An odd reference to Texas in today’s New York Times article about Libreville, Gabon:
In the airport duty-free store, the wine is upward of $400. The service at the fancy French restaurants in the chic Louis district is immaculate, and at the luxury hotel on the sea the call girls dress like fashion models.
The futuristic government palaces on Omar Bongo Triumphal Boulevard, with their flying-saucer and rocket-ship outcroppings, marbled interiors and expanses of plate glass, would make the pedestrian feel humble, if there were any. It is almost as if you could be in a prosperous city in Texas.
Is the writer saying A) That we also don’t have pedestrians in Dallas, B) That everything is big in Libreville, just like everything is big in Texas, or C) Dallas call girls dress like fashion models?
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Maybe it’s a reference to our ugly looking ‘futuristic’ OCP headquarters city hall?
E.) All of the above.
Libreville should be a sister city to Dallas, for kismet’s sake.
Dallas has wide streets and everyone has a car, hence no pedestrians. Besides, no one is humble here, anyway.
This is a good time to refer back to David Byrne’s great article in Saturday’s WSJ.
If a city doesn’t have sufficient density, as in L.A., then strange things happen. It’s human nature for us to look at one another— we’re social animals after all. But when the urban situation causes the distance between us to increase and our interactions to be less frequent we have to use novel means to attract attention: big hair, skimpy clothes and plastic surgery. We become walking billboards.
This observation will come in very handy in the years ahead when one has to explain the silliness of Dallas.
They are probably referring to the part of Dallas where George Bush lives with the mountain views.
We have approximately 6,000 pedestrians who walk the city everyday. The homeless.