A Fug-Ugly Monstrosity, As Observed by a Stranger to Our Town

On Sunday the Times Book Review favorably eyeballed David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries, a book composed of journal entires the ex-Talking Head and cha-cha enthusiast made while touring various metropolises of the globe with his musical combo. A dedicated bicyclist in his hometown of NYC, Byrne totes a foldable bike on tour so he can get out and about and take in the local sight-age. As the Times reviewer put it, the book is “partly about cycling but also about whatever Byrne happens to have on his mind at the time.”

We assume (but we’re not spending $25.95 to find out for sure) that the book does not include what Byrne had on his mind regarding Houston, where he stopped for a concert this past summer at Jones Hall (whose sound quality he pronounced “possibly the best of any hall we’ve played in”––hey, that’s something if you’re keeping score), most probably after his book had gone to press. Just as well, because Byrne’s take on Houston––brought to our attention a few months ago by the infrequently active but excellently named Amnesia Houston blog––is painfully mundane. It’s the sort of routine surface-y observations an out-of-towner would commit to memory while pedaling around the downtown area for a couple of hours and then Googling around for another 20 minutes: Enron, no zoning, the lack of pedestrians on the streets, the proximity of old-black-guys-on-the-front-porch 4th Ward to the skyscrapers (complete with cliched photo of said from 4th Ward vantage, nowhere as striking as 25-30 years ago, what with the newish development in the far background), rumination on Jones Hall namesake Jesse, blah wheeze and so on. Byrne does, however, offer a ripe description of one off Our Town’s true monstrosities, one that certainly bears repeating:

A block or so past the run-down shacks — this is Houston where there is NO zoning — is the new Federal Reserve Bank. It’s a weird, almost surreal post-modern edifice.

The mind turns to Alan Greenspan, former head of the Fed, who helped via deregulation to get us into the mess we’re in today — the whole Goddamn world is fucked, Alan! This very out of place structure somehow lingers, like a fart left by someone no longer in an elevator. Alan was recently quoted as saying “I made a mistake.”

Perhaps this snooty New Yorker was unaware that the cheesy, Lego-like structure was designed by none other than internationally renowned architect Michael Graves, notable for also designing “a line of household goods” for Target and more recently was in partnership with [yellow tail] wines. Perhaps Sr. Byrne did not recognize the true genius of Graves' design as a “playful” metaphor for the Target-like facade of our increasingly abstract post-post modern economy. Perhaps the globetrotting bicyclist didn’t “read” it the way we read it as we hurtle past, on our way to purchase Chinese-made goods at the "River Oaks" Target: as a rebuke, and a warning that we should get busy converting our remaining assets into hard metals and burying the hoard as deep in the backyard as the occasionally permeable clay will allow.

Here’s an interesting critique of the building, prompted by the same Byrne journal entry.

Standing on the Verge of Getting It On: Peter Brown, the Friends ’n’ Family Candidate for Mayor, and the Clear-Cut Favorite of ... Peter Brown!

In observance of the biblical injunction (at least we think it is) that “by their contributions shall ye know them,” we present our second in what apparently will be a long-running examination of the July 15 finance disclosure reports of the major candidates in Houston’s November mayoral election. We hope to complete this venture sometime before the election. In this installment we administer a less-than-thorough going-over of the document submitted by Peter Brown--architect, urban planner, at-large city councilman, husband of Schlumberger heiress, annual summer vacationer in France, father of five and grandfather of 15, U.S. Army vet, a guy who if elected mayor would be older than Bob Lanier was when he took office (!) and, last but certainly not least, the only mayoral candidate bearing the coveted endorsement of Parliament/Funkadelic's George Clinton*. (“But what about Bootsy, baby?”, as some observer, perhaps us, was moved to remark after this news broke.)

