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Houston famously has few zoning laws, prizing growth above all else. It's one of the most diverse cities in the country, and not in that smug Ivy League way, but in a real way, where working men and women from all over the country and world fight to carve out a little piece of a new life. It's an immigrant city. Beneath a downtown office building, there's a simple, busy food court: a Chinese dumpling house, a Vietnamese sandwich shop, an Indian place serving Mumbai and Delhi street food favorites, a shop selling Italian meatballs.

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There's no place like Houston, the most American city in the world, really, with all the good and bad that conveys. Like Memphis, its music is not just entertainment but a moan and wail from the guts of the place: dirty sounds like ZZ Top and DJ Screw and Albert Collins, soulful country like Robert Earl Keen and Lyle Lovett. What other city could produce both Beyonce and Kenny Rogers? Listening to 97.1, the classic country station, while driving near the edge of town, always makes me feel like the radio isn't playing in the car but rather in the sky. Glen Campbell's "Galveston" might be about Vietnam, or about the Civil War, or the Crusades. Houston is a city that shakes off easy attempts, such as this one, to define it, the kind of place where, after living such big American lives, people as divergent as Howard Hughes and Lightnin' Hopkins can find their final resting place, just a few miles apart.

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blindey said:

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MLB network just showed a shot of Downtown Houston broadcast ABOARD THE NEON BLUE FINGERBANGATORIUM. Amazing.

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