I don’t know if it was his idea or what, but I am very clear about the fact that he would catch a ride with the milkman on his horse driven cart at 4 or 4:30 in the morning and would get dropped off at the train station or at State and Madison parked near where one of the busy L’s were, and he would shine shoes for three hours before he went to school every morning.

Food
During Joslyn Taylor’s recent eat-well-on-the-cheap experiment, she discovered the joys of homemade pizza. Here she shares her recipe.

For three weeks, Joslyn Taylor has tried to eat only local and organic food. Now the tiresome, somewhat complicated experiment is forging new habits.

Seeing “No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston” at the Contemporary Arts Museum, I think about the tremendous difference it makes when a city understands the role its own artistic community plays in cultural vitality.

Polycephelus, Kitten Deity, and Serpentine Geese are barnyard animals that, in a less tolerant time, might have been secreted out the back door of Hummel one stormy night and sold to the carnival sideshow. Now they are something not to be shunned but embraced.

Andrea Mellard, Curatorial Associate at the Austin Museum of Art, decided our work fit the show’s theme, Anxiety – work that “marks the current zeitgeist as we collectively hold our breath.” The only problem with Going to Heaven is that I don’t feel at all anxious about going to heaven.

Artist and Renegade Bus contributor James Michael Starr’s sculptures are sometimes large and unwieldy, making them tough to delivery to shows – especially out-of-town. This is the first in a series of dispatches from Starr as he takes his work to shows in Austin and Houston. The show in Austin is fittingly titled “Anxiety.”

Crafters are coming out of the closet, and they won’t stand for their reputation of yester-years as granny-types with spindles of yarn and litters of cats. Teresa Burkett caught up with Stephanie Hindall, who heads Etsy Dallas, and asked her about the growing sense of coolness in craft.

Living in the city and trying to eat conscientiously, buying organic and locally grown, trying to avoid preservatives etc., means spending a good deal of time locating food and little time thinking about how it reaches us. At home on the farm where she grew up, Teresa Burkett rediscovers that eating fresh is simpler—a fabric of the rural lifestyle.

More often than not, we find ourselves with an out-of-town visitor from some less breakfast challenged locale (like Austin or San Francisco) racking our brains for someplace other than the handful of trusty standbys to grab a couple of breakfast tacos or a stack of pancakes and coming up empty.