We’d like to declare here at the outset that was do not consider Peter Brown to be solely a vanity candidate, even though more than 60 percent of the money he amassed in the first six months of this year came from his own apparently deep pocket, in the form of loans totaling $765,000 (for which he’s charging himself zero percent interest--there’s nothing subprime about Peter Brown!). And we were slightly off-base recently when we airly dismissed Brown as the candidate of Stuff-White-People-Like white people, because there are obviously many SWPL white people who dig Annise Parker (like the massage therapist her campaign listed as having made a $10 contribution), and some--well, maybe a couple--who have given money to Gene Locke. Moreover, we were mildly surprised that people other Peter Brown were willing to hand over almost $500,000 to the Peter Brown campaign from January through June, despite general widespread skepticism about his chances of winning (here’s an astute but gentle analysis of Brown’s prospects, by somebody who knows what he’s talking about). It’s clear that Brown has built up quite a bit of good will in certain sectors of the community, particularly among Inner Loop development-property management-realtor types, who share his penchant for planning and mass transit and orderly growth and whatnot, and in Houston’s interlocking circles of Old Money wealth (and by this we mean people who wouldn’t be caught dead in a Shelby Hodge column, at least on the scale and frequency of, say, Rebecca Cason Whazhername). The occupation of a noticeable number of sizable-dollar donors to Brown was listed as “self-employed investor.”

The bearers of venerable Houston names who’ve opened their wallets, and possibly their hearts, to Brown include Cullen Foundation president Roy H. Cullen, down for a grand; Corbin Robertson of Quintana Minerals, also good for $1K; Joan Blaffer Johnson, Jane Blaffer Owen and Marjorie Jester Milby ($1K each), and sundry others whose venerable names we’re too lazy to type. Somewhat more generous, at least for this go-round (but from each according to his abilities, as some joker once said), were Henry Holmes Cullen of Quintana Petroleum and Louisa Stude Sarofim, chair of the Menil Collection, who donated the maximum $5,000 apiece. Also on the Brown ledger were scions of some of the city’s long-past-their-heyday Jewish Merchant families, including Robert Sakowitz, down for $500, and Marilyn Oshman, who chipped in $2,500. Then there’s Sakowitz’s sis, socialite Lynn Wyatt, wife of former jailbird Oscar, who contributed $2.5K.

But Brown’s most generous supporter appears to be an exemplar of the city’s New Money, Frank Liu of Lovett Homes. Light-rail booster Liu himself kicked-in $5K, while Cindy Liu, whom we presume is the Missus Liu, added her very own $5K to the PeterPot (we think it’s sweet how spouses pool resources, especially went trying to get around vexatious campaign finance rules). But the Liu-related generosity didn’t end there: Brown’s report also listed $5,000 contributions from a Frank Liu of the 77007 zip code and a Kirby Liu of Hanover, N.H. (we been there and ain’t ever, never goin’ back). Both of these latter Lius were reported to be STUDENTS for occupational identification. It’s reassuring to know that even in these times of rising tuition, some students are willing to set aside the money they’ve earned washing dishes or whatever to make their voices heard in the political process (we sniff a future piece in this from the Chronicle’s Teen Columnist).

Also maxing-out for PB in the last reporting period were Michael Garver of BRH Garver Construction, who appears to have also anted up for Brown opponent Parker; Richard Bost of Environmental Resource Management; Glen Seureau, listed as president of Seureau Investments; Janet Pignataro Hansen of the Jamail & Kolius law firm; Edward Allen of Eagle Global investment advisors and wife Chinui; James Dunlap of the El Paso Corp.; Andrew Segal of Boxer Property; self-employed Meg Goodman, and James Flores of Plans Exploration. The Wu clan was especially good to Brown: Henry, president of American First National Bank gave $5,000, as did Janae Wu and Chyong Jae Jenny Wu (say that real fast--it’s fun!). (Developer Ed Wulfe--who would be a Wu if he lost the “-lfe”--gave $2.5K in the last period.) And then there were the Browns, proving again that blood is thicker than mud, in the person of Hoyt Brown Sr. of El Paso Energy, accountant Martin A. Brown of KPMG, and Catherine Brown, STUDENT, of the 77019 area code, each good for 5 grand. (We notice Brown listed no PAC donations--perhaps he swore off of them and we missed it, or perhaps he couldn't get any--but he does list, possibly erroneously, what appear to be two direct $5,000 donations from corporate interests, which we believe is not kosher, unless they changed election law while we were dozing for the past 20 years.)<>plans and proposals, a few of which might actually be politically viable). While we personally would not be willing to wager any of the fortune we’ve amassed as a self-employed investor on a Brown victory, the man obviously has potential to wreak some mischief, especially if he can lend himself another $765,000 and paper the airwaves with clever, wall-to-wall commercials, maybe using whoever it was who made Bill White’s ads (although he should have gotten started on it back in the spring). And of course there probably are several thousand Wus and Lius out there who haven’t maxed out, if not on this continent then some other.

*Brown told our old pal Bernstein, late of the Chronicle, that his favorite Funkadelic number is "Under a Groove," meaning One Nation Under Groove, although we would have guessed that he’s partial to Sexy Ways or perhaps Jimmy’s Got a Little Bit of Bitch in Him.

Reports Confirm the Obvious: Locke Is the Undisputed Insider-Establishment Candidate for Mayor (Not That There's Anything Wrong with That, Per Se)

We held off on mowing the grass last weekend--it's still too hot for a delicate flower such as our self to venture out in the fearsome daylight--and instead killed some precious time skimming the July 15 campaign finance reports of the major candidates to replace the apparently indispensable, irreplaceable and downright saintly Bill White as mayor. (We know this is "olds," not "news," but, as we've often noted, we're not on the White Man's Clock here at Slampo's Place.) We'd digested the earlier media reports on the disclosures, but scanning the reports our own bad self left us with a greater appreciation of Gene Locke's role as the chosen candidate of Houston's loose-knit establishment (as much as anything is really "established" in Houston) of insider lawyers, civil engineers, old-school developers and contractors, port interests and so forth. It's quite a distinct branding for a black guy from East Texas who initially came to public attention (sort of) when as a student activist at the University of Houston he was tried and acquitted on a hoked-up charge of inciting to riot. (What this all says about Our Town or Our Post-Racial Future or life in general we'll leave to journalists who get paid for that sort of nut-scratching; we're working strictly on a volunteer charity basis here, and while we're at it we might as well note that we have no horse in the race as of yet--we're in the undecided column between Locke and Annise Parker but listing slightly toward the controller, although if, say, Anne Clutterbuck were to temporarily abandon reason and declare for mayor we'd have to reconsider all options. )

The individual players who as of mid-July had forked over the maximum $5,000 to Locke run right along the Bob Lanier-Ned Holmes money-raising axis: the former Mayor Bob himself and his loverly Missus, the port commissioner (that is, $5k each); longtime port and hospital power/developer/banker/erstwhile potential mayoral candidate Holmes and his Missus; Meredith Long, whom we believe is traditionally identified as a "gallery owner," so we'll go with that; former Houston city attorney, Metro attorney and and Andrews Kurth big hat Jonathan Day and the Missus Day; investor Fayez Sarofim, father-in-law of the Lanier stepdaughter; Herbert Stewart of Camden Property Trust; lawyer Dan Arnold, formerly of the Metro and hospital district boards; John Nau of Silver Eagle Distributors, Kase Lawal, chairman and CEO of CAMAC* (also a port commissioner, as well as a board member of the Houston Airport System Development Corp., at least as of 2007, according to Houston's new leading information source, Texas Watchdog), and Kamaru Lawal, CFO of CAMAC (no relation, of course); engineer James Dannenbaum and his wife; ubiquitous GOP moneybags and homebuilder Bob Perry and wife; JSG chairman James Simmons and his Missus; Rockets owner Les Alexander; Astros owner Drayton McLane; celebrity lawyer (that is, lawyer-of-choice for local celebrities) Rusty Hardin, etc. and so on. (We noticed that Helen Chang, head of Mayor White's Office of International Affairs and Development, also anted up $5,000--of this we know not what to make. And, in what we can only interpret as a gesture of daughterly love, newly acclaimed mystery author Attica Locke made two donations to her dad totaling $700--ain't that sweet? )

Among the large institutional investors in the Locke campaign were the political arm of Landry's, purveyor of indigestible seafood and downtown Ferris Wheel rides ($3100); the PACs of the Andrews Kurth law firm, where Locke is a partner, and the Lockwood, Andrews, Newnam engineering firm, which both gave the maximum $10,000; substantial contributions from the PACs of the Teamsters and Longshoreman's locals; $5,000 from the PAC of Charles Hurwitz's MAXXAM; $5,000 each from the Fund for the Future and the Centerpoint Energy PAC, and $6,500 from the PAC of the Vinson & Elkins law firm, one of whose partners represents that Houston Airport System Development Corp. in its legal quest to remain unaccountable to the public (as detailed by Texas Watchdog).

Notable but somewhat less generous contributors were Oliver Luck, president of the panhandling Houston Dynamo (formerly the 1836---we think it's a soccer team, or maybe a lacrosse outfit), who could spare but a mere $1K; Jason Yoo, the Korean-American beneficiary of affirmative action whose JDDA Concession Management received that no-bid extension of its lucrative food-concession contract at Bush Intercontinental two years ago ( also good for a single grand); and a $2,500 chip from the campaign fund of Beverley Woolley, the westside GOP state rep.

Despite the big-money bent of the Locke effort, there were two humble $100 contributions that caught our eye, one from a Jim Westmoreland. Could this be the former councilman of the same name who lost his seat after it was revealed that he allegedly had privately joked that Intercontinental Airport should be named "Nigger International" when the city was considering naming the facility after Locke's old friend, the late Mickey Leland? The other was from Taylor Branch of Baltimore, Md., the former Texas Monthly writer who won a Pulitzer Prize for one of his three-book series on Martin Luther King and who must have known or interviewed Locke during his agitatin' days (days, we needn't add, that appear to be long past ... ). Perhaps there's a slogan in this: "Gene Locke, Bringing Together White Folks of Diverse Backgrounds and Interests." Or something.

UPCOMING: MORE OF THE SAME, Plus CORRECTIONS, UPDATES, ADDENDA, ASIDES And TENUOUSLY RELEVANT DIGRESSIONS (that is, if we can ever finish perusing Parker's July 15 report, which is almost as long as Thomas Pynchon's last novel).

*Claimed to be "the largest black-owned business in the world" in this 2006 Ebony profile.

But Seriously: Who's the Daddy?

We noticed that our mayor gingerly sidestepped responsibility for that obviously knuckleheaded proposal to subsidize the credit-worthiness of would-be Houston homebuyers with funds originally set aside for Ike-necessitated repairs. According to Wednesday's follow-up by the Chronicle's Carolyn Feibel

While the mayor is responsible for what appears on the council's weekly agenda, White placed the genesis of the idea with the city's Department of Housing & Community Development. He said the staff member's intentions were good.

"As the mortgage markets are collapsing, banks are no longer buying mortgages, then people who can afford a house are not able to buy a house and that's what the staff was trying to address," White said.

Setting aside the question of whether this is a matter a municipal government should "address"---it's not, but let's move on---and ignoring the faulty characterization of the would-be beneficiaries of the now-junked (?) program as "people who can afford a house," we must wonder aloud why White seems to be escaping blame for this hastily aborted (?) fiasco. The Chronicle editorial page, in a recently unprecedented display of timeliness, administered a quick tsk-tsking to the "World Class Folly" but in doing so turned uncharacteristically "playful":

Maybe, it was just some smarty-pants staffer's idea of an April Fool's joke played a month early.

No, please, let's give blame where blame is due: White's the mayor, making housing in the inner-city "affordable" has been one of his high-profile initiatives, and the way we've always understood it the mayor has an agenda director whose job is to do what that title suggests (direct the council agenda). The agenda director works for the mayor. We can only assume that Councilwoman Pam Holm, in blaming the proposal's emergence on "poor leadership," was referring to the mayor, although that would be an unusually direct form of finger-pointing that would deserve the striking of a commemorative plaque. Maybe she was just talking about some anonymous, well-intentioned smarty-pants staffer.

In any case, Feibel's reporting---and by the way, these are the sort of stories you'll miss when the daily newspaper goes the way of the mastodon, miss as in "I miss my mommy" and miss as in you'll never hear about it---has turned a fertile bed for further inquiry. The reporter quotes Housing Director Richard Celli---he works for White, too, right?---saying that only one of 872 home-buying families for whom the city has provided down payments and closing costs during White's tenure has been foreclosed upon. Hmm. That seems to be an almost unbelievably salutary figure, one we assume is documented somewhere on paper. Beyond the technicality of foreclosure, though, we wonder how many of these families are actually iving in the houses they contracted to buy, and what their presence has done for the blocks where they've settled (admittedly a difficult question to qualify, but maybe it's just all good and if so props to the mayor, etc.).

Stanford! Stanford! (Rah Rah Rah)

We have a confession, and we feel a little dirty making it: For the past week or so we have been in the thrall of a wickedly demonic force, a power that has rendered us all but helpless. You know what we’re talking about: that insatiable urge to learn every goddamn thing we can about Sir R. Allen Stanford and his financial legerdemain (which, according to Friday's Wall Street Journal, the Justice Department now believes was the result of a Ponzi scheme---shocking, no?)

The addiction is understandable: a “scandal” whose geographical coordinates include Mexia, Texas, Washington D.C., Galleria, Texas and the Caribbean island of Antigua and which has ensnared such diverse personages as Sir John Cornyn and Sir Johnny Damon has unmistakably high entertainment value (unless you were a, um, Stanford client) and is certainly deserving of attention. But we realized on Friday night that we might have a serious problem when we momentarily thought they were projecting Sir Al’s smiling visage on the Toyota Center’s Jumbo screen during a time out in the Rockets-Mavs game (on closer inspection it turned out to be only some contest winner or season ticket holder with a faint resemblance to the mustachioed financial genius).

We’re sure this will pass, shortly, and we can return to our normal late-night pursuits (sleeping the sleep of the just), but in the meantime we can’t get enough of that Stanford stuff, wherever it comes from and however “true” it may be. And we have many willing enablers.

The Houston Chronicle, which didn’t exactly hop right onto the story (its initial offering, buried inside the paper’s rapidly disappearing business section, was a reprint of the Feb. 13 New York Times story reporting the feds’ scrutiny of Stanford---at least they ran it on the same day), has recovered somewhat and is now assiduously squeezing every possible dollop of juice from the Stanford lemon by instituting its own Stanford Watch blog for the collection and distribution of Google-alerted news items regarding Mexia’s prodigal son. The newspaper, which just a couple of months ago wouldn’t spring to send a reporter to Denver for the crash of that Houston-bound Continental flight, even loosened the pursestrings to dispatch a lucky scribe to Antigua on a Stanford-spelunking mission. (The local paper produced an interesting and very readable profile of Sir Smilin’ Al in its Sunday editions, a story that answered one of the crucial questions regarding Stanford: whether he affects a British accent. [Answer: Yes, apparently he does!])

But the Stanford Watch blog is not the last word on all things Stanford---that distinction belongs to TPMuckraker, which as the true cognoscenti know has been nailing developments in the Stanford saga with a pleasing frequency, including digging up those pictures of Pete Sessions with Stanford in Antigua after the Dallas congressman’s office denied that he knew Sir Al.

Yes, this is a delicious turn of events, nicely illustrating the cozy corruption not only of Washington D.C. (the Times reported on Saturday that “Texas Republicans” single-handedly killed White House-backed and Stanford-opposed legislation to force banks to crack down on money-laundering) but also of the “financial advisory” racket. It appears that the Stanford M.O. was to spread around just enough gold-plated manure---“five-star” meals, trips to the Caribbean, sponsorship of sporting events, charitable donations, etc.---to impress the too-easily impressed and have them give him things (preferential treatment, their life savings ...).

The Most Absurd Thing We've Read All Year (But the Year is Still Young)

From Thursday's New York Times, in a story contrasting the Obama administration's looser standards for White House dress and meetings and the more button-down approach of his predecessor's:

... [Obama] showed up Saturday for a briefing with his chief economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, dressed in slacks and a gray sweater over a white buttoned-down shirt. Workers from the Bush White House are shocked.

“I’ll never forget going to work on a Saturday morning, getting called down to the Oval Office because there was something he was mad about,” said Dan Bartlett, who was counselor to Mr. Bush. “I had on khakis and a buttoned-down shirt, and I had to stand by the door and get chewed out for about 15 minutes. He wouldn’t even let me cross the threshold.”*

Which is just slightly more absurd than this:

Recently axed Merrill Lynch chief John Thain is getting lynched for handing out some $3 to $4 billion in bonuses to employees just before the firm merged with Bank of America. But Thain wasn't the only one handing our checks last year.

While 2008 was a devastating time for investors, 79% of Wall Street workers received bonuses, according to a study by employment Web site efinancialcareers.com.

"Following one of the most tumultuous years in financial history, smart people who did good work deserve to be recognized," said John Benson, the site's founder. "The future of the financial services industry may be opaque,* but the industry has a vital role to play in the global economy--and that requires talent.

Which is just slightly more absurd than this:

[Houston schools] Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra pocketed the biggest reward [for teacher performance] — earning $77,500 of the $80,000 maximum award allowed under his contract. The bonus is on top of his annual salary of $327,010*.

*Emphases added, of course.