NOTE:  If this video says “no longer available,” it’s lying.  Click the HD button on the bottom right and put it in “normal” view.  I don’t know why this one is acting weird.

[Note:  “87 Kinds of Shaving Cream” was scheduled for this week, but I bumped it.  This is the second week in a row I’ve bumped it, both times because I managed to get a new song/video finished in “real time”—i.e., between the time of the most recent posting and the time for the new posting—and I’m usually going to try to go with the freshest choice.]

Shepherd Park Plaza

I knew little about Houston when I moved here in August 1999.  In college I had a girlfriend who grew up in the suburbs to the west of town and visited her family there occasionally, and I spent about half the summer of 1998 working here, but Houston is not comprehensible under those conditions.  Famously, Houston has no zoning and no architectural preservation regulations with any teeth; if you want to build something, you probably can.  If you want to knock something down, you probably can.  If you want to build something but don’t want to bother knocking anything down, you can just go out to wherever the edge of town is on that day and build it there.  If there’s no highway, no problem—we’ll build one to meet you. 

I knew I didn’t want to have the hour-plus commute (one-way) from Katy or Cypress or Pearland, though the idea of a 6,000 square foot house with a swimming pool and a jai alai court for around a thousand bucks (1999 dollars) was tempting.  I knew I couldn’t live in a place called “Pearland.”  I didn’t know much about the various neighborhoods of Houston, but I had a friend who grew up in Houston and who lived in the Heights, and that was enough for me.  So I rented a house in the Heights, started my new job, and went about getting Janet’s visa situation straightened out.  Janet got here on November 22, 2009, the 36^th anniversary of the day Kennedy was shot, and immediately got infested with chiggers.  That’s a different story. 

The Heights is an old neighborhood, by Houston standards.  It’s only a few minutes north of downtown, and its architecture is a mixture of grand old Victorian houses from the early 1900s, Craftsman bungalows from the 1920s, and, lately, stuff like this:

and this:

A trolley line used to run up Heights Boulevard.  There used to be a thriving little downtown on 19^th street, with movie theaters, hardware stores, sundries stores (whatever those are) and probably lots of kindly old bespectacled gentlemen strolling about with twinkly eyes distributing farthings to urchins.  People used to sit out on their porches and sip lemonade or juleps or something, depending on which real estate agent is writing the ad copy for the drafty little 2-1 bungalow he’s trying to sell you for a half a million dollars.   Everybody was friendly and local and nobody would just walk up and steal a bicycle out of your garage in broad daylight, the way somebody did to us, or stand out in the yard drinking whisky and shaking his fist and screaming at cars to slow down, the way I used to do after we bought the house on Bayland.

                In August 2005, after two kids and five years, the longest I’ve ever had the same address, we moved out of the Bayland house and about five miles north and forty-five years backward, to a neighborhood called Shepherd Park Plaza.

                It’s a weird neighborhood.  We kept stumbling across it when we were house-hunting in trendier Garden Oaks, which SPP abuts, and it was always like stumbling into the Land That Time Forgot.  The light was different, and the few people you saw moved in the jerky way of people in old home movies.  It was very . . . sixties, a place where everything had already happened.  It made me nostalgic for a time I’d never actually experienced; it was Beaver and Brady and Mayberry and Wonder Years all rolled into a few sequestered blocks.  Meanwhile, a quarter mile to the northwest a special patrol goes out every Sunday morning to pick up the dead hookers from the ditches along Pinemont.

                The day we moved in, neighbors poured out to help us unload; somebody brought us a cobbler.  We felt very welcomed.  We’ve seen none of those people since. 

OCCASIONAL REJOICING

The Song.  I’m not sure it even is a song.  It doesn’t really have much of a structure, and it rhymes only occasionally.  It’s kind of a downer.  Sorry about that.  It was supposed to be funny, then I was going to settle for wry, and then it just became whatever it is.  I wrote 98% of it on November 28, the third song after the Edict, and put off recording it until I had the last line or two (where to go with the broken trampoline was what hung me up).  It’s a pretty fair description of our neighborhood, with a fair amount of poetic license.  Neither of our neighbors has a trampoline.  The guy climbing on his roof and refusing to come down wasn’t in 1983.  It was Christmas 2007.  I know, because it was me. 

The Performance.  I recorded it Sunday morning and didn’t put a lot into it.  There’s no overdubbing—Buck is singing live with the guitar.  I meant to add a harmonica, but I screwed up on placing my capo on the guitar and mistakenly recorded the song in D flat instead of C.  I don’t have a harmonica in the appropriate key to play a song in D flat, and the neighborhood harmonica store is closed on Sunday.  I could have bought a harmonica on Monday and re-done it, of course, but I’d never finish anything if I kept trying to make these things turn out the way they’re supposed to turn out.  Again, that’s the whole point of doing this.

The Video.  All the video except the shots of Buck (Buckshots!) was made Sunday morning.  Buck wasn’t available for the shooting on Sunday, so his scenes got spliced in, kind of the way Frank Sinatra did Cannonball Run II.  The part of the neighborhood you’re seeing is the part we see on the drive to church.  So you’re not seeing much of the neighborhood.  You get to see a once common but increasingly rare phenomenon in our neighborhood:  rain.  I’ve dropped the opening shot I used on the three prior videos, by the way.  It’s still in some of the videos that haven’t aired yet (including “87 Kinds of Shaving Cream”), but I won’t be using it in any videos made from now on.  It’s too long, and the joke was wearing thin.  The liquor store in the video isn’t actually the liquor store we don’t go to anymore.  We never really went to that one.  The one we don’t go to anymore is across the street and around the corner.

Dedication.  For my wife, who keeps winding up in places like this with me.

Next Week.  Nutcracker Buck sings “87 Kinds of Shaving Cream.”  (Maybe?)