Italics are mine

Trip to Marfa

Recently I took my first trip since the pandemic by driving to Marfa. I am not sure how well-known Marfa is outside Texas but it is a wonderful small town with lots of art, and I just liked the idea of a road trip. (It is also the town where the 1956 movie Giant got filmed.) There is something about driving by myself for long stretches of time that clears my mind and helps me gain insights into my life. I took the scenic route, staying on I-20 until Pecos and reaching Marfa through Route 17. (Random fact: if you're going to stop in Odessa for lunch, I highly recommend the restaurant Cork & Pig.) Once I was on Route 17 I was often by myself for extensive periods of time with only the occasional oil tanker driving in the opposite direction and the experience was amazing. The backdrop of mountains was gorgeous too. Needless to say, I had taken some of my drawing and painting supplies with me to do sketches. Hopefully I will find the time to do full paintings using the photographs I took before summer is over. 

I stayed at Hotel Saint George, which I highly recommend. (It is right by the railroad tracks and the train makes a lot of noise when it comes by, including in the middle of the night, but that didn't bother me.) The hotel has a great gift shop where I bought books about Donald Judd and Marfa and great-looking glasses. In the picture below, I bought the Chinati book from the Chinati Foundation after I toured the outdoors spaces, and everything else is from the hotel's gift shop, called Hey I like it here.

I saw the Prada Marfa in Valentine, TX (basically an outdoors art installation using Prada merchandise in the middle of nowhere), which was another nice drive, about 35 minutes each way on a straight road - my kind of driving. It also took me past the gates of the "Little Reata" ranch from the movie Giant and cardboard cutouts of the stars. I stopped by Hotel Paisano, which was the headquarters for the crew of the movie Giant (I liked my hotel more, but not everyone likes contemporary hotels as much as I do), had lunch at the Water Stop, which was very good. The coffee shop The Sentinel was one of my favorite haunts (I also loved the Do your thing coffee shop), and the last evening after looking in vain for an open restaurant I discovered the pizzeria Para Llevar, which was excellent. (A lot of restaurants are closed during the week, apparently. Some were closed because of the pandemic.) The staff recommended the chicken pesto pizza and it did not disappoint. I bought more drawing supplies from the Marfa Art Supply (as if I did not have enough) and walked around. When I return to Marfa, I hope to try the Al Campo and Cochineal restaurants, visit the Judd Foundation, which was not open when I was there, and see more of the art galleries. 

It is funny how easily I struck up conversations with random people throughout my stay - maybe it was because I was happy to be on vacation, and proud of myself for taking the trip. That was a nice change after the past year and three months.  

Remember Elena Mukhina @Simone_Biles #Gymnastics

So the world was shaken today by Simone Biles's withdrawal from the Olympics team final. I think Biles made the right call, for reasons I explain below. As someone who practiced gymnastics at a decent level many years ago, I wanted to make a couple of comments. Those comments are informed by the fate of Soviet gymnast Elena Mukhina. You may never have heard of that name. To us in the gymnastics world of a certain decade, she is hard to forget. She was the 1978 World Champion and then she broke her leg. It was a long recovery from that injury and she had much pressure to master a difficult move, the Thomas salto, which "caused her to break her neck two weeks before the opening of the 1980 Summer Olympics, leaving her permanently quadriplegic." (in the words of her Wikipedia page) Mukhina died of complications in 2006, at age 46.

I don't think someone like Biles, performing at that level, in the middle of the Olympics, representing her team, would withdraw unless told by a trainer that it was for her own safety that she should. She wouldn't have let her teammates down. She did start signaling in some comments to the press that her mental health was taking a hit (when she said she felt she had the world on her shoulders), and I am glad someone took action on that. In Olympic competition, she missed her vault (completing only 1.5 turn instead of 2.5) just like she had in practice. This is huge on a mental standpoint. If you can't pull through for the Olympics, you're clearly in need of a break. I say this without judgment. I've had some heavy pressure on me this past year, although I was very strong mentally when the year started, and frankly this year was absolute hell. In the end the highest priority is to keep ourselves safe. 

What I am trying to say is, we are lucky as a nation that Simone Biles started the team final on vault because if she had started on the uneven bars or balance beam, things may have turned out very differently health-wise for her. But she was on vault and she went on safety mode (going for 1.5 turns) and a trainer saw it and knew he/she had to pull her out. And I just wanted to write this post to acknowledge this trainer since no one has really talked about that person. In spite of the pressure to get Gold for Team USA, that trainer pulled Biles out because her safety (her not ending a quadriplegic like Mukhina, to be blunt) was more important than a medal. And we are lucky to have that trainer on Team USA. 

To Simone Biles, I wish a prompt mental health recovery and many more medals. But if a choice has to be made between the two, mental health comes first.

Review of "Prophetic City: Houston on the cusp of a changing America" by Stephen Klineberg

I've recently become interested in learning more about Houston, TX and this is one of the books I bought on the topic. The author, a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Rice University with degrees from Haverford College, the University of Paris and Harvard University, ran a survey for about 35 years about the attitudes of Houstonians and residents of the Houston metropolitan region on various topics as the founding director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research. A central theme in his book is that what is happening in Houston right now foreshadows what will happen in the United States in a few years because Houston is much more diverse than other big cities. 

