Robert Boyd

Today I talked about King-Cat no. 80, a minicomic by John Porcellino. I mentioned Porcellino's small-press distro, Spit and a Half, which I recommend that you check out. I also mentioned how Porcellino visited Houston on a book tour, and I wrote about it then. I have written about his work in other posts as well. I want to recommend his books, as well. Check out The Hospital Suite, Perfect Example, Map of My Heart, and From Lone Mountain. I said it in the review and will repeat it here: John Porcellino is a great American artist.

 Robert Boyd

Today I report on Robyn O'Neil: 20 Years of Drawings by Robyn O'Neil. I got the book from O'Neil's website. It's listed at Bookshop.org, but it's back-ordered there so I don't know if you can get it through them. Best to go direct (also, that way, O'Neil gets all the money you pay for it). I recommend her podcast, Me Reading Stuff, which I've written about before.

 Robert Boyd

Today I reported on several graphic novels and comic books. I looked at Ant Colony by Michael deForge, The Show Must Go On by Roger Langridge, Martin Peters by Patrick Allaby, A Single Match by Oji Suzuki, Like a Dog by Zak Sally, Mirror Mirror edited by Blaise Larmee, Anti-Gone by Connor Willumsen, The Weightby Melissa Mendes, Finnegan's Wakeby Nicolas Mahler and James Joyce, Man Made Lake by Aidan Koch, Sufficient Lucidity by Tommi Parrish, and Pirate & Parrot by Lukas Weidinger (the last four all published bykuš!). I mentioned I had a post about Koyama Press. And I mentioned that Roger Langridge's somewhat daily strip, Hotel Fred, can be found on twitter.

 D.H. Lawrence

[Lawrence wrote this in 1924, so I think that places it in public domain. It was written in 1924 but not published until 1934 in Phoenix, a posthumous collection of Lawrence's work. I read it in the newly published anthology of Lawrence's non-fiction, The Bad Side of Books, edited by Geoff Dyer.]

At the beginning of the Christian era, voices were heard off the coasts of Greece, out to sea, on the Mediterranean, wailing: 'Pan is dead! Great Pan is dead!"

The father of fauns and nymphs, satyrs and dryads and naiads was dead, with only voices in the air to lament him. Humanity hardly noticed.

But who was he, really? Down the long lanes and overgrown ridings of history we catch odd glimpses of a lurking rustic god with a goat's white lightning in his eyes. A sort of fugitive, hidden among leaves, and laughing with the uncanny derision of one who feels himself defeated by something lesser than himself.

Am outlaw, even in the early days of the gods. A sort of Ishmael among the bushes.

Yet always his lingering title: The Great God Pan. As if he was, or had been, the greatest.

Lurking among leafy recesses, he was almost more demon than god. To be feared, not loved or approached. A man who should see Pan by daylight fell dead, as if blasted by lightning.

Yet you might dimly see him in the night, a dark body within the darkness. And then, it was a vision filling the limbs and the trunk of a man with power, as with new, strong-mounting sap. The Pan-power! You went on your way in the darkness secretly and subtly elated with blind energy, and you could cast a spell, by your mere presence, on women and on men. But particularly on women. 

In the woods and the remote places ran the children of Pan, all the nymphs and fauns of the forest and the spring and the river and the rocks. These, too, it was dangerous to see by day. The man who looked up to see the white arms of a nymph flash as she darted behind the thick wild laurels away from him followed helplessly. He was a nympholept. Fascinated by the swift limbs and the wild, fresh sides of the nymph, he followed for ever, for ever, in the endless monotony of hid desire. Unless came some wise being who could absolve him from the spell.

But the nymphs, running among the trees and curling to sleep under the bushes, made the myrtles blossom more gaily, and the spring bubble up with greater urge, and the birds splash with a strength of life. And the lithe flanks of the faun gave life to the oak-groves, the vast trees hummed with energy. And the wheat sprouted like green rain returning out of the ground, in the little fields, and the vine hung its black drops in abundance, urging a secret. 

Gradually men moved into cities. And they loved the display of people better than the display of a tree. They liked the glory they got of overpowering one another in war. And, above all, they loved the vainglory of their own words, the pomp of argument and the vanity of ideas.

So Pan became old and grey-bearded and goat-legged, and his passion was degraded with the lust of senility. His power to blast and to brighten dwindled. His nymphs became coarse and vulgar.

Till at last the old Pan died, and was turned into the devil of the Christians, The old god Pan became the Christian devil, with the cloven hoofs and horns, the tail, and the laugh of derision. Old Nick, the Old Gentleman who was responsible for all our wickedness, but especially our sensual excesses--this is all that was left of the Great God Pan.

It is strange. It is a most strange ending for a god with such a name. Pan! All! The which is everything has goat's feet and a tail! With a black face!

This really is curious.

Yet this was all that remained of Pan, except that he acquired brimstone and hell-fire, for many, many centuries. The nymphs turned into the nasty-smelling witches of a Walpurgis night, and the fauns that danced became sorcerers riding the air, or fairies no bigger than your thumb.

But Pan keeps on being reborn, in all kinds of strange shapes. There he was, at the Renaissance. And in the eighteenth century he had quite a vogue. He gave rise to an 'ism,' and there were many pantheists. Wordsworth one of the first. They worshiped Nature in her sweet-and-pure aspect, her Lucy Gray aspect.

