Category Archives: Houston

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and the bah humbugs

December 18, 2015 8:14 AM , Leave a Comment ,

I’ve been on a theater kick for the past couple of years and we are right now at the tail end of the 2015 Fall theater season in Houston.  I just have to say that the theater scene in Houston keeps getting better and better all the time.  Houston has gained a national reputation for its fine dining choices and I can see a time when it gains a name as a live theater mecca as well.

But anyways, some of the local troupes that I follow put on Christmas and holiday related plays to cap the year.  Stark Naked Theater put on “Ho Ho Humbug 2.0“, Bayou City Theatrics put on “The 12 dates of Christmas“, and the Classical Theater Company put on “A Christmas Carol“.

The last is of course the classic Charles Dickens story and I wanted to see it as I’ve never seen it performed live but the other two were contemporary stories set in or near present day America and dealt mainly with how we perceive and deal with this time of year.

For better or for worse, people in this country have come to associate this holiday season with certain things.

  • Religion of course.  This is a christian holiday and at one time this was a predominantly christian nation.  Whether you agree with it or not you can’t deny that there is an influence there.
  • Traditions that bind us to certain European countries where Americans originated from
  • Commercialism which is more of an american tradition.

From the late 19th century till about the Mid 20th century this was the Christmas season (the term “holiday season” wasn’t in widespread use).  Government, Church, and commercial interests helped spread and foster the season and developed it into what we came to know as Christmas time.

But then in the mid 20th century we began to see this change over time.  People started to notice that this time of year didn’t resonate with everyone.

One of the earliest examples was the Peanuts Christmas TV special where one of the characters proclaimed that Christmas was a racket and controlled by some company “back East”.  This illustrated the disconnect that some people had always felt around this time of year.

Mass media began to notice that besides the Christian majority that there were people from other faiths in this country and that more and more new Americans were arriving from non western European lands.

At the same time, commercial interests were moving to leverage the holiday for all it was worth.  Store displays are now put up as much as two months in advance and even though there has been some consumer backlash over this, they don’t seem to care that much.

I thought about all these points as I attended the plays I mentioned up above.

Christmas Carol is of course the original story about someone who has disconnected from the holiday.  Scrooge had consciously made a decision to set himself apart from humanity.  The spirits show him that this was not always the case and that he still had time to fix this condition.

12 dates of Christmas was a story about a woman who loses her fiance at Thanksgiving time and for the next 12 months has disastrous dates with various men.  She reflects on how “family centered” that the holidays can be and how single people can feel ostracized around the holiday season.

Ho ho Humbug 2.0 was the most poignant of the three.  A writer, that hates the holidays, needs a temporary job to make his rent and by accident winds up playing a store Santa Claus.  Through some soliloquies the writer explains that even as a child he had never connected to Christmas and that he felt that this job was a farce.

As the play progresses and he interacts with his co-workers and with the customers, he comes to see that Christmas means so much more than the commercialism, the decorations and customs, and even the religious aspect.  Christmas had a distinct meaning to everyone he met.  In the end he doesn’t embrace all the aspects of the holiday but he comes to find a way that he can celebrate the season and make it his own.

I think that last point is the most important.  I see some people decrying the holidays as being too commercial, too religious, too superficial.  But then I look around at people from other parts of the world cheerfully celebrating the holiday and pretty much just ignoring the bits that they don’t like or understand.

For example, Christmas is huge in Japan for the gifting aspect.  Not many Christians there.  I know some Jewish families that put up Christmas trees and focus in on the gift giving and celebration aspects.  Last year I was on vacation in the tropics at this time of year and I saw some of the locals decorating their hut with a Christmas tree.

I guess what I am trying to say is that you need to make the holiday your own in order to enjoy it.  Most people enjoy the season out of habit.  But for those that find the season to be a chore or a bother, I think that if you look more closely that there is something there for you to enjoy as well.

 

Merry Christmas

Posted in: Christmas, consumerism, culture, current events, holidays, Houston, life in general, pop culture, theater, thought , Tagged: ,

Home not away from home

July 29, 2015 6:31 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Bizarre situations hold no terror for me anymore.  I just accept them as fact and roll merrily along with them.  I mean if you find yourself in a weird or off-putting situation why work yourself up over it?  Just look at it as matter of fact and get on with your day.

I decided to finish the remodeling project on my house.  It has taken 3 years to get the floors done but finally it will be finished.   Don’t even ask how much it cost me but finally it’ll be done.

Part of the problem is that in order to do it I had to abandon my bedroom and my home office to let the men work.  One gets used to having things just so and to have your daily routine suddenly totally wrecked can be disconcerting.  Still we need to soldier on, don’t we?

