JWM Magazine - Winter 2017

lobbying to have the city’s slogan changed,” my friend Michael tells me, waiting a beat before delivering his punch line: “Houston — colon —surprise!” He’s half joking, half serious, and all too used to having to sell the charms of his hometown to uncertain visitors who don’t know what to make of Texas’ largest city. Even I, a native Texan, get wide-eyed when thinking of Houston’s mythic lega-cies — to say nothing of its intimidating crosshatch of freeways, some eight lanes wide. This is, after all, the cosmopolis that has given us so many swaggering energy czars, unleashed the Urban Cowboy craze, built the world’s largest medical center, helped put a man on the moon and begat Beyoncé. But there’s much more to this town than its big oil deals and seemingly endless sprawl.

So while Houston’s official catchphrase (“The city with no limits”) is a nod to its size (only New York, Los Angeles and Chicago have larger populations), it’s also a hat-tip to the “insanely individualistic” spirit that thrives here, as one longtime resident described it to me. After years of rapid growth, local boosters can now gloat that they live in the most ethnically diverse metropolitan area in the country. And with millennials outnumbering boomers, Houston’s now younger than ever, too. It’s also greener, with a more walkable downtown, thanks to a flurry of civic improvements — many finishing up just in time for February’s Super Bowl — that will inevitably attract even more newcomers. Oil prices may be down, but for once the boom is still on.

THE CITIZEN KANE OF CHAPELS

So, where does one begin? Luckily, Michael, a fellow writer who spent two decades living in New York City before moving back 10

years ago, has gamely agreed to play tour guide. Our first stop is a
modern-day pilgrimage site: the Rothko
Chapel. Built in 1971 by the late arts
patrons John and Dominique de Menil,
the ecumenical sanctuary is ringed with

14 massive rectangular paintings by Mark Rothko. I take a seat on a backless bench and stare into one of the inky canvases.

The only other congregant is a woman with a thick gray braid who’s swaddled in a long black robe — it could be religious garb or the latest Yohji Yamamoto. I can’t tell in the octagonal room’s cocoon-like dimness, which has a way of canceling out the superfluous. Some visitors stay in quiet reverie for just a few minutes, some for hours. (The Houston-born filmmaker Richard Linklater once called the Rothko “the Citizen Kane of chapels — a different experience every time.”) However long you linger, the intimate space has a way of gently recalibrating your perspective.

Just down the street is the Menil Collection, another haunt I revisit like an old friend. Here I’m happily made aware of my exact place in history’s grand timeline as we walk amid centuries-old Byzantine knickknacks (keys, buckles, stamps), ancient Paleolithic artifacts and a trove of Surrealist masterpieces. They’re merely some of the more than 10,000 treasures that the de Menils have left for the public to enjoy— no admission fee necessary— in the elegant, Renzo Piano–designed repository. The collection, intentionally not encyclopedic, is quirky and personal and a perfect emblem of Houston’s “anything goes” edict.