(shhh… Don’t tell anybody about Barton Springs )
stork sez "i love you"
that’s a big rat
first we went the wrong way
click to ENLARGE
then we went back the right way
errybody likes little trains
the paparazzi treatment
0 comment
go listen to some screwtapes billy.
Hi Bill,
Hmmm, well, Houston was always a little “scabby”…a word I made up to describe a city with too many new (and ugly) buildings and not enough beautiful old rustic architecture. We’re hoping to relocate there though, and I was looking for something (silly me!) akin to the Sawdust Art Festival here in California. You know, something that runs almost year round, or if you are a resident, you can get a booth for a 10 week stint in summer. What was I thinking????? I only saw a couple of weekend festivals! Is that it besides museum shows? Surely not. I hope you have some good news for me!
–Sheri
This is about as interesting as Eleanor William’s “collecting” article, and you still have not answered Sheri.
Bill,
I’m commenting on something written a month ago, not that time having passed makes your observation any less trenchant. The core element in your observation, it seems to me, is the landscape of Houston. Call it Nature. Culture must be built on top of Nature, and Culture is shaped by the conditions prescribed by local conditions of Nature.
Houston is a swamp. The idea of building anything relatively permanent on top of a swamp is, to say the least, problematic. It may be an unspoken rule among builders in Houston that tiltwall shopping centers and sheetrock clusterfuck apartment complexes are appropriate for a geology that proscribes durability and a deep sense of history. Get in and get out. Take the money and run. If that sounds like private contractors doing business with the Bush Administration, well, that’s part of the picture too.
I left Houston after many, many years, and I am in a place that is so vastly different, with a deep sense of history and a natural world that has supported a deeper culture. That culture has its flaws and its problems, of course (it doesn’t have as much money as Houston), but it has allowed me to reconsider my past back there. The big thing for me here is the landscape. I am very attached to it in a way that is simply impossible in a swamp. I admire so many artists in Houston for building their lives on that squishy, stinky swamp. I don’t know whether that is brave, naive, stupid, or some mysterious combination of all three. In the end though, for me, it did not work. I had to leave.
My best wishes to all.