So after a week of cramming things into plastic storage bins and shuttling up and down the stairs I finally got moved out.  My plan was to work from the dining room and sleep on the rough finished bedroom upstairs but those plans went to hell almost immediately.

The men had to bring in lumber supplies and nearly squeezed me out of my dining room office.  They took apart the bed and stuffed it into a corner and said they might be done in 3 days.

The office dilemma was easy to cope with.  By crawling over my boxes I could get into my office chair and work.

The sleeping arrangement however was unexpected.  So I found myself having to leave the house and sleep at a nearby hotel.  Walking distance from my house.

It’s bizarre to see the neighborhood from a different perspective.  The same area but from a different angle.  The spatial relationships are off for me. The local main street is much closer and the supermarket is farther away.

I wouldn’t call it a cheap motel.  But it’s definitely…. lived in?  It’s one of those places with a kitchenette in the room and the hallway alternates smells of tobacco where someone has surreptitiously smoked or the pungent aroma of someone that’s made up a curry on the little stove.  Mostly inhabited by out of towners that came in for a seminar or training session at the hotel or families traveling the country or just people displaced for one reason or another.

Jogging in the morning takes a different perspective.  The relative distances have to all be recalculated.  And of course I have to go home to work every morning.

Bizarre.

But I can look upstairs each evening and I can see the work progress.  I hope to have some pictures up soon of what I think will be a major improvement in my living condition..

 

Posted in: hotels, Houston, life in general

ten years later

June 29, 2015 6:47 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Recently there have been a lot of articles on the upcoming 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.  A devastating weather event that killed over 1800 people, destroyed New Orleans, sent the largest wave of American refugees across the US since the Dustbowl days, and started many people thinking more intently about climate change.

Along with the rest of the nation we watched on television as the true aftermath of the storm unfolded.  Days later we received a large number of evacuees in Houston and many took up temporary residence here as New Orleans was being rebuilt.

Houston of course missed the immediate effects of Katrina but a few weeks later we became worried that Hurricane Rita.  Katrina refugees feared that they would have to weather a second major Hurricane in less than a month.

I remember the build up in tension across the city as we watched Rita come up the Gulf.  The supermarkets, convenience stores, and sporting goods stores were picked clean of food, batteries, and camping supplies.  The weathermen were on practically 24 hours a day.

Three days before the storm a small trickle of cars started coming in from the coast. A day later it was a torrent of cars.  The coastal residents didn’t need to be forced to evacuate.  The lessons of Katrina were too recent and too raw to forget. The highways were clogged with cars and some began running out of gas just sitting in the gridlock for hours.

My boss shut down the office that day and told everyone to come back after the storm.

I was living in Alief, on the southwestern part of Houston, at the time.  I seriously began to ask myself if staying was such a good idea. But then I thought about the clogged roads and concluded that it was probably already too late.  On TV the reports were all about the preparations to receive the storm.  Plywood was in short supply as businesses and homeowners were boarding up windows.

I drove round the city that night and looked at the preparations.  A car dealership had boarded up one window but the window next to that was wide open.  Maybe they had run out of wood or the employees had fled?  The city was a ghost town.  I went to a local bar that I frequented.  A few diehard barflies kept one bartender and a pair of waitresses company.  Everyone was nervous.  A waitress told me that she couldn’t wait for her shift to end.  She had packed up her apartment and was moving to Oklahoma as soon as it was over.

The day before the storm and the city was edgy and tense.  Everything that could be done short of moving the city a couple hundred miles further inland had been done.  The coastal traffic had ebbed.  No one was left in the area between Houston and Galveston.

The first few waves of clouds from the storm arrived around dusk.  The sky was oddly green.  The weathermen predicted landfall sometime during the night.  I don’t know why it is, but Hurricanes prefer to arrive in the early morning.  I put a flashlight next to my bed and went to sleep.

Of course nothing happened.  At the last moment the storm veered towards the north and went into East Texas and western Louisiana.  That part of the state is much less populated and had already evacuated.  The city was spared the brunt of the storm.

We had dodged the bullet this time but would not be spared three years later when Hurricane Ike came to town.  Back in 2005 we got on with cleaning up and integrating the Katrina evacuees into Houston.

I have to admit that Houston has for the most part benefited from Hurricanes.  First was the 1900 hurricane that devastated Galveston and made Houston into the largest city in Texas.  Grim but true.  And now we received a large dose of culture and flavor from the Katrina refugees that decided to stay in Houston and make it their new home. I think that these refugees and their influence have helped make Houston into a more cosmopolitan and livable city and this in turn has helped draw in more immigrants from other parts of the country.

