It looks as if David Byrne has taken another swipe at Houston in a new WSJ piece.
For some [a 'livable city'] might mean super fast Wi-Fi, the possibility of lucky and lucrative business opportunities and plenty of strip clubs. If that’s what rocks your boat then try Houston, though to me that city, oil money made physically manifest, is my worst nightmare.
I don’t even know what he means “oil money made manifest.” Is he talking about the buildings that the oil companies occupy downtown? Other than that I have no idea how oil money is “made manifest” in Houston. There are no wells or derricks (well, okay there’s one long dead one near Studewood and I-10). There are no “rich Texan” caricatures driving around in their convertible Cadillacs with longhorns affixed to the hood. If I didn’t already know there was oil money in Houston, I would be hard pressed to find evidence of it. I honestly can’t see how Houston is so very different from L.A. or Atlanta.
And it seems that Byrne is making his judgement about Houston based on his bike ride down Allen Parkway on a hot day. He notices Houston’s new Federal Reserve Branch building and then spends an entire paragraph talking about Alan Greenspan and the economy, as if Houston had anything to do with that. Note to David: Texas banks were not the problem. He then talks about the AIG building over the “grassy knoll.” Seriously. There’s an AIG branch building in Houston and somehow that’s like a Kennedy assassination conspiracy, I guess. Second note to David: AIG’s headquarters are in Manhattan. Manhattan is also the place where all those creative financial instruments that actually are responsible for the sorry state of the world economy were created. That’s just a few blocks from where you live, David. It seems like you would have noticed this. Maybe you should ride your bike down there.
Byrne’s cursory investigation of Houston makes me suspect all his other observations. Why should I trust his opinion of Minneapolis, for example?
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of reasons to hate Houston, but the fact that there are oil companies ain’t one of them. And the lack of zoning is actually pretty interesting, if you asked me. I like that there are so many weird combinations.
In other news, I’ve been watching a bunch of old episodes of the Dick Cavett show and came across these fantastic performances.
my personal ties to Houston:
grandfather ran a metal perforation plant on the northside, catered mostly to oil related companies.
uncle spent entire career at exxon.
cousin ran a power trading company.
another cousin lawyer downtown oil co.
dad moved to houston by way of bahrain where he spent most of his career working for arabian oil companies
worked for tech start up company started by the son of a wealthy oil developer.
married the daughter of a South Texas roughnecker whose two son-in-laws work for an oil company and a plastics manufacturing plant.
uncle-in-law oil man cpa.
I love Byrne’s “fart in an elevator” line about that building. It is obnoxious.
I have one of those in common with you. But none of that says how the oil money is “made manifest.”
His line is about that building’s existence reminding him of the Fed’s bad policies, which he apparently thinks are responsible for the economic downturn. Greenspan may have been a cheerleader, but Congress did the deregulation, not the Fed. And this building didn’t have anything to do with any of that, being only a branch bank and only a few years old. And, yeah, ugly.
Do you mean to say that you don’t feel that Houston is an oil town? Or are you taking this down to a literal sense like actually having particles of shit in your nose.
Of course Houston is an oil town. The issue is what about city planning or development indicates that the oil money is “made manifest.” In other words, if you didn’t already know Houston was an oil town, would you be able to tell Houston is an oil town?
Hard to imagine not already knowing. Just be thankful Houston is not quite yet the terror city depicted in that most exceptional James Caan vehicle Rollerball. Although I imagine there are tree exploding asshole socialites currently living in Houston.
I really need to get around to watching Rollerball. I have a copy of it right here.
There’s a part where the team chants “Houston Houston” that will make your heart sing.
I never realized how much Simon looked like Ramon back then. Wow. By the way, perhaps you were unaware, Justin, that David Byrne is a tool?
I’m not sure I’d go as far as calling him a tool. He has opinions like everybody else and his are about as well informed. The problem is that his celebrity allows any opinion he has to be taken seriously. Or, at least in this case, appear to be taken seriously. The real reason this was published is because it might make The Wall Street Journal some money.
