Gentle Ride Van

Blogger be gone

2010-01-06T14:42:00.000-08:00

As of January 2010, Andrea Grover's site can be found here:

www.andreagrover.com

Bye bye, blogger. I hardly knew ye.

You’re A Winner: Fashionable Art Prizes

2009-11-24T18:08:00.000-08:00

What to make of The First Annual Rob Pruitt Art Awards which took place on October 29, 2009 at The Guggenheim Museum in association with White Columns and Calvin Klein Collection? Art prizes with designer names attached have been around since the 1990s, but this was the first “awards show” styled event that mimicked the celebrity-watching antics of the Academy Awards. Part performance art, part Guggenheim benefit, and part droll commentary on awards ceremonies, the event was produced by conceptual artist Rob Pruitt, who doubled as the evening's MC. Attendance was by invitation only (likely relative to patron size and/or art world status), and the process for selecting awardees was left largely to the imagination. As Rhonda Lieberman points out in her ArtForum diary, “it was the cool lunch table of the art world celebrating itself.” Read the rest of this post on my blog We Have The Technology , on glasstire.com.

Where the Avant Garde Things Are

2009-11-11T09:35:00.000-08:00

Cinema Arts Festival Houston, "the only U.S. festival devoted to films by and about artists," launches November 11-15, 2009.

When two New York real estate promoters, commonly known as “The Allen Brothers,” founded the city of Houston in 1836, their intention was to make the township a center of commerce and government. Houston’s bid to be the capital of the Republic of Texas was short-lived, but its status as a center of commerce has stuck like the very first ships that ran aground in what the Allen Brothers dubbed Houston’s first “port”– the shallow and silty intersection of Buffalo and White Oak Bayous. Houston’s forefathers in a long line of hucksters, Augustus and John Allen sold Houston to potential settlers, at $1 per acre, using advertisements that promoted this subtropical marsh as “an elevated land” replete with “waterfalls.”

Now 173 years later, Houston is concretely known as a place to do business – home to the largest petrochemical manufacturing area in the world, and an international hub for biomedical research and the aerospace industry. With no great range of topography, and a nose-to-nose race (on and off since 1999) with Los Angeles for smoggiest city, Houston is no high-ranking vacation destination.

So in 2008, when Houston Mayor Bill White (who has moved mountains so-to-speak to improve Houston’s aforementioned image) tapped his friend Franci Crane to spearhead a new film festival, there was no chance of luring travelers with ski slopes or sandy beaches– the likes of those at Sundance or Cannes. But what Houston did have on a monumental scale was art. Around 7 million visitors per year come to Houston for the Museum District alone; Houston’s Theater District is exceeded only by New York in its number of seats in one geographic area; not to mention the plethora of non-profit arts organizations, folk art environments, art galleries, art chapels, art parades, art festivals, and so on. Read the rest of this post on my blog, We Have The Technology on glasstire.org.

Pictured: H Box, designed by Portuguese/French architect, Didier Fiúza Faustino

I am for art we do for each other as friends

2009-11-11T08:15:00.000-08:00

This Jonas Mekas quote speaks to the reason I started Aurora Picture Show, and everything I believe about art.

"In the times of bigness, spectaculars, one hundred million dollar movie productions, I want to speak for the small, invisible acts of human spirit: so subtle, so small, that they die when brought out under the clean lights. I want to celebrate the small forms of cinema: the lyrical form, the poem, the watercolor, etude, sketch, portrait, arabesque, and bagatelle, and little 8mm songs. In the times when everybody wants to succeed and sell, I want to celebrate those who embrace social and daily failure to pursue the invisible, the personal things that bring no money and no bread and make no contemporary history, art history or any other history. I am for art which we do for each other, as friends." –From Anti-100 Years of Cinema Manifesto, Jonas Mekas, 1996

Read the full manifesto on INCITE!

Pictured: Jonas Mekas receiving a fruit basket from Andrea Grover and the 2009 Artist Award from NAMAC

Art Activism's Greatest Hits

2009-10-30T07:52:00.000-07:00

On October 19, 2009, performance artists, The Yes Men, held a fake US Chamber of Commerce press conference at The National Press Club. A small assembly of journalists listened attentively as "Hingo Sembra," posing as a Chamber official, announced that the behemoth business federation had revised its stance on Climate Change, and would discontinue lobbying against the Kerry-Boxer bill (which calls for significant reductions in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions). Moments later the real Chamber Spokesperson, Eric Wohlschlegel, burst through the doors of the conference room, breathlessly proclaiming the speaker to be a fraud! After a few dramatic seconds of Will the Real Chamber of Commerce Official Please Stand Up Game, Mr. Wohlschlegel made a strategic error by suggesting that the press direct questions to him, not the imposter. "Is the position of The Chamber of Commerce that Climate Change does not exist?" one journalist demanded. Mr. Wohlschlegel opted to ignore the question. He realized too late that any reaction would draw even more attention to the ne'er-do-well policies being exposed, and therein lies the brilliant quandary, which has become a winning tactic of The Yes Men. Read the rest of my top ten list on Glasstire.org.

Image: The Yes Men, Chamber of Commerce Press Conference Hoax

User’s Guide to Temporary, Itinerant, Non-Accredited Art Schools

2009-10-15T12:09:00.000-07:00

In the September 13, 2009 edition of The New York Times, art critic Roberta Smith lamented the “academicization of the art world” (see Artists Without Mortarboards) and, went as far as to write that the growing interest among art schools in offering Ph.D.s in art “makes the blood run cold.” However, what warmed Smith’s cockles was the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, a newly launched insurgent, artist-run school that “is being made up as it goes along.” Read the rest of this post on my new blog, We Have The Technology on Glasstire.org.

Image: The Independent School of Art, Courtesy Jon Rubin

Menil Movies

2009-09-17T07:34:00.000-07:00

It turns out that I’ve been stalking The Menil Collection for so long that they’ve gotten used to me, and even invited me to host a semi-annual screening series of works from The Menil Archives. I have earned my official “media archeologist” badge, and get to work about 20’ below ground in the engine room of the museum – the archives. My underground partners are archivists Geri Aramanda (incidentally, Geri has worked with the Menils since 1968) and Lisa Barkley, who both help me unearth works on audio, video and film. The archive was begun by media studies pioneer, Gerald O’Grady in 1968. The new screening series is called “Menil Movies.”

Image: Ed Keinholz by Robert Bucknam, © Nancy Reddin Kienholz

Schedule
Friday, September 25, 2009, 7:30pm
Menil Collection, 1515 Sul Ross, Houston TX 77006
Menil Movies: Body in Fragments
Films and videos related to the exhibition Body in Fragments. Included is work by or about Ed Kienholz, David McManaway, René Magritte, Georges Méliès, James Rosenquist, and Roy Fridge. Highlights include an outrageous 1962 made-for-television documentary on Ed Kienholz, home movies of René Magritte, and a Georges Méliès silent film from 1898.

About Menil Movies
"Menil Movies" is a semi-annual educational screening series that highlights rarely seen film and videos from the Menil Archives. The series was created to introduce audiences to the range and abundance of the museum’s moving image holdings, including filmic art, documentaries, informational videos, avant-garde film, animation, Soviet cinema, Surrealist and DADA films, and documentary footage of artists and curators affiliated with the museum. For the series, films and videos are grouped by subject and presented to the public as one-hour curated compilations with overview and commentary. The educational component is an essential part of this series. Each movie is introduced with an explanation of its significance to contemporary art and film history, biographical information on the filmmaker or artist, and a summary of the larger film or art movement to which his or her work is attributed. Many of these movies are rarely shown, and in some cases represent one of just a few film prints of a title available anywhere. Some of the historically critical filmmakers represented in the archive include George Méliès, the Lumière brothers, Dziga Vertov (considered to be among the earliest auteur filmmakers); silent film error director F.W. Murnau (Director of the celebrated film Nosferatu); and acclaimed Surrealist filmmakers René Clair, Joseph Cornell, and Man Ray. Videotaped interviews, lectures, and exhibition installations that took place at the Menil Collection make up another rich section of the movie archive. These tapes encapsulate important information about the artists’ ideas and processes, and are valuable documents for research and scholarship. Artists in this section of the archive include 20th century masters Max Ernst, Yves Klein, John Chamberlain, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, and Larry Rivers, to name a few. This screening series makes these works accessible to a broad audience, and raise awareness about the significant resource that the Menil’s movie archive represents. Comparable movie archives do not exist in Houston.

Podcast Interview for 29 Chains to the Moon (Andrea Grover & Astria Suparak)

2009-09-16T07:04:00.000-07:00

Listen to me! Podcast interview of Andrea Grover (curator of 29 Chains to the Moon) and Astria Suparak (director of Miller Gallery) conducted by Eric Sloss (LabA6, College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University). Find out more about the artists currently on view and their visionary schemes for the future.

Podcast Link

Snapshots from Opening Reception for 29 Chains to the Moon

2009-09-14T07:35:00.000-07:00

Miller Gallery has posted some nice photos from the mega opening reception of 29 Chains to the Moon, and the "flavor tripping" reception, 2009: A Taste Odyssey.

I also have some très casual photos from our weekend in Pittsburgh on my flickr site. Big thanks to Astria Suparak, Brett Kashmere, Hiromi Ozaki, Cesar Harada, Jon Rubin, Carol, Lilah, Margaret Cox, Erin Pische, Michael Johnson, Greg Pierce, Alisa Dix, Lowry Burgess, Bill Daniel, Mark O'Connor, and all those who tasted the Kool Aid with us.

Houston Lyceum Lectures (1800s) Revisited at Contemporary Arts Museum

2009-09-08T06:51:00.000-07:00

Houston, TX—The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston hosts a two-part lecture series based on one of Houston’s earliest cultural institutions, The Houston Lyceum. Organized by artist/curator Andrea Grover for No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston, this program invites contemporary experts to lecture on identical topics to those of the early Lyceum, but from a contemporary vantage point. Dr. Mike Fain, Director of Forensics, University of Houston Forensic Society will present Eloquence on September 10, 6:30 p.m. The Cause and Laws of Storms is presented by Lew Fincher, President of the Houston Chapter of the American Meteorological Society, and Lance Wood, the Science and Operations Officer at the National Weather Service (NWS) League City, TX office, on October 1, 6:30 p.m.

“I wanted to create a series of public programs for No Zoning that would give insight into the development and character of Houstonians. By exploring these topics from a contemporary perspective, we can ask ourselves how these interests informed Houston's first citizens, and continue to be visible in today's culture,” says organizer Andrea Grover.

“The objects of this association shall be to diffuse knowledge among its members, intelligence, and information, by a library, lectures on various subjects, and by discussion of such questions as may elicit useful information and produce improvement in the art of public speaking.”
—The Houston Lyceum constitution, 1854

The Houston Lyceum was a cultural organization founded in 1854 (when the city had a population of about 2000) as a precursor to the first public library, and a means to centralize educational resources. The Lyceum (which was inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia based debating society, “Junto”) had several shorter-lived precursors including the Philosophical Society of Texas, and The Houston Mechanics’ Institute. Major activities of the Houston Lyceum took place between 1854-1886, and ceased after the first free public library was opened in 1904. During its heyday, the Lyceum held weekly evening debates at the Harris County Courthouse and later Market House (City Hall), structured as two teams of three that would be assigned opposing viewpoints to argue on topics such as “Is wealth more to be desired than mental culture?”; “Has the credit system been more beneficial than injurious to society?”; “Does the individual form his own character?”; “Are works of art more pleasing to the eye than works of nature?”; and “Is free trade the best policy of nations?”. At the end of each meeting, a decision was made (affirmative or negative) on the given topic and recorded in the minutes.

Houston Lyceum Schedule

All events are free and take place at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston located at 5216 Montrose Blvd. Houston, Texas 77006-6547. tel: (713) 284-8250, www.camh.org.

September 10, 6:30pm: “Eloquence” Presented by Dr. Mike Fain (Original lecture given W.T. Bond, date unknown) The New Oxford American Dictionary defines eloquence as “fluent or persuasive speaking.” Find out more about the art of public speaking from one of Houston’s leading orators.

Dr. Mike Fain has won more than 150 national speech awards. The former coach of the Rice University speech and debate team, he currently is Director of Forensics for the University of Houston. Mr. Fain holds a JD and an MBA from the University of Houston.

October 1, 6:30pm: “The Cause and Laws of Storms” Presented by Lew Fincher and Lance Wood (Original lecture given by C.G. Forshey in 1855) Weather is more than small talk in Houston, and its science has long been critical to residents of the Gulf Coast region. Join Lew Fincher and Lance Woods, two regional experts on hurricanes and forecasting to learn more about the science behind storms.

