Museums, burgers and more!

The Fort Worth Modern Art Museum is gorgeous, inside and out.  Great structure, surrounded on three sides by vast reflecting pools so it's as if it is floating.  Cool, gray concrete walls inside that are rounded and smooth create a feeling of peace and calm.  The art is spaced out well and the rooms are large so there is little chance of feeling overcrowded.  The permanent collection is great, an eclectic sample of modern art with all the well-known heavy hitters and many not-so-familiar artists as well.  There were two special exhibits, one that really hit home with me.  Ed Ruscha's exhibit titled "Road Tested" was inspired by his car trip in 1956 from Oklahoma to Los Angeles.  Because of his love of driving he chronicled that journey and subsequent ones in paintings, photographs and drawings of gas stations, street signs, apartment buildings, and many more images, mainly along the old Route 66.  (Highway 40, which I drove out here, parallels Route 66 in many places.)  Being a fellow fan of the road trip, and seeing gas stations that I almost remember from some collective consciousness and photos of Los Angeles apartment buildings built in the late 1950's and early 60's, the entire exhibit hit on some part of my soul, as corny as that sounds.  As a kid, a couple of times a year my parents would pile all of us six kids in the station wagon and take a two day road trip, or a two week trip to the High Sierras.  I remember those huge gas stations with their Standard Oil and Esso and 76 signs.  
So this exhibit was a flip back into the past for me in some ways.

A photo of the museum.

After the museum we went to this cool funky place called Fred's Cafe, a simple name that belies its reality.  This is a totally Texan spot, unassuming, very local but fine for out-of-towners as well, a very small inside bar with a couple of tables and a large outside patio area, loosely covered, with plastic tables and folding chairs.  Fred's is the place to go to for a burger, big sloppy burgers with great fries, beers and iced tea, live music on the weekends, totally relaxed.  Nothing fancy, nothing pretentious, everything good.  We had a blast.

This is the outside of Fred's, although now the entire top is covered with a canopy and since the plant wasn't there, I can only assume it is now dead.

Sunday was spent in Jenn's backyard, pulling weeds and raking.  It's a huge backyard so it took some time and we filled a couple of big garbage bags with weeds and dead grass.  Today, Monday, we are slowly formulating our plan of the day, which will culminate in having one of Jenn's friends over for crab cakes and other tasty treats.  This morning when I walked the dogs the sky was gray with fat clouds and the temperature was perfect, a mild 68.  It's supposed to be in the 80's this week, a bit hot for this coastal woman, but hey, I'm on vacation!  What do I care!

Over and out for now.