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Saturday,
March 2, 2002
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my study of the art museum, a César (I think) and a docent (reflection in a window, of course)
"The reasonable man adapts
himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt
the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable
man."
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the arts We can sleep in but we are up and showered and ready for something to happen a little after nine. We decide to go to the Galleria and find one of those breakfast places and wait for some stores to open. We go in La Madeleine and get some breakfast. (Why are all the locations of this chain CF zones? The serving up of food is efficient. The cashier backs everyone up.) I see a swarthy man tucking two curved, twelve-inch plastic things under his jacket. I wonder what he is up to until I realize that they are certainly guards for a daughter skating in the class on the ice rink a few yards away, hoping to be a Sarah Hughes. We eat and read the local alternative weekly (Houston Express). On our way out I hear a portly man tell his companions, "They say it's in recovery, the economy, but I don't think...." His voice trails off into the noise of the diners and the skaters. We have been asking people about Enron and its effect. The Four Seasons people put a good face on it. "Now we have the lawyers."
The mall's shops are slowly opening up. There is a stand where watch batteries can be installed and I just happened to have my three old dead Timexs in my backpack so I've brought them along. I leave them to be fixed. We wander about, strolling through a Bally store, going in a Ralph Lauren store where, behind a wood door in nice bins, the clerk shows us $45 boxer shorts. We used to buy FFP Polo Boxers...but not at this price! Geez. We demure on the boxers. (OK, so we are folks who will buy a wine in a restaurant for up to $100 without a thought but we won't buy $45 underwear. Go figure.) We go to Neiman's. FFP reminds me that, not long after we married, maybe the fall of 1976, we came to Houston and visited Neiman's and bought boots for me and a velour warm-up. I do remember. I think we also bought a game and a hat for me in Neiman's. A brown felt hat. Somewhere I have a picture of me in that hat and a silk pants suit. Really. I wish I could find that picture. I don't remember if we bought anything for Forrest.
We pick up my watches
and do a little shopping for presents for later occasions in the Met Museum
store. Then we decide we've had enough of the Galleria. It's time for
art. The Menil Collection is an odd museum. It has a collection of twentieth-century art, antiquities, Byzantine art, tribal art. It is completely informed by what these folks collected. It's free to go to, it's an interesting building to look at art in. We weren't too taken with the large subtle stripes of Agnes Martin. They would be good to decorate with, I suppose, you could match up the couch and throw pillows. Paintings like that always seem to me to be interior decoration. We did a turn through the surrealists and other twentieth-century collection. They have a great collection of Magrittes and Max Ernest. We drove around Montrose after that, aimlessly, looking for a place to eat, maybe some weird shopping. We saw one shop that I at least wanted to get a picture of but we were hungry. We settled on a Scholtzsky's and then wandered through a gay-oriented bookstore. We tried to find the interesting junk shop again but couldn't locate it. We just looked at the interesting houses and apartment buildings and the wildly different state of the different businesses and homes. If it hadn't been so windy and cold, it would have been a nice day to go for a walk around here. We decided to head to the other museums and chose the Comtemporary Arts Museum. They had an exhibit of William Kentridge works. He is South African and does these works which are films made by filming charcoal drawings as he develops and erases and transforms them. There were some of the drawings for them, several rooms with films and a very intriguing work of a film of these drawings projected into a glass box with three shelves like a medicine cabinet. We headed back to the hotel and were swallowed in a huge traffic jam on Westheimer.
We took a taxi downtown and steered the cabbie away from Westheimer with good effect. We got out into the windy night near Solera's. We went in but they wouldn't open for a while. So we walked to the Lancaster, picking our way through the construction. A bunch of traffic lights were stuck last night and tonight they were still (again?) stuck. We walked with a walk sign and the cars and buses, tired of waiting for a stuck light I guess, roared at us. We had some stiff drinks at the Lancaster, talking it all over with the bartender (Bob). As we were leaving, we saw people from Ballet Austin who were there to see the same performance. We walked in the cold and destruction back to Solera's (wasn't far, just cold and destroyed by construction). We had a bunch of tapas and a bottle of wine. I liked the food and I love ordering little dishes until you are full. Some weren't all that little either. We bundled up, walked to Wortham at more risk of life and limb and freezing. So, in the warm theater, I had a little trouble staying entirely awake through Cleopatra but we had great seats and the ballet and the sets were great. What a lot of arts for a weekend. We stopped in the Lancaster bar for a drink and visited with some Austin folks and then managed to grab a cab to get back to our hotel. The driver was some refugee from a chip company that was sold and dismantled or something. He was trying to make contacts for jobs while driving his cab. And...to sleep. Lots of art.
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179
JUST
TYPING