'Oft have I heard of Lucy Gray,' the school-child began to recite on examination-day.

Lucy Gray, alas, was the form that William Wordsworth thought fit to give to the Great God Pan.

And then he crossed over to the young United States: I mean Pan did. Suddenly he gets a new name. He becomes the Oversoul, the Allness of everything. To this new Lucifer Gray of a Pan Whitman sings the famous Song of Myself. 'I am All, and All is Me.' That is: 'I am Pan, and Pan is me.'

The old goat-legged gentleman from Greece thoughtfully strokes his beard, and answers: 'All A is B, but all B is not A.' Aristotle did not live for nothing. All Walt is Pan, but all Pan is not Walt.

This, even to Whitman, is incontrovertible. So the new American pantheism collapses. 

Then the poets dress up a few fauns and nymphs, to let them run riskily--oh, would there were any risk!--in their private 'grounds.' But. alas, these tame guinea-pigs soon became boring. Change the game.

We still pretend to believe there is One mysterious Something-or-other back of Everything, ordaining all things for the good of humanity. It wasn't back of the Germans in 1914, of course, and whether it's back of the bolshevist is still a gave question. But still, it's back to us, so that's all right.

Alas, poor Pan! Is this what you've come to? Legless, hornless, faceless, even smileless, you are less than everything or anything, except a lie.

And yet here, in America, the oldest of all, old Pan is still alive. When Pan was greatest, he was not even Pan. He was nameless and unconceived, mentally. Just as a small baby new from the womb may say Mama! Dada! whereas in the womb it said nothing; so humanity, in the womb of Pan, said nought. But when humanity was born into a separate idea of itself, it said Pan.

In the days before man got too much separated off from the universe, he was Pan, along with all the rest.

As a tree still is. A strong-willed, powerful thing-in-itself, reaching up and reaching down. With a powerful will of its own it thrusts green hands and huge limbs at the light above, and sends huge legs and gripping toes down, down between the earth and rocks, to the earth's middle.

Here, on this little ranch under the Rocky Mountains, a big pine tree rises like a guardian spirit in front of the cabin where we live. Long, long ago the Indians blazed it. And the lightening, or the storm, has cut off its crest. Yet its column was always there, alive and changeless, alive and changing. The tree has its own aura of life. And in winter the snow slips off it, and in June it sprinkles down its little catkin-like pollen-tips, and it hisses in the wind, and it makes a silence within a silence. It is a great tree, under which the house was built. And the tree is still within the allness of Pan. At night, when the lamplight shines out the window, the great trunk dimly shows, in the near darkness, like an Egyptian column, supporting some powerful mystery in the overbranching darkness. By day, it is just a tree.

It is just a tree. The chipmunks skelter a little way up, the little black-and-white birds, tree-creepers, walk quick as mice on its rough perpendicular, tapping; the bluejays throng on its branches, high up, at dawn, and in the afternoon you hear the faintest rustle of many little wild doves, alighting in its upper remoteness. It is a tree, which is still Pan.

And we live beneath it, without noticing. Yet sometimes, when one suddenly looks far up and sees those wild doves there, or when one glances quickly at the inhuman-human hammering of a woodpecker, one realizes the the tree the tree is asserting itself as much as I am. It gives out life, as I give out life. Our two lives meet and cross one another, unknowingly: the tree's life penetrates my life, and my life the tree's. We cannot live near one another, without affecting one another.

The tree gathers up earth-power from the dark bowels of the earth, and a roaming sky-glitter from above. And all unto itself, which is a tree, woody, enormous, slow but unyielding with life, bristling with acquisitive energy, obscurely radiating some of its great strength.

It vibrates its presence onto my soul, and I am with Pan. I think no man could live near a pine tree and remain suave and supple and compliant. Something fierce and bristling is communicated. The piny sweetness is rousing and defiant, like turpentine, the noise of the needles is keen with æons of sharpness. In the valleys of wind from the western desert, the tree hisses and resists. It does not lean eastward at all. It resists with a vast force of resistance, from within itself, and its column is a ribbed, magnificent assertion.

I have become conscious of the tree, and of its interpenetration into my life. Long ago, the Indians must have been even more acutely conscious of it, when they blazed it to leave their mark on it.

I am conscious that it helps to change me, vitally. I am even conscious that shivers of energy cross my living plasm, from the tree, and I become a degree more like unto the tree, more bristling and turpentiney, in Pan. And the tree gets a certain shade and alertness of myself, within itself.

Of course, if I like to cut myself off, and say it is all bunk, a tree is merely so much lumber not yet sawn, then in a great measure I shall be cut off. So much depends on one's attitude. One can shut many, many doors of receptivity in oneself; or one can open many doors that are shut.

I prefer to open my doors to the coming of the tree. Its raw earth-power and its raw sky-power, its resnous rectness and resistance, its sharpness of hissing needles and relentlessness of roots, all that goes to the primitive savageness of a pine tree, goes also to the strength of man.

Give me of your power, then, oh tree! And I will give you of mine.

And this is what man must have said, more naively, less sophisticatedly, in the days when all was Pan. It is what, in a way, the aboriginal Indians still say, and still mean, intensely: especially when they dance the sacred dance, with the tree; or with the spruce twigs tied above their elbows.

