The Road Does Not Go on Forever, Nor Does the Party Never End

The congenial Texas singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen,* in a Q&A [not available in its entirety] in the June edition of Texas Highways,** unapologetically describing growing up in southwest Houston, back when gas was cheap and cars were big, the “domestic oil industry” was not an oxymoron and “Sharpstown” was not synonymous with graffiti, ill-maintained apartments and crappy schools*** but rather was considered a nice place to raise the kids:

We [Keen and his sister] grew up during what I call the bright, shining age of Houston, in the late ’50s and ’6os, when the space program was beginning and the oil business was rocking. Anybody who was involved in oil was just the coolest person on the block [his father was a petroleum engineer]. I remember “Go Texan Day” in Houston, which was the first day of the rodeo and the day the Salt Grass Trail Ride would end up in town. I used to keep a picture in my wallet of me when I was about threee, wearing one of those little felt cowboy hats and holding my parents’ hands as we walked down the rodeo to Go Texan Day …

*Who manages to elude critical enshrinement as a Texas legend or sumpin’ ‘cause he’s an Aggie and a nice guy and apparently has no serious substance abuse problems and has yet to be stabbed to death outside of a nightclub, although never say never ’cause there’s still time to work on the last two.

**A publication of the Texas Department of Transportation, the one whose lush color photography always makes everybody and every place in Texas look 2 to 3 times better than he/she/it does in person.

*** Sharpstown, of course, has been getting a worse-than-desaerved rap lately, especially after the killing of police officer Henry Canales, which actually happened on the far edge of Sharpstown, or where S-town bleeds into the Gulfton area, but in fact most of the single-family-home subdivisions in the area are nicely maintained and offer affordable housing for working/middle-class families who can somehow navigate the less-than-stellar public schools. We thought it interesting that Channel 11 could do this report after Canales’ murder on “the decline of Sharpstown”—a two-decade-old story that—without once employing the term “illegal immigration.” Such is the nature of coming to grips with “problems” in Houston.

Pynchon on Barthelme and Houston

Reviews of the new biography of Donald Barthelme (Michael Berryhill had one in Sunday's Chronicle, but we can't find it online so here's one from the Washington Post and a nice appreciation of the writer himself in Time) sent us back to the introduction Thomas Pynchon wrote for a posthumous collection of Barthelme stories that was published about 10 years ago (if we remember correctly). Pynchon’s essay was helpful in calling our attention to the general pissed-offedness that pervaded Barthelme’s works---a sense of grievance tempered by his “hopeful and unbitter heart,” as Pynchon wrote. (We are certainly no expert on Barthelme, having left unfinished many if not most of his pieces that we waded into, although some thrummed a deep chord---we’re thinking especially of that exquisite sentence Barthelme titled Sentence, which is in some collection or another of his stories.) But the essay is most notable for the way Pynchon bullseyes the Houston of the 1950s and early ’60s and the mark if left on Barthelme, who was unable to shake free of his hometown until he was past 30 and was to return here later, and die here (Pynchon's off on a "fact" or two but nails the essence):

On the principle that you can take the boy out of the country but not vice versa, Houston, Texas, his hometown before New York, must have caused Barthelme some lively internal discomfort over the course of a love-hate affair with the place that went on, it seems, for most of his life. From what I remember of Houston at about that same time, it could have provoked the one emotion just as easily as the other, and in Texas-size quantities, too. The Astrodome was brand new in those days. Air conditioning in the city was ubiquitous. There were schemes afoot to put a dome over part of downtown and air-condition it, creating what today we would call a mall. Entire boulevards were dedicated to churches, side by side, one after another, allowing you to drop the family car in low and actually cruise places of worship. The nearest venue for dope, sex, and rock 'n' roll, then as now, was Austin. The new NASA space center out by Buffalo Bayou was hiring heavily, while from the marshlands around it, mosquitoes were busy spreading an encephalitis epidemic. Sir John Barbirolli had fashioned of the Houston symphony an exquisitely first-rate instrument, while teenage musical heresy focused on California surf culture -- though the Gulf only had surf during hurricanes, all kinds of kids could still be observed driving around with some stick in some woody, flaunting boards that never caught a wave, as if trying to make it all be California. Anyplace but what it was.

Good News: Houston Advances to 54th Place from 55th in "Literate Cities" Rankings; Boosters Cite Jump as More Evidence of "World Class" Stature

Yep, you read that right: Houston climbed an entire notch this year in the "Most Literate Cities" rankings issued annually by Central Connecticut State University, that storied academic powerhouse of New Britain, Conn. (women's lacrosse team mascot: the "Slammin' Poochies"). The bad news is that Our Town still hasn't overtaken Riverside, Calif. ("County Seat of Riverside County") and Newark, N.J. ("A Real Fine Place to Carry a Gun") in the ratings.

How'd we pull it off? Hard to say, given that the CCSU researchers base the rankings of 70 cities (with populations of at least 250,000) on an index of six "key indicators" of a burg's literacy. As one of Houston's paragons of literacy, Ken Hoffman, might put it, here's how we stacked up against other major metropolises across the land, from our best to our worst category (for some reason the researchers did not link to their findings in the 6th category, bookstores per capita):

25th in Internet resources

Tied with Fort Worth for 48th in publications

Tied for 52nd with San Diego for newspaper circulation

53rd in education attainment of its citizenry

Tied for No. 68 with Stockton, Ca. in library resources

The rankings were topped by the usual suspects, with Minneapolis (too cold to do anything but read) and Seattle (lots of coffee-sipping goatee-strokers with computers) knotted-up at No. 1, followed by No. 3 Washington D.C. (somebody's gotta read and write all those federal regs), No. 4 St. Paul (doughty "twin city" of No. 1 Minneapolis) and No. 5 San Francisco (figures).

