the artist's Web site, which is worth checking out, especially for the Roz Chast-meets-Kurt Schwitters pictures.

Richard Patterson review

My review of Richard Patterson's current survey at Dallas's Goss-Michael Foundation is online at Glasstire.

Patterson is a YBA who has relocated to Dallas where he's having a fine time romping around in ultra-American culture and making paintings and sculptures which display equal parts wit and craft.

(image via James Cohan Gallery)

Judge and jury

I spent today jurying a high school art competition at UT-Dallas. Sponsored by the Texas Visual Art Association, it's an annual event in the UT-D gallery. I've done it before, but this year the competition had grown quite a lot over past years' numbers. Over 1400 pieces were submitted. We jurors (Brian Gibb, director of Public Trust Gallery and publisher of Art Prostitute; Liliana Bloch, director of the McKinney Ave. Contemporary; and Margaret Meehan, an active artist currently living in Dallas; and me) whittled the show down to a manageable 170 or so works after hours of viewing and muttering amongst ourselves.

Coincidentally, yesterday I had lunch with a group of artists including Robyn O'Neil who was in my tiny town to jury the student show at her alma mater. I had the pleasure of being her teacher some years back, though I really can't claim to have taught her anything. Robyn is an amazing artist. Here's a picture of one of her drawings:


(click on it to see the full image)

Lunch was wonderful -- great companionship and good conversation that ranged from schemes for financing a trip to Berlin to a YouTube video of Paula Deen losing her pants during a cooking demonstration.

Working

My wife and I visited the Dallas Art Fair yesterday. Because I flashed my press credentials at the door, I got a badge and a thick packet of stuff about the fair and the galleries therein.

It was a real deal. Real dealers doing real deals abounded. Art was everywhere and it was for sale. Major names. The chips were bluer in some spaces than others, but all chips were on the table.



Any worries about the state of the art market in our depressed economy weren't acknowledged. Instead we were treated to Cy Twombly hand-altered prints, Donald Judd wood cuts, a Henry Darger watercolor, and works by lesser known folks. All were desirable. All were available.

The little Jeff Koons Balloon Dog I saw (a few hours into the experience and after we'd both reached the saturation point) summed it all up most eloquently: A sweet object of desire, shiny and bright, which could be mine for the right price.

The end of an era

Word has spread that Gerald Peters Gallery in Dallas is shutting up shop. A part of a Santa Fe-based gallery empire, the Dallas location has been in business for 22 years, according to their Web site. In the past year they've shown works by Jun Kaneko, Dan Rizzie, and a number of artists with Texas reputations such as Terrel James and Bill Komodore.

When Talley Dunn (now of Dunn and Brown Contemporary) was gallery director back in the 90's, they offered a very young Trenton Doyle Hancock his first one-person show. He was still an undergraduate student at the time. At the opening reception, Hancock dozed atop a big, galumphing platform designed to represent an early iteration of his mythical "Mound" characters. At set times during the evening, an alarm clock sounded and Dunn climbed up the mound to feed the artist a bite or two of brightly colored Jell-O. Then, as Hancock drifted back to sleep, colorful balloons tumbled out below him. The artist: sleeping, eating, shitting. It was great fun and more than a little edgy.

But lately, that sort of adventurous spirit has not been in evidence at Gerald Peters, as the gallery increasingly turned to safe bets with big price points. Dale Chihuly, for example. It couldn't have helped that a number of nationally recognized artists left to join Dunn in her new venture.

What the closing means for the art market in Dallas and nationally, one can only speculate. It sure can't be good, though.

Giving it away

The Dallas Center for Contemporary Art is holding an auction this month to raise funds for their new digs. As I do each year, I've donated a painting to their effort. That's my painting above. The title is Bit. It's oil on a digital print on canvas. The auction is online here. Or if you prefer, my piece is here. I can't say I'm charmed by the green background for my little pink beauty (who displays art on a green ground?), but they didn't ask me about it.

Bid early and bid often.

Eliasson

My review of the Olafur Eliasson survey at the Dallas Museum of Art is online here. There's an error: the captions for two images are switched tonight, but I've asked them to fix that.

The image above is Room for One Colour (2002).

Nice guy

Weird image:


His name is Jeremy Newton, and he's a graduate student at a university where I used to teach. He was invited to participate in a group show at Centraltrak in Dallas. The opening was tonight. That pink scumble of stuff above is a detail of a carpet of Pink Pearl eraser rubbings Jeremy made last year. The guy's a natural. He scattered a layer of eraser rubbings on a gallery floor before he'd ever heard of Barry Le Va. Maybe he still hasn't heard of Le Va. I don't know.

The trouble with what I saw tonight, though is that idiot gallery visitors don't look where they're going. Jeremy told me that his initial installation with the piece humbly and simply lying on the floor didn't work out because oblivious folks kept stepping on it. He had to set it on a low pedestal for the opening. Much was lost. Confining his oddball material to a raised platform took away some of its stubborn, mute factuality and made it only "art."

I've seen it in other contexts, and it's better than that.

Art's spectrum

I saw two shows in Dallas over the weekend that just about set the limits for the spectrum of activities covered by the blanket term "contemporary art."

At the Dallas Museum of Art the Olafur Eliasson survey "Take Your Time" celebrates and explores the conundrums surrounding perception and consciousness -- specifically the consciousness of perception considered as experiences in a continuous duration. It's all Bergsonian philosophy and the embededness of perception in the ever changing objects of its awareness, except when it's all look at the facts of the museum experience and how that context attends what you're getting out of these things you're looking at. The audience Saturday was enthralled. Smiles and appreciative murmurs abounded. Fun philosophy. (image via www.olafureliasson.net)



At Conduit Gallery I caught the last day of a smart, hip show by Fahamu Pecou, a painter and graphic designer based in Atlanta. His day job involves working with assorted hip-hop performers, helping to design the particular street-smart, tough guy images of masculinity so central to marketing their music and personas. This led Pecou to generate a Warholesque campaign for himself involving a series of paintings based on imaginary covers for (mostly) actual magazines like Artforum and Tema Celeste featuring himself as a star. His campaign slogan: "Fahamu Pecou is the shit." It's all the intersection of public image, race, and constructed gender executed with a fierce wit. The title of the painting above is Warn a Brother.

Gallery sights

Some things worth looking at in the Dallas gallery scene (in no particular order):

1. Richie Budd's funny, insouciant and encrusted sculptures at Road Agent Gallery.

Beneath the slops and pours of nameless plastic guck (in this and other sculptures) are items like a dried mouse cadaver, a popcorn machine, dangerous-looking firecrackers, and a Sony Walkman. One piece, Bon Voyage Somnambulating De Pileon (Jamielee Lee), includes a light show, a fog machine, a soundtrack, and (best of all at an opening) a cooler that dispensed cocktails. I'll likely write about it for somebody in the coming week. What I write is up in the air -- which is to say I'm baffled, but impressed.

2. Allion V. Smith's photos -- "Hall Pass" is the show's title -- at Barry Whistler Gallery.

Shot mostly at Dallas' Booker T. Washington magnet school for the performing and visual arts, Smith's cool images deftly evoke a vivid sense of the flavor and aura of a particular place. Pictures are silent, but this show has a soundtrack that has nothing to do with audio recordings. You can see what the place sounds like. My initial reaction was they should be exhibited as a group in a university classroom building. I know just the place.

3. Jackie Tileston's paintings at Holly Johnson Gallery. Quoting extensively from classical Chinese landscape painting and God knows what else, Tileston's works generate an insane, but somehow convincing, sense of pictorial space.


I guess it's the willful shifts from crisp edges to atmospheric washes, but what I find satisfying and instructive is the fact that she can make a painting so divided against itself still seem complete.

4. Aaron Parazette at Dunn and Brown Contemporary. Hard-edge abstraction meets retro-cool typography in paintings of surfer dude vocabulary words gone all strange.


If I can wrap my brains around a portion of his project, I'll whip out a review-like item on this show as well. They look extraordinary, and busting up reading by means of letter forms is a project after my own heart.

Dallas Video

We attended a panel discussion on video art today at the DMA. Organized by the Dallas Video Art Festival in conjunction with a video series currently running at Conduit Gallery, the DMA, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and other sites in the region, the talk consisted of off-the-cuff observations about the medium by the show's curators -- Bart Weis, Charles Dee Mitchell, and Carolyn Sortor -- and Paul Slocum, whose And/Or Gallery was host both to an interesting show I reviewed recently for Art Lies and to some of the video festival, too.

Slocum is a hacker and newer-than-new media artist who has a band called Tree Wave and a blog here (if you may be susceptible to seizures, beware the frenetic wallpaper). Years ago, Slocum took a beginning painting class from me, as he reminded me after the DMA event today. He says his paintings were mediocre. I can't remember his paintings, but I do remember him. That may be evidence to support his estimation of their value. It's good to see him doing well in his nerdly niche.

The presentation included snippets from a number of videos which either have already run in the series or will run in coming weeks. (The festival lasts five weeks) Notable snippets included Jon Pylypchuk's demented "Dating Game" reenactment (starring wieners -- the boudin blanc was an albino), Guy Ben-Ner's disarming "Moby Dick" retelling in his kitchen (co-starring his daughter), and Dominic Angerame's "Anaconda Targets," which consisted of unedited cockpit videos of smart bombs doing their terrible work on an Afghan battlefield.

As is usual for such Sunday afternoon museum talks, most of the discussion lingered on the surfaces of things. (Not that there's anything wrong with surfaces. Someday I'll write of my belief in mere appearances and the allure of skins.) Still, I'd have liked to hear a bit more about the recursive -- or redoubled -- concepts of time these artists addressed. Sortor was always on the brink of saying someting about it, but it never happened.

Observation to take to the bank: Dee Mitchell, discussing "Anaconda Targets" opined that the artist's not editing or otherwise altering the images or the audio rendered it a readymade documentary. Chew on that a moment and the importance of the surface may begin to appear.

Writing about the Art Bomb

My review of Robert Wilhite's The Bomb is online. I mentioned Wilhite's show at Barry Whistler Gallery in a June 14th blog. At that time I only had a cell phone picture of it. Below is a great shot by photographer Allison V. Smith.


Another review has passed through the final edit and has been approved for publication here. A third, destined for publication here is still in the rewriting stage. Writing for an online journal like Glasstire is a real pleasure. Fast turnarounds = instant gratification.

Happy Fourth of July. Let us now contemplate the Fat Man.

Sex and assassination in the city

Last night I was waiting at an outside bar on the south side of Dallas to meet two women from a magazine I sometimes write for in New York. The joint is called Lee Harvey's, and it's a ramshackle collection of picnic tables, gravel, beer, mixed music, dogs, and casually dressed patrons just off Akard Street south of I-30. Some of the patrons were quite casually dressed indeed. One woman in a spaghetti-strap tank top offered us more than a little of what comedian Dawn French once termed an "astonishing bosom." But that's Dallas.

A 2006 poll of Dallas Observer readers named Lee Harvey's the best place in Dallas to "pick up some tail." Sundays the music is run by DJ Sistah Whitenoise, according the the bar's Web site. I was pretty anxious going in. I'm not accustomed to scenes where one picks up tail. But the dogs were fun. A woman with an ordinary bosom tossed a filthy tennis ball for a pair of rambunctious standard poodles; a badly behaved mutt jumped on a picnic table a little before the patrons seated there were done with their onion rings.

I'd never met my dinner dates, having only spoken to them on the phone. They were here in Texas to get a sense of the regional art scene. Also to get out of New York for a couple of weeks. Sipping a Shiner Bock, I started getting concerned that I'd not recognize them when they arrived.

But I did. It wasn't only the shoes -- hair, blouses, posture, gait all gave them away -- but the shoes alone were enough to tag 'em. Not Manolo Blahniks, but not Dallas either. Really not Dallas. Introductions complete, we got more beer (well, one of us got a Shirley Temple because she's pregnant.) and studied the menu. Burger, salad, onion rings (said to be the best in Dallas, but they weren't), two chicken panini sandwiches. An adorable mutt who could have been the model for that asshole Rodrigue's "Blue Dog" pictures begged impertinently and futilely for my sandwich.

Conversation ranged from Dallas galleries to the Kiefer winged book in Fort Worth to their itinerary across Texas. They plan to finish up at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa. I raved about the Judd aluminum boxes and about the Flavins. Probably I got pretty boring, but that's me.

Talk turned to the name of the bar. Yes, I said, I was here when JFK was killed. I was 12 and really too young to process what had happened, but still naming a bar after the killer is a mistake. Even if it's a very friendly place with cute dogs and lovely women. I still remember my mother lying face down on the bed sobbing that terrible afternoon.

Today my dinner companions drove to Houston. I stayed in Commerce.

Dallas dinner

At the suggestion of a friend we ate at Thai Noodle and Rice on Fitzhugh just east of North Central while we were in Dallas tonight. We hit the ATM on the way because we were forewarned they didn't take credit cards. It was a delight. The whole place has a homemade feel to it right down to the hand-lettered take-out menu: "Hot & spicy make taste."

We had an order of basil rolls, which were spring roll-like concoctions served with a delicious peanut/tamarind dipping sauce. That was the appetizer. One of the main courses was a spicy flat noodle dish with small bits of pork. Wow. The other main was a Thai beef salad, which although it was really good, didn't match the marvelous balance of spice, sweetness and texture of the noodles.

While we were eating, the cook dropped by our table to make suggestions for our next meal there (beef with sticky rice is all I remember). "I try to make it like the original," he said of his cooking. I liked that. Not authentic, but like what he remembers from before he emigrated.

As we prepared to leave, a waitress came by to suggest other tasty choices for our next visit since we like spicy food. I know it's a way of drumming up business for the restaurant, and that's okay. But there's something especially rewarding about seeing people who are both really good at what they do and know that what they do is really good. Having them share it with you is a pleasure.

Our tab was less than $25.

Tracy Hicks at the MAC

The McKinney Avenue Contemporary offers several art exhibitions a year in a large space it shares with the Kitchen Dog Theater in near north Dallas. Exhibitions have been of uneven quality -- a gorgeous, lyrical exhibit of David Reed's abstractions a few years back, for example, and a moving retrospective of paintings and sculptures by the late Scott Barber not so long ago suggest something of the place's potential.

But there have been a number of clinkers like the visually unintelligent exhibit of banal photo constructions by the otherwise very smart David Byrne a a while before the Reed show. As a visual artist, Byrne's a good musician. Yeah, I'm aware of the Talking Heads' RISD provenance, but he obviously got his show because of his musical fame, not the visual power and poetry of his work. An early Heads lyric snippet: "All my pictures are confused..." Right you are, David!

This afternoon we drove to Dallas to see the work of Dallas artist Tracy Hicks at the MAC, and true to form it was uneven. I've worked with Hicks in the past. Back in the 90s when I was the pet art writer for the Arlington Museum of Art and Hicks organized a group show there, he and I exchanged numerous emails and I toured his studio as we discussed an essay I was to write for the show's catalogue.

His offerings at the MAC consist of two installations: "still/LIFE" in the modest project room, and "Global Warning" in the largest rear gallery. The topic is ecological decline and species extinction, but I found looking at his rubber cast frogs and cast resin bottles visually pleasant enough (at least in some instances) that the message didn't really matter. Also, I have to say that (his scholarship notwithstanding) a plethora of thermometers scattered about and inserted into assorted cast laboratory-associated forms comes up short as a poetic way to address what we are doing to this planet.

A room full of bottled and jarred rubber frogs glowing in the dark under UV light on the other hand -- well that's something to see.