Lew Fincher is the President of the Houston Chapter of the American Meteorological Society, and co-founder of Hurricane Consulting, Inc. Lew is a hurricane specialist, and hurricane historian, who has assisted the Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration, (NOAA), with a focus on Texas Hurricane History. One of the most honored assignments he was asked to be part of was the 2005 National Weather Service Hurricane Katrina Assessment Team, as the lone non-government member of the 8-person team. Later that year, he also assisted the Houston/Galveston Area Council’s Hurricane Rita Evacuation Taskforce as its hurricane information resource, as it looked into the problem areas that occurred. He has taught workshops and been a Keynote Speaker at many conferences, including the Texas, Florida, and the National Hurricane Conferences, where he also serves as a member of the Planning Committee. Mr. Fincher also is a member of the Galveston County Historical Commission and a Life Member, and former Board Member of the Galveston Historical Foundation. He has served both as an information source and on camera spokesman on the subject of tropical cyclones and the history of hurricanes in the Atlantic Basin for many different media outlets in print, and television.

Lance Wood is the Science and Operations Officer at the National Weather Service (NWS) office in League City, TX. Prior to this position, he was a senior forecaster at the League City office. He began his career with the NWS in El Paso, TX, in 1994. Lance became a forecaster at the NWS Lake Charles, LA, office in 1995, before coming to the Houston/Galveston area in 1998. In addition to his NWS experience, he worked for Duke Energy in Houston as a trade floor meteorologist, where he provided weather forecasts to support energy trading. He is a graduate of Texas A&M University; receiving both a Bachelors and Masters Degree in Meteorology. He is married and has three children.

Image: Market House (1885) hosted regular meetings of the Houston Lyceum (courtesy City of Houston)

Curator's Statement: 29 Chains to the Moon @ Miller Gallery at CMU 8/28-12/6/09

2009-08-11T13:15:00.000-07:00

In 1938, the visionary designer R. Buckminster Fuller wrote Nine Chains to the Moon, his radical proposal for improving the quality of life for all humankind via progressive design and maximization [1] of the world’s finite resources. The title was a metaphor for cooperation – if all of humankind stood on each other’s shoulders we could complete nine chains to the moon. Today, the population of the planet has increased more than three times to 6.7 billion (we could now complete 29 chains to the moon), and the successful distribution of energy, food, and shelter to over 9 billion humans by 2050 requires some fantastic schemes. Like Fuller’s revelation from five decades earlier, 29 Chains to the Moon features artists who put forth radical proposals, from seasteads and tree habitats to gift-based cultures, to make the world work for everyone.

Nostalgia for our alternate future is in the ether on this convergence of anniversaries: 2009 marks the 40^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the centennial of Futurism, and the quadricentennial of the Newtonian telescope. Over the last year, major art museums have presented exhibitions of visionary design and architecture [2] , meant to reignite that spark of collective imagination that the 20^th century saw via world fairs [3] , the formation of international space agencies, and the promise of better living through technology.

Among the surveys was the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2008 exhibition, Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe. Viewers familiar with Fuller’s pragmatic geodesic domes and octet truss structures were introduced to his lesser-known concepts for tomorrow’s cities, like Dome over Manhattan (Midtown Manhattan acclimatized by a 2-mile diameter glass dome); Cloud Nine (a spherical cloud city that could levitate an entire community), and Triton City (a modular seastead for 100,000 inhabitants). Despite having a hallucinatory, science fiction veneer, these proposals were serious enough to be examined by agencies like the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development, which commissioned the study for Triton City, and, along with the U.S. Navy, approved the design.

If one of Fuller’s futuristic communities had been realized, it would not have been the first time that science fiction became science fact. In 1945, author, inventor and futurist Arthur C. Clarke predicted geostationary communications satellites, some 15 years ahead of NASA’s launch of Echo, the agency’s first experimental communications satellite project [4]. In 1941, Isaac Asimov popularized the term “robotics” in his short story, Liar, over three decades before Carnegie Mellon University founded The Robotics Institute in 1979. Aldous Huxley foresaw cloning decades before Dolly the sheep was made incarnate (again), and countless other authors and artists envisioned technological milestones – from the creation of the atomic bomb to nanotechnology – and their social implications in advance of their manifestation.

It’s not so easy to instill in the public the same brand of wonder and nationalist pride that the Space Race evoked from 1958 to 1975. One seismic shift of late has been the redirection of major scientific exploration from countries to private corporations and citizens [5]. Unbridled individual potential is one outcome of the information age, but so is ambient fear of the future. A 2002 Time Magazine poll revealed that 30 percent of its respondents believed that the world would end within their lifetimes. The work in this exhibition corresponds to the other 70 percent of the population that is optimistic despite the massive challenges faced by civilization [6]. These artists seize technologies that provide unprecedented platforms for collaboration, and new ways of visualizing and representing reality. Theirs is a moment of fluid exchanges between artistic and scientific disciplines, and cooperation among private and public institutions, toward the realization of a possible future.

– Andrea Grover, Curator, 29 Chains to the Moon

Footnotes

[1] Fuller called this ephemeralization, or doing more with less. It refers to the tendency for current technologies to be replaced by ones smaller, lighter, and more efficient.

[2] Design and the Elastic Mind was another important survey of anticipatory design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2008.

[3] The next registered “world exposition” will be Expo 2010 in Shanghai, China with the theme of “Better City, Better Life.”

[4] According to the Buckminster Fuller Institute, Fuller and Clarke were lifelong friends, who “shared a common fascination with the concept of a "space elevator" (the subject of Clarke's book The Fountains of Paradise) and Clarke wrote in his introduction to Buckminster Fuller: Anthology for a New Millennium, "when the space elevator is built, sometime in the twenty-first century, it will be his greatest memorial."

[5] Private corporations like Virgin Galactica and SpaceX are entering what was once exclusively the domain of government science agencies. Prizes like X Prize (which promotes “revolution through competition”), with initiatives in space travel, automotive design, and genomics, requires registered teams to be 90 percent privately funded.

[6] In September 2000, world leaders came together at United Nations Headquarters in New York to adopt the United Nations Millennium Declaration, committing their nations to a new global partnership to end poverty and hunger, provide universal education, gender equality, child and maternal healthcare, combat HIV/AIDS, and create environmental sustainability, via global partnership. With a deadline of 2015, these have become known as the Millennium Development Goals.

Open_Sailing is a multi-disciplinary international team led by Cesar Harada and Hiromi Ozaki that is revolutionizing the concept of seasteading and social production of ideas and technologies. The Open_Sailing prototype is a “living architecture” at sea, composed of multiple dwellings, ocean farming modules, and an amoeba-like design that can expand and contract, based on the existence of calculated risks. “Open_Sailing acts like a superorganism, a cluster of intelligent units that can react to their environment, change shape and reconfigure themselves. They talk to each other. They’re modular, re-pluggable, pre-broken, post-industrial.” The concept for Open_Sailing came from creating a geography of fear – a world “potential threat map” that highlighted the centers of greatest risk (pandemics, high-human density, recent violent conflicts, hypothetical nuclear fall-outs, tsunami risk, potential exposure to rising sea level, and so on), to determine the safest areas on Earth, which happened to be at sea. Open_Sailing was awarded the 2009 Prix Ars Electronica in “THE NEXT IDEA” category, and is underway with construction of an advanced prototype for their floating laboratory. www.opensailing.net

Stephanie Smith’s projects span the worlds of architecture, art, technology, and culture. Her research into the social practices of fringe and nomadic societies yielded a movement she calls Wanna Start a Commune?, and include diagrams for creating modern Cul-de-Sac Communes, portable kiosks for non-monetary exchange and meet-ups, and most recently an online platform for creating as many communes as your life demands, (www.wecommune.com). Smith says that the impetus for these projects was to counter the assumption that being green means consuming green products; instead she wanted to revive the best parts of the commune concept (a community where resources are shared) and “bring collective attitude to places where it doesn't yet exist.” Smith is also the founder of Ecoshack, a design experiment that began in Joshua Tree, CA and is now an LA-based design studio inspired by the ad hoc, indigenous and archetypal typologies typically found at the fringes of society and culture. In 2008, the Whitney Museum identified Smith as the designer/entrepreneur most actively taking the ideas of Buckminster Fuller into the 21st century. www.stephaniesmithsofar.wordpress.com

Mitchell Joachim [jo-ak-um] is a Co-Founder at Terreform ONE and Terrefuge. He earned a Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MAUD at Harvard University, M.Arch. at Columbia University, and BPS at SUNY Buffalo with Honors. He currently serves on the faculty at Columbia University and Parsons and formerly worked as an architect at Gehry Partners and Pei Cobb Freed. He has been awarded the Moshe Safdie Research Fellowship and the Martin Family Society Fellow for Sustainability at MIT. He won the History Channel and Infiniti Design Excellence Award for the City of the Future and Time Magazine’s “Best Invention of the Year 2007” for Compacted Car with MIT Smart Cities. His project on view at the Miller Gallery, Fab Tree Hab, has been exhibited at MoMA and widely published. He was selected by Wired magazine for "The 2008 Smart List: 15 People the Next President Should Listen To." www.archinode.com

Terreform ONE is a non-profit philanthropic design collaborative that integrates ecological principles in the urban environment. The group views ecology in design as not only a philosophy that inspires visions of sustainability and social justice but also a focused scientific endeavor. The mission is to ascertain the consequences of fitting a project within our natural world setting. Solutions range from green master planning, urban self-sufficiency infrastructures, community development activities, climatic tall buildings, performative material technologies, and smart mobility vehicles for cities. These design iterations seek an activated ecology both as a progressive symbol and an evolved artifact. www.terreform.org