Yes Byrne is a Tool and an Ass and a Douche.
Well I’ll say the same thing here that I commented in Sara’s article. Why the hell does Byrne bitch about nobody being on the streets then complains about the unbearable heat? Secondly the lack of interaction with human beings in his blog about Houston is very telling.
And if you still don’t think Byrne is a Tool. Compare Byrne’s pompous tone with that of Christopher Soloman of the New York Times. Where Solomon is open in interactive Byrne is closed minded and aloof.
“Zoning, schmoning. There is a kind of urban anarchy here that gives the city a real punch.” (From No. 815.)
It’s true: The greater metropolitan area is truly a geography of nowhere, a crazy quilt of strip malls and strip clubs and gas pumps and houses. But the sneaky thing about Houston is that the city’s heart isn’t to be found in one place; it’s in a thousand small places and subtle pleasures. Trouble is, most outsiders don’t have the time to assemble the scattered pieces. Only with time does mishmash become mosaic.”
The full article is here: Saying a Spirited ‘Nay’ to Houston’s Naysayers By CHRISTOPHER SOLOMON
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whoops gotta fix that link the NYT article is here http://travel.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/travel/12houston.html?_r=1
Yes that NY Times article is sweet as is the marketing campaign behind it (Houston It’s Worth It) but to me it’s also telling. If you have to dig so deep, what’s wrong with the surface? I myself am often in position up here in the “Northern Tundra” (as some of you not so well-informed readers refer to Chicago) to defend Houston. Though I do become more and more aware of Houston’s surface problems.
How do you tell that Houston is an oil town? Because you have to drive and drive and drive to get anywhere for one thing.
The HIWI campaign is a blue-collar bohemian response to a mainstream cultural problem. Although the whole weird thing people up here get on about zoning makes no sense to me at all (zoning sounds boring and I don’t get a feel in NYC or Chicago that things are tightly zoned). Anyway, why are West U houses so big, energy hogs, blocky and ugly? It’s because the land is worth so much money, the developers feel they have to build a big clunky house on it to make it sell-able (whose gonna buy a $600,000 bungalow?). It’s actually cheaper for them to build big (you can swing around and put up a full sheet of gypsum in a big place a lot faster than a small space). However people buy these boxes –mostly people involved in the energy machine.
On the surface you have oil, energy (the national face of which is still Enron) and medicine (the national face of which is extremely rich doctors fixing up rich Arabs).
I would like y’all to tell me, not the hidden treasures, but how on the surface Houston has got it? Or at least where it’s going that is good. People are looking for signs of direction –where is a place going, what’s it gonna be like in twenty years?
Personally, I think Houston will be stronger than ever but might be facing a larger outside resistance for what it represents (unsustainable energy profits, hot asphalt). This might build up even more resistance within its inhabitants — a sort of “what do we care, life is good” attitude. And what should you care, I guess, if life is indeed good. Is it good?
Well there are always cities whose charms require a local to show you its charms and its people. Houston is one of those places where that helps unless you have some time to invest here.
But I think that’s part of being a good traveler to begin with – learning how to appreciate things that don’t fit your pre-conceived notions. You know When in Rome…? I mean, come on, there is a heatwave and he’s riding his bike around in the middle of the day and then he bithces about how nobody is out at that time and yet complaining about the heat? Hey dumbass, there is a heat wave, put two and two together. Whatevs!
Look what Byrne did was just cross his arms and harrumph but he could have had a good time if he’d been open to it. A good friend of mine was visiting France recently and she found herself with no money, trying to get to a village, and it was raining. She could have been pissy and miserable but instead she stuck out her thuimb and embraced the adventure. In the end, not only did she get to where she was going, but she was also fed a warm meal by a nice couple and met quite a few nice people. I mean that is the spirit of traveling to me – adventure and openness. Byrne had neither but of course to do so would have involved reaching out to people.
As for the issue of sprawl and big houses. It’s actually because land is so CHEAP. The land isn’t worth that much – comparatively speaking – but if developers can throw two townhomes next to each other on the same plot and remove the old 1930′s bungalo and the yard, they can sell each for twice as much as the old house went for. As for owners of the McMansions? That’s just conspicuous consumption and those kind of Bougie homeowners aren’t just a Houston phenomenon.