 

 

Posted in: Houston, hurricanes, weather

Foodie city

June 11, 2015 6:22 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Reading through the local newspaper and Houston websites I see that I’ve probably picked the worst time to get in shape and lose weight.  I read through websites like the Houston Press or magazines like Houstonia and there are always announcements about new restaurants and how up and coming chefs are migrating here.

Back in my twenties when I was just starting out we did have a bit of a food scene if you knew where to look for it.  Areas like the west side Chinatown offered up a variety of Asian dishes.  The Tex-Mex restaurant has always been a staple of Houston cuisine and we had some of the best.  Of course we also had the traditional steak restaurant.

But back then if you were to name cities to visit to experience haute cuisine or just a wider variety of dishes then Houston never even came up in the conversation.

Something happened back in the late-late nineties or early 00’s.  Here and there a chef would escape the rat races in other food towns and set up little bistros in Houston.  Not in the downtown area but near downtown where the rent was cheaper.  Chefs that might have otherwise left stayed and honed their skills.  Certainly Hurricane Katrina injected a dose of New Orleans talent into the mix.

By trial and error, by enthusiastic practice this city began building a reputation one dish at a time.

So here we are and I see that the wave is beginning to crest.  I have to admit that sometimes the temptation is overwhelming.  Just looking at the variety and quantity of places to explore makes me want to take a week or two off my diet.

Thankfully (I suppose) living out in the suburbs I don’t have ready access to these culinary wonders.  I’m not hours away from any of these places of course (I could in fact reach most of these in twenty minutes) but just far enough to put them in the slightly impractical column.

I console myself with the thought that I am working towards a worthwhile goal and that one day I will treat myself to a mini restaurant vacation.

Posted in: diet, food and drink, habits, health, Houston, restaurants

Adapting to Houston’s weather

June 7, 2015 4:29 PM , Leave a Comment ,

I was at a fair and standing under a tent on an early June evening with a fan blasting right behind me and it still felt ridiculously hot.

Yup. Houston’s Summer had arrived.

Summertime in Houston isn’t so much a season as it is an ordeal by fire.  It is often the last barrier to recent emigres considering whether or not to make the city into their new home.

You may come here in November and be charmed by all the restaurants and parks.  You may come here in March and be thrilled by all the culture and sunny weather.  Then again, you may come here in August and turn right back around and refuse to get out of the plane.

It’s not a gentle land and definitely not one to wander about without some sort of air conditioner or fan on during the long Summer days.

This evening we were discussing the recent rain storms that had plagued the city for a couple of weeks and relating what we were doing when “the big one struck” on Tuesday night.

Most of the stories centered on underwater roads and monstrous hail stones that pelted anything and everything in sight and of all the downed fences and broken tree limbs that still have to be collected by the garbage collectors.

But here we are a week later and we were sweltering in the stifling heat and humidity.  I reflected that life in Houston was often like that.  Things were apt to change quickly in this town and if you didn’t adapt you would at best be left behind.

We’ve little to no experience with the bitter Winters that others experience up north but when these storms do make it to Houston we wisely stay in and don’t even try to brave the cold.

Of course we have a lot of experience with Hurricanes and we are often prepared days or even weeks in advance of the large storms.  Here’s hoping that we have none of that this year.

In the meantime we are adapting to our Houston Summer and preparing to host this familiar pattern of weather.  Hot and sunny for the next 5 or 6 months.

I’m already missing the rain.

 

Posted in: Houston, life in general, weather

A time for everything

May 18, 2015 6:12 AM , Leave a Comment ,

The rain’s been relentless this past week.  All I hear about on social media and on the radio is how awful the rain is and how it ruins plans.

Yes of course that aspect of the recent heavy rains is regrettable.  The rains affected some plans I had one day and the power outage stopped my office work on another day.

On top of everything when we get real Houston style storms it gets pitch black outside and with the lightning and thunder you get a feel for the fury and power that nature can wield.  Not all that fun but this is the rainy season in Houston.

But the thing is that if we look cross the country we can see what it’s like to have permanent “nice weather”.  California is going into its fourth year of drought and conditions are reaching a critical state.  I hear horror stories from my California friends about dead lawns, livestock, and water rationing and listen to their speculation as to where they may be able to move to in order to escape this disaster.

Of course along with our rainy season we get our dry season in Houston; July, August, and September.  The season when clouds will not dare show their faces unless they have a hurricane to give them backup.  These will be the endless afternoons where the sun will be relentless and refuse to set till after nine at night.

It’s curious to me that during these days that people won’t complain as much.  To me at least, this type of weather is as bad or even worse than rainy days.

