Buy My Stuff
Zines and Books make Excellent Gifts
I keep hoping to make a little money from this newsletter, but I give it away for free. It’s almost as if I didn’t spend two years getting and MBA, right? But one way to make some long green is to sell stuff. I have the various zines I’ve produced for sale online.
Goodbye to Hollywood was created for Zine Fest Houston this year and was a premium for Patron subscribers. In it, I talk about the terrible 1967 that Twentieth Century Fox, the rise of New Hollywood, Roger Corman as the training ground for young directors and actors, and my own tenure working for Corman.
Finding Forrest Bess contains all my writing about hermetic Texas artist Forrest Bess, including a review of the very comprehensive solo exhibit at the Menil Museum in 2013 (although it wasn’t complete. People discover previously lost Forrest Bess paintings all the time.) and an expedation to try to find the remains Forrest Bess’s shack in the swampy land of East Matagorda Bay (which Houston newspaper columnist described as “surely the lonliest spot in Texas”).
Money contains a selection of essays having to do with the intesection of money and art, including a previously unpublished essay about the Phoenix Commotion, which builds eccentric houses from recycled materials for artists and single mothers in Huntsville, TX. (The house on the cover is a Phoenix Commotion creation.)
The idea behind Exu was to produce a Houston-based art magazine, big enough that the poster-size pages would give the artworks reproduced the space to really shine. The cover is by Ike Morgan, and it includes art by Trenton Doyle Hancock, Emily Peacock, Sarah Welch, Mack White, JooYoung Choi, Debra Barerra, Nathaniel Donnett, and several others, as well as writing by Sig Byrd, John Nova Lomax and Pete Gershon. Alas, there was no issue two. You can have this unique item for just $3 (plus shipping and handling).
But the perfect Christmas present is a book, which is why I have an online bookstore through Bookshop.org. You buy the books, and I get a little bit of what you pay. Bookshop.org is all about helping independent booksellers, including me!
This is one of my favorite books. Borges is mainly known for his short stories, and all of them can fit in one book. I started reading Borges when I was in college and had a summer job working on a boat. I fell in love. I’ve read and reread these stories many times. You should too.
Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas by Fernando Flores is also a book of short stories, mainly about punk rock bands in the Rio Grande Valley. These stories are so good that I read the whole book in one sitting.
Robyn O’Neil: 20 Years of Drawings. Weirdly enough, as I type this, I’m listening to Robyn O’Neil’s podcast, Me Reading Stuff. O’Neil is based in Washington State, but I still think of her as a Texas artists. Her drawings are intriguing and strange, and this book does a great job of reproducing a bunch of them.
Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment by Boris Groys is a short book about a single work of art. It’s a clever work of criticism about a delightful work of art. Groys was an early critic of the conceptual art movement in Moscow towards the end of the Soviet Union and is one of my favorite critics. And Ilya Kabakov is a great, witty artist.
These are just a few of the books in my online bookstore. I hope you will consider browsing through it (and buying a book or two).
[Please consider supporting my work by becoming a patron.]