Give me your power, oh tree, to help me in my life. And I will give you my power: even symbolized in a rag torn from my clothing,

This is the oldest Pan.

Or again, I say: 'Oh you, you big tree, standing so strong and swallowing juice from the earth's inner body, warmth from the sky, beware of me. Beware of me, because I am strongest. I am going to cut you down and take your life and make you into beams for my house, and into a fire. Prepare to deliver up your life to me."

Is this any less true when the lumberman glances at a pine tree, sees if it will cut good lumber, dabs a mark or number on it, and goes his way without further thought or feeling? Is he truer to life? Is it truer to life to insulate oneself entirely from the influence of the tree's life, and to walk about in an inanimate forest of standing lumber, marketable in St. Louis, Mo.? Or is it truer to life to know, with a pantheistic sensuality, that the tree has its own life, its own assertive existence, its own living relatedness to me: that my life is added to, or militated against, by the tree's life?

Which is really truer?

Which is truer, to live among the living, or to run on wheels?

And who can sit with the Indians around a big camp-fire of logs, in the mountain at night, when a man rises and turns his breast and his curiously-smiling bronze face away from the blaze, and stands voluptuously warming his thighs and buttocks and loins, his back to the fire, faintly smiling the inscrutable Pan-like smile into the dark trees surrounding, without hearing him say, in the Pan voice: 'Aha! Tree! Aha! Tree! Who has triumphed now? I drank the heart of your blood into my face and breast, and now I am drinking it into my loins and buttocks and legs, oh tree! I am drinking your heat right through me, oh tree! Fire is life, and I take your life for mine. I am drinking it up, oh tree, even into my buttocks. Aha! Tree! I am warm! I am strong! I am happy, tree, in this cold night in the mountains!'

And the old man, glancing up and seeing the flames flapping in flamy rags at the dark smoke, in the upper fire-hurry towards the stars and the dark spaces between the stars, sits stonily and inscrutably: yet one knows that he is saying: 'Go back, oh fire! Go back like honey! Go back, honey of life, to where you came from, before you were hidden in the tree. The tree climbs into the sky, and steal the honey of the sun, like bears stealing from a hollow tree-trunk. But when the tree falls and is put on to the fire, the honey flames and goes straight back to where it came from. And the smell of burning pine is as the smell of honey.'

So the old man says, with his lightless Indian eyes. But he is careful never to utter one word of the mystery. Speech is the death of Pan, who can but laugh and sound the reed flute.

Is it better, I ask you, to cross the room and turn on the heat at the radiator, glancing at the thermometer and saying: 'We're just a bit below the level, in here'?  Then go back to the newspaper.

What can a man do with his life but live it? And what does life consist in, save a vivid relatedness between the man and the living universe that surrounds him? Yet man insulates himself more and more into mechanism, and repudiates everything but the machine and the contrivance of which he himself is master, god in the machine.

Morning comes, and white ash lies in the fire hollow, and the old man looks at it broodingly.

'The fire is gone,' he says in the Pan silence, that is so full of unutterable things. 'Look! There is no more tree. We drank his warmth, and he is gone. He is way, way off in the sky, his smoke is in the blueness, with the sweet smell of a pine-wood fire, and his yellow flame is in the sun. It is morning, with the ashes of the night. There is no more tree. Tree is gone. But perhaps there is fire among the ashes, I shall blow it, and it will be alive. There is always fire, between the tree that goes and the tree that stays. One day I shall go --'

So they cook their meat, and rise, and go in silence.

 There is a big rock towering above the trees, a cliff. And silently a man glances at it. You hear him say, without speech:

''Oh, you big rock! If a man fall down from you, he dies. Don't let me fall down from you. Oh, you big pale rock, you are so still, you know lots of things. You know a lot. Help me, then, with your stillness. I go to find deer. Help me find deer.'

And the man slips aside, and secretly lays a twig, or a pebble, some little object in a niche of the rock, as a pact between him and the rock. The rock will give him some of its radiant cold stillness and enduring presence, and he makes a symbolic return, of gratitude.

Is it foolish? Would it have been better to invent a gun, to shoot his game from a great distance, so that he need not approach it with any of that living stealth and preparedness with which one live thing approaches another? Is it better to have a machine in one's hands, and so avoid the life contact; the trouble! the pains! Is it better to see the rock as a mere nothing, not worth noticing because it has no value, and you can't eat it as you can a deer?

But the old hunter steals on, in the stillness of the eternal Pan, which is so full of soundless sounds. And in his soul he is saying: 'Deer! Oh, you thin-legged deer! I am coming! Where are you, with your feet like little stones bounding down a hill? I know you. Yes, I know you. But you don't know me. You don't know where I am, and you don't know me, anyhow. But I know you. I am thinking of you. I shall get you. I've got to get you. I got to so it shall be.--I shall get you, and shoot an arrow right into you.'

I this state of abstraction, and subtle, hunter's communion with the quarry--a weird psychic connexion between hunter and hunted--the man creeps into the mountains.