SPECIAL READING ROOM WITH MATERIALS FEATURING

The Buckminster Fuller Institute
Lowry Burgess, Space Artist and CMU Professor
International Space University
The Seasteading Institute

~~~~~~

Andrea Grover is an independent curator, artist and writer. In 1998, she founded Aurora Picture Show, a now recognized center for filmic art that began in her living room as “the world’s most public home theater.” She curated the first exhibition exploring the phenomenon of crowdsourcing in art (Phantom Captain, apexart, New York, 2006), and, with artist Jon Rubin, organized an exhibit in which worldwide participants created a photo-sharing album of their imaginings on Tehran (Never Been to Tehran, Parkinggallery, Tehran, Iran, 2008) She recently curated screenings for both Dia Art Foundation, New York, and The Menil Collection, Houston. 29 Chains to the Moon continues her research into cooperation and distributed thinking across disciplines. www.andreagrover.com

Images, top to bottom:

Open_Sailing Model, Open_Sailing (model made by Martin Gautron, Hiromi Ozaki, Adrien Lecuru, and Cesar Harada)

The Cul-de-sac Commune Project, Stephanie Smith

Fab Tree Hab, Terreform ONE, (contributors: Mitchell Joachim, Maria Aiolova, Landon Young, Javier Arbona, Lara Greden)

29 Chains to the Moon

2009-07-20T13:52:00.000-07:00

29 Chains to the Moon: Artists' Schemes for a Fantastic Future 
Guest curated by Andrea Grover 
Organized by Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University 
Aug. 28 - Dec. 6, 2009 
Sept. 11, Fri. 6-8pm: Reception  

Artists include: Terreform ONE (Mitchell Joachim, Maria Aiolova, Landon Young, Javier Arbona, Lara Greden), Open_Sailing, Stephanie Smith, more

About the Exhibition
 In 1938, the visionary designer R.Buckminster Fuller wrote Nine Chains to the Moon, his radical proposal for improving the quality of life for all humankind via progressive design and maximization of the world’s finite resources. The title was a metaphor for cooperation–if all of humankind stood on each others’ shoulders we could complete nine chains to the moon. Today, the population of the planet has increased more than three times (we could now complete 29 chains to the moon), and the successful distribution of energy, food, and shelter to over 9 billion humans by 2050 requires some fantastic schemes. Like Fuller’s revelation from five decades earlier, 29 Chains to the Moon features artists who put forth radical proposals, from seasteads and micronations to floating cities, to make the world work for everyone.

IMAGES:
Fab Tree Hab, Terreform ONE
Open_Sailing model, Open_Sailing
Cul-de-sac Commune Project, Stephanie Smith

Dear Buckminster Fuller

2009-06-29T21:10:00.000-07:00

This letter was sent to Buckminster Fuller on November 19, 1982, nine months before his death (from the book Buckminster Fuller: Anthology for the New Millennium edited by Thomas T.K. Zung). The letter and Fuller's response choke me up every time.

Dear Buckminster Fuller:

My last grandmother died recently, as expected, but I didn't expect to remember so much I forgot to talk with her about, and I'm a bit blue when I think of her. She was born about the time when you were, and since your death soon could not be called unexpected, I want to send you a note of appreciation.

Insofar as I represent the generation twice removed from yours (younger in human terms, older in Universe time), I want to thank you on behalf of all of us, for a life well done. There's no question that you will be better known in fifty years than you are now, because every year your ideas, language, and general optimism appear to become more saturated in the collective consciousness.

You have know the stagecoach, yet remain on the cutting edge of the electronic age. You are so wonderfully arranged that I can be assured that you will read this letter. How you come to God, I don't understand, but God bless you.

Love,

Joe [Joseph Wheelwright]

Buckminster Fuller responded on December 13, 1982

Dear Joe,

There have been two generations of Wheelwright friends in the first half of my life. They were all admirable individuals. I interpret your spontaneous writing to me in so daringly tender a way as a message of comprehension and accord from all those whom I love who have died and in my youth were so often dismayed and alarmed by all the mistakes I had to make to become shocked into discovering what I had to learn. This was to thoughtfully discover on my own, in both the biggest and most exquisite ways, what needed to be done, and could now be done for the first time in history to make the world work for everybody. It was a task that required a special-case individual to initiate, and individual who had come to the point of suicide and was inspired to commit his total experience inventory only to the advantage of all others but self.

There's lots more to be done, which it seems to me I have to do before I die, as a follow-through in accomplishing all that with which I committed myself to cope. I never pray God to do anything, because God would not be God if the eternal, absolute intellectual competence needed my suggestions.

I feel sure that God holds you in grace and will continue to do so. I thank God for an additional Wheelwright friend.

Faithfully yours,

Buckminster Fuller

6/11/2009: Jacuzzi Movies at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston

2009-06-05T10:22:00.000-07:00

Read the Preview in Houston Press

Screening of Tamás Wormser’s Touched by Water

A free screening of Tamás Wormser's Touched by Water, a documentary about bathing rituals around the world, will take place on the back lawn of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston on Thursday, June 11, 2009 (with additional screenings on June 25 and August 6). A functioning hot tub will be setup on the lawn with open dipping and snacks available from 6:30pm-8:30pm. Screening starts at 8:30pm. Viewers are invited to watch the film from the lawn (bring a lawn chair or blanket) or request reservations for hot tub seating by calling (713) 284-8257 (limited space). Event postponed in the event of rain.

Presented and hosted by artist/curator Andrea Grover, this screening is part of a series of public programs produced by Grover for the current CAMH exhibition No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston, on view through October 4, 2009. This program follows the tradition of thematic, collage-style, site-specific, and social screenings that Grover created for Aurora Picture Show, the microcinema she founded in 1998.

Film to be screened:

Touched by Water, 2006, Tamás Wormser, 46:00, color, video From the holiest rituals to fashionable leisure, from ancient Roman baths and elite European spas, via Turkish hammams and ritual dips in the Ganges, to high-tech, multi-media pools, this film looks at bathing cultures around the world and explores our essential bond with water-—the sensual pleasure we derive from it as well as the spiritual renewal. Touched by Water is both an ode to the social ritual of public bathing and a thought-provoking look at water’s spiritual significance.

About Tamás Wormser Tamás Wormser was born and raised in Budapest, Hungary, and has lived in Montreal, Canada since 1986. Touched by Water was inspired by Wormser’s native experience of public bathing in Hungary, as well as his interest in the social rituals of bathing. He shot this film single-handedly over ten years in 13 countries, with a small video camera that allowed him to unobtrusively capture rarely documented locales, including a Turkish hammam, and a mikvah, or Jewish ritual bath. Wormser is the founder of Artesian Films through which he has directed eleven films, including Traveling Light, a film about nomadic artists.

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is located at 5216 Montrose Blvd. Houston, Texas 77006-6547. tel: (713) 284-8250, www.camh.org.

Press Previews & Excerpt from Geoff Winningham's "The Pleasures of this Stately Dome"

2009-05-28T07:38:00.000-07:00

Astrodome Cinema screens tonight, May 28, 2009, 6:30pm at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston!

CAMH exhibition puts iconic Astrodome on silver screen
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/arts/theater/6444037.html#

Astrodome Cinema- CAMH exhibit takes a look at the former "Eighth Wonder of the World"
http://www.houstonpress.com/2009-05-28/calendar/astrodome-cinema

Astrodome Cinema at Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston

2009-05-13T13:02:00.001-07:00

On May 28, 6:30pm I'll be screening two Astrodome-related films as part of my projects for No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston at CAMH.

Nicknamed the "Eighth Wonder of the World," "Can Do Cathedral," and "Taj Mahal of Sports," the Astrodome opened in 1965 as the first domed sports stadium in the world. During its height, the Astrodome hosted historical gatherings such as the “Battle of the Sexes” (a theatrical tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billy Jean King); “Millenium ’73 (a convening of followers of Divine Light Mission and the Guru Maharaj Ji); an Elvis Presley concert that broke all previous attendance records; and a 13-car motorcycle jump by Evil Knievel. According to the Astrodome's mastermind, Judge Roy Hofheinz (former Mayor of Houston), its design was inspired by a visit to the Circus Maxiumus in Rome, and indeed it reigned as one of the largest stages in the world until it closed in 2000. A mere 35 years after its spectacular unveiling, the Astrodome had become a relic. In 2001 on the same complex, Reliant Stadium was built-- the first retractable roof football stadium, with 20,000 more seats than the Astrodome. Today, the Astrodome is vacant and its fate is unknown.

Films to be screened:

The Pleasures of this Stately Dome, 1975, Geoff Winningham, 54:00, 16mm on video, color, sound
A study of the Houston Astrodome as a folk theater, created on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the dome. Winner of the Documentary prize at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1976, and funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The film includes vintage footage from the construction and grand opening of the Astrodome in 1965, plus footage from ten years of diverse and memorable shows, including destruction derbies, Evil Knievel, Billy Graham, chariot races, rodeos, calf scrambles, and various professional sports. The film is punctuated by an extended interview with Judge Roy Hofheinz, who conceived and built the Astrodome.

The Lord of the Universe, 58:00, 1974, TVTV (Top Value Television), color, sound, video
Sixteen-year-old guru Marahaj Ji attempts to levitate the Houston Astrodome in this 1973 DuPont award winning documentary. Follow the guru from his New York mansion to limousines in Houston and listen to his followers celebrities and non-celebrities alike extol his virtues. TVTV's creative use of graphics, live music, and wide-angle-lens shots to convey the desperate efforts of these lost children to find a leader. "If this guy is God, then this is the God the United States of America deserves." Abbie Hoffman. Courtesy Video Data Bank

Further reading:

Last Innings at a Can Do Cathedral, Jim Yardley, October 3, 1999, New York Times

Ode to the Astrodome, Brock Bordelon, astrosdaily fansite

Lessons in the Sky: A Filmic Tribute to Audubon

2009-05-06T08:40:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, June 16, 2009, 8:30pm
Dia Art Foundation and The Hispanic Society of America present 'Tuesdays on the Terrace' @ Audubon Terrace at The Hispanic Society of America
Broadway between 155th and 156th streets, New York City

Lessons in the Sky: A Filmic Tribute to Audubon
Curated by Andrea Grover, founder Aurora Picture Show

John James Audubon’s New York farm, Minniesland, once occupied 40 wilderness acres of what is now the Washington Heights Neighborhood in Upper Manhattan. This cinematic tribute to the universal pastime of bird watching is a nod to the farmland that once comprised this region, Audubon’s life work with wildlife, and the timeless current of artists’ studies of the natural world. This screening will showcase short films and videos on birds and natural history in a variety of genres including film and video art, documentary, experimental, animation, found footage, historical and silent films.

Image: The realTime and Life of John James Audubon, Emily Kuehn, video and animation, 2009

New DVD by Enid Baxter Blader: A Film is A Burning Place

2009-04-10T14:02:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to have produced this DVD of shorts by the fabulously talented, Bluegrass songstress, and beautiful heterochromic-eyed filmmaker, Enid Baxter Blader.

"A dreamlike poem to landscape and the body, presence and memory, more delirious than anything Hollywood could imagine."-- Barry Schwabsky, Artforum

A Film is a Burning Place: Works by Enid Baxter Blader This compilation of experimental short films and videos by Enid Baxter Blader unfolds like the pages of a lost diary, with fleeting glimpses into an anonymous someone's memories and desires. A filmmaker, painter, and bluegrass musician, Enid Baxter Blader finds inspiration in ruminations on rural life, stormy weather of the emotional and environmental variety, majestic landscapes, and small town civility.

Works on the DVD include: Local 909er, Secret Apocalyptic Love Diaries, The Revival of Lee Mackey (excerpt),They Will Cure What Ails, Blind Town/DownHome Sublime, Corn, 2001, Lindbergh Road (excerpt), Just a Second (excerpt), Blue (excerpt), Lucille and Letter from the Girl (excerpt). 101 Minutes.

The DVD includes an essay by novelist and journalist, Ben Ehenreich.

Purchase DVD
Wholesale through Microcinema

CINEMAD DVD hits the streets

2009-04-10T10:09:00.000-07:00

Mike Plante curated this superb DVD by some of the gods and goddesses of experimental cinema, and Aurora Picture Show and I produced it (Aurora Video Label). The DVD comes with a 60 page booklet of interviews from 10 years of Cinemad, Mike Plante's indispensible zine about independent, avant-garde, and underground cinema.

Cinemad: Almanac 2009
A new DVD compilation of damn great short films by:

Animal Charm
Cam Archer
Stephanie Barber
Bruce Conner
Kevin Jerome Everson
James Fotopoulos
Sam Green
Jake Mahaffy
Bill Morrison
Leighton Pierce
Jennifer Reeves
Deborah Stratman

To celebrate 10 years of covering unusual films and filmmakers, Cinemad magazine presents a compilation of short films that defy simple categorization. Produced by Mike Plante and Andrea Grover. 77 minutes.

Trailer
Purchase DVD here
Wholesale purchases through Microcinema

Confluence: Points of View on Buffalo Bayou

2009-03-11T15:59:00.000-07:00

Here's an excerpt from the press release for Confluence, the public art project I've been working on with Sandra Percival.

Buffalo Bayou Partnership Announces Confluence: Points of View on Buffalo Bayou and Spring Artists Talks

HOUSTON, Texas (February 18, 2009) – Buffalo Bayou Partnership announces Confluence: Points of View on Buffalo Bayou, a multi-year contemporary art project that will introduce innovative public art within the environs of Houston’s historic waterway. The first manifestation of Confluence is a March-April 2009 series of Artists Talks by participating artists, Matthew Coolidge/The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Mark Dion, Teresa Hubbard /Alexander Birchler, and Pedro Reyes.