The discerning reader---assuming you've been able to read this far---will note that the above cities are all horribly expensive places to live when compared to Houston ('cause they got unions and land-use regs and workable mass transit and so forth) and, except for D.C., all have negligible populations of illegal Spanish-speaking immigrants.

Also---and we believe S. Palin would second the motion---they're all gay, as the kids say.*

Anyway, so what if we (us Houstonians) aren't big on the readin' and writin' thing. We (me) haven't done any research on this, but we'd wager that Our Town has far and away more Wing Stop locations than any of these fancy-pants cities. Plus: We got the Art Car Parade!

They can rank all day and all the night, but we's No. 1!

*Not "gay" as in homosexual, because of the above cities we believe Houston would be second only to S.F. in both total number of gay men and women and gays per capita, but "gay" as defined by the authoritative Urban Dictionary: "Often used to describe something stupid or unfortunate. Originating from homophobia; quite preferable among many teenage males in order to buff up their 'masculinity.' " Hotcha!

... In Which We Vote Early, and Are Moved to Whitmanesque Rhapsody Over the Glories of Democracy

We carved some time out of our sorta-busy schedule on Thursday to cast an early vote at the Bayland Community Center. It turned out we needn't have carved out quite so large a slice, as the line, despite winding almost halfway around the sizable building, moved quickly and we were able to discharge our civic duty in about 25 minutes, 26 tops.

It was a beautiful, sunny day and everyone in line was courteous and seemed in relatively high spirits---living contradiction to the abstract nastiness of the national campaign. The queue graciously parted and closed again when precinct workers returned from fetching hobbled or enfeebled voters and escorted them to the front of the line (we'll remember to bring our cane next election). The variegated glory of the city, and southwest Houston in particular, was present in all its multitudinous parts: the middle-aged Chinese couple in front of us, conversing in Mandarin, the lady gripping a rolled-up League of Women Voters election guide; the young Hispanic woman behind us who said she had taken off from work and although initially daunted by the length of the line found it to be moving remarkably fast; the elderly black man, doddering precariously on his walker, who waited patiently until a poll worker helped him inside; the middle-aged white man in shades and the red Sopranos ball cap (that was us). People were happy, and chatty, but in a solemn and restrained way, as if they were on the steps of a Methodist church after services (light on the sermonizing, heavy on the good works, no fire and brimstone whatsoever). As sometimes happens, we were moved to a near-weepy reverie over our wonderful country, and how much we love it (despite its---and our---many failings).

Did we see any celebrities (you're probably asking)? Uh, no, but we did pass before candidates and relatives of candidates. There was citizen Bob Higley, who was passing out push cards for his wife, a candidate for re-election to a state appellate court (how sweet!)---literature that we noticed nowhere mentioned Justice Higley's party affiliation (R). As we rounded the corner there stood Joan Huffman, a Republican candidate in our top-of-the-ballot special election to fill an empty state Senate seat. Ms. Huffman was leaning on a crutch, literally (we did not inquire as to whether she had sustained injury while block-walking). When she sought to push her card on us we felt compelled to explain that we would gladly read her advertisement but would "probably" vote for the main Democratic candidate. "Sure, that's OK," said she. "Gee," we thought, as the line moved on, "she sure is a nice lady," a Gladwellian snap judgment that was reinforced when we heard the old black dude with the walker worry aloud whether his early vote would be fully counted---something off-the-wall like that---and Ms. Huffman patiently assured him it would be. Hmmm, thought we, maybe we'll vote for this lady. After all, we were in no way wedded to Democrat Chris Bell, and had only resolved to vote for him because he's a nice guy, too, and desperately wants to hold some---any?---public office. (We're not a natural people pleaser but we try to help others in need, when we can, and along those lines were hope Sr. Bell will consider a 12-step program for habitual office-seeks should he suffer voter rejection this go-round.) As we rounded into the home stretch---past the cardboard boxes some public-spirited type had provided for the "recycling" of push cards---we had just about made up our mind to go with Ms. Huffman. Then we perused her push card and noticed she had proudly listed her endorsement by the scrofulous Link Letter. Back to C-Bell for us!

Shortly thereafter we were glad-handed by one Dexter Handy, Democratic candidate for Precinct 3 county commissioner, a retired Air Force officer who introduced himself to us (and everyone else) as "honest, ethical and handy," something like that. This caused us to briefly consider asking him to accompany us back home to help fix our leaky kitchen faucet. Instead, we were so taken by the push-card picture of Mr. Handy, resplendent in his old uniform and sporting an impressive chestful of medals, that we cast our meager vote for him. (We have no problem with the incumbent, who we assume will be handily re-elected without our vote.) And for the Justice Missus Higley. And Chris Bell, redoubtable one-time office-holder searching for yet another office to hold. And many judicial candidates who were rank strangers to us.

You say we're superficial, and we say, yes, but that is an inalienable right with which we have been endowed by our Creator. We hope you have a wonderful Election Day and that you remain, as always, honest, ethical and handy.

Commercial Landmarks of Houston, No. 5 in Our Award-Winning Series

When it was built in 1963 it was hailed as the 8th Wonder of the World. Or maybe the 9th or 10th---something thereabouts. While its exact wonderment ranking is lost to history, it is generally recognized by preservationists and architectural historians as the first domed transmission repair shop in the 3400 block of Chimney Rock. The first fully equipped one, that is. But now the Transmission Dome has fallen into disrepair and disuse, a magnet for the graffiti artist and vagabond. There is some talk of turning the Dome into a Japanese-style hot-sheet hotel, complete with a small "gondola ride" between cubicles, but the credit crunch has probably queered those plans. Vestige of a simpler day, we're afraid we'll never see its like again.

