The Beer Can House - Houston, Texas

I've seen many photos of this famous beer can house in Houston, Texas but nothing really prepared me both the ordinariness of the neighborhood (suburb-ish) and also the sound. Those streamers hanging from the eaves are actually the bottoms of beer cans strung together, and they rattle and jingle in the breeze. Everything is made of beer cans, including the roof but with the exception of the driveway which is concrete with embedded marbles. Houston wasn't exactly my type of place but seeing this house was worth the drive through. Click on the photo to see more details - like the ladder going to heaven.

Why I like Florida

I'm often asked if I like living in Florida. So, here's one reason I like Florida: this is where we keep our trash.

My favorite houses

There are many ostentatious displays of wealth to gawk at in Florida but my favorite houses are the ones that show impeccable attention to detail. These are a few I like so much that I ride past them on my bike just to visit them.



This one makes me think of France... outre-mer...I love the vines on the risers of the front steps.


These photos aren't much good, but this is probably the one I would probably like to live in (and conveniently it's for sale!). Unfortunately I missed the flowering of the wisteria over the garage door - if you can see there is only one cluster of blossoms left, hanging down right in the middle.




However, just because it's gigantic, and right on the beach doesn't mean I won't like it. For example:

Small town street art

Having lived for the past year or so in a very small and conservative "city" I've been on the lookout for both art and subversion. To my surprise I found both behind one of my favorite lunch places, on the dumpster. Thank you, PRUDE!

A selection of Kupka from the Centre Pompidou

La gamme jaune, 1907

Plans par couleurs, 1910-1911
Ordonnance sur verticales en jaune 1913

I love to see artists change over time, especially when the trajectory is visibly traceable as in the case of these three paintings by Frantisek Kupka that I recently discovered at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The transition from figurative to abstract, from flowing to geometric forms, and the increasing sophistication of the color scheme all show hard work and serious examination. (plus I have a thing for yellow too)

The Centre Pompidou has an online database which is quite handy. The images are not the highest quality (for obvious reasons I guess) but it's a great resource nonetheless.

Monet Refuses the Operation

Monet refuses the Operation
by Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

The Afflicted Yard - photos of Jamaica that white people didn't take

I didn't get to see the show "Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art" at the Brooklyn Museum of Art which closed on January 27, but I would have liked to. One of the participating artists was Peter Dean Rickards, a Jamaica-based photographer with a keen social/ cultural sensitivity and a wicked sense of humor. On his website his photos are divided into specific catagories: Women, Places, Famous People and People Who Think They're Famous, and Everything Else. I guess the above photo, Dogball, would qualify as everything else.

see more of Peter Dean Rickards' work: http://www.afflictedyard.com/index.html