This week, a phalanx of hardhats winched Houston's newest public art installation, a 20,000 pound monolith called "Cloud Column," into its permanent home, across the street from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

"Cloud Column," a shimmery, bean-shaped mass of hand-hammered stainless steel, is the work of sculptor Anish Kapoor, whose most famous installation, "Cloud Gate," sits on Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago. "Cloud Gate" is a massive, bean-shaped pile of hand-hammered stainless steel, a block away from Chicago's venerable Art Institute.

The only difference between Chicago's shimmery bean and Houston's shimmery bean is that our sits vertically, not horizontally, and theirs has been around since 2004. We're second bananas, in the shimmery bean department.

Chicago has not been kind.

Tribune columnist Kim Janssen sniffed: "If being surrounded by a cultureless abyss insufficiently communicates to confused tourists that they are in Houston, the bean's verticality will therefore act as an additional reminder of their poor life choices."

Houstonians are sadly accustomed to the nation's reproach. When NASA was passing out space shuttles, Houston, a town so deeply connected to the NASA that our basketball team is called the Rockets and our police officers wear a shoulder patch emblazoned with "Space City, U.S.A", didn't make the cut.

Chantilly, Va., got a space shuttle. Los Angeles and New York City got space shuttles. Houston got a fiberglass replica. That's humiliating. It's like asking your mom for Dr. Pepper and having her come back from H-E-B with Dr. B, the house brand knock-off. You drink it, but the carbonation comes with resentment and secret, seething rage.

WHO'S DEFENSIVE?: The Houston-Chicago bean war goes national

During last year's Super Bowl week, a Manhattan-based radio host named Craig Carton called Houston "a dump ... a city that's not prepared to host a Super Bowl." In 2016, an Internet site called Thrillist named Houston "The Worst Designed City in America." We've been mocked, derided, scorned in manifold ways. Even They Might Be Giants, the much-loved rock band, has taken a shot:

I wanna go play where the geckos play

Where I can't understand a word the people say

Where the noonday sun burns you alive

By the ramp for Interstate 45

That's Houston to the rest of the world, a mess of weird-talking yokels, speaking gibberish as they amble along endless freeways, addled by the relentless heat, cultureless, tasteless, clueless.

This dismissiveness usually doesn't bother me. Yes, it's hot. Yes, we have a lot of freeways. Yes, the vaunted Menil museum is something like a set of civic fancy soaps, designed to impress visitors, but not actually used: Houston is always going to turn out in far greater numbers for Garth Brooks and monster truck rallies than for a chance to ponder the mad scribblings of Cy Twombly.

And getting into a war of words over gigantic shimmery beans ain't my cup of tea. It's like arguing with a Chicago sports fan whether the Bears' Tyler Bray or the Texans' Taylor Heinicke is the better backup quarterback: Does it really matter?

"Cloud Gate," "Cloud Column," vertical beans, horizontal beans – it's not worth typing about. But Kim Janssen couldn't leave it to beans. He got personal.

HOUSTON IS the most self-conscious city in America, the civic equivalent of an anxious ninth-grader, nervously gearing up for his first high school dance, all growth spurts and sweatiness, big and clumsy and worried about what the cool kids think. Kim Janssen confirms Houston's worst fears, that all people are noticing is the flaws and the failings and the general dampness.

I have news for you, Mr. Janssen, it will be a cold day in Baytown when Houstonians give a toss what Chicagoans think.

"Chicago" derives from a Native American word meaning, "The Place Where Stinky Onions Grow." That pretty much sums it up. The Windy City is loud, crooked and smelly, a place decades past its prime and massively overrated. Get a few blocks past the thin strip of interesting buildings lining the Chicago River and the pleasant strip of greenspace along Lake Shore Drive, and Chicago is endless tracts of nondescript frame houses, beat-down shopping centers and people in Cubs t-shirts, saying "I live down by the Cat'lick church, dere," an expanse of bad accents and bad design, a cultureless abyss that stretches from Gary, Ind., to the Wisconsin state line.

Chicago is less a Great American City than Toledo with a pituitary disorder.

"City of the Big Shoulders"? They may be big, but they're awful stooped these days. Chicago is a little bit like the Bulls basketball team: It's been a long time since it did anything interesting. The city has a proud architectural tradition, but the most noteworthy new building to grace the skyline in the last 35 years is a Trump Tower. A Trump Tower!

OUR CONDOLENCES: Dear Chicago: Houston's bean is better. And so is Houston.

The football team is lousy. The baseball teams are lousy (I know, the Cubs, the Cubs. Spare me your Cubs talk. The Cubbies' recent championship was less noteworthy achievement than statistical inevitability. They are the Halley's Comet of pennant winners). The town that gave the world The Jerry Springer Show (yes, it currently tapes in Connecticut, but you birthed it), "Killroy Was Here" by Styx, and the oeuvre of John Hughes has no business getting sniffy about another city's lack of culture.

Any city that counts among its treasured cultural icons Rahm Emmanuel, bratwurst and pickle relish that glows like something leaking from a nuclear reactor is a city with more than its share of problems.

And don't get me started on that goop they call "Deep Dish." What Chicago does to pizza ought to be brought before a tribunal at The Hague. It's atrocious food, for an atrocious place. Spare us your critiques, Hog Butcher for the World.

Houston isn't perfect, and no one knows that better than Houstonians. No city has a taste for turning large concrete heads into slightly unnerving art installations quite like our Xanadu on the Bayou.

The Astrodome is a true wonder, a marvelous marriage of aesthetics and engineering, the perfect symbol of innovation and can-do spirit that makes this town great. In the ultimate Houston accolade, we've ensured its immortality by turning the Dome into a parking garage. We are big and sweaty and mired in what my mom used to call "an awkward phase." We're from Down South, and when we open our mouth, sometimes we seem to put our foot there.

That's changing. We've got the Dandelion Fountain. We've got Eclectic Menagerie Park, the glorious assortment of gigantic welded grasshoppers, armadillos and other fantastic creatures gracing the grounds of the Texas Pipe & Supply Company on Highway 288. We have a thriving community of artists and musicians and writers. We have a vibrant arts scene. We aren't afraid to be ourselves, and we like who we are, weird, wonderful, one-of-a-kind people, producing more weird, wonderful, one-of-a-kind treasures than a city whose greatest claims to fame are the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and Oprah Winfrey could possibly imagine.

So come on down, Mr. Janssen. We'll buy you some barbecue. And show just how glorious a "cultureless abyss" can be.

We'll even let you take a selfie in front of our big shimmery bean.

Cort McMurray is a Houston businessman and a frequent contributor to Gray Matters.

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