all events, sporting venues and cultural institutions suspend public activities and performances until Monday

drowning plastic fish, Helen Altman

So HPD shuts down cultural events, who cares? Not Doomsday, that's for sure. Looks like all those openings cancelled recently will be bottling up the front end of October, I hope people are up for Wednesday openings and dodging debris.

Britt from the Chron is on fire- here's the Third Ward art update from Rick Lowe, Alex Wukman compiles your FEMA aid process for the Free Press, Food Not Bombs is up and running (and you should help them!), everyone should shut up about Hirst (it's old news- go look at FAILE and Banksy), the Galveston Arts Center was thrashed and Helen Altman's work destroyed, Booker-Lowe Gallery in the Heights is throwing a daytime opening (copping their neighbors DBHB?) cum fundraiser/ donation drop-off Sunday.

Good grief, I'm in Austin for a UT game. This is gonna suck. UT kinda takes the cake here in ATX; I have not seen such homogeny in T-shirt logos since Shell sent all their employees to volunteer for Katrina relief. It's like the Longhorns take the place of baseball here, not rooting for one team but the whole idea of the national pastime. The devil-horn salute familiar to metalheads the world over is a patriotic symbol, seen on everything from presidents to, well, presidents. Cody Ledvina is opening his show at Domy here in Austin tonight- r u goin?

Caudy Ledvinu, speller extrerdinaire and ankle-pants fanatic

WHAT THE HELL

Country Fried Home Videos (my brother Chris' toes), Jacob Calle

What The Hell 2

Speaking of Calle, I'd love to bring up his stupid shit as being apropo today. What the Hell should be the name of our city right now. Instead it's the title of his unfinished film. In the course of running Scavenger Hunts that push the boundaries of taste (light yourself on fire, make out with a stranger) and curating outsider shows in warehouses that burn down (contrary to rumor, I didn't burn anything down) Calle has set himself up as a Rob Pruitt (after his comeback) for Houston.

One man sweeping a mountain of broken glass

In the course of the next month you can expect taggers to blow up in Galveston and the city's insterstitial spaces. Performance work will get more and more violent. Painters will develop a taste for darkness and pain. Alcoholism will be rampant. New transplants to the city will be faced with a shuttered gallery system- some institutions may even go under in the short term. If we can just get back to openings and articles we could be alright, but I do not see polite chit-chat in my future.

Drowning doesn't require water, just effort.

We know you, bear.

It was Jacob Calle!

For Immediate Release

Museum District on Caroline Street



Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Reopens Thursday, September 18, with Free Admission through Sunday, September 21


Main campus buildings, including the MFAH film auditorium, shop, and Cafe Express, all accessible to visitors

Glassell Studio School classes resume Thursday, September 18; Junior School resumes Monday, September 22; MFAH house museums reopen next week


Houston, September 17, 2008 – The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will reopen to the public Thursday, September 18. Admission will be free for Thursday through Sunday, September 21.

Both gallery buildings on the museum’s main campus, at Bissonnet and Main, including the museum’s Brown Auditorium Theater, shop, and its Cafe Express restaurant, will be available to visitors. In addition, screenings for the museum’s film program, including the films of Italian director Pupi Avati – hosted by Avati in a special appearance – and two screenings of The Black List: Volume One, will proceed as scheduled along with Avati films canceled last weekend because of the hurricane. A host of family programs will also be presented throughout the weekend. Regular museum operating hours will be in place, with the exception of Thursday, September 18, when the museum closes at 5 p.m. rather than 9 p.m.

Glassell School of Art day and evening classes resume Thursday, September 18; the Junior School resumes Monday, September 22. The MFAH house museums, Rienzi and Bayou Bend, will reopen next week; Rienzi on Wednesday, September 24, and Bayou Bend, slated for Friday, September 26, pending clean-up of the gardens and grounds.

shellshock.

Delcambre, Louisiana


High Island, Texas


Bolivar Peninsula, Texas

Galveston, Texas

notes.

via National Geographic

Britt from the chron sez that it looks like Houston art institutions survived the storm with minimal damage, but the city is on hold as Houston cleans up. A half million people have had power restored in the area, and downed power lines are slowly being cleared. I'm glad that the Orange Show survived.

U of Houston students are volunteering with the City of Houston distributing supplies at 3443 Blodgett Street on the TSU campus – two blocks west, off Scott Street.

Neighbors are banding together to clear large trees in Eastwood; gas shortages are being inappropriately exaggerated by CNN according to one midtown resident; it seems like the debris will take months to clean up but that won't stop people from returning to work and school- which is apparently beginning already as the streets are no longer empty of vehicles.



In Austin, a Galveston blogger was rooted out of a shelter where she was writing appaling statements about the conditions of the evacuees treatment at the hands of authorities. According to a local Austinite the shelters are operating smoothly, and that the blogger took the space that a truly needy person could have occupied.



I hope that y'all are well.

Two.

I'm in Austin. Missed the Gallery Lombari opening last night. Went to a house party instead.

Houston, I love ya. Go Texans. Chapultapec is open y'all.

One.

kroY weN

Jim Pirtle in New York!


Hi Jim.


story on Glasstire: CLICK HERE

For those of us growing up or living in Montrose and the Heights, notsuoH was, and continues to be, an institution. My friends and I often found ourselves there well into the morning, playing chess with a handful of tattooed strangers and, after enough coffee, a few playwrights. The space belonged to painter and performance artist Jim Pirtle, and was nestled in a vintage 1893 three-story walk-up, in what was then a quiet, untouched and rail-free stretch of Main Street in downtown Houston. The space itself was an ever-changing mind-fuck of found objects—beer bottles, bikes, ancient magazines, Christmas lights, a sea of wooden coat hangers—and hundreds of other things which, when seen together, appeared more like garage sale items than peripheral décor.

"It's a graveyard of sorts," says Macias, who quit his job and sold his car for the opportunity to come up with Pirtle. "Here, nothing is what it seems, nothing is arbitrary and nothing is accidental."

Hurricane Ike Turner

Seen on the news--- BEARS!

The Silver Fox in Houston

Excuse me, but weren't you shining my shoes?

Anderson Cooper is standing down the street from Kim Son in Downtown. He said that there is a bar still open down the street. Betcha it's The Flying Saucer. Ya know, I could see 11 high-rise construction sites from the 7th floor at Kirby and Richmond yesterday- I'd be worried about that shit. Kemah's under water!

Here's some Rua Minx.

Roughly 27 Percent.

DUAL installation at AWarfare

I've been thinking about everyday objects as projectiles. Shrapnel is not that different from a pile of broken glass from a television screen. At 110 miles per hour a lawn chair is an eight-cornered metal-frame sail. Freeway signs could twist south with the center of the storm, whipping around, being sucked into my neighbor's house. The gigantic, jagged L would whine and wheeze. The paranoia and angst of waiting for a natural disaster is not very different from waiting to be be deployed, someone told me.

I walked around the block in Lindale Park. There were about 65 houses and maybe 18 1/2 were boarded up in anticipation of the Eisenhower Administration. One guy only gets a half point 'cause he forgot the whole front of his house. The humidity is sick.

A garden hose in someone's yard looked perfectly capable of flying in a 20-foot arc in the air and smashing the ranch house's lace curtained front window. At the shady club down Fulton they were unloading plywood, even though the windows had been boarded up and painted the same color as the building years ago. I might bring a shopping cart across the street into my garage. Just so it doesn't bash through my garage door at 3 in the morning, with a loud bash not piercing the metal, but opening the room to the rain and tree debris. The eye will be here at 7 am. I'm listening to Hungry Eyes.

Natalie Dee