"dec 18, a car pulls up and forces venus into a black van. venus's brother, saturn explains: it's because we love you, please understand. venus spends the year's end away from family and friends in somewhere, arizona, undergoing detox. but venus is not lonely: his gregarious self blooms in the intense therapy sessions, and v. makes new friends-- there was also diana and liza and britney, and a couple of others. and they all enjoyed shaken truth martinis and hors d'oeuvres."alas, it quite wasn't that type of vacation. instead venus cozied up in the warmth of houston, v's diasporic home away from home away from home. there, v. enjoyed the blood in the aero's ice hockey game, which they lost; watched unwieldly amounts of college football while drinking wine; did ten days straight of bikram; almost finished knitting a green alpaca wool scarf; scavenged nightly for cookies; opened presents and bickered; frequently prowled throughout montrose and its lovely cafés, antique shops and vintage clothes stores.
and also saw fabulous shows at the contemporary arts museum houston and the museum of fine arts (mfah), and at the menil collection (see picture). the pipilotti rist show at the contemporary arts museum was gorgeous, her video art pieces are sublime. at some point they felt like proust's madeleine: smallness, color, texture all evoked in v. intimacy and childhood, much in the same way that klee's "polyphonic" paintings, on show at the menil collection, do. v confesses feeling disarmed before klee and rist. much like a detox program, they return you back to zero. houston as the launching pad of the new year.
2 comments:
Houston is really up and coming. According to Wikipedia and the 2005 U.S. census, it's now the 4th largest city in the U.S. after New York, L.A., and Chicago, and has a population of over 2 million.
What might the future hold for Houston, v.?
on the sunny side, there's a lot of potential-- it's hip on the right sides, and there's not too much of a fuzz about it. the arts scene is amazingly rich (houston is such an understatement!), there's a couple of good galleries and that means that there is patronage. restaurants are fantastic, and the gay scene is fairly good (i had a blast at southbeach, one of the clubs at montrose). the down sides are its messy-cum-suburban feel, the proliferation of strip malls, and that it's quite a bit segregated. public transport is growing but it could be better. maybe that would help-- anyhoos, it's totally worth checking out. ---v.
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