The Buffalo Bayou Partnership, an organization that oversees beautification and redevelopment efforts along Houston’s historic waterway, has a long history of supporting public art on Buffalo Bayou from temporary architecture to dramatic permanent lighting design. These significant commissions by prominent artists and designers, such as Mel Chin and L’Observatoire International, undertaken over the last two decades, have established visual landmarks along the Bayou that contribute to the mapping of the waterway, and enhance public engagement with the bayou.

Confluence: Points of View on Buffalo Bayou will invite local, regional and international artists to create new temporary and permanent public artworks, integrated public programming, and special events for the 10-mile stretch of the Buffalo Bayou from the Memorial Park to the industrial Ship Turning Basin, connecting diverse Houston neighborhoods to the history and present-day life of the Bayou. Artists have been selected on the basis of their past work and their ability to engage the imaginative landscape of the bayou.

The Artists Talks series will introduce past work and proposals by artists invited to develop projects for Buffalo Bayou. The artists have conducted site visits to the bayou, presented preliminary ideas, and are in the research and development stage of their projects.

For more information, please contact Trudi Smith, Buffalo Bayou Partnership’s director of public relations and events (713.752.0314 ext. 3, tsmith@buffalobayou.org).

Life After Aurora

2009-01-15T12:28:00.000-08:00

A few people have asked what I'm doing now that I'm no longer on staff at Aurora Picture Show (my first child, not of the flesh), so here's a running list.

• I'm making lists! (with the my new app: Remember the Milk-- highly recommended for freelancers)

• I'm working as a Curator and Producer for Confluence: Points of View on Buffalo Bayou, a contemporary art project of the Buffalo Bayou Partnership that initiates the creation of innovation public art and related programming on, along and within the environs of Houston's historic river, the Buffalo Bayou.

• I'm freelancing for Aurora Picture Show's Aurora Video Label, and completing production on two outstanding titles: A Film Is A Burning Place: Works by Enid Baxter Blader; and Cinemad 2009 Almanac, which is curated by Mike Plante.

• I'm co-editing a book with Ed Halter on a history of U.S. microcinemas, titled A Microcinema Primer: A Brief History of Small Cinemas.

• I'm hosting a new bi-annual series at The Menil Collection called "Menil Movies."

• I'm being a hausfrau and mutter

Pictured: Tour of Buffalo Bayou with Sandra Percival, Cynthia Toles, Terrie Sultan, Gilbert Vicario, Mary Leclere, and Donald Sultan.

Texas to Long Island by Van

2008-12-28T18:56:00.000-08:00

My wanderlust was satisfied this holiday with a family road trip from Texas to New York to visit my parents. Along the way, we visited/crashed with friends, film folks, and ex-Texans. Our northbound stops incuded the 100 acre Rushing Nursery near Mobile, Alabama; the headquarters for the A/V Geeks in Raleigh, NC; and a mountainside cabin/residence of Glen Latham in Linden, Virginia (where we had a some decadent donuts at The Apple House). We arrived at our destination: Freeport, NY on Christmas Eve, and now we depart for home (Houston, TX) in the morning. First stop, Orgone Archive residence in Pittsburgh, PA.

Pictured top to bottom:
Germaine at A/V Geeks HQ; Lola, Gigi, Ralph at Rushing Nursery; Glen in cozy cabin.

Click for complete photo set.

From My Parent's Home to My Dream Home(s)

2008-09-28T16:35:00.000-07:00

This past summer I continued taking photographs of my parent's Long Island home and have posted them to my Flickr site. This is the same house I grew up in, and the major theme of the decor is "nautical". Of late, I have been dreaming up my ideal home, largely influenced by my beach-side and road-side upbringing, and now I am certain I want to live in (a.) an r/v, (b.) a houseboat, OR (c.) a lighthouse. The following are some places I would live, if I could. Pictured: Starlux Hotel, Wildwood, NJ.

A Vintage Airstream Trailer in New Jersey
A Houseboat in Berlin
Galloo Island Lighthouse

Here Is Always Somewhere Else

2008-09-01T20:38:00.000-07:00

DVD review for Cameraworks Fall/Winter Issue 2008

Here is Always Somewhere Else is a documentary film by Rene Daalden which pieces together the brief life of the enigmatic artist Bas Jan Ader (1942-1975) who was lost at sea during the creation of his final performance, In Search of the Miraculous. In 1975, Ader attempted to cross the North Atlantic in a twelve foot six inch sailboat named “Ocean Wave” from Massachusetts to Ireland, but only his vessel reached the Irish coast some six months later. For an artist whose films, photos, and performances were often framed around profound failure—images of the artist falling, colliding, crying—this final gesture seemed prophetic and staged, but continues to be a mystery for even those closest to him.

Thirty years later and upon the urging of Ader’s widow, Mary Sue Anderson, Rene Daalden began retracing Bas Jan Ader’s footsteps, which were often parallel to Daalden’s own—from Calvinist families in a small city in Holland to the no religion manmade landscape of Los Angeles. The two figures became aliens in both their assumed hometown and their actual homeland, or as Daalden states “home is never the same as you remember” for emigrants. While Ader took the path of conceptual art, Daalden became a feature film director, and his expertise in a more traditional movie realm serves this nearly impossible-to-recreate story well. Through the hazy lens of three decades past, Daalden successfully makes sense of Ader’s journey from failed artist in his lifetime to one of the most mythical and influential artists of today, using testimonies and excerpts of related works by contemporary artists like Charles Ray, Richard Serra, Tacita Dean, Marcel Broodthaers, Ger van Elk, Pipilotti Rist, and Rodney Graham, peppered throughout his story. In this way, Here is Always Somewhere Else is also a rare and engaging survey of contemporary art film and video.

Daalden begins the film by asserting how difficult it is to really know another human being, demonstrated by a visit to Ader’s widow’s home in Claremont, California, which only serves to heighten the mystery. Even the artist’s wife is bewildered by Ader’s intentions, and keeps the residue of his work—postcards for exhibitions, photographs, and notes--buried under a chaotic pile of junk, complete with scurrying rodents and shades of Grey Gardens happy madness. Mary Sue makes a suggestion to Daalden to use his own intuition to trace Bas Jan Ader’s journey, and this becomes the device for Daalden’s exploration of both his journey and Ader’s. Through archival images of Ader’s art films and Daalden’s feature films, the director discovers the overlapping themes of gravity, pilgrimages, and the search for one’s destiny—heavy subjects that Ader approached with comic self-deprecation and Daalden with camp. Interviews with Ader’s relatives and peers prove less revealing, and serve only to underscore the confusion that surrounded his brief life. Amazingly, the most profound statements come from the people who never knew Ader, namely the sailor Henk De Velde, who has circum-navigated the globe five times, and states with acuteness awareness that Ader was searching for the in-between moments--after the fall but before the impact--when you let go of this world for a instant.

With snippets of films of the artist falling from a tree into a stream, riding his bicycle into a canal, rolling off of his rooftop, and forcing himself to cry on camera, the documentary depicts a hopeless romantic, whose sentimentality was cultural and deep-rooted in a tragic family history, but ill-matched for the time, which favored Fluxus and irony. The real clue to Ader’s work comes from the story of his parents, resistance heroes who hid Jews in their home during World War II, leading to the execution of his father, when Ader was only a toddler. Their heroic gestures and constant search for divine meaning, left an impression on Ader that he could only express through trying to always be somewhere else, to become part of the cosmos or an ocean wave.

Have 20,000 Films, Will Travel

2008-05-01T23:10:00.000-07:00

Written for PIQ Magazine, May 2008

While America’s favorite movie of all time might be Titanic by James Cameron, for 16mm film collector Skip Elsheimer it’s Pride on Parade by Oscar Meyer, a 1979 morale-boosting film made to increase the productivity of assembly line workers by comparing their synchronized activities with those of a high school marching band. Images of festooned, high-stepping musicians are juxtaposed with weary looking Oscar Meyer team members in lab coats and plastic shower caps as they sort, inspect and package baloney and hotdogs. See the similarity?

It’s the search for these sorts of “huh?” moments that makes collecting 16mm PSAs, educational, training, and industrial films an obsession for Skip Elsheimer, founder of the A/V Geeks archive. Did anyone in the Oscar Meyer production crew notice the weak smiles of the workers and the porno-like quality of the assembly-line footage with rhythmically bouncing hot dogs? (Skip says the trade term for this is “assembly line porn”.) These bad ideas gone good are common among 20th century informational films, like another of Skip’s finds, Shake Hands with Danger (1980)--a cautionary tale of heavy machinery accidents and careless operators, set to a catchy country and western song about severed fingers.

Shake hands with danger
Meet a guy who oughta know
I used to laugh at safety
Now they call me... Three-Finger Joe

After watching so many safety films you would think some of it would have rubbed off, but Skip’s house in Raleigh, North Carolina is piled high with potential hazards. His bungalow is home to 20,000+ film prints, assorted projectors, a Telecine (for transferring films to digital formats), a large collection of film strips and their accompanying (beeeeep) cassette tapes, as well as his supportive girlfriend Germaine Fodor (and her own collection of original handicrafts like a Toast-chee pillow she made for Skip after their first date), not to mention their rescued and disabled iguana Judy, who roams free, at about one inch per hour.

In the 1990s, Skip was a member of the Raleigh-based music/performance art collective, Wifflefist—known for live audio/visual mash-ups of media history, such as their Hee Haw/Lawrence Welk Show show. This was a continuation of Skip’s childhood interest in puppet shows and drama club. While searching for material for one of their gigs, the group acquired a large quantity of discarded 16mm films at a local flea market. This passing fancy for Wifflefist, which disbanded in 1998, eventually became Skip’s full time pursuit. The datedness and campy fashions were part of the initial appeal of the films, but as time passed, Skip grew to appreciate their more subtle qualities—experimental camera work, imbedded sociological meaning, and unintentional works of art. A recent find from the latter category is titled Tire Rigging Demo (no date)—with stunning close up shots of car tires rolling and bouncing over mountainous terrain accompanied by exhilarating production music. Skip guesses this test film was made to demonstrate an ad agency’s “new rig” to potential automobile industry clients, the first clue being that it was recovered from a dumpster outside of an ad agency in Los Angeles.

How Skip amassed over 1,000 films per year can be explained by the 1980s technological shift from film to video. As VHS tapes became the preferred teaching format of libraries and archives, entire collections of 16mm ephemeral films from the 1930s-1980s were phased out of school systems and public libraries nationwide, with no time or money to consider transferring or preservation. Skip says, “They needed the room to replace old teaching machines--16mm projectors and films—with new teaching machines-- computers. Often I would need to pick up an entire room of films and shelving to make way for PCs.” There was a kind of film free-for-all for anyone who could reduce a librarian’s laborious trips to the waste bin. Now Skip makes special road trips to distant states to save de-accessioned films (he’s like the EMS of celluloid), and occasionally rounds out his collection with a rare title or two purchased from Ebay—though he dislikes the online auction house overall because “it sucks my time, and my money.” While the films may mostly be free for the asking, the habit of collecting is not. Skip’s decision to buy an eight-bedroom former Raleigh boarding house for storage purposes, and pour his life savings into purchasing, picking-up, and refurbishing a coke machine-size, 1000 lb. Telecine was the price he paid to keep up with his obsession. In the last three years he has finally cobbled together enough income through film transfers, stock footage licensing, public screenings, talks, and DVD sales via his publisher Fantoma to quit his day job as a funny and affable phone support technician for Alien Skin Software. International tech support has lost a rare asset while film history has gained an archivist.

Today, Skip is part of a small circle of well-known 16mm collectors in the U.S., among them, Rick Prelinger of Prelinger Archives, who Skip cites as a major influence. Rick began collecting ephemeral films about a decade before Skip, and made national news in 2002 when the majority of his films (over 120,000 individual cans) were acquired by the Library of Congress. Rick and Skip both contribute to the website, www.archive.org--providing free distribution of public domain films--and have been spokespersons for film preservation, orphan films, copyright and ownership issues. Skip says the two met circa 1993 when he was trying to sell films (unknowingly) to a client of Rick’s, namely, Mystery Science Theater. Skip sent along a list of titles to MST, which they then forwarded to Rick. Rick did a little reconnaissance by calling Skip and inquiring if he had a copy of the sought after title Soapy The Germ Fighter (1951). Skip did, and the friendship commenced. Since then Skip has successfully licensed footage to television shows like Wonder Showzen, VH1, and The History Channel.

What really distinguishes Skip from other collectors is his signature A/V Geeks film screenings that are participatory, performative, raucous, and generally take place in unusual settings (although he has regular screenings at two Raleigh mainstays--the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science, and an Irish Pub called Tir Na Nog.) He has shown school bus safety films on a moving school bus, cafeteria manners films in a Middle School cafeteria, films about drinking in a micro-brewery, films about insects and pesticides on a farm, creepy religious films in a church, boat safety films on a boat, films about meat in a sausage factory, films about winter in the middle of a gruelingly hot, humid summer, and films about fathers for Father's Day hosted by Skip and his dad. Major institutions like Anthology Film Archives, New York, George Eastman House, Rochester, and the American Museum of the Moving Image, Long Island City have also opened their doors and their theaters to him.