And even a white man who is a born hunter must fall into this state. Gun or no gun! He projects his deepest, most primitive hunter's consciousness abroad, and finds his game, not by accident, nor even chiefly by looking for signs, but primarily by a psychic attraction, a sort of telepathy: the hunter's telepathy. The when he finds his quarry, he aims with a pure, spellbound volition. If there is no flaw in his abstracted huntsman's will, he cannot miss. Arrow or bullet, it flies like a movement of pure will, straight to the spot. And the deer, once she has let her quivering alertness be overmastered, or stilled by the hunter's subtle, hypnotic, following spell, she cannot escape.

This is Pan, the Pan-mystery, the Pan-power. What can men who sit at home in their studies, and drink hot milk, and have lamb's-wool slippers on their feet, and write anthropology, what can they possibly know about men, the men of Pan?

 Among the creatures of Pan there is an eternal struggle for life, between lives. Man, defenceless, rapacious man, has needed the qualities of every living thing, at one time or other. The hard, silent abidingness of rock, the surging resistance of a tree, the still evasion of a puma, the dogged earth-knowledge of a bear, the light alertness of the deer, the sky-prowling vision of the eagle: turn by turn man has needed the power of every living thing.  Tree, stone, or hill, river, or little stream, or waterfall, or salmon in the fall--man can by be master and complete in himself, only by assuming the living powers of each of them, as the occasion requires.

He used to make himself master by great effort of will, and sensitive, intuitive cunning, and immense labor of body.

Then he discovered the 'idea.' He found that all things were related by certain laws. The moment man learned to abstract, he began to make engines that would do the work of his body. So, instead of concentrating on his quarry, or upon the living things which made his universe, he concentrated on the engines or instruments which should intervene between him and the living universe, and give him mastery.

This was the death of the great Pan. The idea and the engine came between man and all things, like a death. The old connexion, the old Allness, was severed, and can never be ideally restored. Great Pan is dead.

Yet what do we live for, except to live? Man has lived to conquer the phenomenal universe. To a great extent he has succeeded. With all the mechanism of the human world, man is to a great extent master of all life, and of most phenomena.

And what then? Once you have conquered a thing, you have lost it. It's real relation to you collapses.

A conquered world is no good to man. He sits stupefied with boredom upon his conquest.

We need a universe to live in again, so that we can live with it. A conquered universe, a dead Pan, leaves us nothing to live with.

You have to abandon the conquest, before Pan will live again. You have to live to live, not to conquer. What's the good of conquering even the North Pole, if after the conquest you've nothing left but an inert fact? Better leave it a mystery.

It was better to be a hunter in the woods of Pan, than it is to be a clerk in a city store. The hunter hungered, labored, suffered tortures of fatigue. But at least he lived in a ceaseless living relation to his surrounding universe.

At evening, when the deer was killed, he went home to the tents, and threw down the deer-meat on the swept place before the tent of his women. And the women came out to greet him softly, with a sort of reverence, as he stood before the meat, the life-stuff. And the children looked with black-eyes at the meat, and at that wonder-being, the man, the bringer of meat.

Perhaps the children of the store-clerk look at their father with a tiny bit of the same mystery. And perhaps the clerk feels a fragment of the old glorification, when he hands his wife the paper dollars.

But about the tents the women move silently. Then when the cooking-fire dies low, the man crouches in silence and toasts meat on a stick, while the dogs lurk around like shadows and the children watch avidly. The man eats as the sun goes down. And as the glitter departs, he says: 'Lo, the sun is going, and I stay. All goes, but still I stay. Power of deer-meat is in my belly, power of sun is in my body. I am tired, but it is with power. There the small moon gives her first sharp sign. So! So! I watch her. I will give her something; she is very sharp and bright, and I do not know her power. Lo! I will give the woman something for this moon, which troubles me above the sunset, and has power. Lo! how very curved and shard she is! Lo! how she troubles me!'

Thus, always aware, always watchful, subtly poising himself in the world of Pan, among the powers of the living universe, he sustains his life and is sustained. There is no boredom, because everything is alive and active, and danger is inherent in all movement. The contact between all things is keen and wary: for wariness is also a sort of reverence, or respect. And nothing, in the world of Pan, may be taken for granted.

So the fire is extinguished, and the moon sinks, the man says to the woman: 'Oh, woman, be very soft and deep towards me, with deep silence. Oh, woman, do not speak and stir and wound me with the sharp horns of yourself. Let me come into the deep, soft places, the dark, soft place deep as between the stars. Oh, let me lose there the weariness of the day: let me come in the power of the night. Oh, do not speak to me, nor break the deep night of my silence and my power. Be softer than dust, and darker than any flower. Oh, woman, wonderful is the craft of your softness, the distance of your dark depths. Oh, open silently the deep that has no end, and do not turn the horns of the moon against me.'

This is the might of Pan, and the power of Pan.

And still, in America, among the Indians, the oldest Pan is alive. But here, also, dying fast.

[I was curious what Lawrence would have to say about Pan. Obviously I was thinking of Apocalypse by William Burroughs, which is the source for the title of this blog. But Lawrence's conception of Pan is quite different from Burroughs'. Lawrence has a lot of woo-woo pantheism here, which is weird because surely Lawrence knows that the root word "pan" means "all" and does not derive from the god Pan--although Pan is the root of the word "panic". And there is a lot of "noble savage" mythologizing here, which just seems racist. But this feeling that civilization was an error was a common trope of romanticism. You can read Wordsworth's poem "Lucy Gray"here.]