For my part, I am glad for these rainy days and rainy weeks.  Every time we get one of these events I comfort myself thinking about all those water reservoirs that are north and east of Houston and I hope that they are topping off with fresh water.  I think about my California friends and their hyper abundance of “nice days” and I hope that sometime soon that they will be able to enjoy a rainy Houston day.

 

Posted in: attitude, environment, Houston, thought, weather

mindless hate

May 10, 2015 6:28 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Sigh.

It takes a lot to get me angry these days.  Maybe it’s a function of age and passions have cooled, or maybe I don’t have as much to get angry at these days.  Sure there are things that frustrate me, all around me and I get frustrated on a daily basis.  But anger doesn’t manifest itself in my life anymore.  At least I didn’t think it did.

I was driving around getting various chores done early on a Saturday morning.  I pulled up at a turn signal at a large intersection and as happens more often than not there was a panhandler there.

He looked thoroughly beat up by life.  Dark tanned skin, ratty and dirty clothes, and nothing than skin and bones.  Most public officials frown on people helping out panhandlers but I will pass out a few dollars every once in a while and I suppose I will continue to do it in the future.

But just before I hand my money over he stops me and pulls out a printed sign.  He asks me if I was a christian and just then I read the sign that’s filled with a litany of hateful anti-homosexual messages.  The sign looks like it was printed on a computer and the paper was laminated so it could survive out on the streets.  I think to myself “You’ve got to be kidding me”.

He starts up on some rehearsed speech denouncing same-sex marriage.  I stop him in mid-stride and tell him “I am not going to listen to this.  We are not going there.”  He walks off down the median and mumbles something that sounded like “Have a nice life, homosexual lover”.  Of course he didn’t say homosexual.

I think about getting out and saying or doing something regretful but the light turns green and I drive off instead.  I have to control my foot to not floor the pedal.

I am incensed.

It’s a naked, mindless bigotry that I have not witnessed in a long time.  It’s not the veiled or hidden prejudice that you see in popular media or hinted at by people you may casually know.  It was this stupid, in your face, and even prideful hatred that I thought no longer existed except in some of the most backward of places in the middle of nowhere.

I am flabbergasted for the longest time.  Just mulling it over and over in my head.  It’s like I can’t believe I just had this encounter.

What makes it worse is that this is a guy that most likely has had to live with the sting of prejudice against homeless people.  People have probably made negative judgments about his character without knowing anything about him and here he is doing the same thing.  I want to find this guy and ask him what made him turn into this hateful person?  Was it his family, a teacher, some friends that warped his perspective and made him the way he was now?

I am left angry by the encounter.  Angry that this still exists, angry that people can still fall prey to such notions.  Angry that I can’t really do that much to change the situation.

I wish I could end this post on a happy note but there is really nothing happy about the episode.  This is just sad.

Posted in: culture, driving, Houston, life in general, prejudice, religion

between worlds

April 18, 2015 6:19 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Big western cities like Houston give people lots of room to develop themselves and their lives into what they want them to be.  I guess that’s part of the allure of what is sometimes referred to as the “american dream”.

I mean you can go from one part of Houston and suddenly find yourself in a totally different situation to what you were in five minutes earlier.  I have friends and acquaintances all over the Houston area from the big ex-burbs like Katy, Sugarland, and the Woodlands and of course friends inside the city limits proper.  They all swear that their part of Houston is the best and can’t imagine how people can live in other parts of town. People can find the part of town that best suits them and live the type of life that they want.

But beyond just mere geography there lies another type of life that we can lead.  The individual interests, the pass times, the hobbies.  Whatever you want to call them.  I find it amazing how wrapped up and how into these things people can get.  People can get so into these things that they barely notice that there are other worlds out there.

I tend to drift between a variety of different worlds and different groups so I’ve had the opportunity to observe these various sub-cultures interact and express themselves in their own natural surroundings.

Some examples?

Back in January I was at a big art gallery party held in what used to be a factory.  Crowded from top to bottom with well dressed people, loud music, food and drink.  Models, artists, and local luminaries all hobnobbing the evening away.  Lots of back slapping and hearty handshakes as people got re-acquainted or met new friends and contacts.

In the Fall and Winter I go to book readings downtown.  A local group invites notable authors and they come to Houston to read from their latest books.  Sometimes it’s a well-known personality, sometimes a barely known author.  I can already recognize some of the audience members as regulars and I get the sense that this is a group that has a long history.

A couple of weeks ago I was at an anime convention at the George R Brown.  Kids and adults all dressed up in costumes and walking nonchalantly around.  Nobody really giving them a second thought.  Most of the vendors, staff, and speakers at these events travel on a convention circuit and see each other all the time.

