I had low expectations going to Houston. Notorious for everything from its poor air quality to its humidity to its corrupt businessmen and politicians, I worried that I might be entering a dank, segregated, knotted backwater of confused Americana.
For the record, the only people complaining of the humidity during my time there were Texans. My fellow Californian relatives didn't seem to mind much at all. It was generally overcast, and a pleasant breeze wafted through the city the whole time I was there. If anything, the weather was much more pleasant than that of Dallas, when I was there a few years ago. Oddly, my Dallas and North Texas relatives complained about the humidity and weather in Houston most of all. One suspects an intrastate rivalry.
Yet in Houston, I discovered a city of fascinating contrasts, a place where 5-star restaurants settle in alongside slums, where mansions; museums; industrial and commercial buildings; all settle in amidst one another in block upon block of blended sprawl random enough to confound even an Angeleno.
Aspiring into the sky throughout a wide swath of the city are skyscrapers that loom above an urban canopy. Standing at a window or balcony above the city, the trees crowd alongside one another so tightly that much of the city seems undeveloped, so that only by driving the city’s streets does one realize that, in fact, the city is thickly developed, but blessed with mature trees everywhere.
The conurbation that extends from the Gulf Coast in the South, to the massive airport on the North, plays host to a diverse array of people and their cultures, a swimming mass of humanity in a city notorious for its traffic.
The freeways, in any case, seemed much better marked to me than those in Dallas. One could find ones destination, and could navigate comfortably along the innumerable frontage roads lining the edges of the nested freeways.
I’ve read that following a cycle of real estate development there followed a crash, and the prices dropped precipitously, to the point that numerous immigrants moved into Houston, to make parts of it their own. Nestled amidst the urban forest, one finds ethic neighborhoods that don’t smack of the Balkinization notorious in other American cities. Instead, a diverse range of ethnic groups abides cheek-by-jowl, sharing communities, retail strips, and restaurant zones.
My mother and I decided to visit some of these enclaves. When I asked a (South Asian) Indian man at a gas station about how to locate the Hillcroft neighborhood, he brightened considerably, and directed me in excited, breathless phrases, to drive a few blocks away to a polyglot neighborhood, where Thai food, Mexican cuisine, South American, and Japanese food, among many other kinds, were available adjacent to one another; where two-story Indian clothing specialty stores soared alongside the street, their windows lined with saris; where an Indian vegetarian restaurant in a strip mall was immediately adjacent to a Muslim halal butcher shop. Somehow, everyone seemed to be getting along.
At the Sheraton where we stayed, a multi-day Indian graduation ceremony was underway. Houston, the US’s 4th-largest city, shows
demographics that list just under 5% of the population as “Asian,” but there seemed to be many more Asians than that around. In fact, the only Indians I saw in this former cowboy town were of the subcontinental variety: yet another irony, and one that fits the town. Does
Pakistan International Airlines have a terminal at the airport in your town?
Even Houston’s great art museums echo the eclectic jumble of the city at large. At the
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, we entered a gallery displaying over a dozen
ancient Roman busts, walked into the next room to encounter
contemporary Argentine photography, then moved into the next chamber, where 19th-century American landscape painting and
colonial American art awaited. How often can one compare Roman to colonial American busts? It was an incredible juxtaposition.
Then, just past a courtyard of contemporary figurative sculpture was a room of Modern art, including Jackson Pollack’s No.6, which floored me, and the first time a Pollack ever has gotten to me.
As I stared at the painting, and let it work its magic in front of me, forms emerged, coalesced, and receded; danced to and fro, fore and aft in the proscenium of my perception. I reveled in the painting as it had its way with me, and in allowing the forms and the roughness and the smoothness and the clarity and the blurredness to occur, accepting the work utterly on its own terms, I felt I had a sense of the artist coming through the work, communicating to me. There is a moment in work like this when every dimension folds into the message, when everything coheres into alignment with the overarching meaning, when method, technique, emotion, viscera, and analysis all both focus and recede, and one is immersed.
And alas, seeing it
online only does it a disservice. Some art just doesn't cut it unless seen in person, such as
this sculpture, which cracked me up in person at SFMOMA, but for which photos do no justice.
One is tempted to attribute this madcap selection of weirdly assorted masterpieces as another symptom of Houston’s oily past, when wealthy petrol barons and baronesses dropped small fortunes on assorted bits of art, contributing them to the museums, without perhaps knowing what made the work great.
But who's to say what touched them, what moved them to contribute? Who's to know the true depth of their experience with the art they bought and they gave.
One must be impressed with the work of such people as the oddly-named philanthropist,
Ima Hogg, whose contributions to Houston art, culture, and civic life are not easily discounted.
I may have been in town for a family wedding, but by the looks of it, the town doesn’t sleep. Near my hotel, a Starbucks was still cranking at 2 am, and the groomsmen were able to stay out partying until 6 am.
What sort of town has more trees than any city I’ve ever seen, yet is notorious for
its pollution? What kind of city is further southeast than I’ve ever been in the U.S., yet is considered an outpost of the “Southwest”? What kind of town gives rise to the Kenneth Lays and the Tom DeLays of the world, yet has the finest examples of Southern hospitality I’ve ever witnessed? Where else could one find a George H.W. Bush Intercontinental Airport that has, as its main thoroughfare, John F. Kennedy Blvd. running through the middle of it?
But what’s most interesting about Houston to me, is not that I liked it
despite its contradictions, but I suspect, rather,
because of them.