 Robert Boyd

A few days ago, I woke up before sunrise (as I always do in the winter) and looked out my window to see some of the thickest fog I've ever seen. Normally at night I see the lights of downtown Houston skyscrapers, but this night I saw almost nothing. As I watched, astonished by the gloom, I wondered if I would even be able to see the sun when it rose. I looked up the exact minute of sunrise for that morning and waited. The gloom grew lighter, but no less obscure. I looked to the east from my balcony and could see no sun. The only light I could see were some headlights from the cars below my window and the large freeway light nearest to me. Normally I can see four of them to the east. The view was inspiring, so I took out my phone and snapped a photo of it which I posted on Instagram and Facebook. The picture I posted had an Instagram filter that made it appear warmer than the raw version. 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Robert Boyd (@robertwboyd2020)

Above is the Instagram post. Here is the unfiltered photo:

After I posted this on Facebook, I was contacted by Marc Weidenbaum, a friend from the comics world, about it. He texted me:

Howdy. I was wondering, would it be OK if I use your photo for a project? I'll credit you for sure. I have this weekly music community I moderate, and each Thursday I send out a compositional prompt. I'd like to potentially use this image for one.

I responded, "The fog photo from this morning?"

Yeah, that's the one. The project I did online before launching the Disquiet Junto music community was called Insta/gr/ambient, and I gave 25 musicians one another's Instagram images and said, "This is the cover of your next single. Now record it." I think I wanna do that with this image, if that's cool. We usually get 20 to 40 participants from around the world.

 I, of course, agreed. Marc posted it on his music blog, Disquiet Junto. And many musicians and composers responded. Their music is almost exclusively electronic, most is wordless, and mostly soundscapes without melody. It is very nice music to play in the background while reading a book on a foggy day. And here is the playlist:

Weidenbaum was an editor at Pulse, the house magazine of Tower Records (remember them?). He later worked for Viz, then the largest publisher of manga in the U.S. Somewhere along the way, he became interested in electronic and ambient music. In 2014, he wrote Selected Ambient Works Volume II for Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series of books about notable record albums (in this case, Aphex Twin's album of the same title). 

I feel exceptionally proud that my early morning snapshot helped inspire this body of music. But really, the credit goes to Weidenbaum: he's the one who has built up this community who eagerly respond to his entreaties.

 Robert Boyd

Today I report on the R. Crumb Sketchbook vol. 2: Sept. 1968 - Jan. 1975. Time has forced me to reconsider Robert Crumb, who I used to esteem unreservedly. I think you'll see why I re-evaluate the man and his art in this report. I ordered this book directly from the publisher, Taschen. My go-to bookseller, Bookshop.com, doesn't have all the sketchbooks available. I only see volume 1 and volume 5 in their online store.

 by Robert Boyd

Today I report on Erik Bulatov, a book published by Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. I mention The Ransom of Russian Art by John McPhee and The Experimental Group by Matthew Jesse Jackson, which I have reviewed before.

 Robert Boyd

If you have $7.4 million to spare, you can buy this big house just down the street from Bayou Bend. I don't know who owns it now, but they have an interesting art collection.

Here's another piece of lawn art (small in the photo, just right of center). It appears to be brown and shaped like a knot.

There is art in every interior photo, but most of it is stuff I can't identify.

Any idea who created some of this art (except for the Hoods and apparent James Surls)? Please let me know in the comments below!

 Robert Boyd

This house is on the edge of River Oaks and can be yours for just four million dollars. The current owner has packed the house with art. I can't identify any of the art, although a couple of pieces might be photos by MANUAL (Ed Hill and Suzanne Bloom). 

The work over the mantle is the first piece that I thought might be a MANUAL.

I think the photo of books over the bed is by MANUAL.

 Robert Boyd

This mammoth mansion can be yours for just 20 million dollars. You can show all the art you want, and presumably if you could afford this manse, you could afford any art you want. And the current owners have an art collection, but I couldn't recognize any of the pieces.

The figure on the right hanging upside down by his feet is striking, but I have no idea who it was by.

Another image of the hanging man sculpture.

Can you readers identify any of this art? Please respond below!

 Robert Boyd

Back in the 70s, cartoonist Shary Flenniken drew a raunchy comic strip about two 13-year-old girls for the National Lampoon magazine. (She drewthis comic from 1972 to 1991.) These strips are kind of a precursor to the animated TV show Big Mouth. It was definitely groundbreaking work. For some reason, Flenniken never collected these strips into a book until now. In her excellent introduction to this new edition, Emily Flake wrote. "What Flenniken understands and brings gleefully to the page is that adolescent girlhood is positively feral and that teenage girls are both threatened and threats themselves." The book is called Trots and Bonnie and was published by New York Review Comics. 

In 1991, I was an employee of Fantagraphics Books, publisher of The Comics Journal. Fantagraphics was located in Seattle, which is where Flenniken is from. Flenniken was married to Bruce Jay Paskow (a member of the folk revivalist band The Washington Squares) and the pair had moved back to Flenniken's family home in Seattle. That's when I got to know her, and we arranged for me to conduct an interview with her. It was published in The Comics Journal issue 146 which came out in November 1991. I was not a great interviewer, but Shary was a great interview subject.