You can see the broad appeal when you read about the shows in Skip’s own words.

And A Puppet Shall Lead Them: For some reason, somebody in charge felt that they could get their point across better if they used a puppet. Nevermind how distracting, ludicrous and somewhat creepy it all looks. Join the A/V Geeks for a night of 16mm films where the puppets know best. Films included: The Toymaker, Santa Claus and Punch and Judy, Parents: Who Needs Them? and What Is A Family?

Small Furry Animals And The Sins Of Man: Who said that animals can't sin?!? A look into a world where dogs are bigots, lemmings commit suicide and rats perform heinous crimes against nature. These films come from a school system near you for your entertainment. All you have to do is figure out what the lesson was supposed to be.. Films included: Hoppy the Bunny, Frank and his Dog, Skipper Learns a Lesson, Disney's White Wilderness: Lemmings (excerpt), Ratapolis (excerpt) and Squeak the Squirrel.

Food: It's What for Dinner: 16mm educational films that deal with food and food preparation. Delightful, delicious and good for you too! Or is it? Films include Why Eat Our Vegetables, Keeping Food Safe To Eat, Tasting Party, Short Order Cookery, Pride on Parade, Outbreak of Salmonella Infection and The Art of Cake Decorating with Norman Wilton.

Huh?: Whoever made these films had a point to make. They wrote a script, involved dozens of people and spent lots of money. So, why is it that these films don't make any sense? Films include: Easy Way Out, Appy's Adventures, Curious Habits of Man, Day the Milk Was Turned Off, Punctuation: Colon, Semicolon, and Question Marks.

What every one of the A/V Geeks events includes, regardless of location, is a kick-off participatory read-a-long film strip on subjects like Why Aren’t I Popular? and What Troubles A Troublemaker? Audience members read one line of the text while Skip congratulates them on their solid reading skills. This sets the classroom tone and helps bring those who remember back to their school days.

Today Skip is heavily involved with the recently inaugurated International Home Movie Day, and is also helping to digitize and put online other institution’s film collections, like the Academic Film Archive of North America and University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Museum (with over 600 anthropology and archeology films). In his most monumental task to date, Skip was hired by NASA to put their entire collection of film and video on the Internet. He says he doesn’t collect films just to own them, but rather, “to reintroduce these films to the public. Their real value is in showing them to people.”

At Your Service DVD for Art Lies

2008-03-27T15:59:00.000-07:00

I curated a DVD titled "At Your Service: Escaping the Project Trap" for the Spring 2008 issue of Art Lies magazine. It's a compilation of artists' informational videos and new media works that use recent innovations and information aggregators (Google maps, GPS, flight pattern tracking, statistical data.) for purposes other than they are intended. Have a look.

Pictured: Aram Bartholl's Map

I Want to Buy an Electric Vehicle

2008-01-14T08:15:00.000-08:00

I am searching for an electric vehicle that I can buy right now. It has to reach highway speeds, get at least 50 miles per charge, and have room for 3-4 passengers (since I'll be traveling with my showgirls, Lola & Baby G). I am currently on a consumer waiting list for a Phoenix Motorcar, their SUT model pictured here.

On Friday, I watched Who Killed the Electric Car, a documentary about the auto industry's destruction of their own (successful) electric vehicle programs. EVs require little maintenance and are not dependent on gasoline-- indicating that both the oil and auto industries would suffer profit losses should the EVs catch-on.

Never Been to Tehran

2007-10-19T07:30:00.000-07:00

,
Jon Rubin and I have organized another exhibit together called Never Been to Tehran. NBTT opened this week at several exhibition spaces around the world, including Tehran. The project asks participants to take photos in their own environment of what they think Tehran, Iran might look like. There are 29 international participants who are uploading 3-5 photos per week to a universal photosharing site; the slideshow of the photos is projected from an internet connection into the exhibition spaces. Over the next 4 weeks, the exhibit will evolve from a few dozen photos to a few hundred, while the participants continue to research Tehran and respond (in some cases) to the other photos contributed. Visit the Never Been to Tehran website here.

Image by NBTT participant, Heidi Hove Pedersen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Cabin Fever

2007-07-29T22:01:00.001-07:00

Ever since the Grover/Lama family (me, Carlos, Lola and Gigi) and our friend Guy returned from our RV vacation along the California coast, we have been unable to think about anything but RVs. This weekend, we drove to Holiday World and Camping World to see if they had any diesel engine, Class C vehicles, but they didn't (we want a diesel so we can convert to biodiesel). They said Dutchman will have one out soon, but while we're fond of the name, we're not too fond of their vehicles. So we are thinking that when the time comes, we will have our brother-in-law, John, customize an RV for us via his ambulance-manufacturing business: Frazerbilt. John seemed intrigued by this when we popped the question at our daughter Gigi's second birthday party today. While Honeydew the Clown entertained our kids, we talked about the future Aurora Mobile Microcinema/home for family of four (plus one roadie, Guy).

My friend Bree Edwards is living the motorhome lifestyle right now, on tour with Dream Theater. She and her boyfriend Johnny Dekam are providing live video visuals for the world tour. Bree has been a big inspiration for me this year, constantly feeding my head with green utopian nomadic prefabulous ideas.

My passion for compact family travel probably took root in the 1970s when my family of 7 regularly took trips in our 1968 Clark Cortez motorhome, always with Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass playing in the 8 track player. My father converted the closet into bunk beds for me and my sister, Joanne; the beds measured about 2 x 5 feet, but we loved them as long as no one closed the sliding closet doors. Later, my parents purchased a 41' Morgan ketch, and crammed as many as 13 family members on board for a little coastal cruising. It was at this time that my dad bought his first and only firearm as protection from "pirates". It was a rifle of some sort, and I remember that his friend Marie Bolton carried it on board Chalk Airlines for us when she met us in Bimini. Can you imagine having a rifle as your carry on? When I recently questioned my parents about this, they said "oh, well she packed the bullets in her checked luggage." Reassuring to the other passengers, I'm sure.

Pictured: A 1968 Clark Cortez that some fine person has remodeled.

Take my class, please

2007-07-27T14:39:00.001-07:00

Andrea Grover is offering a class at
University of Houston, School of Art this Fall

Intermedia Course:
Participation Art: From Social Sculpture to Distributed Creativity

What was it about the social climate of the 1960s that gave way to group-participation, happenings and actions? And can today's networked communication give the crowd even greater creative agency? This course looks at the history of participation art from the 1960s to present, and examines the social and technological trends that have ignited a new genre of democratic art-making--incorporating ten to ten-thousand participants in the creative process. Students will become familiar with seminal participatory art works of the last 40 years, read critical texts on Social Sculpture, Distributed Creativity, Gift Economies, and Relational Aesthetics, and finally, collectively create a new "crowdsourced" work of art. Course #: Art 4397 / Section #15735 or Art 6397/ Section # 3344. Visit www.uh.edu for enrollment info!

Image: Ant Farm, 50x50' Pillow, 1969

Assignment Zero: Crowdsourced Journalism

2007-06-05T22:05:00.001-07:00

The massive database of interviews on the subject of crowdsourcing is live on Assignment Zero, including my interview by Leah DeVun. I wonder how Jeff Howe feels about his term "crowdsourcing" exploding into thousands of splinter efforts in under one year (his article on crowdsourcing first appeared in the June 2006 issue of Wired). It's a revolution!

I'm also a member (although non-participating because of overcommittedness) of Cooperation Commons, another excellent initiative to research, understand and catalog massive cooperation efforts across all disciplines and industries, founded by the guru of future tech, Howard Rheingold.

Pictured: graphic of SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence--at home). Distributed computing was an early form of crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourced Artworks

2007-05-10T20:10:00.000-07:00

I had a nice talk with Leah DeVun today for an article on crowdsourcing that may be published in Wired Magazine. The article itself is crowdsourced by Assignment Zero, an experiment in open source journalism, and will include interviews with dozens of authorities on mass cooperation, including Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia), Howard Rheingold (author Smart Mobs), Laurence Lessiq (chair Creative Commons), and many others. Leah interviewed me about distributed creativity, which lead me to this post. Below is an brief list of artworks made by the crowd (some willing, some unwitting). I will continue adding to this compilation.

Volunteer Partication
LearningtoLoveYouMore by Harrell Fletcher & Miranda July
The Sheep Market by Aaron Koblin
SwarmSketch by Peter Edmunds
Found Magazine edited by Davy Rothbart & Jason Bitner
MobioOpera by Shu Lea Cheang
Share various participants, multiple cities
SimpleTEXT by Jonah Brucker-Cohen
PostSecret by Frank Warren
Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say, Not Signs That Say What Other People Want You to Say by Gillian Wearing

Participation by Invite
Never Been to Houston by worldwide participants, organized by Jon Rubin & Andrea Grover

Artists associated with distributed creativity and/or relational aesthetics:

Jonah Brucker-Cohen
Harrell Fletcher
Jonathan Harris
Miranda July
Sal Randolph
Jon Rubin
Trebor Scholz

Research:

Institute for Distributed Creativity
Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud
Participation edited by Claire Bishop
The Art of Free Cooperation by Trebor Scholz

Astral Projection

2007-05-07T14:23:00.000-07:00

Never Been to Houston. I missed posting all together the info on this exhibit co-curated by Jon Rubin and me. Never Been to Houston was an exhibit Jon and I organized for Lawndale Art Center in March-April 2007. The two of us invited artists (recommended by our colleagues) from around the world to submit photos to a photosharing site of what they think Houston might look like (none of the participants had ever been), using only their city as the photographic subject. The photosharing site was then streamed into the Lawndale gallery and projected on a large rear projection screen that could be walked around 360 degrees. The exhibit evolved daily as more photos were added and participants responded to each others' contributions.

This project was not pro or con Houston, but rather a way for geographically dispersed artists to have an almost telepathic connection via shared web real estate and a virtual brain trust. Never Been to Houston continued my personal research into crowdsourced artworks and non-commodity based art practice. You can read about the exhibit here in the Houston Chronicle.

Photo by Jon Rubin, Pittsburgh, PA for the exhibit Never Been to Houston

Nebu-Lola

2007-05-07T14:01:00.000-07:00

Houston, Texas Asthma Capital. We're still trying to understand what brings on Lola's asthma, and last week's episode seemed to be triggered by exposure to cats, coupled with a mild viral infection. Here she is looking proud to be asthmatic as she receives a nebulizer treatment at the doctor's office. As always, she turns on the charm for the camera. Thumbs up!

A waterfall made by my mother for a luau in 1970s

2007-04-24T21:53:00.001-07:00

A waterfall made by my mother for a luau in 1970s
Originally uploaded by Gentleridevan.

Spray Foam & Other Art Supplies. My mother studied painting at Syracuse University in the 1950s. Upon graduating, she immediately went to work in my dad's boat business for the next 40 or so years, and raised five children. Her latent artistic talents surfaced in peculiar ways like this spray-foam volcano that still resides in my parent's backyard. She made it for a Luau in the 1970s, using the foam that my dad used to make our docks float (dock foam?). Originally water cascaded down the volcano's facade into a small fiberglass koi pond, now a small vegetable garden. For the same Luau, my mother hand carved a 4' tall tiki figure from a solid log, made paper mache flowers that were the size of basketballs, spray painted them with florescent paint and planted them on spikes throughout the yard. I'm slowly starting to photograph the remnants of her art projects that are peppered throughout the house they my folks have lived in since 1955.

Frieze! Put Your Hands in the Air.

2007-02-08T16:09:00.000-08:00

I forgot to post that Holland Cotter gave Phantom Captain: Art and Crowdsourcing a Last Chance notice in the New York Times (to the left).

And there's another review in this month's Frieze.

Phantom Captain at apexart

2006-10-22T13:20:00.000-07:00

Phantom Captain at apexart
Originally uploaded by Aurora Picture Show.

Phantom Captain: Art & Crowdsourcing, the exhibit I curated for apexart, New York, opened this past Wednesday, October 18. Rather than go on and on, you can read my essay on the apexart website, or visit the show in person until November 25. It features works by Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July, Aaron Koblin, Allison Wiese, Davy Rothbart and Found Magazine, and Peter Edmunds.

The opening was packed with your friends and mine, Carlos Lama, Laura Lark, Allison Wiese, Delicia Harvey, Eileen Maxson, Luca Buvoli, Aaron Koblin, Mary Ellen Carroll, Susie Rosmarin, Jeff Howe, Barbara London, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Paul Miller (DJ Spooky), Art Jones, Nick Hallett, Marisa Olson, Pamela Clapp, Yona Backer, and many mohair.

An exceptionally big thanks to Sara Hines and Steven Rand of apexart for the grand invitation and rock star reception.

Laura Lark has written a review on her blog here.

Related events at apexart:
November 8, 6:30pm Davy Rothbart and Jason Bitner of Found Magazine will be reading and the band Anvil will perform.
November 15, 6:30pm Wired Magazine contributor Jeff Howe talks about crowdsourcing, the term he and Mark Robinson invented.

By the Hour

2006-10-12T21:13:00.000-07:00

