Houston & Austin
09 March 2024
Laurie Lipton is an artist based in Los Angeles working entirely in pencil, who creates elaborate depictions of modern America, not always in the most favourable light. Her work is notable for the unique talent that produces it, and the recurring themes of complexity and alienation. These often take the form of Heath-Robinson-like contraptions, operated by gross caricatures or skeletons.
I had assumed the inspiration was her homeland of LA, but after the swampland of Louisiana gives way to the colossal industrial and refining complexes east of Houston, I sense her work is modelled on this area and Houston itself. I’ve no photographs as this observation is based on riding to and through it on the freeway but find ‘Round & Round’ on www.laurielipton.com and you’ll get my drift.
Houston is the very embodiment of the American city in the popular imagination. An impressive skyline, ringed by a necklace of freeways. Each is an architectural marvel in itself with soaring, graceful curves that connect one stream of thundering traffic with the next.
The suburbs, needless to say, go on forever, and to the west of the city are sleek and prosperous. Galleria is the swankiest and where I’m perched at the bar of Pappa Brothers Steakhouse, on the advice of Richard, for the full Texas experience.
The smallest steak on the menu is a dainty 10oz filet - about 230 grams, so not really that dainty at all. But the locals can - and do - go all the way up to the 28oz Tomahawk at $190. The appetisers and sides alone could feed a UK family of four. So I go small but still emerge $150 poorer after a salad, 10oz New York Strip with mash, an Old Fashioned and two glasses of wine. Worth it though…
10 March 2024
After an easy 160 miles to Austin, I’ve booked for dinner at ‘Barley Swine’, having read about it in a UK newspaper travel section some years earlier. Housed in a nondescript neighbourhood shopping mall, the no-choice, monthly-changing, nine-dish tasting menu is worth all the accolades heaped on it. By some quirk of fate, there is an Austrian red wine, recently listed, called ‘Das Phantom’. This is a great favourite from my annual skiing trips to Obergurgl in the Southern Tyrol but not one I expected to find in Texas.
Staying in out-of-town motels is to enter a strange nocturnal world. Often deserted during the day, a motley cast of characters emerge out of the shadows as darkness falls. Nights are punctuated by cars arriving and departing at all hours, doors slamming, wailing, random shouts and last night - demonic laughing outside my room at 03:30. I’m sure these are all perfectly pleasant, law-abiding sorts of folk but it’s unnerving nevertheless.
So after another disturbed night, I seek out brunch in the achingly cool South Congress District and the Cathedral of Junk nearby, the lifetime creation of one Vince Banneman. Vince began building the Cathedral in 1988 and it is now a thirty-foot structure fashioned from over 60 tons of mass-production cast-offs and other detritus. I’d heard it was temporarily closed and it is until next week, so I can only get a glimpse of it from the street. I can’t help thinking I’m glad I don’t live next door and wonder if he knows Laurie Lipton. I’m sure they’d get on well…
More conventional views are to be had from Mount Bonnell Park. It’s the highest point in the area with commanding views over Downtown Austin and the Colerado River. Mega-mansions, symbols of the city’s increasing prominence as a Tech Hub, dot the hillsides on either side.
As the self-proclaimed ‘live music capital of the world, no trip to Austin would be complete without a visit to one of the legendary venues. On YouTube, I listen to four artists performing tonight. John Schneider & Lonelyland are the standout choice, on at the Saxon Pub at 20:30.
After a beer at one of the bars on Rainey Street, a series of lovingly restored period houses in the shadow of completed and under-construction skyscrapers, I grab an early dinner at Stella San Jar on 6th Avenue. It’s perfectly OK and would grace any UK provincial High Street, but is it really the 3rd Best Restaurant in Austin? Well, TripAdvisor seems to think so while Barley Swine (between one and two Michelin stars, in my reckoning) is 52nd.
There are no Ubers to be had as it’s Day Two of the SXSW festival so I walk the two miles to the Saxon over the 1st Street Bridge and through Butler Metro Park to the suburb of Barton-Mills.
The band are superb musicians grinding out anthemic Americana, just as I had hoped. The surprise is that the leader is a South West Texas version of Randy Newman, with some withering depictions of local behaviours. I don’t think this would travel and the between-song anecdotes would probably get them cancelled by po-faced UK audiences. So you’ll just have to go to the Saxon on a Monday night, where he is much loved and been in residence for the last twenty-five years.
Leaving the next morning, I’m sorry to be leaving Austin and stop for brunch at the famous Magnolia Cafe on South Congress. Classic 70’s rock plays to a crowd aged from twenty to eighty. Or at least it seems like that: the city’s magic lies in its powers of rejuvenation for those of us at the upper end of that range. As Bob Dylan put it, later parroted by The Byrds: “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”.