Much of the discussion of the strip has been about its raunchiness and overt sexuality, but one thing not mentioned often is Flenniken's debt to older American comic strips. In the interview, she tells about cartoonist Dan O’Neill's exercises that he had his disciples (who in addition to Flenniken included Bobby London and Ted Richards) do. He would have them draw strips in the styles of early American comic strips. The idea was for them to lose their ego about having a "style". And all of these artists took this comics art education into their published work, including Flenniken. Trots and Bonnie recalls the drawing style of H.T. Webster (1885-1952), who drew The Timid Soul, The Thrill That Comes Once in a Lifetime, Life's Darkest Moment and other slice-of-life strips. Aside from the brilliance of Trots and Bonnie, I always loved that Flenniken consciously evoked the beautiful history of comics. 

I highly recommend this book. 

 Robert Boyd

When I was a mere lad in college taking art history courses, I took a class called "Art Since the 40s". It was the early 80s and postwar art in the art history classes at the time referred mostly to American and some European art. And even that is broader than what was actually taught--there were all kinds of tendencies, styles, movements, and individual artists who didn't make the cut for some reason. And in my class, taught by the great Picabia scholar William Camfield, their were some movements that merited at most a slide or two before the main currents were rejoined. 

One of these movements was Chicago Imagism, which popped up one day in class with slides of art by Jim Nutt and Karl Wirsum. I sat up and took note. I ended up doing a paper on the Hairy Who, one of the Chicago Imagist sub-groups that included both Nutt and Wirsum. There wasn't much written about them at that time (now there are several excellent monographs and books on the period), so I scoured the Rice art library for mentions and reviews. In retrospect, I see how unambitious I was--all of those artists were still alive in the early 80s. I could have called information in Chicago and gotten their phone numbers. It would have been a much better paper if I had talked to the artists themselves. But I was a 20-year-old whippersnapper and that didn't even occur to me.

Karl Wirsum died on Thursday, May 6. I wanted to show a few great images by Wirsum as a tribute to this wonderful, eccentric artist.

 

 

Karl Wirsum, two pages from The Hairy Who Sideshow, 1967

Karl Wirsum, Screamin Jay Hawkins from Hairy Who (cat-a-log), 1969

Karl Wirsum, Measle Mouse Quarantined from His Fans, 1980

poster for a Wirsum exhibit in 1967

 Robert Boyd

Today I report on Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe. The Sacklers are the family that own Purdue Pharma, the company whose aggressive marketing of their highly addictive narcotic painkiller OxyContin caused the opioid epidemic that swept the U.S.A. over the past three decades. The book details the incredible connection to the arts that the Sacklers have long had and how their family fortune is almost totally based on peddling addictive prescription drugs (Valium, Librium and OxyContin). Photographer Nan Goldin, who was addicted at one point to OxyContin, makes a big appearance in the book.

 Robert Boyd

47 Grand Regency Circle is a mansion in the Woodlands, a planned community north of Houston. It can be yours for just $6,495,000. The art in the photos is not particular interesting as art, but it is interesting to see what a wealthy oil zillionaire chooses to decorate his house with.

This painting is the most interesting piece of art shown in the photos. It has an regionalist feel, similar to Thomas Hart Benton. With its oil field roughneck subject matter, it reminds one of Texas regionalist artists like Jerry Bywaters and Alexandre Hogue. I can't identify the painter by looking at it, but I do wonder if it is contemporary pastiche of regionalism. Can any of my readers identify it?

One can almost make out the signature on this one, but I can't read it.

I'm assuming that the photo in the center is of the couple who owns this house. It feels a little self-absorbed, but if I were a late 18th/early 19th century English lord, I would love to have a portrait of myself by Gainsborough, Reynolds or Romney. I was intrigued by the Van Gogh self-portrait to the right. It can't be an original--is it a framed poster? A painted duplicate?

Another photo portrait decorates the bathroom.

It's hard to see, but there is a sexy photo of the lady of the house (I assume) that wouldn't be out of place on the walls of a dude's college dorm.

I did like the way this black wall in the breakfast room was designed to be written on. The portrait of the woman's face is interesting.

 Robert Boyd

When this house was listed, it created a lot of interest on Facebook. People who live near Rice University have long been curious about this house, which I've always privately referred to as the Death Star.

So now, we have an opportunity to see this monstrosity from the inside. And you can buy it for just $4.3 million. Not surprisingly, there is interesting artwork inside, although I could identify none of them.

The first piece is this enormous stone face. Here are a few more views of it.

The interiors are pretty low color. And most of the art seems subdued and grey, mostly abstract.

There you have it--all the artworks I could see in the photos shown on the listing on HAR.com. None of these seem familiar, although the giant head reminds a little of Jaume Plensa, the Spanish sculptor who has pieces at Rice University and at Buffalo Bayou Park. 

Do you, dear readers, have any idea who created this artwork.

One last image--the back yard. It looks less Death Star than suburban office park.

 Robert Boyd

Today I look at several books from my personal library. I looked at several books: The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander, The Alterations by Kingsley Amis,  Foundation, Second Foundation andFoundation and Empireby Isaac Asimov, Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme by Tracy Daugherty, Forty Stories by Donald Barthelme, Oil Notes by Rick Bass, Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, The New Confessions by William Boyd,  The Gay Place by Billy Lee Brammer and Leaving the Gay Place by Tracy Daugherty. 

