But somehow I had only ever imagined Dealey Plaza in Dallas to be basking permanently in bright sunshine, with green grass and clear blue skies and Jackie Kennedy's pink dress glowing in the lurid high-saturation blur of the Zapruder film. There was something eerie and unsettling about arriving here on a grey and misty December morning to find the Grassy Knoll looking like any old roadside verge I might find back home. Also - and this may just be me - I'd always assumed that the road was flat, but in fact it slopes quite sharply downhill.
The whole thing - the plaza, the Grassy Knoll, the distance to that sixth floor window (remember that Americans call the ground floor the first floor, so in British terms it's only the fifth floor) - is smaller than you might think. That sixth floor is now a museum where you can pay $14 to go and check out the view that Lee Harvey Oswald had through his rifle sights. I didn't bother. It was ghoulish enough just to watch all the idiot tourists outside, grinning inanely for their selfies as they posed at a location famous only for a man having had his brains blown out there. A couple of blocks away, an exact replica of the open-top presidential limousine sits permanently parked by the roadside and you can pay $5 to be photographed sitting inside it. It all reminded me of my 2008 visit to Tuol Sleng, a preserved Khmer Rouge prison in Cambodia from which almost nobody got out alive. There were English ra-ra girls in Ugg boots, smiling and preening for selfies next to the torture racks, with dried bloodstains still visible on the walls behind them. People, mostly, are morons.
While I'm being a grumpy old man (it happens from time to time)...here in Dallas I had my first ever taste of big-league basketball and it wasn't great. I was dismayed to find that they play constant loud music over the tannoy, while the ball's in play. For instance, when the away team is attacking, you get either the 'Jaws' theme or a military-style drumbeat for the crowd to chant 'De-fense!' over and over again. As soon as the whistle blows, the annoying loud music is replaced by annoying loud commentary. It never stops. And yet there's no real drama to the action: one team runs left and scores, then another team runs right and scores, and repeat, ad nauseam. I left after the end of the first quarter. The stadium was half-empty anyway. Needless to say, refreshments and merchandise were both ruinously expensive.
The richer parts of the city - Uptown, Turtle Creek, Oak Lawn - are spotlessly clean, but also depressingly bland and uniform. Bars and restaurants that make you feel like you're in a foreign hotel; shops that make you feel like you're in a foreign airport. Fortunately I can't afford to stay in the rich places, so instead I'm in an area called Deep Ellum which is a bit more bohemian. In a local bar called Dada, there was a costumed lady on stage staring vacantly into space. I sat at the bar and waited for her to start singing, or taking her clothes off, or both; but she didn't move. Perplexed, I got about halfway through a pint of Deep Ellum IPA before turning away from the bar to discover that the whole place had been booked out for a sketching class and she was the model. Doh.
One more stop to go on this trip. It's almost time to head home for the festive season. I wonder if I can find somewhere on America's east coast where I can fly home from, a place that one might associate with Christmas in some way?
 |
| The Grassy Knoll and the sniper's window. It was cold and grey the first time I came here (see text), but the weather was better the next day. |
 |
| Dallas by night, from the east |
 |
| Motorcycle, or possibly Batmobile |
 |
| NBA basketball: Dallas Mavericks v Denver Nuggets at the American Airlines Center. Meh. |
 |
| Edd vs Food #48 Velvet Taco, 3012 N Henderson Avenue, Dallas TX Two tacos in flour tortillas: 1. Crisp chicken tenders, Buffalo sauce, Danish blue cheese, ranch creme, carrots and micro celery. 2. Akaushi beef burger, peppered bacon, smoked cheddar, lettuce, onion, tomato, pickle and velvet sauce. |
