Wandering the park during the party, and got found by an adorable little someone hiding behind a lightpole playing peekaboo….
Two days, two hundred or so artists, who knows how many sticks of pastel chalk, and a very large street-painting festival to benefit the Center for Hearing and Speech… and you gotta be there* while it’s happening because on Sunday night the fire department hoses take over and it all goes away. It’s almost a zen thing. (A very very cold and wet zen thing, this year; I’m not so advanced as that. I got out before the trucks arrived.)
*Or you can know someone who makes pictures. And posts them to the internet.
Not sure how much it counts as a confession when everyone I’ve ever met has known it since the beginning, but…
I’m a borderline bookaholic.
No, I’m not a collector exactly; collectors worry about editions and conditions and provenance and all that stuff, which is all well and good, but I don’t do any of that. I just love to read the things. Paperbacks cost less and take less space on the shelf, which means more books in less space. This is a Good Thing.
So Saturday was … Book Day.
Started out hitting a couple of yard/garage sales (sometimes you find people getting rid of the most amazing stuff….) where I scored a more-or-less new copy of Muhammad Yunus’s socio-economic treatise on eliminating poverty by way of business. (Yunus founded the Grameen Bank; he knoweth whereof he speaketh.)
And then came the fun part… Book Fairs! Part 1: The Julia Ideson Library for the Houston History Book Fair. Get that? A gorgeous room full of books full of history. Yeah. I could lay out a whole LOT of money there, but work’s been thin lately… so I glanced through a couple of dozen books I need (Not counting the thousands I just WANT) and said hello to several friends – authors, booksellers, historians, collectors… before letting myself slink out with only one volume, the third of Elton Miles’s Tales from the Big Bend series. I don’t get to spend as much time out in Big Bend (or anywhere else) as I’d like, but I do have friends out that way and the tales are always worth the time….
And I was too busy checking books and greeting friends to shoot much (books and I go back WAY further than cameras and I, believe it or not)
Story Sloane, of Sloane Gallery fame, a friend and travelling companion of 20 years’ standing now (wait, wait, how did that happen? We ain’t that old, knees notwithstanding.) trading stories with Ann Becker, half of Becker’s Books, (from whom I scored the Miles, and made note she’s got a good stock in J. Frank Dobie, also high up on the stories to get list….) (Free promo notice … Sloane Gallery helped sponsor the event, and I’m sure Ann got her licks in there too, because she’s Just That Way.)
Besides there’s such a thing as being TOO invisible when shooting, as when columnist/historian/blogger J R Gonzales runs you over…
Said hi to Mike McCorkle, who’s put together (on a shoestring and a LOT of hard work….) a history of the City of Bellaire that’s now in its fourth edition (!), Capt. Paul Matthews of the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum, plus some good folks from the 1940 Air Terminal Museum down at Hobby Airport (what these guys don’t know about the history of commercial and private aviation in Texas probably isn’t worth knowing – but they want to learn about it anyway), Bright Sky Press (I’m not sure how long they’ve been around, but WOW do they have some nice work), Houston History Magazine, and, of course, HAM (plus several other local historians and authors whose cards fell out of my vest somewhere during the later part of the day, dammit!)….
If I’d hung out as long as I wanted I’d have spent way too much money and my truck would have been towed a dozen times…. plus there was the other book fair.
The Other Book Fair was at the Museum of Printing History which is another of Houston’s Lesser-Known Treasures. This fair seems to be far more about book as object than book as information, which means books way out of my price range (I stayed away from the white glove gallery room…) but I did find some neat people from the Book Arts Guild to steal ideas from. 
Further back I ran into Dan Becker, the other half of Becker’s Books, and John Dillman, part of Kaboom! books, Houston’s Least Eponymous Book Store, (a new favorite since the Chron sent me up there), the Friends of the Houston Public Library, from which I scored a copy of Laura Gilpin’s 1949 biography of the Rio Grande (complete with an interesting inscription), and half a dozen dealers in unique, rare, and antique things I can’t possibly afford….
And, around another corner, of course, was the Artist In Residence, Printmaker Charles Criner, and a couple of assistants, working on handprinted tshirts.
And it was at that point time to escape while I had an open route to the door and there were still books that hadn’t noticed me yet.
Spent the afternoon reading. Of course.
With Guitarist.
Now, you can say what you like about Ricardo Sweatt Rodriguez, but he’s an experienced traveller.
And he brought his guitar along with the case, to share music and a beautiful evening at the Willow Waterhole Greenspace.
I met Mr. Rodriguez briefly several years ago on a photo shoot (Butler’s Books in Rosenburg) and he persuaded me to accept one of his CDs. (I’ve honestly forgotten whether he gave it to me or I bought it for cash money. Probably he gave it to me as I didn’t at the time have cash money to spare for such things. But I’ll buy the next ones as quick as I can get them. He’s that good. Really. Does some of the funkiest off-standard guitar tunings I’ve ever heard….)
(I’ve hidden some other pix at The Gallery (Dunno whether you should hear that with an ominous rumble or just a rimshot, take your pick)…. just in case anyone wants to see them….)
Aw, c’mon, it’s only one click and you KNOW you want to.
Or you could always go over to his management company website and hear the guy play for yourself. Or even buy the CD. (Check out “Caravan.” It’s sampled for free but that one piece… worth the price of admission all on its lonesome, along with “Soul Mountain.”)
