It’s diverse, and not just in terms of ethnicity. In the midst of what former mayor Annise Parker called "a toxic sea of red," Houston is a stalwart blue dot that hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since the 1970s. Parker, who left office in January, was the first openly gay mayor of an American city with a population over a million. There’s all that sprawl, but there’s also light rail, and greenways, and art installations, including the Big Bubble, which consists of a single red button nestled in a brick column on Preston Street by Buffalo Bayou. Press it and you’re not really sure what will happen, which is kind of the point: you idiot, you just pressed a red button for no reason, and might have blown something up far away. You didn’t, as far as you know. Instead, there’s a rush of compressed air, a rumble, and then a giant burp out of the yellow-brown water of the bayou.
The Big Bubble is the single greatest piece of public art I have ever seen, because it involves making a city fart at you.
It’s not pretty or scenic or anything other than a swampy, soupy, overheated, traffic-ridden amoeba of a city, the kind that at its worst moments resembles an overgrown fungus capable of dying from a serious congestive heart condition.
But this—
Houston is a cruel, crazy town on a filthy river in east Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It’s a shabby, sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the west—which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch
—it ain’t accurate. It’s not close. If there are pansexual cowboys, I didn’t meet them. If there is a culture of sex, money, and violence, it’s average at best for the American standard. Ditto for the crooked cops and brazen women. It can be shabby, but you try keeping a suit pressed in that heat for longer than six minutes. I don’t know what the code of the west is, but in Texas I assume it doesn’t kick in until somewhere just west of San Antonio.
When he wrote that for The Independent in 2004, Hunter S. Thompson needed every place to feel like that, I guess, but that’s not what I saw in Houston. Houston is best experienced mouth-first, and the enemy is not an army of malevolent cowboy conmen, but a much more mundane one: gout. Trying to eat everything you are supposed to eat — the Korean braised goat dumplings at Underbelly, the barbecue at Killen’s, the Frito pie I had as a side dish at Cream Burger, the Vietnamese pho, the Indian at Himalaya— will level you. That none of this is mentioned by Thompson is proof he did not eat solid food for the last thirty years of his life.
Houston is disordered, diverse, hot, constantly fighting its own bulk, nearly ungovernable, prone to flooding, traffic jams, and occasionally susceptible to the cruel whims of global oil and gas prices. It sometimes follows currents contrary to what the rest of the country does, or thinks, or buys or reads or listens to or eats. In the 2016 elections, Houston chose Kim Ogg as District Attorney after the openly gay candidate ran on a platform of diverting non-violent drug offenders away from jail and properly prosecuting rape cases. In the midst of the most savage, reactionary election season in recent memory, that happened.
It’s a lot of things floating along at once, is what I’m saying — some above the water, some listing below it, and some in the process of heading one way or the other. All that uncertainty and flux doesn’t stop. It’s ceaseless. It can’t be stopped. It is what your city is, or will be: diverse, messy, probably hot and unplanned in the way all thriving organisms are. You could not contain Houston, not with three belts strapped tightly around it. It’s the messy, hot, live present and future, as certain and unstoppable as heartburn from trying to digest all of it.
https://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2016/12/20/14006214/houston-cougars-football-tom-herman-major-applewhite
Austin clearly the best city. so your friends got surprised that Austin was the best city in tx? or that it wasn't full of rattlesnakes? wut.
...in my company, everyone based in Texas hates Austin except for the one sales guy who lives in Austin. I have 4 friends I know who moved to Austin...two of them moved back to California and one of them who moved to Austin in the 1990s has since moved on to Waco, lamenting that "Austin ain't Austin anymore". One is still in Austin and loves it.
Am I wholly off base?
and then headed to Johnson City for 2 nights for a girlies weekend. Apparently, there are a bunch of wineries in the area?
Put together just the cutest little gift bags for the gals.
On the go Metamucil
Liquid IV
Mini bottles of Titos
Cowboy boot earrings, in a variety of colors.
Dark chocolate Reeses
And my personal favorite, assless chaps guys that sit A TOP the wine glass!!!
37