Somebody in the 5900 Block of Newcastle is Mighty P.O'ed at the Philadelphia-based Cable-and-Internet Giant

“I Can See Us Sittin’ 'Round the Table, When from the Family Koran Dad Would Read …” *

Usually the only solicitors drawn to our neighborhood are those wily Jehovah’s Witnesses and the guys who want $10 to paint our address on the curb in a Texas flag motif. But Friday brought something new under the sun: Some believer had swept down our street and hung a black-jacketed paperback copy of the Koran (or Quran, as it was spelled on the cover) from the doorknob of every household.

An accompanying flier informed recipients that the Muslim holy book was a “free gift” from the Book of Signs Foundation, which according to this recent Chicago Tribune article “hopes to clear up misconceptions” Americans supposedly harbor about Islam. But the group has a “particularly ambitious” long-term goal, the paper reported:

… that each household in the U.S. possess a Quran, even if the residents are not Muslims.

From what we could detect the gift** was not unanimously well-received in our neighborhood. The lady next door approached us we puttered in our front yard after the afternoon rains and asked, her voice heavy with suspicion, “Did you get a copy of the Koran put on your front door?” We said that we had and assured her she hadn’t been precision-targeted for conversion. “Well, it pisses me off,” she said, going on to assert that Muslims in the U.S. are given much wider latitude in their proselytizing than Christians. We had no facts on which to argue or agree and simply said that we guessed that the deliverer had right to drop the volume on our doorstep, as many times as desired, as long as he didn’t make a nuisance of himself. "Yeah, I know," our neighbor agreed. "But it still pisses me off."

Later we read the fine print on the flier and discovered that the gift was not really free and that the Book of Signs Foundation actually wanted---demanded---something of us, something that would not only require an expenditure of our valuable time but our conformance to a tenet of Islam:

NOTE: Please remember that this is a Holy Book and therefore treat it as you would treat your own scripture. While it is our sincere desire to present this to you as a gift, we realize that some may not want the copy. Please don’t throw it. Call us and we’ll arrange to have it picked up or you may give it to your nearest Mosque or another Muslim …”

Nah. This still being America, we’ll retain our right to toss our new Koran into the garbage or the recycling bag or pitch it in the barbecue pit next time we’re running low on charcoal. And we suspect our neighbors will do the same.

*With deep apologies to Willie, of course.

**We once again made a run at skimming through the Koran and once again were struck by what an angry load of gibberish it seems to be, with almost every page we opened devoted to dictate after dictate on the necessity of bending to Allah’s will. Here, randomly chosen, from the book of Al-Mujadila, 58:5: “Verily, those who oppose Allah and His Messenger will be disgraced down to dust, like those who were disgraced before them: For We have already sent down clear Signs (Ayat). And the unbelievers (will suffer) a shameful penalty …” Which we suppose is no different than the biblical threat of roasting for eternity in the Lake of Fire, but at least the Bible tells occasionally coherent and interesting stories, and the power of the language in the King James version cannot be denied.

Everybody’s Dancin’ Those Late John Garfield Blues (¡Leo Gorcey Es Tu Papá!)

Some genius has gone and done it: combined Americans’ two insatiable addictions---watching TV and filling their gas tanks---into one unholy consumer experience. We’re sure this isn’t a brand new phenomenon, but we first encountered it late Friday afternoon at the Hugo Chavez Fill-Er-Up around the corner from our house. We wondered why everyone was staring up toward the tops of the pumps---perhaps gas had already hit $4 a gallon and we missed it, or maybe the face of Jesus had been rendered visible behind the glass---then noticed that each and every gasoline dispenser was newly crowned by a small, two-sided flat-screen TV! We caught the eye of the Hispanic wrecker driver at the next pump, who was chuckling and shaking his head: “Man, they’re making so much money now they got their own TVs!” he observed. “Yeah,” said we, “maybe they got cable, and we can just walk over here at night and catch HBO.”

Alas, the offerings of “Top Pump” TV (or maybe it’s “Pump Top”), as we noticed it is called, were not as riveting as premium cable. It was very thin sopa, sort of like what you get on an airplane before they show a bad movie or a Mork and Mindy rerun (as we noticed they were actually doing on the last United flight we took). While we kept one eye on the pump ($3.62 per, on the cash card), the other eye was treated to a five-day weather forecast, an ad for a financial services company we found easy to ignore, and a snippet of E!-style “news” reporting not the latest U.S. fatality count from Iraq but that “Drew Barrymore had a hard night when she was rear-ended by a hit-and-run driver in Hollywood.” The fetching young actress was OK, however, and “had the presence of mind” to get the license plate of the other driver (what presence!). “Yeah, we’d like to rear-end Drew Barrymore!” we shouted at the wrecker driver (we are truly beyond embarrassment). The driver only smiled thinly, leaving us to worry that he was perhaps a born-again Christer and thus offended by our misguided attempt at male bonhomie, or that his pump was not tuned to the same “channel” as ours, or that he had taken us literally and was preoccupied with the fantasy of driving recklessly to the scene and hauling off the disabled vehicle of a comely movie star.

In any case, we assume this placement of TVs atop the pump is a simple but likely ineffective way to get the customer’s mind off his or her soaring gas tab. Desperate times call for etc. (yeah, we know gas is cheap as dirt here compared to what they pay elsewhere in the world). Just the other day we heard a story, second-hand and uncorroborated (very), of a chance encounter between two shoppers at the Neighborhood Wal-Mart that ended with one, a middle-aged African-American lady, confiding that she and members of her church congregation were now joining hands around the pump and praying for prices to fall.