Whew! That's a lot. I hope you enjoy them.

 Robert Boyd

Today I talked about Goethe's Faust: Part One, translated by poet Randall Jarrell. I've read a bunch of translations of Faust over the years, starting with the Walter Kaufmann translation, then the version in The Essential Goethe, and the Fausttranslated by Philip Wayne, which are briefly discussed in this video. Also mentioned are the drawings and prints of Faust by Eugène Delacroix, music based on Goethe's poetry by Gounod, Mendelssohn, and Schubert (also mentioning Houston painter Earl Staley's designs for Gounod's opera Faust.) I'm hoping YouTube will let me keep the video up given that I used copyrighted music in it--we'll see, I guess!

 Robert Boyd

Today I looked at some books on one of my bookshelves. I looked at And Still the Earth by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, Apocalypse by William S. Burroughs and Keith Haring, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino, Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It by Geoff Dyer, To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer, The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art by Rüdiger Safranski, Born to be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery, Goyen: Autobiographical Essays, Notebooks, Evocations, Interviews by William Goyen, and Devil to Pay in the Backlands by João Guimarães Rosa.

 Robert Boyd

It's been a long time since I wrote about The Big Show,Lawndale Art Center's annual open-call juried exhibit. Writing about it used to be a annual tradition, but I've fallen off the past few years (and the exhibit was cancelled last year for COVID reasons). I went through the show without the list of artists--I wanted to respond to the pieces without responding to the names of who produced them. I want to admit something that should be obvious, but I am unable to be objective when I know who the artists are. Especially if they are my friends. Only one of the pieces I liked I could instantly recognize as being by a friend of mine, which undoubtedly affected how I viewed it. I didn't look at the names of the artists until after I looked at the pieces.

The juror was Cecilia Fajardo-Hill. She went further than most jurors have in the past by trying to break up what inevitably is a cacophony of voices into a kind of taxonomy of genres and approaches. The categories were abstractions, deferments, embodiments, identities, landscapes, materialities, nature, and resistance. I admit I wasn't paying close attention to these categories as I walked through--perhaps when I go see it again, I will. Some are obvious enough, but I'm not sure about what Fajardo-Hill means by deferments, embodiments, or materialities. 

One thing I noticed was the presence of several large drawings, including one by Joachim West.

 

This is one of those pieces where close-ups on some of the details are called for.

 

 

West doesn't give the viewer anything to focus on--every square inch seems no more or less important than any other square inch. He's like a figurative Jackson Pollack.

The same can't be said about Vincent Fink, whose amazingly detailed has a clear focal point.

 

This M.C. Escher-like drawing would go great with a bong hit in the dorm room if I was 40 years younger. But as an old guy who hasn't been in a dorm in a long, long time, I was impressed by the level of detail and the complex, curvilinear perspective.

 

This piece by Colleen Maynardpretty much requires close examination. 

 

I am reminded of how scientists before the invention of photography had to be pretty good artists. They had to draw what they were observing in nature. In a way, the camera helped pull art and science apart.

Unlike Fajardo-Hill, I'm not going to try to classify what I'm looking at (except to point out these three incredible drawings above). Here's the rest of what I liked on my first pass. (I suspect that will change when I go see the exhibit again.)

 

This sculpture group by Angela Corson is exactly what it looks like--panties. I suspect the artist dipped them in porcelain slip and then fired them. I assume that the process of firing them burned away all the silk and cotton, leaving only porcelain in the end, but I don't know enough about firing porcelain to speak with confidence. The handprint on the panties on the left is super-creepy. 

 

Do all the artists use their legal names when they sign their work? I initially suspected that Bismark Alejandro Rex was a nom du pinceau. But he exists in the internet under that name, so what do I know? Whether this is his real name or not, I enjoyed his jaunty Mexican-flavored abstraction.

 

At every Big Show, there are always artworks constructed out of material that one could buy at Home Depot or Lowes. Those places are like the art supply store for a certain group of artists, like Chet Urban. I think this grid of brads and tarp will make some think about the landscape of Houston post-storm. Houses with holes in them covered in blue tarps--it's the world we live it.

 Cressandra Thibodeaux, Pills and Courage, 2021, digital C print on paper

Cressandra Thibodeux runs 14 Pews and is probably best known as a documentary filmmaker. I believe the subject of these two photos is her mom, and if so, she is a good sport. The pill-bottle curlers is a witty reuse of this cylindrical shape so familiar to everyone who has ever gotten prescription drugs. I've often wondered why pill bottles are always transparent orange.

Deasa 

When I first saw this, I thought it might be by John Runnels, as he has frequently done pieces made out of cigarette butts. 

Deasa Turner, Smoke & Mirrors, 2019,cigarette and cigar butts, found objects, vintage animophic ashtrays, and vintage mirrors on wood panels (detail)

Deasa Turner, Smoke & Mirrors, 2019,cigarette and cigar butts, found objects, vintage animophic ashtrays, and vintage mirrors on wood panels (detail)

But the artist is Deasa Turner, one of many artists in the Big Show whom I have never heard of. That's what I like about the Big Show every year--there are always a lot of artists with whom I am unfamiliar--it reminds me that there are artworlds here in the Houston area that I have never seen.

