lone star

i'm writing from the radisson business center, fort worth, texas, open til 10pm, on an ancient ibm keyboard connected to a pedestrian dell desktop with free high speed. i just hopped out of the hot tub in which i chlorinated myself in shorts from the lost and found. the hotel is most accomodating.

today i visited two museums with my aunt and two of her friends, owen and judy. one museum i've seen in pictures, heard about for decades, the other is completely new to me. the first is the kimbell, designed by louis kahn. i once told a newspaper reporter that i thought architecture was at least 50% about photons. the kimbell is a testament to that notion, as is the second museum, but that comes in the next paragraph. kahn's design of long parallel barrel vaults slit at their apex to allow light to penetrate and be washed upon the vault's interior surfaces produces some of the most beautiful museum lighting i've ever seen. the light is made especially beautiful by kahn's use of travertine marble and highly finished concrete.

next we crossed the street to see the modern designed by tadao ando. the entrance is a modest and calm composition of glass, metal and steel. it's not flashy but, kind of like a good movie, the first minute of your experience whets your appetite and foreshadows the interior, which is one of the most beautiful museum interiors i've seen. i said to my aunt, "you can't take a bad picture in here." five wings house the art and sit in a reflecting pool. each is punctuated with a giant Y-shaped column supporting its cantilevered roof. there is perhaps twenty feet between wings and you can step out into a brightly lit floor to ceiling glass atrium at the end of each and observe people in the other wings looking at art. with so many panes of glass interacting you see reflections of the museum, people and art overlayed with what you are seeing directly. it felt like i was looking through memories and though the people i could see in the other wings were many panes of glass separated from me, i felt a closeness to them.

earlier in the week i visited friends michael and rebekah in wimberly. they had a surprise for me which turned out to be a session with glenda bell, a sound healer, who surrounds you as you lay in relaxation with vibrating metal and crystal bowls. when these bowls begin ringing together the sensation is, well, just amazing. my bones vibrated, my pulse quickened, the sound moved through and around me. at the end she placed a couple bowls on my chest and abdomen. i was high hours afterward.

after just arriving, i drove a rented car east to houston, where my friends garrett and sarah live with their two kids. i've not seen them since they were married. garrett graciously toured me around houston, showing me the great and the banal, both of which i love, and which seem to be freely intermingled in houston. it's refreshing to visit a place which zoning has not homogenized. i've come away with an aesthetic appreciation for houston. some of the highway interchanges take your breath away.

tomorrow, dallas.