But Sprawl and freeways are beyond the point. LA is a huge sprawl and it NEVER gets the invectives heaved upon it compared to Houston. So when i read something like Byrne’s piece I can only draw from it that he’s an ignorant snob.
West U land is not cheap because of proximity and cultural desires. West U, in a way, is a form of zoning –a bad form in my opinion. Inner city areas should be mixed use.
I don’t think the term “ignorant snob” does anything to help the northern opinion of Houstonians as blunt cowboys who once latched on to a strain of logic find anyone in opposition to simply be retarded.
LA never draws the disdain that Houston does because it has a variety of charms which mitigate its sprawling ugliness: the beautiful climate, the mountains, the blue ocean, and the glut of attractive young women who come for the glamor of the movie industry and stay for the soul crushing of the service industry. Houston doesn’t have those things and it’s not through any fault of the predominant industry. Well, maybe if energy were more glamorous, we could do something about that last example.
My issue isn’t that Houston is such a fantastic city, but rather it’s not as bad as Byrne makes it out to be. I don’t even find any of the things that the Times travel guy mentioned all that compelling. I mean, yeah we have lots of barbecue and Tex Mex, but that doesn’t make a great city. Okay, maybe you could make a case for the Tex Mex.
Houston really isn’t very different from Austin, but if you asked people in Austin about Houston, they would tell you it’s a wasteland of traffic and strip malls. They apparently fail to notice that they have those same strip malls and, frankly, worse traffic. Houston has it all over Austin in so many ways. It’s ethnically, culturally, and politically diverse in a way that Austin’s monoculture can’t touch. Come to think of it, how many other cities can genuinely claim to be politically diverse?
Anyway, I still hate Houston, but my hatred is an informed hatred. So there.
“an informed hatred” is pretty much the way to deal with Houston and how most people here deal with this city. We’re always going to be the ugly kid of cities but it doesn’t mean there isn’t some charm if you get to know it. That is my problem with Byrne’s article and why I feel, ignorant and snobbish. I mean take this line…
“We pass a residential neighborhood with lovely oak trees shading the street, and then, without any major landmark to let us know we’ve crossed a line, we’re in the ghetto, with shotgun shacks and old black men sitting on stoops in the withering heat.” Does he interact with anyone here? No, not a sould.
For Byrne this scene may seem horrible but you know I would bike through the Med center and the 5th ward I’d love that bike ride. I remember one day in the summer where it was a small break from the heat and I swear it was a wonderful scene – kids waving behind a fence, a group of girls dancing to hip-hop on a boom box, old black dudes playing dominoes, and some weird eastern European dude going up to everyone he passed on his bike saying “You look beautiful”. Am I worrying about zones or a bank building? No. I mean once the heat came back it was empty at 4pm but that’s pretty typical of that trail when it’s not hot. The point is that you can’t just take a snapshot of a place like byrne does and say that represents everything.
So yes, Kilian he’s suggesting he knows the city when he’s simply basing it on a poor snapshot (one that I think he seems pre-disposed to) and that is why I say he’s an ignorant douche and the tone is condescending toward those people who live here and therefore I say he is being snobbish. Sorry if that makes me look like a big mouthed Texan but I’m just callin’ it like I see ‘em.
That line about the ghetto is ugly. Would he have turned around and pedalled as hard as his hairy little legs could carry him if there was a sign? Does he want a DisneyLand style sign that says “GhettoLand?”
Tricia and I had the same problem in Chicago when we first arrived. We’d be tooling around on our bikes and suddenly end up in the projects. I didn’t get upset that there wasn’t some kind of warning. Well, actually there are but you have to live here a while to read them.
for what it’s worth, and not sure what it means, Houston is #6 in the EPA’s list of top purchasers of green power – http://www.epa.gov/grnpower/toplists/top50.htm (Chicago, the Windy City, is by comparison #16).