Things wander my way sometimes. I spent part of Friday morning in Bellaire doing a shoot, and right there in front of the historical Trolley Car was a good-sized banner advertising the Houston Area Wood Carvers annual show and sale, this Saturday at City Hall.
Since the weather forecast for Saturday said “rain” and my initial plan for Saturday had been a car show, well, I kind of made a small mental note. I grew up doing car shows, rain or shine, and trust me, they don’t gain from water falling out of the sky. No matter HOW much we need the rain.
And, oddly enough, the weather guys were right, and driving thirty or forty miles to shoot cars trying to cover up wasn’t much of an idea, so I wandered over to City Hall – 29.70310 N, 95.46813 W. And that banner was right, too…
Kenan Schultz of Channelview tells me his wife said this guy “looks like he’s about to sit down and tell a story,” so he became “The Storyteller.”
Schultz himself has that same look going on…
And around the corner, there’s Fred Childers,
doing this absolutely fascinating “fan dove” thing.
He tells me that fan carving of this sort has been around for a long time… but having never seen it before myself, I was just blown away.
Further up was Carolyn Halbrook, working on an icicle ornament.
Her specialty is chip carving… which she also teaches. It’s a style that results in things like this:
There were a lot of Santas and Christmas things out; it’s a sale, too, and there were a lot of unique designs.
These folks are good….
I’ve got a standing invite to drop by and learn how to do this… which I think I may have to try. (Not that I need another time-eater of a hobby, but still…)
And as Kenan Schultz told me, “There’s no such thing as a worked-up woodcarver.”
Up very early in the morning for a walk before it gets too hot….
One thing I LIKE about North Richland Hills. They have good parks and a very nice walking trail, about a mile and a half, that runs along the power company right-of-way. Happily for me one end is a short stroll from my mother’s apartment; the other end puts me out not far from Grapevine Highway, which is one of the major business arteries in the area.
And towards the middle is a small church on a large chunk of land…. with a very pleasant (if somewhat overgrown) labyrinth with an unusual layout. I generally stop to walk it; this time I went with a camera.
If I’m ever up this way in spring when the roses are blooming I expect it’ll be very nice; until then I’ll happily make do with the rosemary bushes that sit right along the path and give off a very nice scent when you brush against them (which you can hardly avoid….)
One of the things that seems to go with getting older is seeing your childhood shrink as you look back at it.
I dropped back into Fort Worth again to check out an exhibit at the Kimbell Art Museum (and it’s only on for a couple more days, so if you missed it, you missed it.) In the process of dodging what looked like a fairly ugly traffic jam after the long haul from Houston, I made a brief excursion into the past.
40-odd years ago (some of them odder than even I could have imagined, which makes them very odd indeed), this was the East Branch Library, part of the Fort Worth Public Library system. I remember it as a very large building, much bigger inside than out. I spent many happy hours seeing the world from inside this building, and I have to admit I choked up (just a little, understand) to step back inside. This is where I discovered, much to my ongoing and permanent delight, that the world is full of books… for hundreds of years, thousands of people of all sorts have felt the need to pick up a pen or a typewriter and tell stories. Things that happened, things that might have happened, things that should have happened, things that ought to be possible in a perfect (or at least another) world.
For many years I thought they wrote those things just for me, personally, and even as I’ve learned that wasn’t the case, I still try to read as many as I can, and I continue to believe there’s nothing more valuable to a civilized society than a system of public libraries.
Even if they’re smaller than they used to be….
Gotta say this for Texas: our leaders have their priorities straight. There’s not enough money for schools, food, or health care for our weakest and poorest, but our roadside rest stops have gotten some serious money poured into eco-friendly makeovers. (Not that I mind this especially, from a safety standpoint, but it does seem odd that we have no money for people or road maintenance, but there’s plenty to spend encouraging people to drive all to hell and gone across the state with gas prices through the roof and a serious lack of air in the air….)
Anyway I’ve hit several of these over the last few months; each one has its own theme, usually related to the area around it… (and all carping aside they’re very nice, and it’s REALLY nice to see TxDOT paying attention to environmental issues.) This one is outside of Corsicana on I45.
(Pay no mind to the bison; he’s big, but slow and (UNLIKE his furry compatriots) approachable… though when it’s close to a hundred degrees outside you might want to think twice about petting him. He DO get just a bit warm…)
Well, not really.
Cleaning and organizing photo files gets tedious, but then sometimes I find little moments I’d forgotten about….
Have a flower.
I went to San Antonio for a weekend in June to do some research for The Other Texas, my somewhat-more-serious Texas History and Culture blogzine. I walked the Paseo Del Rio (which has changed a wee bit since college days), hit El Mercado, visited the Institute For Texan Cultures and the Texas Folklife Festival, stopped by La Villita, visited dear alma mater again, and in general had a fine if low-key time wandering old stomping grounds and wondering why I left. Yes, there were pictures, and yes, I will be posting them soonly. (I’m doing some fairly major computer restructuring at the moment; one of my major photo-processing boxes went croquet.)
Anyway, on my way out of town I stopped by to drive part of the San Antonio Missions Trail (you’ll see more of this later) and while I was wandering around looking at the the old Spanish stone aqueduct that feeds the fields and San Francisco de La Espada Mission, I scrambled up one side of the bank and encountered a nice young couple coming down…. the she of which couple spotted my camera (ALWAYS carry the camera…) and promptly advised that if wanted a nice bed of Indian blankets I should walk just upstream to the second trail (at the big tree) and turn left up the hill…
Okay.