I find that if I think of my recent brief excursion to Fort Worth as a reconnaissance trip, I can almost justify it in my mind as a worthwhile use of three days. Fortunately, I suppose, days are things that I seem to have in abundance.
I've been hearing what seems like a lot about Fort Worth, for it being such a sideshow in the great panoply of sophisticated American life. I've always had the impression that where Dallas was rich, Fort Worth
was prudent in its development of culture, and the two cities are locked
into a sort of rivalry that pushes both forward (though Dallasites
won't admit to the pressure). Thus Fort Worth has long been a surprisingly vital center for the fine arts, a result of the longstanding dedication of a few wealthy people to music, sculpture and painting. And, let's be honest, because Dallas has always been more than a little vulgar in its wealth; that gave Fort Worth the edge in the competition.
But lately I've been hearing about Fort Worth as -- gasp! -- a center for artisanal and culinary craft as well. This was something new under the sun, and for several years now I've been mulling an expedition up that way to see for myself. I was last there in 2011 to see a very special and truly magnificent exhibition of Caravaggio paintings at the famous Kimbell Museum. That trip, other than the exhibition itself and a brief foray into Grapevine, was a disappointing trip down memory lane, which may have cured me at least partially of feelings of nostalgia whenever Fort Worth crosses my mind. So on this trip, I did my best to avoid the parts of town where I spent or mis-spent the quotidian parts of my youth.
Weather and Sherry's travel made the middle of March the earliest time I could make this trip. I invited my friend Roland, and he accepted, and his schedule made it necessary to stick to my original poorly-thought-out plan to make it there and back in three days, with only one day to see anything in the city. And a flat tire on the way up meant that a chunk of that one day was spent sitting at a tire dealership, where the only entertainment was a bit of catty people-watching. Our vague plan to split the day between the Kimbell and the Zoo morphed into an afternoon at the Kimbell, with drive-by sightseeing bookending the museum. This, more than anything, kept the entire trip from being anything I would call a success.
But there were a couple of bright spots.
First, the weather heading up was glorious. I took a more westerly route than usual. I almost always go north on 281, through Blanco and Johnson City to Hico, in order to avoid the horrible traffic on Interstate 35. It used to be really bad only as you cross the Colorado River, at Austin, but now the unpleasantness of the drive extends from, roughly speaking, Loop 410 to the east-west split near Hillsboro; and at certain times of day it will linger either until you reach your hotel or until you exit the Metroplex on the farther side of Denton. But because I had to pick Roland up at his house on the northwest side of San Antonio, I saw an excuse to take a western route that would feel too out-of-the-way if done from my own more centrally-located home. So we cut the corner between 1604 and I-10 by taking Kyle Seale Parkway and Sisterdale Road, then climbed up through the Hill Country to Fredericksburg and north on Highway 16.
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| Not a suspension bridge |
Route-planning is a favourite activity of mine. Finding new and interesting places to sightsee gives purpose to any trip, and the pleasure of anticipation usually exceeds the pleasure of actual experience: the latter often amounts to a few moments of contemplation and photography practice sandwiched between long hours of just driving. (Not that I mind the driving, if the roads are good for it.) And Texas, where almost nothing is new to me, suffers from the curse of familiarity. I have already seen the Dead Man's Hole and the World's Largest Spur (several of them, in fact) and have no desire to repeat those experiences. So the only place worth an actual stop along the chosen route was the Bluff Dale Suspension Bridge (actually a cable-stayed bridge), which looks ready to collapse any day. Since I've seen it now, I won't care much if it goes. The most interesting thing about the bridge is the fact that it was moved to its present location, more than a hundred years ago, when it became superfluous at its old location a mile and a half downstream.
There were several other locations on my planned route to begin with, but once I made the calculation that it would put Fort Worth out of reach of a day's drive, I shaved the plan down to the bare essentials: lunch at the Koffee Kup Cafe in Hico (a tradition stretching back decades), the old bridge, and circling around so that I could enter Fort Worth from the northwest, thus avoiding much of the city's (relatively mild) congestion. The popping of a cord in a front tire made me glad I had skipped all that other stuff, as it was still daylight when I had to stop to change the tire, and I only had to drive maybe 35 miles on the spare.
Second, we managed to find what may be the best Thai food in all of Texas, at a small storefront restaurant called
Buon Bistro, on Beech Street near Loop 820 North. It just happened to be fairly close to our hotel, and was still open when we got there around 8pm. We were the only people in the place at that hour, which may have played some part in why we had the full attention of the two young women running the shop. The waitress mentioned that the pad wun sen was, in her opinion, one of the best dishes on the menu; and since it's my favourite Thai dish, I chose that, along with an order of spring rolls.
At Thai restaurants in San Antonio, "spring rolls" are small fried egg rolls. Appetizers wrapped in won ton skins and not fried are called "summer rolls" or "fresh rolls." I usually order those. But this time I ordered spring rolls, 'cuz I felt like that kind of mild sinful splurge. What I got, though, was summer rolls. I was happy with that, especially because the order of three, served with peanut sauce and sweet-and-sour sauce, were outstanding in taste and texture, and the individual servings of sauce meant that I could double-dip to my heart's content. It helped, too, that both sauces were better than most I've had. The peanut sauce managed to be full-flavoured without being at all overpowering; never an attribute of peanut sauce in my prior experience.
The pad wun sen ... well, I've never had a bad dish of pad wun sen. It must be really easy to do well, but let's not take anything away from the kitchen at Buon. This pad wun sen was so good that I think I have never before had a really good pad wun sen. I ordered it medium spicy, and maybe next time I'll ask for something a little less in the way of spice, but it was sooooooo good that I might just stick with "medium spicy" if I ever make it back to this place.