I have to say, the parts where he enumerates statistics were the least interesting for me, and the parts where he shares actual stories and quotes from Houstonians were page-turners. Having gone through quite a few volumes of turgid prose written by academics who thought they could write for the general public, this book is better than average, and it turns out from the title (not cover) page and the acknowledgements that this is due to one Amy Hertz, who helped write the book. (When I found out about her, I thought it was wrong not to include her name on the cover page via a simple "with Amy Hertz", as for the title page. That does not shed Stephen Klineberg in a good light to have relegated her to the insides of the book. Having read the pages where he spouts off the statistics, I am very convinced that she played a critical role in making the book interesting for the general public.)

So what do I like about this book? First, I like Texas, and I like books that focus on parts of the United States that aren't on either coast. Also, I like cities with top universities: Rice University in Houston, Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Northwestern University outside Chicago. The elites of the nation are no longer educated solely in Massachusetts and California, and Texas is fascinating because of the large number of Democrats and Republicans thrown together for better or for worse. Houston also has a thriving economy that isn't limited to oil and gas but also included health care and more. After going through Hurricane Harvey, it also has more stories of resilience than many. And then simply I always love learning more about my adopted state of Texas. 

So this is why I picked up the book, but here are a couple of passages that caught my attention and made me like the book even more, once I started reading it. I really got into the book at Chapter 6, "The moral core of a paradoxical city," because of its emphasis on Hurricane Harvey. Then Chapter 7 "The black/white divide" was another home run, especially the story where an African American police sergeant shared the story of his son (in his early twenties) moving to a new neighborhood and getting pulled over for no obvious violation. "His hands were shaking so badly he couldn't get out his license and registration" (p.145) and because he had some obvious PTSD symptoms from the encounter, his dad "brought him to the local precinct of his son's new neighborhood and introduced him around." The young man knew all the cops in his dad's neighborhood but none of them in the area he had just moved in. "He was so scared that he asked his dad to go with him to his new local precinct and introduce him around." 

I also loved the story of Derrick Ngo, who was admitted to Harvard after being homeless thanks to his stint at the Energy Institute High School, and the insights of developer Stan Marek and BakerRipley then-CEO Angela Blanchard.   

Some quotes from the book:

• "Houston is one of the most vibrant, rapidly growing metropolitan areas in America, with a vigorous entrepreneurial economy, thriving primarily because of the tremendous energy, vitality and commitment to hard work on the part of immigrants who have been pouring into this city from Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Caribbean." (p.192)
• "We found out that teachers were going too easy on the kids, giving them lower than grade-level textbooks." (p.266) The pressure of going too easy on students is something I can relate to. 
• A May 2015 article in the Houston Chronicle "described the "Texas myth" as a place that "relished the death penalty, that's obsessed with guns, that's anti-education, anti-science, anti-immigrant, and anti-environment." But the author's surveys "show clearly that the general public has been expressing more progressive views over the years, and as in the state's other major cities (Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso), area residents are now more firmly affiliated with the Democratic Party." (p.268)
• "[Houston] is low, flat, and full of bayous; it rains a lot, and we will always flood. Solving for flooding is the window, because it will take us into the densification we need, building upward instead of out over the floodplains and in the flood zones." (p.278)
• "Cities need to form partnerships with their "city accelerators", organizations with the cutting-edge knowledge and critical resources that come out of the nation's most prestigious universities, think tanks, and philanthropic organizations." (p.280)
• "Still, I worry about the city's mounting problems, especially the burgeoning gap in access to quality education; the growing pockets of concentrated poverty, homelessness, and despair; the persistence of environmental racism; the region's increasing vulnerability to flooding; its position as a hub for human trafficking." (p.282)
• "In The New Localism, Brookings Institution fellows Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak posit that the best opportunities for shaping the future of America will come from its major cities." (p.283)
• "Houston's economic future will depend on its ability to harness the new energy technologies, to become the third coast (along with Boston and San Francisco) for the life sciences, supported by the world's largest conglomeration of medical institutions, and to develop a full-fledged entrepreneurial ecosystem, stimulating new ideas and new wealth in the high-tech sectors of today's economy." (p.284)

Rating: four stars out of five.

Review of "Hold Still" by Sally Mann

I picked up this book, in its hardcover version, after my latest visit at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. I had actually never heard of Sally Mann before, but I loved the large number of color and black-and-white photographs in the book (at least in the hardcover version, the reproductions were of high quality although they were integrated to the text instead of being on separate pages.) The book was very well written and it provided good insights into her life up to 2015 - her son committed suicide about a year later so that is not in the book - but, in spite of her friendship with fellow Lexington, Va. local Cy Twombly, the fact remains that she doesn't quite have the sort of life and career that would lend itself to a full-length memoir so she has to spend a lot of the book on her parents, photos included, and the black woman who raised her as a child. I actually liked a lot the part about her interactions, as a young white girl, with black folks, which was written with great sensitivity, and the part about her elderly father committing suicide. Regarding the controversy of the pictures of her naked young children, I felt she was a bit naive not to expect what happened, but if you live on a farm in a place like Lexington, Va, it is probably easy to forget there are weirdos out there. So, the book is well-done and the stunning pictures will certainly inspire many photographers, but I did skip some pages about her parents, especially before she was born. Hence, the rating of four starts out of five. Definitely worth a look/read.