I came across these pictures, from the DiverseWorks 2005 Voyeur-themed gala, on Spacetaker.org. First, Sixto Wagan steals the show as a she-man in a tartish bustier and thigh highs. Tame by comparison, that's me in the black trench coat with headphones. I was supposed to be an eavedropping flasher. My husband Carlos was a sleazy porn fan--not a stretch, and is wearing the red running suit. Together we were so convincingly creepy that when we stopped at Hollywood convenience store to buy some porn (as a prop for the party), I was followed around the store by a perv looking for my menu of services. Carlos gave off his greasy pimp vibe--again, not a stretch, and we got to the car and split.

Phantom Captain: Art & Crowdsourcing

2006-10-10T08:08:00.000-07:00

Written for apexart Exhibition, October 18, 2006

As I am writing this essay, I am also searching for extraterrestrial life. Boinc—a free software platform for distributed computing using volunteer computer time—is running imperceptibly behind this Microsoft Word document. Along with 501,283 current online users in 227 countries, I am part of SETI@home—the now famous scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers to download and analyze radio telescope data in an effort to Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). SETI is the most popular of “grid computing programs,” which employ the leisure time of the crowd to solve a complex problem. While I’m not expecting a shout out from ET, I am curious about the art analog to this growing phenomenon of mass volunteer cooperation, or crowdsourcing.

Jeff Howe introduced the term crowdsourcing in his June 2006 Wired Magazine article, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” to describe a new form of corporate outsourcing to largely amateur pools of volunteer labor that “create content, solve problems, and even do corporate R & D.” Examples of online enterprises successfully built on crowdsourcing are abundant: EBay—which enlists users to stock a marketplace, consume from and police it; Amazon—which relies on users’ product reviews to sell to like-minded shoppers; and the more recent Threadless—a company that prints and sells user-generated t-shirt designs based on popular vote. In his 2002 book Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold called these consumer-driven ratings “reputation systems” and indicated that for the moment (barring radical changes to telecommunications law) consumers have the power to create what they consume.

If networked communication gives consumers newfound creative agency, can it also make the crowd more artistic? According to Clive Thompson in his 2004 Slate Magazine article “Art Mobs,” mobs cannot think free form, or as he more aptly concludes, mobs can’t draw. Thompson uses as example the experiments of British web developer Kevan Davis who provided the online platform for a mob to create a font or draw an image. While the crowd could approximate letters of the alphabet, they could not agree on how to draw a television or a face, two directives that yielded shapeless blobs. A more fruitful experiment along these lines is SwarmSketch.com created by Peter Edmunds. Each week, SwarmSketch randomly chooses a popular internet search term, which becomes the sketch subject for the week, with visitors contributing to a group illustration. Edmunds has improved the mob’s draftsmanship by restricting individual contribution to a single line, and then allowing users to vote on which line stays, goes, or gets lighter. While anxiety-triggering words like “terrorism” and “E. Coli“ have yielded formless squiggles, cartoonishly accurate illustrations arise from warm fuzzy terms like “pumpkin carving” or “panda bear.” The results are something akin to the unholy union of a Cy Twombly and a Willem de Kooning drawing, and a very compelling argument for the mob’s creative talents.

While collaborative drawing is one way to measure a crowd’s aptitude for creative consensus or collective unconscious, individual contributions that function by comparison also produce fascinating outcomes by virtue of the crowd’s general inability (or lack of desire) to follow simple directions. Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July’s LearningToLoveYouMore.com web project (web design by Yuri Ono) offers easy numbered assignments for anyone—artist or non-artist—to complete and upload his or her results (known as “reports”). In Assignment #30: Take a picture of strangers holding hands, the instructions are clearly stated: “Ask two or more people who are strangers to you and to each other to hold hands and then take a picture of them. Take the picture when they aren't smiling. Please make sure the picture includes the faces of the strangers.” Despite the instructions, the majority of reports for Assignment #30 include exactly two strangers with mixed smiles, and some don’t include the strangers’ faces, which might be cropped out or obscured from behind. These mistakes, deviances, or inspired interpretations of the same assignment are expansive responses to narrow specifications, and generally defy consensus. Divergent thought is after all one definition of creativity1.

Via assignments like #14: Write your life story in a day or #39 Take a picture of your parents kissing, LTLYM delivers on the spirit of togetherness implied in its name, inspiring telepathic fellowship among its worldwide contributors.

A similar bond exists among contributors to Davy Rothbart’s Found Magazine, which turns average people into dumpster-diving connoisseurs of soiled and wadded-up scraps of paper. Entirely populated by the objets trouvés discovered by its thousands of loyal voyeurs, Found Magazine is dedicated to reprinting anonymous “love letters, birthday cards, kids' homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, doodles--anything that gives a glimpse into someone else's life.” Each found item is printed alongside field notes from the person submitting it, explaining the location and circumstances under which the item was discovered. The result has produced cult enthusiasm for both the magazine and Davy’s traveling public readings, in which he imagines and fills in the missing pieces of finds like a “to-do list” retrieved from an empty shopping basket reading, “Turn in Library Books, Find out about college, Mail Dad’s shit, Pay Bills in advance, Write Crystal, Hide guns, Pack, and Get medication.”

With the oldest recorded cookbooks dating back to the 15th century, the tradition of sharing recipes is perhaps the most familiar form of crowdsourcing presented in the exhibit. Allison Wiese’s Artists’ Cookbook is based on the 1977 Museum of Modern Art Artists’ Cookbook by Madeleine Conway and Nancy Kirk, and composed of free “recipes” submitted by contemporary artists. Like LTLYM, Artists’ Cookbook encourages divergent thinking among participants posed with the simple assignment: Give me a recipe.

In the 1979 documentary “Everyone is an Artist,” Joseph Beuys is asked while he prepares dinner if peeling a potato is art. His response is “even the act of peeling a potato can be considered a work of art if it is a conscious act.” In the spirit of Beuys’ potato and Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1970s Soho restaurant ”FOOD”, Allison imagines the raw ingredients of a recipe as artistic material, cooking as artistic process, and the shared meal as performance. Culminating in the distribution of recipe pages and a shared potluck, Artists’ Cookbook pays tribute to the Beuys-ian theory of social sculpture: Everyone should apply creative thinking to their own area of specialization, be it cooking or otherwise.

From specialization to rote labor, the 7,599 participants in Aaron Koblin’s The Sheep Market were unclear of its purpose but nonetheless accepted the task to “Draw a sheep facing to the left” for $.02 (US) per sheep. In November 2005 Aaron posted this Human Intelligence Task (HIT) without explanation on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, or MTurk, a crowdsourcing site--named for the 18th century chess-playing automaton alleged to have beaten Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon--where corporations can list simple paid tasks that “people do better than computers,” such as categorizing products, completing multiple choice surveys, transcribing, rating, etc.

While a good idea in theory, in practice the puny compensation and uncreative tasks have led to the declining use of the site. Aaron offered an unusually creative task to MTurkers and collected over 10,000 responses in 40 days. He writes, “The Sheep Market is a web-based artwork that appropriates the MTurk system to implicate thousands of workers in the creation of a massive database of drawings.” Aaron’s integrated drawing tool application allowed him additionally to create animations of the sheep being drawn.

At the conclusion of the sheep HIT, Aaron notified the workers that they had participated in an artwork, and that the sheep would be for sale as collectible stamps. He posted the stamps and statistics (like sheep per hour: 11; average wage: $.69/hour; average time spent drawing: 105 seconds) on the project’s website, TheSheepMarket.com. The MTurkers were mostly “hostile” according to Aaron, who was however satisfied with the ensuing lively discussion, which included threads like “They’re selling our sheep!!!” and “Does anyone remember signing over the rights to the drawings?”

With the cooperative intention of projects such as these, crowdsourcing as a method of artistic production appears to be heir to the throne of 1960s and 70s happenings and participatory art. These artists are less interested in sole authorship and visibility--they are phantom captains2--and more in distributed creativity, gift economies, and other models that disrupt how we think about and assign value to art. As evidenced by grid computing programs like SETI, even the biggest supercomputers cannot compete with half-a-million networked home machines. And Howard Rheingold predicted in Smart Mobs that “key breakthroughs [in technology] won’t come from established industry leaders, but from the fringes, from skunkworks and start ups and even associations of amateurs. Especially associations of amateurs.” Perhaps breakthroughs in art will come from the skunkworks, the noodlers, and the untrained crowd, too.

Andrea Grover, 2006.

1 Convergent vs. divergent production was defined by the American psychologist J.P. Guilford to distinguish different types of human response to a set problem. Convergent production uses deductive thinking to arrive at a single answer, while divergent production is the creative generation of multiple answers.

2 “Phantom Captain” is a chapter in R. Buckminster Fuller's first book, Nine Chains to the Moon (Fuller’s metaphor that if all of humankind stood on each others’ shoulders we could complete nine chains to the moon). He used the term to describe a sort of ghost in the machine concept of consciousness, and implied that all phantom captains are telepathically connected, especially when their actions are extended through the shared use of machines.

My Own Private Mega Church

2006-10-02T22:02:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, September 23, I was invited to tag long with a Rice University architecture studio taught by Mary Ellen Carroll and Charles Renfro to take a behind-the-scenes tour of Houston's Lakewood Church. After I came to, I accepted the invitation.

Lakewood is the largest mega-church in the U.S. with seating for 16,000. It's housed in the former Compaq Center where the Houston Rockets used to play basketball. Pastor Joel Osteen is the impresario behind Lakewood's success. Osteen insists on high production values, designer lighting and rigorous attention to detail while editing the program for television. We were told on the tour that Lakewood's lighting was intended to mimic Hollywood award shows and cost $1.5 million.

For some crazy reason they offered to let us watch the 7pm service from the catwalk. It was like a Janet Jackson concert meets a Tony Robbins self help seminar, with Barbie and Ken as your hosts. There were fake waterfalls, piped in fog, and it smelled really good for a place full of people. It didn't feel the least bit like my childhood experiences of church at Our Holy Redeemer, but rather like life inside a Christian Biosphere 2.

Pictured is Joel Osteen's wife Victoria, who my husband says looks like a Playboy model.

Germaine Fodor's Secret Life

2006-09-07T20:09:00.000-07:00

Germaine's Collection and ET Pillow
Originally uploaded by Aurora Picture Show.

Earlier this month my friend Edith Sorenson and I visited the A/V Geeks HQ in Raleigh, NC (home of our friends Skip and Germaine). Skip is nationally known for his unhealthy but entertaining habit of collecting 16mm films and showing them to audiences in unusual places, but I discovered that Skip's girlfriend Germaine has secret talents of her own. Take this delightful pillow she embroidered with "ET Loves Cum." What's not to love? Germaine also made Skip a Toast Chee pillow (soft sculpture) when they were first dating. While we were staying with them, Germaine was making doll clothes and wigs. What a gal!

Stuffed Marlins

2006-08-13T21:49:00.000-07:00

Inside the Remsen Family Bayhouse, LI, NY

I love nautical kitsch. While I was on Long Island, my parents were invited to a Bay House party, and I eagerly tagged along hoping to get some decorating ideas for my future houseboat. Bay houses are small bungalows on the marshlands, originally built by fisherman, baymen and duck hunters, and they're only accessible by boat. A few of the houses have generators, but most have no power at all, so it's like camping. Around 1965, many bay houses on LI were moved to preserve the wildlife on the wetlands, but a handful like this one remain, to preserve the other wild life on the wetlands. That's my dad "Capt. Al" sitting on the cooler on the right. He's the one with the white beard, dark shades and the fat baby (my Gigi!) on his lap. Please also enjoy the stuffed marlin photo (hanging above the duck decoys and the beach glass).

Texans Gone Wild: NYC edition*

2006-07-30T15:42:00.000-07:00

Picture: Lola waiting for the bus near Times Square; taken with my Treo. We had a doctor's appointment for Lo with Dr. Richard, and caught the bus back from 50th Street.

I'm on day four of my trip to New York, and I'm starting to think about things other than work. I'm writing from my brother and sister-in-law's apartment in Chelsea. There's a Buddhist meeting in their living room, and I'm not quite ready to join the chanting. "NAM MYOHO RENGE KYO."

This morning I had breakfast at Cafe Mogador with Ed Halter and Thomas Beard. Ed just had a book published: From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games. Ed and Thomas are a swell couple, and talking avant garde film/video shop with them is like scratching an itch with a long back scratcher/shoe horn with the creepy plastic hand. It satisfies!

I met with Tali Hinkis of Lovid, and had a botched playdate for the girls at the Riverrun Park (89th Street). Lola refused to leave her cousins and so I went to the playdate empty handed. Rama, Tali's daughter, was appropriately disappointed. Later, Tali and I walked down to the 79th Street Boat Basin, where I considered the feasibility of living on a houseboat in NYC. It seems possible, but was more expensive than I thought: $2500/month during the high season and less during the low, averaging about $2100/month for a 25' vessel. It would have to be a really really tall houseboat with an elevator to make it work.

