The Best of Pan, 2023

This is the time of year when magazines, newspapers, bloggers, podcasters, etc., publish their best-of-the-year lists. This has been a strange year for me—my enthusiasm for The Great God Pan Is Dead was less than in previous years. This was partly due to the death of my mother in May. This is demonstrated by the number of posts I wrote each month.

I kind of fell off the Earth in November.

Top post for 2023: John Nova Lomax

By far the most read post was my tribute to Houston writer John Nova Lomax. Lomax was a writer deeply involved in uncovering forgotten Houston. I got to know of his when he published a series of first-person travelogues called “The Sole of Houston” in which he and his wingman, David Beebe, would take epic walks along some of Houston’s least inviting stroads. They were fascinating. When I wrote that post, Lomax had just gone into hospice care. Lomax died a couple of weeks later.

Michael Dougan, “Opportunity Jones”

#2. In memoriam Michael Dougan

You people are morbid! The top two posts are about people who died in 2023. Dougan was an excellent cartoonist whom I got to know when I lived in Seattle in the early 90s.

Robyn O’Neil, Hell, 2011, graphite and collage on paper

#3. Art in 2022

Art in 2022 was a post pretty similar to this one. It was a list of some of my favorite art exhibits from that year, such as this mammoth Robyn O’Neil piece from a show at Inman Gallery.

still from video posted by “petersigma”. This is a Vurgil Grotfeldt painting from CSAW

#4. CSAW Revisited

Commerce Street Artist Warehouse was an important site in the recent history of art in Houston. (Whenever I type a sentence like that, it feels weird; the idea that fucking Houston has an “art history”.) I’ve written about it many times, including long interviews with some of the founders, Wes Hicks and Kevin Cunningham. This most recent post was an excuse to show a video taken back when Deborah Moore was there, and we see a young Jim Pirtle and Perry Webb (before he became Mark Flood).