Also, to me, even though Houston might not obviously appear to be an oil town, it does very obviously appear to be a (or have been) a boom town. And I bet a quick analysis of the age of things and when the money was made, would probably make it not too hard to figure out that it was an oil boom and not say a gold or IT or steel or whatever.
I’m not sure this really says much. There is a lot of cheap wind power in Texas and, all things being equal, people will pick the green alternative. It’s true that Texas is investing heavily in wind power, but like everything else in Texas, that’s because there is lots of money to be made, rather than any sort of commitment to the environment.
Actually Bryne sounds pretty informed in that blog post. I think he does back up his statements about oil manifestation with bio information about some of Houston’s famous “benefactors.” …if I remember correctly.
That’s silly. He simply looked up the history of the namesake of the hall he was playing. That’s a pretty low bar you’re setting there. And what did he find out? A rich guy, who happens to have made his money from oil, built a theater. That sort of thing doesn’t happen in any other city, does it?
Chicago’s benefactors make gum and gut pigs and rule the world.
Maybe Houston needs a rebirth. Chicago had to rebuild after its boom in the 1800′s. Maybe Bryne is Houston’s Upton Sinclair. Take him to your apartment so he can see the misery of your existence, put it in a book and get some much needed attention to your plight.
Didnt Chicago had a big fire to help it along though? Maybe Byrne is not the person to bring, but maybe just import a few more Australians.
I’d happily take Byrne around Houston and I guarantee he’d come back with an feeling he had a good time and an informed hatred.
Take him to your apartment so he can see the misery of your existence
No way. Nobody gets to see how many rats get into my sausages. It’s a trade secret and I don’t trust him to keep it.
Not to change topics but… http://blogs.houstonpress.com/rocks/2009/09/the_angry_mob_at_u_of_h_was_no.php
That’s right. I’m famous. I’m working on my book about all the cities I’ve biked through right now.
Maybe you guys are experiencing some sort of Stockholm Syndrome after being in Houston for so long… you know, defending your oppressor… and “informed hatred”? does that mean that you know it’s hateful and have concrete evidence about it, and therefore, better the hateful you know than the hateful you don’t know? Do you also hang out with people you hate just cause you know them? I thought that was reserved for the pages of this blog. anyways, I dont really think you guys have any real hatred for houston. I think you love that city, every grimy, sweaty, stinky part of it. i know i did when i lived there, i would’ve gladly sat under any building drain pipe to prove it. saying you hate it is just your way of showing it, and to have a foreigner try to upstage your love/hatred for it, well, that is just unacceptable.
Take your truth elsewhere, hombre. This place is for lies only.
Trying to confuse me with the liar’s paradox? well played grasshopper…
“Nobody gets to see how many rats get into my sausages.” Somebody should be quoting that… guess it will be me.
I don’t much care what Byrne thinks of Houston, but it’s good to see another recent post make it into our greatest hits column.
Ha Ha ha I was thinking the same thing.
I do, because I’m curious to understand why Houston represents what it does to a certain set of New York intellectuals. Woody Allen is another one who tosses Houston around as his most immediate example of a city not to emulate.
I always wondered where Woody’s experience with Houston came from. I guess he’s probably been here, but it couldn’t have been for long.
Here are a couple examples for you, Mr. Way.
1. I was eating free food in the lobby of a building at MIT this spring. This free food was part of a going away shindig for one Mr. Bill Arning, curator of the MIT Visual Arts Center. The woman introducing him said that he was leaving to take over as director of the CAM in Houston and then made some crack about how she didn’t even know there was art in Texas. Now, this may have been half serious, but it’s sort of alarming that anybody would make such a stupid remark in public. This is about as stupid as people who complain about “liberal elites” in Boston–except the people saying those things don’t represent an academic institution. To Arning’s credit, he quickly defended the arts scene in Houston as being the most comprehensive he has seen. But I don’t think anybody believed him.
2. I saw Greil Marcus speak at the CAM and he said that he had no idea there were all these interesting things in Houston and that he was pleasantly surprised. This was even on a hot day. He had obviously bought into all the negative propaganda as well.
