Marking the spots

The 'X' on the road marks the spot where John Kennedy's presidency ended.

I can't help thinking of how life hurtled on for everyone else beyond this point. In the life of the nation, one presidency ended and Lyndon Johnson's began. It's quite a punctuation mark.


All this happened nearly 50 years ago (50 years ago, next year in fact). It's history. It happened 'before my time', in the words of the majority of people I know. But so much of it seems to have happened in the modern day: Kennedy's motorcade was flanked by police motorcyclists, the story was covered on live national TV, there are colour images...

So often in the US, history is here in the ever-present. It gives me goosebumps. You can still kind of follow the route:

even if some of the buildings have changed.

I remember when I was interviewing Michael Daugherty about his opera, Jackie O. I asked him if he'd had any contact with the Kennedy family while writing it. No, he had said, but at the premiere he was introduced to Nellie Connally, one of the patrons of the Houston Grand Opera (the commissioning company). He said she'd been very moved. 'And she was', he said, or words to this effect, 'the wife of the Governor of Texas at the time.' I held my breath: '...and sitting in the front seat of the car the day President Kennedy was shot.'

As I repeat to myself, it's one of the sombre realisations I had here at Dealey Plaza: History is printed on the present here.

And what makes this even more overwhelming is that in America, the moments in history and the issues they turn on are huge - civil rights, the extent of liberty, the rapprochement between  East and West, the highest stakes... moon landings, for heaven's sake.

This is why I have always thought their stories were ripe for telling on an operatic scale. However, in the past few weeks I've discovered an Australian story which I think is on the same scale. Of that more anon...

Fifth day here in Dallas and the impressions have become more nuanced. Last night walking back, we heard the most ornate birdsong - in the middle of this glassy skyscraper-scape. I love the big advertisements on the blank walls of buildings.

Later on I might walk over the Dallas Museum of Art. They've got an exhibition of paintings by the 20th century German Expressionist, George Grosz. He came to Dallas and painted it in the 1950s. The exhibition is called Flower of the Prairie: George Grosz in Dallas.

http://dallasmuseumofart.org/View/CurrentExhibitions/dma_410984

Fascinating what you see, if you stay and look long enough.

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.