A few months ago I was at a boxing match. Now, my idea of boxing matches were moodily lit events with maybe a couple dozen guys around a ring in some grungy gym.  But this was a large hall with thousands of people and valet parking.  Very well-organized and looking around I got the sense that a lot of these people came to these fights regularly and knew one another.

The two things I noticed in all four of these situations was:

1.  A real sense of community within these groups.  They were fully developed sub-cultures.  Individuals in these groups were totally comfortable within these situations.

2. I am fairly certain that if I asked individuals within these sub-cultures about the other sub-cultures that they would either not know anything about those groups or almost nothing about them.

This leads back to my observation of how this large city allows people to find and express themselves in their own part of the city and lead the type of life that they want to lead.  I find it fascinating to travel from one to another.

Posted in: activities, culture, Houston, life in general

Taking what’s offered

March 11, 2015 6:59 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Life has been hectic this year.  Along with the stresses of work and trying to get some side projects going, I have some family responsibilities to tend to and on top of that a cold laid me low for about a week.  With all that going on, I have hardly had any time to relax and enjoy life.

Making plans with friends has been fairly difficult as in some cases I’ve had no certainty when I would have time to relax or if I would have time to relax.  As a consequence I’ve had to make the most of what time I did have to relax.

Programs from some plays that I've recently attended.

Programs from some plays that I’ve recently attended.

One thing that I’ve been relying on lately has been Houston’s outstanding theater scene.  Ranging from off broadway touring companies to small venues to amateur dinner theater, we are extraordinarily blessed with a lot of acting talent in this town.

The nice thing about the local theater scene is that it is usually fairly easy to get tickets, they are rarely sold out.  The theaters are usually fairly small so even the “cheap seats” are good seats.  The acting and production values of the local troops are fairly high so you get more than you pay for.  Lastly, most theater companies have online ticket sales so I can usually book a seat just hours before a performance.

Comparing this to movies?  In some ways better and in some ways not as good but I would not say worse.  I mean with movies of course you can be totally immersed in the story world.  It’s all very visual and the story is all there to see.  With plays you have to use some imagination.  Even the most lavish stage props and backgrounds won’t look totally real.  But with a live human actor right in front of you speaking the lines and instilling the lines with emotion you somehow get more into the story than you would with a movie. Difficult to explain unless you’ve been to one of these plays.

For me at least these plays have helped take the edge off life lately and have given me a bit of a release on those days that life seems to be ganging up on me.

If you ever need to take the edge off or if you are just curious, I would highly recommend it.

 

Posted in: activities, culture, current events, entertainment, Houston, theater

The Rodeo and the new Houston

March 9, 2015 5:50 PM , Leave a Comment ,

Houston has been struggling hard for the last few years to shed its “hick” and “cowboy” labels and take its place as a cosmopolitan city that it is and as a nexus for several different cultures to mix and mingle.  Yet at its core it still retains some of that wild west persona.

This becomes extremely evident at the end of February and in early March when the Houston Livestock show and Rodeo takes place.  The Rodeo was and is a celebration of Houston’s agricultural and ranching ties.  A throwback to the days when cattle trails wound their way up and down the state and more people worked in and around Houston in the cattle and livestock industries.

For generations, Houston kids could go downtown with their families and watch goggle eyed as the cowboys rode in a parade in their western finery and marching bands played and all manner of floats and displays rolled past.  They could then go to the Rodeo and look at the animals and talk to the cowboys and just take in the country culture.

Eventually music acts were added to the Rodeo.  Some of the music isn’t even country music and truthfully the musical acts are now a big part of the Rodeo.  In fact for some that’s all that the Rodeo represents to them.  I think without the music the Rodeo itself would have been much diminished and would not be having record crowds.

As it stands now the Rodeo is an integral part of the Houston experience.  Something that can really be only found here.  I think that it’s a positive for Houston.  As much as I would like to see Houston “grow up” and become more worldly, to have more culture, to be thought of as a first rung city (and it is, I admit it we’ve done amazing things in the last 20 years), I still want it to retain some of its own character.

I don’t want us to become a clone of one of the eastern cities, or another Los Angeles.  I want us to become our own city.  Incorporate the best aspects of other cities, add in the valuable contributions of our large immigrant populations from all over the world, but retain something of what Houston was.

If we can do all those things we can build a city that people will want to come and see, a city that others will want to emulate.  Part of that process is embracing events like the Rodeo and helping it flourish.  Events like this give us something special and point to as uniquely Houstonian.

Posted in: activities, Astrodome, culture, current events, Houston, life in general