The Point Almost Poked My Eye Out

My latest I'm With Stupid post on Glasstire: A look at girls of all ages in funny outfits. Beauty Knows No Pain: Images by O. Rufus Lovett and Leah DeVun at the Houston Center for Photography in Houston.

I'm With Stupid

Dear, patient, tolerant WhinyBabyLand readers:

As you may have noticed in past months, there hasn't been much to read here. I've let you down, and I'm sorry. I know that many of your lives have been darkened by sadness and pain--pain that can only be caused by the lack of solid, self-absorbed, rant.

But for those of you who were wondering if there would ever again be a place to read the maudlin musings of a frustrated faux Erma Bombeck/Fran Liebowitz/Andy Rooney/David Sedaris wannabe-type, wonder no more! I'm With Stupid is the new avatar for WhinyBabyLand!

Same great taste, Different location--Here's my maiden post on Glasstire.

Enjoy!

I was more fun when I was blogging, but whadda gonna do?

I miss writing my REAL whinybabyland shit, just because I don't have to be professional and I can be, like, all fucking snotty, and man-o-man do I miss hurling the insults. There's just not time, what with all of these bloody Glasstire reviews! Damn their oily hides. Anyway, I've got 2 new pieces on there (new to me, anyway--I think one of them's been there for a while): NeoHooDoo: Art For a Forgotten Faith @ the Menil Collection, Houston, and Mark Fox's Dust @ the Rice University Art Gallery.

Go! Read! The only excuse you could possibly have is that, if I were you, I probably wouldn't bother...

That's a Negative

Holly Andres, “Behind the Old Painting,” 2007, C-Print at Quality Pictures Contemporary Art.


Portland-based artist/photographer/writer (formerly of Houston, TX) Chas Bowie, who once brought us the totally awesome blog YOUR DAILY AWESOME is back in the blogging business. For those of us who were bummed when Bowie quit showing us cool shit (even though it was probably taxing to find something cool every single day, we can now be happy again. According to Bowie, "The goal of That's a Negative is to provide a voice of critical discourse about the medium, to examine the lineage of contemporary trends, and to attempt to make sense of the practice and theories of global photography. I am exposed to photography in Portland more than anywhere else in the world, so the site will also serve as an ongoing record of photographic activity in Portland."

He's already got some great stuff up, so check it out.

Another Wonder of the World Wide Web

OK, at the beginning of the year I said that I was taking myself off of MySpace
and Facebook because I felt too old to be doing such hoo-la-la. I mean, when one of the friends' 14 year old kid asked me to be her friend on Facebook, I felt like a big loser. But hey! What was my problem? What's wrong with having friends not simply of all races, creeds, and colors, but of all ages, too? Heck, bring it on.

So anyway, I actually did take myself off of MySpace, but it's simply not that easy to do with Facebook. I couldn't do it, anyway. But I can't seem to send off a personal message to a single person without accidentally sending it to 50 people. Oh, but there are so many joys to Facebook! Now that I'm back on it, I can piss off half the day by playing Scrabulous. And I can discover the joys of the Edinburgh-based comedy stylings of Idiots of Ants:



More importantly, I can keep up with loads of people I haven't seen or even thought about in years! One such person is Robin Jones, a guy that was going to the University of Houston when I was in the Creative Writing Program there and was teaching Comp 101 as a teaching assistant. Talented Robin was always popping up in the most unexpected places. Once he burst into my classroom, tap-dancing and singing about wanting to know about gerunds. Another night in some late '80's December, I was sitting in Cafe Express with a couple of friends, and a Santa Claus freaked me out when he made a run for me and sat on my lap. Needless to say, Mr. Claus was, in actuality, Mr. Jones.

Well, he's one of those people I hadn't seen or thought about for years. No, that's not true. Every time I've thought about gerunds, or Santa, for the past 20 years, he's the first thing that pops into my head. So now we've found each other again on Facebook, and the magic's back in my life! I thought that I was the biggest pop-culture geek on the planet, but I've found my match. Robin Jones has three pretty amazing blogs, and they all address everything from Robert Culp to Mannix. It's well-written, pretty entertaining stuff, and if you get bored with Facebook, you can always spend hours watching old TV trailers. I know I do:

Your Fiend Mr. Jones
Mr. Jones Challenges You to Cast a Fictitious Remake
You Know the Face...
He's a real find.
Even if he doesn't know what a gerund is.

It's Old. It's Weird. It's at the CAM. And on Glasstire.

Yee-haw. I've written a review on The Old, Weird America at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston on Glasstire. Y'all click on over. It's more fun than a barrel full o' angry beavers.

Patrick Phipps' "It Took The Night to Believe" @ Domy Books, Houston: May 9-June 27

A long time ago, my niece got this thing for Christmas that was something like the Visible Man anatomy model. Except this was just a visible head, kinda. It was clearly not meant for educational purposes; if you pushed a button, viscous green goo would trickle from its nose. I think all of the orifices did something of the same nature, but I remember the runny nose the best. My niece was like, "Cool!" I hadn't seen anyone get so worked up over a toy like that since a Power Ranger.

It fascinated me and weirded me out simultaneously, but, like my niece, I was like, "Cool!"

I had the same feeling when I studied Patrick Phipps' new sculptures in It Took the Night to Believe over at the Domy Bookstore. The sculptures, fashioned from plaster bandages, newspaper, masking tape, airbrush colors, acrylic paint, gesso, and model railroad landscaping supplies, have this odd fragility and a distinctly human quality. That is, if you're human and you've just been knocked around enough to require medical attention, and then, having gotten it, you had a dozen more mishaps.

It's interesting how his work has evolved from his drawings and paintings. His 2D stuff always had a rough, visceral feel; the way he let his paint drip, and his use of graphic materials and subject matter, done with such painterly flair, was done with such immediacy, you always knew you weren't far away from the artist himself.



One gets the same feeling here, but one also gets the feeling that, perhaps because they each have such a presence, that these are a band of Phipps' monstrous, misshapen, but still treasured children.

Phipps admits to having been influenced by both Franz West and Rachel Harrison, but I think there's more West here. Harrison's work has that blobbed-out look to it, but she tends, especially lately, to coat her objects with layer upon layer of paint, and I like Phipps' work more in this respect. (Keep in mind, people, that I spent a month in RachelHarrisonville, and I'm pretty sick of her stuff.) Phipps' work feels, despite its blobby misshapen quality, extremely delicate and fragile.

I hadn't seen Patrick's work for a while, and was really looking forward to seeing what he's been up to. It Took the Night to Believe came as a real surprise--like, Ewww, Cool.