If you’re interested, Lonely Planet is running a pretty good sale on printed and ebook guides over at their website.
Dunno how long this lasts….
Got home yesterday afternoon after a spectacularly “meh” photo shoot (nice people and all but a lot of commercial and advertiser shooting is just inherently not screamingly creative or original or off the wall) and heard the neighbor’s rosebush calling me… and it WAS off the wall.
So Saturday night hits and all of my plans have quietly blown themselves to tiny bits… leaving me free to take a quick run up to the Heights for Mitch Cohen’s First Saturday Arts Market. I was actually hoping to catch a couple of friends exhibiting there, but that part of my luck wasn’t on. Got to meet some new artists, though, so it’s all good.
I hadn’t heard Alexis Moore before, and was reasonably blown away…. but as I don’t have sound here, I’m just going to point you to her website. Go thou and be smitten. Smited. Whatever.
Wandered on… even with the sun going down, this is Houston in July. I wanted SHADE.
And further in, I found shade and a fellow bookbinder, Amie Krebbs, who works in recycled cardboard and hemp (and other stuff) to create some very impressive art “Gournals.” (Don’t correct her spelling. It’s not a mistake.)
She’s self-taught, as I am, but it appears she’s much more creative about it… These Gournals are art; my journals are simply handwriting storage. And she’s mastered that tape binding, which I never have. I’m just slightly envious, though not enough to actually DO anything about it….
Wandered further yet, looking at photographs and soaps and jewelry and painting and pottery and scents (Mitch goes for variety, and very conveniently provides a list of artists for the terribly curious) and ended up catching a lesson in enameling technique from one Mary Jarvis, 
who paused a conversation with friend and boothmate Chris Magisano of Maggie’s Meltdown 
to explain to me the differences between cloisonné enamel, with which I was familiar, and champlevé enamel, a very old technique which manages to be completely new to me.
The circular piece on the display in front of Mary is cloisonné.
This is champlevé.
(The difference, for the curious, has to do with how the frame of the piece is built. Beyond that the explanation gets a little complicated. I’m not sure I understand it well enough to explain without drawings and photographs with circles and arrows….)
Around another corner was one Brett G. Hall, who says he wanted to be an artist for 30 years, but he went into the commercial side of the field and got caught up in that whole “making a living” thing. Now he’s doing the only thing he ever wanted to do – drawing. (But unless I’m way wrong he likes talking about it, too.)
Several of the pieces Brett showed were done with colored pencil on a colored paper, with highlights popped out in opaque white pencil. It’s a very appealing approach.
Made one more pass through the market (photojournalists are somewhat like sharks – we keep moving or we drown) and ran across John Delafield, the potter who made my late night coffee mug (the one that could double as a beer stein). He was having a very good evening, and said he’d sold all the “special” ware he’d made for the market, and a bunch of other stuff too. Always good to see him; he does wonderful work…. simple, solid, utilitarian. It’s not “fine china” but if you drop it it’s more likely to break your foot (or your floor) than crack itself. That’s my kind of work.
By this time it was getting on to closing, so there was just enough light left to grab a couple of shots of “Grifters and Shills.” It’s modern folk in the classic political/cultural tradition…
And then, one last trip past the H-Town StrEATS food truck…
And it was time to go home….
I’ve covered the City of Bellaire Independence Day Parade off and on for about 20 years now, and this is the first time I’ve actually seen this.
An actual Mini in the MINI car club contingent. Mid 60s MkII Morris Mini Minor, RHD, to be specific. Owner says it’s a 998cc engine….
The rest… well, as far as I personally am concerned, the rest was just a parade.
(I learned to drive in an earlier model; nothing else will ever come close.)
Market Square, San Antonio …
The horchata was excellent, but it was a bit early for lunch…
I’m pretty sure I live in the wrong world because I don’t see things like this every day.
Just a lemur taking his man for a drive….
This should happen more often, I think.
There was a sale at the bookstore today. Obviously, therefore, I went to the bookstore.
And, on my way out….
Hooked a quick left into a convenient parking lot and grabbed a camera, because the last one of these I saw was in a museum in another state probably thirty-odd years ago.
And here’s one parked in a shopping center.
For those of you who are wondering (which is probably most if not all) this is a late-50s, early 60s Messerschmitt KR200 Kabinenroller. It’s mostly motorcycle underneath, 200 cc engine, tricycle wheels, chain drive, seats two in tandem, and it IS a motorcycle so you’d best be friends. GOOD friends. Mechanically somewhat quirky and I don’t know that I’d have the cojones to drive one around H-town.
It’s a pretty odd little duck, but total production was over 80 thousand of the things so it’s not THAT rare. It’s basically a cute little town buggy… Top speed is around 55, so you wouldn’t really want to take it out on a Houston freeway, but for little shopping trips or running out to the cafe or the bistro…
I was hoping the owner would come back so I could get more information, but no such luck. I’m just kind of glad to see it out being driven. World needs more things like this…
05/28/13 11:00 Update
I am more or less reliably informed that this is NOT an authentic KR200. It’s a replica with a Honda 250 engine and a fiberglass body. As I know enough about the vehicles to recognize what it was but not enough to know an original from a copy, and as I do know people crazy enough to have built a copy*, I’m going along with the update.
All the information about the KR above is correct; it’s just that this is by report NOT an original version.
*Look, I have friends who built a trebouchet big enough to fling refrigerators and volkswagen beetles, okay? And I know a guy who built a plastic-body copy of a LeMans Porsche on a VW chassis – and put a real turbo Porsche engine in it. It’d do close to 200 mph… with volkswagen steering, suspension, and brakes!
I have some SERIOUSLY weird and potentially insane friends who do strange things for reasons nobody else really understands…
Was out on my usual morning walkabout, dodging traffic and contemplating just how far and where to reduce my “social media” efforts (answer: almost 100% and across the board, owing to the usual lack of response to them by the people at whom they’re targeted) when my grumbling and grousing was interrupted by this batch of prickly pear smiling at me.
Y’know it’s kind of hard to be seriously annoyed at the world when the cacti are friendly.
From Wednesday’s meeting of the Toad Car Club at the redoubtable Richmond Arms Pub:
Pretty little thing….
Just before several inches of rain came pouring down last Saturday, I took a stroll through the International Festival in downtown Houston.
It was a bit of a departure… not the festival itself, I’ve done that regularly for several years. This year, though, I took a single camera with two short lenses, no telephoto at all.
There’s stll work to be done, but I’m not unhappy with some of the results.
