Do You Think You Can Tell?
Yes, I refer of the Pink Floyd song, "I Wish of You Here". I have been today to this place, the wise fool of the American cities, the dissolute robber-baron - the Houston!
It is amazing, indescribable. The secret: no zoning.
posted by Latouche at Large at 9:50 PM
4 Comments:
I visited Huston once. And I have to admit my first thought wasn't "no zoning"
It was "Wow. A strip club on every block"
My first impression upon visiting was "Wow...I'm in Anchorage, but hotter and flatter, and fewer Texas accents".
I take some solace: a cheerful, Democratic couple in Houston laid the price of a '02 Hyundai to have one of my paintings class up the joint.
Oddly, it has to be admitted that Houston is one of the ten or so major American urban art centers. (with NY, LA, Boston, DC, Chicago, Philadelphia, SF, Seattle, Miami, with places like Portland, Minneapolis and Cincinnati serving as vigorous second art-bananas.) Live too far outside these locales, and the local artists are basically just decorating the place for the Chamber of Commerce.
But I might tender that this is in the same way that the bourgeois anti-republican revolutions in Renaissance Italy, including the Medici themselves, commissioned barrels of art to cover up their political crimes.
That's fine. What are you going to do with the Hyundai?
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