After we had filled our tank three-quarters up with $30 on the cash card we went home for some more TV watching, taking in a DVD that included an old John Garfield movie, the Busby Berkeley-directed They Made Me a Criminal, which featured an early appearance by the Dead End Kids/Bowery Boys, so early that “Slip,” the Leo Gorcey* character, was still known as “Spit” and actually spat on people. It is the dream of Spit and his somewhat reformed fellow juvenile delinquents (who are in the process of being redeemed by falsely accused and on-the-run boxing champ Garfield) to open a gas station in the Arizona desert because, according to the Billy Halop** character, “they make good money.” To illustrate---or perhaps debunk---that notion, Garfield and the lads stop at the only nearby station to gas up their jalopy. “Lessee: eight gallons … that’ll be $1.30,” says the grizzled proprietor. By our ’rithmetic that’s about 16 cents a gallon. According to one of those on-line services that calculate the “relative” value of old money (for yuks, we guess) the $1.30 paid by John Garfield in 1939 was worth $19.41 in 2007, at least as measured by the CPI (not always the most reliable measure, according to the learned Web site we consulted, but what the hell). That’s around $2.43 a gallon.

Yeah, we remember $2.43 gas.

*According to the authoritative Wikipedia, “Gorcey was removed from the cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album after his agent demanded a payment of $400.” We believe our copy includes Mr. Gorcey’s mug, and we will make it available to you to have and hold for, oh, $400.

**According to Wikipedia, “Diminishing film work, marital difficulties, and a drinking problem eventually ate away at Halop's show business career.” And: “Halop married seven times.”

Everything Depends

... on a brown shoulder bag and pink suitcase

left for the taking

against a telephone pole

at the intersection of Harwin and Beltway 8

on Friday, March 28, 2008.

Myron Anderson’s Listening Back: Another Good Thing about Houston

One in an Ongoing But Very Sporadic Series On Our Town’s Many Fine But Perhaps Not Readily Apparent Qualities and Attractions, Which We Often Overlook as We Spend Seemingly Interminable Moments Going From There to Here and Back …

A month or so back, when only but a select few bloggers were calling attention to the somewhat overripe commentary of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, we heard Sen. Obama declare that the choice facing Americans is between “marching forward or looking back.” At that moment an image bloomed in our mind’s eye and we could see them, the Obamaphiles, coming just over the rise, hut-hutting along, lockstep, brimming audaciously with hope, resolutely fired-up and ready to go, somewhere, while the very air seemed to billow with the strains of some jaunty martial music---was it the theme from The Bridge Over the River Kwai they were whistling? At the head, of course, was the senator himself, sporting a Lincolnesque stovepipe and pair of vintage Chuck Taylors and tossing his baton into what seemed like the upper reaches of the stratosphere.

The mind’s music was alluring and we felt the pull---we could see our self teamed with the senator in an old man’s game of two-on-two, us raining downs 3s from way behind the line, like World B. Free in his prime, Obama using those sharp elbows to clear the lane and put back our rare misfire, or kick the ball back out to us with Russell-like precision, and after two decisive to-11-by-ones victories we’d knock off for some green tea and foreign policy discussion---but ultimately we knew that we must open our eyes again and draw the blinds on the passing procession, for we are a “looking back” sort of individual and attended too many Mardi Gras parades as a youth.

Fortunately, the next day was Friday, a day we were once forced to observe by the consumption of fish at the L.J. Alleman School cafeteria (frozen fish sticks or an ice cream-scooper of a substance passed off as étouffée, which we believe was a lump of white rice doused with ketchup and containing two or three “shrimp”) and which we much later voluntarily welcomed with early-evening rounds of “Jack” and billiards while the unpleasant, hectoring sound of the Marshall Tucker Band’s Can’t You See wafted through the smoke-choked rooms of The Brass Rail. But these days, the days of our early dotage, we celebrate Fridays not with dated religious superstition or barroom debauchery but with a quick morning listen over our car radio to Myron Anderson’s Listening Back show on KTSU, 90.9 FM. It’s a definite improvement on our previous Friday rituals.

Mr. Anderson, or Myron, if we can be so familiar, has been on the air since 1981 (we believe that’s what we heard him say during his last anniversary show) and since the show’s debut there has been much more music produced for listening back. In fact, Myron says he plays music for people who came of age in the “’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s”---a declaration we found sobering when we realized that persons whose salad days passed in the 1990s might now be listening to “oldies.” Yet Myron seems to stick mostly to the music made by black Americans from roughly the early 1960s through the mid 1970s, and for that we and other H-Town oldsters are grateful.

On some Fridays, when we must ferry our 14-year-old Obama supporter to school, we find our self fighting for our right to listen back as the middle schooler presumptuously switches the dial over to 104 or 96-point-something, whatever it is. Ordinarily we shrug and let it pass---radio, after all, is for the young---but on Fridays we must slap her hand and assert our parental prerogative. We tell her to listen closely and learn. Greek and Latin may no longer be necessary, but an educated person should be able to speak with knowledge of Gamble-Huff and the Philadelphia Sound and know the words to every song Otis Redding ever sang, even the obscure shit that wasn’t released until 30 years after his death.

On the morning after we heard Obama delineate the choice facing modern Americans we were riding alone, running late and cursing the red lights and the other motorists who had the gall to be out driving on the same roadway as us. Oblivious to our plight, Myron and a sidekick were reminiscing about great blaxploitation (not a term Myron used) flicks of the early 1970s, the ones we so enjoyed as a Young White Negro-in-Training, and playing music from those movies. He spun Bobby Womack’s swelling theme for Across 110^th Street, then concluded a mini-Star Set with Womack’s strangely beautiful Hairy Hippie (“I’d like to help a man, when he’s down, but how can I help ya, Harry, when you’re sleepin’ on the ground? Sorry, Harry, you’re just too much weight to carry 'round.”), which was attached to no movie but was a great song nonetheless. Then Myron spoke lovingly of The Liberation of L.B. Jones, reeling off the names of all the actors and giving special mention to Lola Falana, who, as he observed, had “some legs.” We heard no more, for we had arrived at our destination, but we needed no more, for Myron had set us in mind of the Fridays when we were young, full of Jack and free of cafeteria fish sticks, and the whole world---perhaps even Lola Falana’s legs---seemed open and beckoning.

Urban Hygiene

Our wife reports that she was returning from a field trip with a contingent of high schoolers recently when the portside of the bus erupted into raucous laughter and energetic rubbernecking near the intersection of Fannin and Richmond. The cause of the commotion was a woman who was nonchalantly shaving her legs at the bus stop. Apparently aware of her audience, the woman raised an arm and gave her pit a vigorous swipe or two with the razor. After the bus moved on and the laughter subsided our wife used the occasion for a hastily improvised admonition on the importance of staying in school, getting good grades, taking AP courses, etc.---lest you wind up shaving at a Metro stop, y’understand---although it seems an equally valid lesson to be drawn from the encounter is the need to keep one’s self spruce, even when one lacks a fixed address. Whatever the case, we suspect the spectacle was much more entertaining, and educational, than the visit to the theater.

Dispatches from the Precinct Caucuses of Our Mind, and Other Locations

We ran across this unpaid political message---and we don’t fully endorse the sentiment---while cycling Sunday morning ’neath the bridge over the bayou at Stella Link and South Braeswood. Context clues suggest that it was the handiwork of neither the Clinton campaign nor the Harris County Republican Party but rather a lost cell of the Young Spartacus League or some other crypto-Marxist outfit; nearby graffiti of a similar style proclaimed “Revolution Is the Solution” and “Evidence, Not Piety” (a sentiment we fully endorse).

SOMEWHERE IN SOUTHWEST HOUSTON – History will record that the Clintonites routed the Obamaphones among the Democratic primary voters who assembled in the smallish library of the Philip K. Dick Elementary School. (“They had a lot more books when I went here,” observed one 40ish Obama backer.) Creamed ’em. The vote was something like 80 to 50, a sum of caucus goers that according to one older-timer was 126 more than turned out for the after-hours precinct get-together back in ’92, when the other Clinton was eventually nominated. We figured it would be a pro-Hillary bunch: overwhelmingly white and tending to the old side, slightly frayed but mostly good-humored, lots of middle-aged women by their lonesomes or with kids in tow---teachers, nurses, social workers, accountants, etc. (no Obama Girls)---and a goodly representation of vaguely ex-hippieish saggy white guys (besides us). Two dudes in union T-shirts. A husband-and-wife lawyer combo. Our neighbor, Blanca, an ex-community college administrative type who sort of assumed the spearheading of the Hillary effort in the neighborhood (the Clinton campaign actually had stationed a nice lady from Boston in the precinct for organizational purposes, but she properly vacated the premises before the caucus began). Some of the peckerwoods from down the street who, we were surprised to learn, can sign their names. A dozen or so African Americans, six of whom voted for Clinton and one of whom bore a striking resemblance to the Carver character on The Wire (there’s always a Wire angle: We were so flush with fellow-feeling that we button-holed the dude after the conclave to inform him of his look-alike-edness and suggest he check the show out on DVD “if you don’t mind a lot of cussin’ ”; before hustling quickly away he assured us he would). Three or four really old and hard-eyed Caucasian gents in ball caps who we’d bet are Rush listeners but pissed off enough to go Democratic for real this year (all caucusing for Obama). Our wife, who somehow was involuntarily elected secretary for the evening. And us, a very nominal, foul-weather Democrat and first-time caucus attendee, previous employment situations having precluded us from taking such a lofty profile in partisan politics.

We had to flip a coin in our mind before we came down for the Missus Clinton, despite our aversion to the boss-lady shadings (if we were gonna vote our convictions---anti-war, anti-amnesty---then we would have gone for Ron Paul, but we decided we wanted our vote to count, and then we’re not really clear on how we’d fare under a return to the gold standard). While we’re sure that either Democrat would be dipping deeper into our pocket to buy more artificial hair weaves for Sheila Jackson Lee (a metaphor, that), we’re also fairly certain that either would steer us toward a slightly saner policy in the Mideast than the one dictated by Bill Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. And not mouth “free trade” as if it were the inviolable word from Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Or maybe not. It’s an imperfect world, and we are an imperfect vessel.

The caucus ran smoothly until it didn’t. After the tally, the chair-gal, a comely ingénue with much stage presence but, as it turned out, a loose grasp on the rules, asked for a vote of unanimity on a resolution to do away with the caucus system, and it was loudly so moved before one wild-eyed nay-sayer could get his say in. He was royally pissed about that---he looked a little like the Unabomber, sans hoodie---and, hopping off the library table he’d been squatting upon, confronted the chair-gal in a most ungentlemanly manner: “I’m 71 years old and I’ve been to 18 caucuses,” he bellowed, literally getting up in the young woman’s face, “and I don’t need some 25 year old telling me what to do.” This elicited much hissing and razzing from the assembled and moved us to the loudly expressed opinion that the old crabapple was “fucked” and “a good example of what turns people off about the Democratic Party---like it’s an exclusive club for the insane” and other bon mots that drew approving nods from nearby fellow caucus goers. The guy went on about how it’s good for neighbors to get together and see each other and such---all sentiments we heartily endorse---but the more he talked the more bitterly deranged he sounded. Like some outlanders crashed his little party. He finally relinquished the floor and the chair-gal, perhaps rattled by the confrontation, let the meeting adjourn without attending to the crucial business of electing delegates to the Senate district convention. Some of the old-timers, most vocally the husband-and-wife lawyers (they brought a calculator!) moved to right the ship, and the delegates were duly selected (although a good half of the attendees had split). Earlier, when someone had noted the unprecedented turnout---the library was crowded, and close---someone else shouted from the back, “Yeah, and it makes me proud to be an American!” A sentiment we all---Obamaphone and Clintonite, true believer and marginally committed, sane and insane---fully endorsed with loud applause.

Update: MSNBC just called Texas for Clinton, a stunning rebuke to this blowhard.

All Hail the Prolerizer!

The Jan. 14 New Yorker includes a fascinating (yep) article on the globalization of the U.S. scrap metal business. Originally the province of itinerant Jewish immigrants who plied the 19th century countryside scrounging castoff farm implements, today the business of recycling scrap is evolving from a “hodgepodge of mom-and-pop junk yards” into a rapidly consolidating and highly lucrative industry. According to writer John Seabrook

In 2006, two of every three tons of steel made in the U.S. came from recycled steel … The U.S. steel industry is not the world leader it once was, but no one produces more junk than we do---scrap metal was among our most valuable exports last year.

We had no time to savor the small irony of our used-up crap fueling the economic expansions of China and India, because as it turns out there is an important Houston angle underpinning the story. It seems the device that pulverizes our old pick-ups and commercial refrigerators and transforms them into small balls of steel was realized right here:

This type of machine, which was invented by the Proler brothers---
Hymie, Sammy, Jackie and Izzy---in Houston in the late nineteen-fifties (they called it the Prolerizer), is standard equipment these days in any medium- to large-sized yard.

Who knew? as Hymie himself might have said.

Here’s a description of the Prolerizer prolerizing, from the book Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte (as quoted in a New York Times review):

''The Prolerizer has a 6,000-horsepower synchronous motor and enormous blades that can convert whole cars to fist-sized chunks of scrap in 30 to 60 seconds. . . . Cars plummeted onto the shredder's spinning rotor, which bristled with 32 bow-tie-shaped blades that weighed 300 pounds each. . . . They were 30 inches long, and though made of a steel-manganese alloy, they lasted a mere 24 hours, such was the ferocity of their labors.''

Whoo-weee! We can’t recall reading of the Proler brothers in any of the official histories of our city, but we have no doubt that when the books are finally balanced on the ledger of time it will be the Prolerizer, and not the Weedeater or the world’s first air-conditioned stadium, that will be considered Houston’s greatest contribution to Western Civilization.

“They’ll Hunt Me Down and Hang Me for My Crimes, When I Tell About My Dirty Life and Times”

A week-ending quiz on current events, specially prepared for you, the discerning and erudite reader …

1.) During Roger Clemens’ Monday news conference, lawyer Rusty Hardin passed Clemens a note that read

A. “Please, please, don’t throw a broken bat at any of these sportswriters.”
B. “Lighten up.”
C. “Tighten up, but don’t you get too tight.”
D. “Don’t look now, but there’s a third ear growing out of your forehead.”

2.) Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal’s forwarding of an email he received at work in which Bill Clinton is called “the closet thing to a black president we’ve had” (because he “smoked weed” and “had his way with ugly white women,” etc.) confirmed that

A. Rosenthal possesses a second-rate intellect.
B. Rosenthal possesses a third-rate intellect.
C. Rosenthal is eminently qualified to be chief prosecutor of the nation’s third-largest county.
D. Rosenthal secretly wishes he were black.

3.) In that email the Clinton “joke” is attributed to

A. Nipsy Russell
B. David Duke
C. “A black comedian in Canada”
D. “A black comedian from the Congo”

4.) Dr. Sam Siegler, husband of made-for-TV assistant district attorney Kelly Siegler and Rosenthal’s personal physician, passed along to Rosenthal an email with an attachment that showed

A. Men pulling down the blouses of unsuspecting women
B. Men pulling down the pants of unsuspecting women
C. A man “wagging his weenie” at unsuspecting women
D. “Hot Latina-Asian Foot Worship”

5.) Following disclosure of the Siegler email, Kelly Siegler, who is seeking to replace her boss as district attorney, said her husband

A. “Cusses like a sailor …”
B. … Has a crude sense of humor.
C. Is a “total asshole.”
D. “… is one funny son of a bitch …”

6.) According to Roger Clemens, over the years Roger Clemens has been given many injections of painkillers and Vitamin B12 in the buttocks by

A. “Ken Caminiti”
B. “A faded, jaded junkie nurse …”
C. “Dr. Sam Siegler”
D. “… trainers, nurses, doctors ...”

7.) Before storming out of his own news conference, Roger Clemens professed a desire to enter “the private sector” to, as the New York Times put it, “avoid ever dealing with further questioning” about his alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs. The most likely “private sector” occupation open to Roger Clemens after his retirement from baseball will be

A. Pulling tractors with his teeth at county fairgrounds in Mississippi and Arkansas
B. Breaking a 4-foot stack of concrete blocks using his forehead
C. Strutting around a wrestling ring in tight shorts
D. Anger-management consultant

8.) Should Chuck Rosenthal resign or be removed as Harris County district attorney, which private sector occupation is he likely to pursue?

A. Bit player in remake of The Shaggy D.A.
B. Geriatric model for Darque Tan and/or diversity consultant
C. Vaudeville humorist and/or radio talk-show host
D. Pulling tractors with his teeth at county fairgrounds in Mississippi and Arkansas

9.) Which of the following comments was made by Brian McNamee, Roger Clemens accuser and former trainer, during a phone conversation that Clemens recorded last week?

A. “I love you, man.”
B. “You turn away every time I try to share my feelings.”
C. “I can’t open up to you the way I want to---and I know you can’t.”
D. “You had the softest cheeks, Rocket Man.”

10.) An email discovered among those in District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal’s inbox included an attachment that, according to Channel 13, “shows a black man passed out, surrounded by watermelon and fried chicken” and is titled “fatal overdose.” Other food and drink traditionally enjoyed by rural black Americans* that would have been appropriate to reference in the email include

A. “Red pop”
B. Chitterlings
C. Hog jowls and gravy
D. Collard greens

BONUS: At the heart of the Chuck Rosenthal email scandal lies

A. Arrogance
B. Hubris
C. Stupidity
D. Insularity and in-breeding

Answers: B, B, C, A, A and B, D, D, D, C, All, All

*If you haven’t check out the comments on this posting at Lone Star Times, where, in an “I am Spartacus” moment, Caucasians and African Americans weigh in on their love of watermelon and fried chicken.

…To the Bone

We returned from an extended Memorial Day vacation to good news on the home front: Roger Clemens would be returning to the Astros, the ground was getting a desperately needed soaking, and, most reassuringly, the city’s spirit, or something, remained unbroken by the fall of Enron, contrary to what the Wall Street Journal and New York Times would have you believe.

Still, we were bothered, anxious. We traced that feeling to our drive back into town, heading west on I-10 to 610 East, then south over the Ship Channel Bridge, where we are invariably elevated by the awesome spectacle of all those cranes and boats and cargo containers (a panorama, admittedly, that is best enjoyed from 130 feet or so in the sky, at least by us).

But only a few minutes later we quickly deflated, as we sped past the giant mountains of gravel and broken concrete chunks near the Cullen exit of the South Loop, then onward past the long-abandoned neighborhood shopping center with the grass growing on the roof (and it’s gettin’ high---maybe someone should run a mower over it).

These sights caused us to confront that eternally bothersome question: Why (oh why) is Houston so damn ugly? And: Was it always this ugly? And further: Is it just our imagination or is it getting uglier, and if so is there anything that can stop the relentless uglification (other than moving out to Cinco Ranch and not having to look at any of it)?

These are questions we occasionally ponder as we drive down one local thoroughfare or another and it is again made clear to us that the true face of Houston isn’t the view out Elyse Lanier’s back window or that gaze down Main Street from the old Warwick Hotel that supposedly set Bob Hope to rhapsodizing, but rather the beat façade of a dowdy apartment complex, now in the 30th year of its 20-year lifespan, or the rutted parking lot of a gone-to-seed and mostly vacant strip center, the one with the nail shop as its anchor tenant.

We are no simpering aesthete, having learned life’s hard lessons in the dark woods and on the public playing fields of the Hub City, yet all this ugliness can’t be good for the soul, individual or collective; it's certainly more burdensome to the city's spirit than the mere fall of Enron.

It is, of course, axiomatic that no one ever moved to Houston for the scenery or atmosphere---we certainly didn’t---but does a run-and-gun economy necessarily have to be complemented by such a repulsive landscape?

We have vowed to investigate this matter, thoroughly---we may even make it our life’s work, at least though next weekend---and will report back with our findings.
___________________

In the meantime, we see that the Houston City Council OK’ed not only those traffic-light cameras but the use of federal money for a day-laborer gathering site. While the Slampo’s Place editorial board, after a recent heated meeting at a nearby halfway house, expressed faint disapproval of both measures, we personally are unable to get excessively riled about either, although the use of a Community Development Block Grant (a CBDG, as we in the know call it) for the illegal worker gathering spot (that’s not what it’s called, but that is what it is) again points up the ways that illegal immigration discombobulates otherwise rational people and politicians (and many who aren’t).

The vote, predictably, split on party lines (we have no problem with partisanship on the technically non-partisan council, although it seems the body did attract a better caliber of individual before term limits, when it wasn’t always so obvious who was a Democrat and who was a Republican), with the Democrats, including the mayor, all coming together to support the measure, helping to ensure that their party lives up to its new slogan: “We’re Keeping Wages Down” (and the only party more discombobulated by the issue than the Democrats is the other one).

The lone Republican to favor the measure was our own representative on council, the well-known (well, not so much) International Man of Mystery, M.J. Khan, who, according to the Chronicle

said he believes there are people at the site seeking lawful employment. “It’s presumptuous on our parts to assume that all the people who will use the center are illegal immigrants,” he said.

It’s good to have beliefs, but better to have facts, at least when deciding public policy. Again, we’d challenge the councilperson to go to a day-labor site---formal or informal, there’s dozens and dozens to choose from---and locate one legal worker. If Khan keeps this up he may find himself with a real challenge on his hands next election (our proposed slogan: “Let’s Get Together and Make Houston a Real Pretty Place”).

But Khan’s discombobulation was nothing compared to that of Bill White’s, who according to the newspaper said:

"We fund the streets and highways. I'm sure because of the federal government's failure to enforce immigration laws there are some people who are undocumented on the streets and highways. That doesn't mean that we're condoning unlawful immigration."

We always hear what a smart guy the mayor is, but this "analogy," as the newspaper described it, gives us pause to wonder.

Nobody Ever Moved to Houston to Read No Damn Book

Back in another lifetime, when we drew a meager (very) paycheck from a since-discontinued publication that operated out of a building at Highway 59 and the West Loop in southwest Houston, we were summoned to attend a news conference early one morning at a hotel near Hobby Airport. The holder of the news conference was John Tower. We’ve long forgotten the topic, and we can’t remember if Tower was then still the lone Republican U.S. senator from Texas or had taken leave of that office and was on his way to the public humiliation that capped his career. We do remember one thing he said, though.

Tower was way late to his own event---we’re probably embellishing this faint memory, but we seem to recall that from close-up he still reeked of the previous evening’s consumption---and when he finally tottered up to the dais, he spread his arms, grinned broadly and declared, “Well, it’s good to be back in this very erudite city once again.” *

That was the first time we had heard Houston referred to as a “very erudite city.” And it remains the only time.

We weren’t sure what Tower intended by that throwaway remark, and we didn’t have the opportunity to ask that morning, as there were notes to be taken and supposedly more pressing questions to be posed. We figured that he probably was just kidding, giving a hung-over wink to his pals in the small audience, but we also considered the possibility that he was being wickedly sarcastic. After all, he was something of an erudite fellow himself, or had pretensions thereof (with his Savile Row suits and detachable collars, etc.), having attended the London School of Economics and Politics and been a professor of political science for a long spell. And although Tower was born in and raised a bit in Houston and graduated from high school in Beaumont, he chose to base himself in Dallas, where to this day the locals look down their long thin noses at the yokels in Baghdad on the Bayou, as newspaper columnists of days past called our town (how come nobody calls it that no mo’?).

Or maybe he was being sincere, in a chummy and early-morning woozy way, and through his long years of public service had recognized something in our town that had escaped the attention of less discerning observers.

We had occasion recently to again ponder Tower’s salutation when we learned of Houston’s showing in the annual literacy rankings of cities with populations larger than 250,000 as compiled by John J. Miller, the president of Central Connecticut State University (“the Harvard of central Connecticut,” as Jon Stewart called it). The survey weighed several factors to formulate what Miller calls “one critical index of our nation’s health” (don’t ask us how a university president has time to compile a study).

Baghdad on the Bayou was ranked 53rd, sandwiched between No. 52 Mesa, Az. (“The Little Phoenix of Maricopa County”) and No. 54 Phoenix (“The Big Mesa of Maricopa County”) out of 69 U.S. cities (in 2004 Houston came in 63rd among 79 cities ranked).

This year’s Top 10 was populated by the usual suspects associated with books and computers and other manifestations of “literacy”---Seattle, Minneapolis, Washington and San Francisco---but also included Atlanta, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, smallish tank towns that usually call to our mind “National League,” not “literate.”

In Texas, Austin was tops at No 16, followed by Fort Worth (tied w/ Las Vegas for 44th) and Dallas at 48th.

Houston ranked behind Jacksonville, Fla. (“The Birthplace of Hooters”), but ahead of No. 63 Arlington (“The City With Plenty of Parking Spaces”), No 64 San Antonio (“The Heavy Metal Music Capital of North America”), No. 67 Corpus Christi (“We’ve Got a Nice Beach”) and No. 68 El Paso (“Welcome to the End of Earth”), which barely escaped its last place finish of 2004, thanks to Stockton, Cal.

Most of the cities in the lower third of the rankings are in California or Texas and have large immigrant populations, which we would surmise accounts for their poor showings (Los Angeles clocked in at No. 60). Survey compiler Miller did not see fit to include “a large supply of cheap labor” as a criterion.

What he did consider were the number of a city’s bookstores per capita, the educational attainment of its residents, its Internet and library resources, the newspaper circulation in the metropolis and the number of magazines and journals published there.

We’re generally suspicious of these type of ginned-up surveys (“Fattest City,” etc.), especially one that proposes to quantify something as seemingly intangible as a city’s literacy, so we thought we’d take a closer look at the categories and how Houston fared:

Bookstores, based on both retail outlets and rare and used bookstores, as well as the number of members of the American Booksellers Association per 10,000 population: Houston managed a tie at 39th with Nashville, ahead of Dallas but behind Fort Worth and Oklahoma City. According to Miller, “The presence of retail book stores is positively associated with quality of libraries. So, it is not a question of whether people buy books or check them out: they do both or neither.”

Education level, based on the percentage of adult residents with an educational level of 8th grade or less, the percentage of adults with a high school diploma or higher and the percentage with a bachelor’s degree or higher: Houston showed up, barely, in 51st place. No. 1 was Colorado Springs.

Internet resources, based on the availability of library Internet connections and commercial and public wireless Internet access, the number of Internet book orders per capita and the percentage of adults who have read a newspaper on the Internet: Here Houston scored best, tied for No. 24 with very erudite Colorado Springs.

Library resources, based on the per-capita number of branch libraries, volumes held in libraries, circulation of material, library and school media professionals: Houston again nailed down the No. 51 slot; St. Louis (!) and Cleveland (?!) were ranked Nos.1 and 2.

Newspaper circulation, weekday and Sunday, divided by total city population: No. 50, alhtough the Houston Chronicle has retained its ranking, as you may have read.

Periodical publishers, based on number of magazine publishers with circulations over 2,500 and the number of journals published with circulations over 500 per 100,000 population: We’re No. 49!

Hmmm … there does seem to be a pronounced consistency to Houston's place in the pecking orders.

We must now conclude that in all likelihood our man Tower was poking fun at us.

Or else he thought he was in Fort Worth.

*Writing this led us to muse on how unlikely it would be for someone like Tower to be elected to a statewide office in Texas today.