The red tips on the cigarettes make me think of lipstick stains, and the vintage ashtrays have a feeling of noir--like a femme fatale meeting a private dick at the Formosa Cafe in Hollywood. 

 

One thing that is constant in the Big Show is that some artists take the opportunity to honor their heroes. I'll never forget teenager Avril Fagout's life-size sculpture of the Black Veil Brides from the 2013 Big Show. (I winder what she's up to now...) Romeo C. Robinson, not being 15 years old like Fagout was, picks a somewhat more grownup hero to honor--James Baldwin.

 

I don't know who Eddie Filer, Jr., is depicting in this triple-portrait, but I'm going to guess it may be Eddie Filer senior. It does seem to be an homage to a man who, for Filer, is the voice of reason--someone who calmly discusses with you whatever is troubling you.

 

What attracted me at first to Hallie Gluk's photo was the intense color and baroque composition. The title, Atemsia, suggest the baroque associations may be intentional, if Gluk is refering to Artemisia Gentileschi, the Italian baroque painter who has finally been rediscovered by the hitherto extremely sexist art historical establishment. 

 

These two pieces are by someone named Josh Alan. Seeing them, I wonder if they are by the Josh Alan who was a guitarist living in Dallas, whom I once saw years ago at the Mucky Duck here in town. I suppose he could moved closer to Houston in the intervening years. Although his brother, Drew Friedman, is a well-known illustrator, I've never known Alan to do visual art. But as I looked for his website, I see that this Josh Alan is not the guitarist. Their identical names are just a coincidence.

 

These long flat landscapes by Karen Hilyer, with vanishing points created by furrows in the fields, attracted me as I walked past. I almost missed them because they are so small (perhaps that is a result of them being pinhole photos). Just to give you an idea of the scale, I tool a photo of them next to other pieces.

 

Kira Jane Porter's painting is another highly antic abstraction (a lot of abstractions in this Big Show). I like how the mark-making seems like a pastiche of comic book styles without quoting any images that I can tell.

 

I wonder with Orna Feinstein's piece if the shape already existed and she added the colored threads after. It looks as if the rounded part is the top of a screw that is colorfully being screwed into the rectangular portion.

 

I liked Roslyn M. Dupre's piece mostly because of the shovel handles used as the base. A handsome piece.

 

This piece by S.G. Starr seemed quite slick (which might in part be due to the shiny coat of resin on it), but its poster-like presence caught my eye. I liked how the half-tone in the central ribbon image was so visible compared to the rest of the image.

 

I like seeing a rough-hewn assemblage in the Big Show. The tradition of Wallace Berman and George Herms lives on! Looking at Tra' Slaughter's webpage, it seems that he has done a few assemblages like this over the past year, although more of his work is two dimensional work.

This just scratches the surface of what's at the Big Show. I am so glad to see that it has returned.

 Robert Boyd

Over the past year, during the COVID restrictions and COVID-related unemployment, I've lived in books. In August of 2020, depressed at being cut off from the world, I started recording some thoughts about the books I was reading. Right from the start, I felt awkward doing it. I'm not a smooth talker--I'm not telegenic--I didn't organize my thoughts well. I didn't take advantage of the incredible power that PowerDirector for Dell (the editing software I use) put at my fingertips. I could have easily edited out every awkward phrase, every stumble, every um, but I was too lazy to do it.

The reason I'm thinking about this now is that I have stumbled across a book channel on YouTube that does everything right in my opinion. I've found several YouTube book channels, and for one reason or another, they are all mostly unsatisfactory--often because of the books that the hosts seems to love. But all of them are sleeker and more "professional", for lack of a better word, than my Book Reports.

But I've found one book channel that satisfies me on every level--in the depth of its analysis, the books being discussed, and the presentation. The title of the channel isBetter Than Foodand the host is Clifford Lee Sargent. I think when it started he was living in Portland, Oregon, but has moved around since then to Los Angeles and, I think, Austin, Texas. But from the point of view of his listeners, he's always in a room filled with books.

Why do I feel Robert Boyd's Book Report is worse than Better Than Food? His presentation of each book is clear--he has a thesis. And he gets to the thesis by digging deep into the book. And his delivery is quite good, but you can tell it's not seamless--he has edited the shit out out of his reviews. There are lots of random edits where I think it is obvious he cut out some bit of awkwardness or a place where he misspoke. Years ago, when I lived in Hollywood, I hired an actor to do a voiceover for a video I produced to promote the comics line I was editing. We went to the recording studio on Hollywood Blvd., and this guy--an ordinary-looking schlub with a TV newscaster voice read the voice-over I wrote. But he didn't read in straight through--he would make mistakes and start sentences over on the spot. Listening to him, you knew he knew that his voiceover would be edited to create a smooth, seamless delivery. 

I think Sargent works in a similar way, which I should emulate. If what I'm saying isn't perfectly expressed, I should just stop and say it again better. Then edit out the awkward bit before I upload it.

Sargent also has the advantage of being good looking and somewhat stylish. Well, I can't do much about my looks, but I can strive to present myself better on camera.

Anyway, here is Sargent talking about one of my favorite books from the last few years, Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas.