Day Two - Dallas

Second impressions. We walked into I. M.Pei's Meyerson Center last night for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra concert. I.M. Pei? One of the most famous architects of the past century? There were signs in the foyer mentioning that the Dallas Symphony's Music Director, Jaap van Zweden is Musical America's Conductor of the Year. There are CDs on sale of the DSO's performance (under Zweden) of their commission, August 4, 1964. The piece, by Steven Stucky and Gene Scheer (mentioned also in yesterday's blog), is perceptively set on one of the most poignant days in US history, when the inspirational and tragic trajectories of LBJ's presidency (the passage of Civil Rights legislation and the disastrous Vietnam War) intersected in the discovery of the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers in Mississippi and the Tonkin Gulf incident. I figure this is a great arts city in light of all this. Then, before the concert, the mayor gets up and says that we are in the largest contiguous arts precinct in the world. Dallas is rising in my estimation.

This afternoon I walked with Raff Wilson, a colleague from the Hong Kong Philharmonic, to Dealey Plaza where Lyndon Johnson's presidency commenced (ie, after President Kennedy was assassinated there).

'This is it,' said Raff as we came to traffic lights in Elm Street.  'What, here?' This small, tight area?

It is so much smaller than I expected. The grassy knoll is not that far away and yet in film footage of people rushing it (in the direction of where they suspected they heard the shots), it looks like quite a distance. I also never realised that the road runs downhill here.

or how close Kennedy was to getting onto the freeway and away.

Across the road I looked up at the former Texas School Book Depository and it was eerie to see a guy standing in the sixth floor window from where Oswald was meant to take aim, unless you have formed the impression that he didn't do it, or that there was a second shooter by the grassy knoll.

But the theme of this blog is to question impressions. What is needed is evidence.

Would this be evidence that Dallas is on the up?

That's what I always associate public transport and light rail with.

First impressions - Dallas

Arriving in Dallas yesterday, I was struck firstly by how wooded and green it is on the outskirts. This often strikes me about the US. I assume that, as a country that has been settled longer than Australia and with a more rapacious attitude toward nature, it would be over-cleared. No, that is Australia's dubious honour.

Downtown, though, is one of those bleak cityscapes that you'd find in a Jeffrey Smart painting -

carparks, glass towers,

at night: not a soul. How do US cities get to this degree of urban desolation? The people drive their cars into underground carparks and then straight up into their towers?

I crossed Elm Street last night, and there were sequences of charming old Art Deco or 1920s buildings, but it's a bit like a mouth that once had a set of good teeth.

Yet, Dallas is a cultured city. It has a symphony orchestra and an opera. Its opera company commissioned Therese Raquin, the piece by Tobias Picker and Gene Scheer that in some respects is the most successful contemporary opera - because Picker and Scheer figured out that lyricism's true province is the broad depiction of love and death.

It will be interesting to see how my impressions vary over the next few days.