I have to say, I lose a lot of respect for people who aren’t smart enough to realize when something is bullshit.
Greil Marcus? doesnt he teach or taught at rice?
Marcus teaches at UC Berkeley. He used to teach at Princeton. I don’t think he’s taught at Rice.
Oops, i was thinking of George Marcus, the anthropologist… my bad.
Well, I’ve never felt a need to defend the city to anyone else nor do I feel any great need to convince anyone of its charms. I love Houston, partly because it’s always been home, but partly because I know it has a lot to offer people who are willing to look.
In the same way, I’ve never been one to bang on other cities. Mostly because I’ve not spent enough time in any particular city to feel as if I know it well. I’ve spent about a month total in Chicago (my longest time in any town except Myrtle Beach and Waco), and I like it quite a bit, but I noticed it was dirtier than our town and that to live in a neighborhood like Montrose near the center of the city, it would cost considerably more. Still, I don’t feel like I can have an informed opinion on the city’s charms or dismiss it smugly as if knew all I needed to know.
At the same time, I must admit much of my good opinion of Chicago probably springs from its treatment in films and from its good reputation as a city of myriad awesomeness.
I suspect that much of Allen’s and Byrne’s opinions of Houston comes from this second type of “knowledge” rather than the first type, which would have been formed from brief encounters (probably less than one month total).
I’ve known a very few folks who lived here a few years and dislike Houston. Their opinion is of more use to me. I’d be more inclined to learn of their experience. Since I can be more sure they actually know what they’re talking about and aren’t relying on proxies or repeating an opinion they know to be widely held among their peers.
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BTW, to crass up the tone of the comments a bit, those shots of Tina’s ass shaking are the stuff that cities are build upon.
I noticed that too. How could I not?
Wonder what Clark Gable thought of Houston? I had known he lived here, but not the circumstances.
http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2009/09/houston_101_frankly_my_dear_i.php
Frankly that’s pretty damn interesting mrshl.
I just realized this post existed, so even though this thread has been dead for two months, my two cents are lining up to get into the party, to mix metaphors.
1. FUCK David Byrne
2. Justin is mostly right about the “oil money made manifest” line. It’s a well-turned phrase that bears no relationship to reality. Money is money. Kilian says that Houston is an oil town “because you have to drive and drive and drive to get anywhere for one thing.” Dude, have you ever been to Phoenix? Or Denver? Or DALLAS? Atlanta is a little bit nicer than Houston, but not because you have to drive less. Sprawl in the South and West results from the time period in which they evolved coupled with the existence of money, not the source of the money.
However, there is one area in Houston where the oil industry is made manifest, if not the money itself, and that’s the petrochemical corridor on the southeast side of the metro area. Heavy industry is, of course, one of the things that makes an urban area diverse and livable, by providing living-wage jobs to a population without the financial resources to break into white-collar professions. . . something a New Yorker born after, say, World War II would know little about. Heavy industry is also among the most picturesque elements of an urban landscape, if one of the most viciously destructive to its environment and the health of its populace.
3. Again, contra Kilian- sorry, man- but at this point Houston is anything but a boomtown. It has a much more diversified economy than most people think, and although the petrochemical industry is still the primary driver of the economy, that will probably get a lot more lucrative, not less, before a gradual decline, assuming that we eventually move toward a less oil-dependent society.
Not to mention, Houston is full of people who own property and have long-term, stable employment. It doesn’t have a lot of conspicuous consumption, not like Miami. And, it’s got 4 million people. A society that large does not shift quickly in any direction.
4. Houston may soon be the first major city in America to elect a lesbian as mayor. By contrast, the mayor of New York is a development-crazed billionaire who got the city council to repeal term limits so that he could stay in power. Its last mayor was one of the more notable assholes in recent American history. Look at the mayors of New York and the mayors of Houston and tell me which city you’d rather live in politically.
5. One more for the road: FUCK YOU DAVID BYRNE
So glad Danny is exploring our back catalog.
Me too.
well put.