*I am secretly a native Freeport, Long Islander (along with my boyz Lou Reed and Chuck D), but have lived in Texas for 11 years.

Chakra Con

2006-07-20T13:00:00.000-07:00

My oldest kid, Lola, has asthma, eczema, minor hairloss, and sinusitis. Houston, it's not worth it. Carlos and I are convinced that the damp weather and poor air quality are contributing factors. We visited an acupunturist today and he had Lola sit on my lap and hold single viles of allergens. While Lola held a vile, I raised my arm and the acupuncturist tried to push it down. Whenever my arm was weak, he associated the weakness with a reaction to the substance. Lola thought the whole thing was a laugh riot, and decided to announce "I farted" on multiple occasions. Carlos, my new agey hubbie, seemed to like the doctor, especially when he found a copy of Alexander Grey's book on the shelf, with forward by Ken Wilber and Carlo McCormick, the triumvirate of wisdom. For some reason Carlos handed me a book on tantric sex for women.

At the end of the tests, the doc recommended that Lola eliminate wheat, sugar, milk and cheese. No more cheese blintzes, chocolate croissants, or Newman O's. He also prescribed a number of tinctures and mysterious homeopathic drops. Fingers and chakras crossed.

The Wallpaper Lady

2006-07-19T11:06:00.002-07:00

Today I hired the Wallpaper Lady to install this autumn scene wallpaper mural in our living room. It's apparently New Hampshire. When my daughter Lola arrived home from pre-school, she asked "How do we get in there?"

The Wallpaper Lady's real name is Julie, and turns out we were both fans of the now defunct Star 790 AM radio station, especially the old timer disk jockey, Paul Berlin. Berlin had been DJing since 1950 when he went off the air in 2004, and had all the affects of a dutch uncle, with a twist of brat pack humor. I wonder where Paul is these days?

Old People

2006-07-18T11:27:00.000-07:00

Picture: Anne and Buckminster Fuller by Suzanne Murphy

On rare occasions people cry while they're giving public talks, and I just did. A senior's group was visiting the theater that I run/live in, Aurora Picture Show, and they asked me about my dogs who were here five years ago when they first visited. I started telling them very matter-of-factly that both dogs had passed away this year, and the next thing I knew my bottem lip was quivering. Oh well, they caught me off guard. Everyone smiled uncomfortably, and then someone chimed in on another subject, but all I heard was "blah blah blah blah," because I was stuck in my head.

Speaking of death, recently I came across a two-DVD series of interviews with R. Buckminster Fuller (Buckminster Fuller: The Lost Interviews), which I highly recommend. The interviews are from an early 1980s (Fuller lived 1895-1983) cable access show on psychic phenomena and have a humorously new agey vibe, but what Fuller has to say is fantastic. He speaks about a myriad of subjects like the death of his 4 year-old daughter, how he had contemplated suicide but then decided he could justify living by trying to improve humanity, and how he did not speak at all for TWO YEARS-- his wife did all of his talking. She must have been a very loving person. He didn't speak because he needed to unlearn everything he had been taught, in order to tap into his innate genius (Fuller believed all children are born geniuses, but it is trained out of them). When asked by the host if he believed in life after death, Fuller replied "I don't believe in it anymore. It am convinced by the evidence." Then he explained how when he was growing up, school children were taught that reality is anything tangible, but during his lifetime all sorts of invisible realities were discovered, like atomic energy, for instance.

Here's an excerpt from Fuller's 42 hours of lectures titled "Everything I know." You can read the full transcripts at the Buckminster Fuller Institute website.

"And whenever death is no weight is lost. At first the scientists saw a little tiny bit of weight but it turned out to be the weight of the air in the lungs, the air in the lungs weighs quite a little. We take on 54 pounds of air a day, out of which we subtract 7 pounds of oxygen to keep ourselves going; and so that that residual air, and there is actually no identifiable arrow moving needle moving identification of anything being lost when the phenomena of life goes.

Now, you've often heard, recently, great specialists getting particularly into the chemistry in the virology and so forth, getting to the point where they say they have been able to identify in star dust the unique chemistries essential to produce the organism of life. They call it they have now, the key to life. When this man dies all the chemistry is right there. You know that. I now have to come to the absolute conclusion that the mistake is all the time in identifying the animate as being physical. What goes on in this room between you and I, and that word "between" is very important. Remember SYNERGY. What goes on between you and I which is understanding is really not implicit in your organism in your nose or your hair or anything. I simply say there is a synergetic phenomena that does go on between that is not of. It is not the physical, and everything that is going on between me and you is absolutely metaphysical. I use the word "metaphysical" the physicists, then, identify the "physical" then as energy, energy associative as matter and energy disassociative as radiation, and one convertible into the other. Metaphysical is everything that doesn't move a needle. And there is nothing that moves any needles here regarding this information I am giving you. The quality of the information the significance of the information. That is absolutely metaphysical."

Warhol Films

2000-04-19T20:57:00.000-07:00

Screening Warhol: New Takes on the Artist and Filmmaker

The Menil Collection & Rice University Media Center

April 2000

In 1964 when avant garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas headed over to The Factory to present Andy Warhol with Film Culture magazine's Independent Film Award (a fruit basket), he brought along his Bolex camera. Mekas' film, aptly called Award Presentation to Andy Warhol, 1964, 12 minutes, includes Andy Warhol, Baby Jane Holzer, Niko, Gerard Malanga, Ivy Nicholsen, Kenneth King and Naomi Levine. Like the films for which Warhol was being honored, Mekas' film was an unscripted cinema verité of the 1960s New York art world. Unlike Warhol's films, Mekas' was short and edited.

Warhol's passion for the unedited-- his longest film **** was 25 hours-- continues to elicit questions and was largely the topic of the film series and symposium "Screening Warhol: New Takes on the Artist and Filmmaker" at Rice University Media Center and The Menil Collection. Inspired by the recent restoration of some of Warhol's 4000 plus film works, "Screening Warhol" was an impressive undertaking that included among other films a world premiere of Sunset-- a commission of John and Dominique de Menil for a chapel in San Antonio-- and presentations by authors and scholars Callie Angell, Douglas Crimp, David James, Lynne Tillman and Branden W. Joseph. Like many of Warhol's films, the series was more of an endurance test than a crowd pleaser.

Warhol's films from 1964-68 broke all of the tropes that the Hollywood studio system had developed over 60 years. No crosscutting, no special effects, no directing, no editing. Warhol's camera was static and his characters were obliged to improvise for 33 non-stop minutes (the duration of a 1200' film magazine). What surfaces in those endless minutes is idiosyncratic behavior, self-consciousness, humor and awkward silence. On-screen drug use made performing fun for some of Warhol's Superstars like Ondine (Robert Olivio) and Brigid Berlin in Imitation of Christ. As they lay in bed shooting up, Ondine and Berlin seem sleepy and slap happy. Other characters seem to unravel as the camera rolls like Edie Sedgewick in Kitchen; she continually sneezes as a signal for a line cue. In Horse, a "sex" western, six or so cowboys stand around a horse for 100 minutes. The few lines written by Ronald Tavel include "I'm the Kid from Laramie. Hang me on yonder tree". The cowboys eventually resort to wrestling and crotch grabbing to pass the time. As Lynne Tillman stated at the symposium, "Warhol's characters were self-conscious even when they were nearly unconscious."

The screenings at Rice Media Center were a measure of tolerance levels. Typically more than one half the audience abandoned ship before the end of the evening. Lasting the entire duration of a film was an achievement. On Frameworks, an internet listserve for experimental film, the resurgence of Warhol's films around the country is a hot topic. A message with the subject heading "Boredom/Warhol" elicited 22 responses on kinds of boredom, Buddhism and boredom, Boredom and the Ego, Structural Film, time and boredom, etc. One of the responses came from Callie Angell, one of the "Screening Warhol" symposium speakers and Adjunct Curator of the Andy Warhol Film Project at the Whitney Museum. (Angell is currently cataloging over 1000 reels of Warhol's films.) Angell described Warhol's films as producing "productive boredom" which elicits a heightened perceptiveness. Similarly, a critic for the Village Voice commented after watching 25 hours of **** in 1967, "I became all perception, no memory, no intelligence." He also admitted that being on speed helped.

Mel Chin: Eveready Artist

1998-12-20T22:22:00.000-08:00

Written for Houston Sidewalk, 1998

If there was an award for the busiest, most prolific artist of 1998, Mel Chin would be in the running... But didn't he win that award last year? This Houston native is well-known for 30 plus years of socially conscious mixed media works, installations, and monumental sculpture. Not shying away from controversial subjects, Chin continues to tackle some of the most difficult ones – human rights violations, environmental deterioration and erased histories.

Maintaining 3 residences in North Carolina, New York and San Francisco, Chin has been roving the lecture circuit this year from Stanford University to University of Houston. This summer, Chin's work was included in Blaffer Gallery's "Putt-Modernism" exhibition (his contribution to the miniature golf course was "hole number 4" called "Shelter", addressing the bombing of Baghdad during the Gulf War). In October, Chin along with Arlan Huang and Binglee had an exhibit at China 2000, New York, and his one-person show "Inescapable Histories" (traveling through 1999) has made stops at Washington State University and University of Alabama.

Objects from "In the Name of the Place"-- the collaborative project headed by Chin and the GALA (Georgia/Los Angeles) Committee which involved placing discrete conceptual elements on the set of Melrose Place-- were auctioned off at Sotheby's of Beverly Hills in November '98. Proceeds were donated to two women's college funds, the Fulfillment Fund and Jeannette Rankin Foundation. You can find out more about this project at www.mpart.com.

On the publishing front, Chin's development in land reclamation , Revival Fields -- an ingenious project that uses plants called "hyperaccumulators" to remove heavy metals from contaminated soil, was highlighted in the 1998 3rd edition of "Earthworks and Beyond" by John Beardsley, published by Abbeville Press.

Mel's current work-in-progress is an opera about "warfare in the plant world" called Stimme Von Eden (Voice of Eden). He intends to open the opera in Germany and later tour the U.S. In addition, Chin's collaborative landscape project with Bob Wood, the "Threshold Project" continues at Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California.

And finally on the Houston front, Chin's commission for the downtown Sesquicentennial Park-- seven 70-foot-tall stainless steel columns containing 1,050 drawings by children born in 1986-- was completed in May 1998.

Superman Enclosures

1998-08-27T21:28:00.000-07:00

Image: Phone booth transformed into an aquarium by artists Benoit Deseille and Benedetto Bufalino as part of the Lyon Light Festival in France.

Written for "The Unlikely Muse" Houston Sidewalk, 1998

In Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film "The Birds", Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hendren) finds refuge inside a telephone booth as vengeful birds pummel the glass enclosure with their beaks. This terrifying film moment-- with a telephone booth as a transitory safe haven-- has been imitated often in film and on television, including a recent X-Files episode ("Patient X") when Maria Covarrubias (Laurie Holden) is waylayed in a phone booth by a boy exposed to alien black oil.

From Superman's famous changing room to sexual turn-on, the telephone booth is a curious urban artifact-- a privately owned glass housing that provides silence, protection from the elements, reading material, a good view and a phone. Like a precursor to artist Andrea Zittel's self-contained comfort units, the phone booth is a type of functional cosmopolitan armor, purchased anonymously for five minutes with a few coins dropped in a repository.

Myrmidon Corporation on W. 20th Street in the Heights-- with hundreds of telephone booths stacked in their stockyard-- looks like a call box graveyard-- but this is misleading. These telephone booths (know in the business as "Superman Enclosures") are actually enroute to be sand blaster and painted for resale to the public. Most people in the market for refurbished enclosures are looking to make a few bucks by operating their own payphone business, but others have noticed the less obvious potential in these salvaged aluminum boxes. According to Robert E. Driver, Jr., President of Myrmidon Corp., creative citizens have purchased these enclosures for uses as varied as a private wet bar, a snake aquarium, a homemade smoker and a pool area phone. Driver says while he's heard of people surviving severe storms in telephone booths, marauding birds would be a first.

Game Not Over

1998-08-01T21:10:00.000-07:00

Written for "The Unlikely Muse"
Houston Sidewalk, August 1998

From the 'ping' of Pong to the 'bleep' of PacMan, the sounds and images of video games are the cherished memories of children born since the 1970s. Producing a pale-skinned generation with acute motor skills, beefy thumbs and the ability to "tune out" any peripheral activity, video games have had both their opponents (parents) and their champions (kids). Whichever side of the digital divide you stand on, this annual $10 billion business has left a lasting impression that has nostalgic young collectors paying top dollar for arcade dinosaurs like Asteroids, Centipedes, Defenders and Galaga.

Though determining the first video game is still an issue for heated debate, most experts will tell you it was either William Higin-Botham's 1958 "tennis game" developed at Brookhaven National Laboratories, New York, or MIT graduate student Steve Russell's 1962 "Spacewars". In either case, an enterprising company named Atari took the ping pong ball and ran with it.