There was enough food on both our plates to take the leftovers back to the hotel, and they ended up being dinner the next night, too. Prices were pretty good to begin with, but when you get such good food at such good prices and have enough of it to have it twice, that is really good value.
We also found a pretty damn good breakfast place, called Breakfast Club 51, which was conveniently located right across the street from the shop where I got a new set of tires. First off, they serve coffee in extra-large mugs, which felt like a no-brainer move to me; and it's a good thing they do, because they only had one girl waiting tables in the entire large-ish dining room, and if she'd had to run around refilling ordinary mugs she'd probably have quit in the middle of her shift and no one could blame her. My breakfast was eggs Florentine, well made and rich and I so wanted to lick the plate but settled for running my finger through the remnants of the sauce one time. Maybe twice.
And for our one other meal in Fort Worth we went to Gus's World Famous Fried Chicken on Magnolia Avenue, a national chain outlet that was recommended to us by the sales girl at SiNaCa Gallery, where I acquired a piece of art glass for my slowly-expanding collection (nearly 70 pieces, if I count everything; let's say about 50 pieces worthy of the name "art"). That area is now a center for night life and shopping; when I lived in Fort Worth it was a slum. Gus's makes its batter with more than a touch of Louisiana Brand hot sauce, and the result is, as Sheriff Taylor would have said, "goo-ood." Since it was "pi day" and they had it on the menu, I decided first on a slice of sweet potato pie; and since I was being more or less good, dietarily speaking, I only ordered the two-piece dark-meat "snack," which came with just a slice of white bread and no sides. A good move, I think, though a third piece of chicken may not have caused regrets. Excellent food, very good service, good prices, and a welcoming funky atmosphere featuring excellent blues on the PA system.
Friday, our one day in town, was clear and warm but very dry and extremely windy (think gale-force), and the wind picked up a lot of dust in West Texas and brought it in for a visit to the Big City; so much dust that by evening it looked like wildfire smoke or a heavy fog. The weather was still good enough to allow us to enjoy being out in Fort Worth, but the dryness of the air gave me slight nosebleeds, and the dust made it a little bit difficult to breathe. It was, on that account, probably for the best that we spent the major part of the day in the Kimbell, seeing their collection.
I do not at all share the Arts Community's fondness for modern art, and since this blog post is my opinion and no one else's, I will say what I think. If you have different thoughts, you may keep them to yourself, or express them in your own blog post, or you can put your thoughts in the comments and maybe I'll post them. (There's supposed to be a link at the bottom* where you can do that, but half the time I don't see it there. Take your chances if you like.)
Somewhere around 1820, artists got the idea that all the great stories of our (Western) history -- myths, legends, and the beliefs that inform our culture -- had been done to death. Everything one could say about, for example, the beheading of Holofernes or the fall of Icarus had been said, and every lesson learned. There had been many centuries of realistic sculpture, and a few centuries of realistic painting (starting with the discovery and use of perspective in art, in the Renaissance). Artists were, apparently, tired of painting what they saw, and started painting what they could imagine they saw. Okay, fine. Then they went on to paint lines and blocks and colours and spots, and found that people with money to buy art would buy into glib critical statements of what those coloured lines and blobs meant. Descriptions of art now sound like a waiter's description of a bottle of expensive vintage; substitute emotional terms for fruit flavours and hints of oak, and you've got it in one.
Modern art sells, apparently. People who can afford to buy art buy it because it's a way to hold wealth that maybe says complimentary things about them: that they have taste, sophistication, style, grace, &c. It's like Bitcoin for the walls. Modern art is vague enough that you can claim any meaning for it: it is subjective, and because it can mean whatever the viewer wants, it has no intrinsic meaning. Unless, of course, it also happens to be beautiful, but that hardly ever is the case.
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| Annibale Carracci, The Butcher's Shop |
Maybe some people genuinely like that vagueness. I don't. When I stepped into the gallery containing European paintings after 1820, and saw the blurry landscapes and primitive representations of people and shapeless strokes and lines of paint, I waited for a sense of ... well,
anything to come to me, a suggestion of what the painter was trying to say. As usual with this sort of ... art, I got nothing. Sometimes I get something, but it's rare. Perhaps I just wasn't in a receptive mood, after buying tires, to be moved or intrigued by Mondrian's coloured lines on a white background, or the faceless people on a blurry Parisian street. I was much more receptive to the look in some long-dead Englishwoman's eyes in a Joshua Reynolds portrait, and even by the overrated light of Venice in a Canaletto landscape.
Well. Anyway. So I spent most of the afternoon seeing all the galleries in both buildings of the Kimbell Museum. Roland mostly sat and waited on various benches. I'm not entirely sure it's because of his difficulty in walking; I suspect he's not genuinely interested in fine art. Not sure why, of all the things I suggested we might do on our one day in Fort Worth, he picked the Kimbell (and the Zoo, but then we had the tire issue to deal with, so it was one or the other, and with the wind blowing so much dust we preferred the indoors).
After the Kimbell, we drove a short distance to the location of the Leonard's Museum. When I was a Fort Worther, Leonard's was The Place to go in town: a huge department store complex that took up three and a half city blocks, and had huge parking lots along the Trinity River that connected to the store with a subway! Wow. The store is long gone now, but I wasn't entirely averse to yet another trip down memory lane, especially since I thought it'd be a brief one. Turns out the museum, though, is only open on Saturdays, so Roland was not to be burdened by my reminiscences about something that was probably not as grand a part of my childhood as I want it to be.
* I see that the link for comments has changed; what used to be a pen-symbol is now just the legend, "no comments:". If you click on that, it'll take to you a place where you can question my righteous authority, for all the good it'll do you.