Today you can peek into arcade game history in the warehouse at Houston Game PCB Repair Center in the Heights, a specialized fix-it shop for wayward electronic games. Vazric Grigorian, the shop proprietor, has been "repairing boards" since 1974 when he was an electrical engineering student paying his way through school at University of Houston. Grigorian worked for a Houston-based company called H.A. Franz, a vending distributor that carried Atari's sought-after 'Pong' game. In the 80s, Grigorian worked privately as a "game consultant", researching new products and making recommendations to prospecting companies. Now with back issues of RePlay Extra piled up in his office, and hundreds of arcade games and their guts exposed in the back, Grigorian says confidently, "There's nothing we can't fix."

The tools of the game repair trade are similar to those of a TV repair shop: screwdrivers, soldering irons, oscilloscopes and volt meters. Mammoth green and silver motherboards are filed systematically on shelves while a few crouched over technicians peer into the bellies of Star Trek and Ms. PacMan. And just about every landmark game is warehoused in Grigorian's endless repository. A stroll down the peculiarly quiet aisles past Stargate and Space Invaders will leave you hankering for a roll of quarters.

Modern Mannequin

1998-07-20T21:47:00.000-07:00

Written for "The Unlikely Muse" Houston Sidewalk 1998

"Mostly what we're doing these days is cutting off a lot of heads," muses Timber Childress of Modern Mannequin, Houston's only authentic mannequin repair shop. "We also fix broken fingers and cut off the knees for tabletop displays." While Timber lends her expertise to this highly specialized and somewhat macabre sounding craft, her daughter Sherrie Childress Mendez continues the 52 year family tradition of restoring and modifying mannequins for fashion display. Behind the creaky screen door of this modest green bungalow lies an uncanny theater of fiberglass body parts.

Like an old world craftsman, Sherrie sits surrounded by the tools of her trade (airbrushes, sanders and drills) as she refinishes the surface of a headless mannequin. There's nothing high tech about this workshop with its drop ceilings and fluorescent lights; as Timber allows when her husband Tom purchased the repair shop in 1946 all he really got was "a spatula, a bucket of puddy and a shade tree." Philip Phang, a former cosmetologist with Dillard's and Saks 5th Avenue is the mannequin make-up man, adept at using oil-based paints to create pouting lips and piercing eyes. And Franklin West, a congenial handy man makes the daily rounds as well as the bases on which the mannequins stand.

As Modern Mannequin expanded over the years, so did the green bungalow with makeshift additions added for storage. Every turn of a corner reveals unclothed bodies with clear plastic bags over their heads (to protect their hair and make-up). Timber points out a mannequin that looks like Grace Jones, another that could be Suzanne Summers and another that unequivocally is Sher. Among the Greneker's, Hindsgaul's and Rootstein's (all mannequin manufacturers) are a few choice specimen's about which Timber simply says "Don't ask, their not for sale." A priceless fiberglass Louis the 14th and a 1920s flapper are among Modern Mannequin's prize possessions.

As headless and armless forms replace the expressive one-of-a-kind mannequins of yesteryear, Modern Mannequin does more and more amputations than high fashion makeovers. When I suggest that these anonymous forms might appeal to a wider audience, Timber informs me of a more likely explanation: mannequins are just expensive and hard to dress. - Andrea Grover

Editor's Note: Modern Mannequin's work can be seen at Foley's, Neiman Marcus and Saks 5th Avenue.

To get there: Take Highway 59 to Little York Rd exit. Head west on Little York for about 1-2 miles and Modern Mannequin will be on your right side at number 619.

Inner City Fly Fishing

1998-05-19T22:07:00.000-07:00

Written for "The Unlikely Muse" Houston Sidewalk 1998

Mark Marmon of Metro Anglers promises to get you fly fishing within ten minutes of downtown Houston, and it's not because he has a really fast car. Would you believe that carp, bass, mullet, perch, sunfish and coy reside happily in the city's dingy Bayous and Day-Glo-colored manmade lakes? Mark Marmon will convert any skeptic who thinks the only organism that could survive in these tepid waters is E. coli. Still, the name of the game is catch and release.

Fly fishing is practically a religion for some. This zen-like practice which involves the art of fly-tying, with delicate tools, a nearly invisible line and ornate artificial flies attracts a faithful following. A fly fisherman prides himself in his attentiveness, his knowledge of the environment, and his skillful casting that leaves the water seemingly untouched. It's a quiet, somewhat solitary sport where the fish can see and hear you and vise versa. Needless to say, it's not the same type of fishing where you strap yourself into an angler's seat and reel in a 200lb tuna while screaming profanities at the top of your lungs. Less drama, more process.

Marmon, who grew up fly fishing with his grandfather in the Medina and Guadalupe Rivers of San Antonio, makes a point of "wetting a line" nearly everyday. He says the diehard fly fisherman always has his gear in the car, and in Mark's case, his gear and some Honduran cigars. Besides his rod and lines, assorted flies, his hemostat (for removing the hook) and nipper (for trimming the line), Mark carries a detailed log book of every fish that he catches. Since January, he's caught 225.

About a year ago, a plastic surgeon from Ann Arbor, Michigan responded to an on-line ad that Mark had posted with his pledge of inner city angling-- he had joked to friends that he could start a business of his favorite pursuit. Mark's first client was so pleased with his return that Mark started receiving word-of-mouth referrals. Year's of experience, a love for the sport and forensic knowledge of Houston's waterways (Mark previously worked for a bio assessment company -- another reason he knows not to keep the fish) were the impetus for Marmon's Metro Anglers.

There are 3 "lies" (the place where fish hold and feed) to which Mark directs his clients: the lakes on the grounds of Transco Tower, Braes Bayou, and 2 lakes near the Astrodome. Mark provides all of the equipment and the trips last about 2 hours.

For our urban fishing excursion, Mark and I met at Braes Bayou near the corner of Stella Link and North Braeswood. We parked our cars at a run down strip center behind a Texaco Station and walked south across the Stella Link bridge to the other side of the Bayou. As we passed over the water, we -- with the aid of polarized sunglasses --could see several dozen huge carp, mullet and coy actively cutting the surface. We climbed gingerly down a steep incline and across a high speed bike path full of cyclers that recognized Mark and shouted "how's the fishing?" and other inaudible greetings. Within seconds, Mark cast his coffee bean fly in the water and repeatedly casted in the direction of the fish. When Mr. coffee bean didn't "match the hatch" which means imitate what the fish are eating, Mark switched to a bead head nymph, and bingo! We had been there for about 15 minutes when he had a take on his line and reeled in a sizable German brown carp, number 226.

While inner city angling might lack the idyllic scenery and elicit more than a few inquisitive stares, once you witness the abundance and variety of fish, it's hard to notice anything else. What's more is now when you post a "gone fishing" sign on your office door during lunch hour, it's feasible that you have.

Metro Anglers
713-666-8868
mcubed@usa.net

Brucker Survival Capsules

1998-05-01T22:27:00.000-07:00

Image: Brucker Survival Capsule arriving at Texas Oil exhibition by The Center for Land Use Interpretation. Photo: Rachel Hooper

Written for "The Unlikely Muse" Houston Sidewalk 1998

The Martians have landed on Wayside Drive in East Houston. A field of bright orange saucers with their hatches poised to open invokes images of Grover Mills, New Jersey during Orson Welles' 1938 radio broadcast, "The War of the Worlds." Perhaps these strange vessels are carrying "the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars." Do they mean us harm? Actually, they mean to save our lives, but not in the Heaven's Gate sense.

The alien ships are really fiberglass lifeboats-- the lifesaving devices found aboard oil riggs and jumbo seafaring ships. Alexander/Ryan Marine & Safety sells these refurbished saucer crafts which we're designed in 1968 by a now defunct safety company called Whittaker, and resemble space technology of the era. Known as Brucker Survival Capsules, these round lifeboats have room for 28 passengers and are typically equipped with life preservers, seatbelts and 7 days worth of sea rations that would make you seasick if you weren't already-- unappetizing carbo cubes labeled "compressed concentrated food" and single-serving water bags.

But not if you're James Bond. Fans of 007 might recognize the Brucker Capsule from the final scene of "The Spy Who Loved Me." James and his handsome companion await sea rescue in a modified Brucker capsule, fur-lined and furnished with champagne and mood music. So much for rations and sea sores. That same lifeboat was later sold and incorporated into an episode of the 70s television program "The Six Million Dollar Man."

If you look in the backyard of Alexander/Ryan, you'll see some more streamlined double-hulled lifeboats. These are the modern crafts that replace the Brucker Capsules. But the space age capsules are still for sale if you're planning to make a low budget sci-fi film or a James Bond-inspired love den.

A topical side note: The main impetus for today's mandatory marine safety equipment--flares, survival suits, radios, rafts-- was an event that occurred back in 1912, the sinking of the Titanic.

Alexander/Ryan Marine & Safety

2000 Wayside Dr. Houston, TX 77261-9363

(713) 923-1671

To get there: Take I-10 East to Wayside. Head south on Wayside about 1/2 mile and Alexander/Ryan will be on the east side of the street at both 1910 and 2000. The 1910 lot says Nova Enterprises, but it's rented by Alexander/Ryan for the storage of their Brucker Survival Capsules.

Kaplan's Ben-Hur (RIP)

1998-04-10T09:11:00.000-07:00

Written for Sidewalk.com, 1998

Granny Depot

If you're wondering where grandma still finds her patio dresses and long legs, Kaplan's-Ben Hur may be her secret source. This unadorned department store on Yale is delightfully frozen in the 1950s while the rest of the neighborhood gradually submits to the 21st-century. Enter Kaplan's and step back to a time when shop tenders were more like extended family and merchandise could be paid for "on account." Despite its fast food neighbors, Kaplan's remains an unyielding fixture, family-run for 85 years, with patron's from almost as far back.

Martin Kaplan, the current proprietor, is as friendly and helpful as the man who sold you your first pair of Buster Brown's. Martin's grandfather, Dave Kaplan, started the business in 1913 and passed it on to his two son's Bennett (Martin's father) and Herman, hence the catchy name Kaplan's Ben Hur. (Sorry to disappoint all you Charleton Heston fans.) What began as an Old West-style general/feed store evolved over the years to its current one-story department store structure. Though they don't carry cotton seed meal anymore, Kaplan's still has some old-fashioned merchandise, like hand-embroidered doilies, white linen baby bonnets, and pastilles in ornate tin boxes. And if you're ever missing mom, the mostly female staff at Kaplan's can satisfy your need for nurturing. On a cold day, you'd be surprised if they didn't ask if you were dressed warm enough. Many of these women are native Houstonian's, some even grew up in The Heights and remember collecting Kaplan's trading stamps, or receiving a free toy on their birthdays.

The most impressive corner of Kaplan's is the pastel colored Lingerie Department. Sandra McGee, who shopped at Kaplan's with her grandmother in the 1950s, can show you around and educate you to the subtle distinctions between a mu-mu, a patio dress, and a model coat. An ample selection of girdles, full and half-slips, and long legs or flairs (knee-length nylon underwear) reveals the age of some of their clientele. The Gift Department, with impeccably tidy glass shelves, has figurines by M.J. Hummel, Royal Doulton and Lladro that are aesthetically arranged with the pride of grandma's curios cabinet. The Housewares section has tea, coffee, shortbread, hard candy, jams and jellies. Here you'll find one of the best selections of Texas cookbooks and Texas foodstuff in Houston. The Stationary Department has tasteful greeting cards, puzzles, photo albums and assorted Bridge paraphernalia-- essential tools of the grandma trade.

EPILOGUE

Kaplan's was sold and demolished in 2005

Formerly located at:

2125 Yale St

Houston, TX 77008

Texas City Skyline

1997-09-24T21:19:00.000-07:00

Written for "The Unlikely Muse" Houston Sidewalk, 1997

Let's face it, there's something Orwellian about Texas City. Even with it's proximity to Houston, extremely affordable living, and the title of 1997 All-America City, most people would need more than a nudge to live there. All the perks in the world, and the cutest downtown can't conceal the foreboding skyline of the Texas City Industrial Complex — annual manufacturer of billions of pounds of petrochemical products. And 50 years ago this past April, Texas City earned a third name, The Texas City Disaster, when a chemical fire in the harbor led to a litany of explosions and a small tidal wave — an apocalyptic event of Biblical proportions that left 4 percent of the population dead.

But Texas City, like its sister cities of Gary, Indiana and Newark, New Jersey, has many lives and many secrets: This sacrificial lamb by day is transformed at sundown into an alluring futuristic landscape teaming with activity. Driving through the Industrial Complex at night, one might wonder if this is where the Nexus 6 replicants are assembled. This fantastic skyline of glimmering lights and fiery torches has a hypnotic quality that's strangely soothing, like the moment you decide to uncover your eyes and watch a televised surgery. In between the refineries and veiled by perpetual fog, an occasional patch of green grass is a reminder that nature once lived here. The towering smoke stacks and electric transformers all blend together in a endless network of metal and monkey bars. Some manmade canals and modest attempts at landscaping along Bay Street appear as alien as palm trees on the moon. Just follow the grid-like, numbered streets (we recommend 5th Avenue for its irony) until you find the best view of this awe-inspiring twilight zone. If you park your vehicle to gaze upon the complex's glory, don't be surprised when your visited by a Rutger Hauer-like security guard, just move on...slowly.

From Houston: Take 45 south 30 miles to exit 16, FM 1764. Follow this road east to 146 south, then take 1765 east to the Texas City Industrial Complex.