Your Daily Awesome

The State Fair of Texas starts this weekend, and no matter what it is you’re doing, it’s not as interesting as the Fair. As you might guess, it’s an impossibly enormous event, where you could walk for miles without covering the same territory twice. Besides the perennial record-breaking livestock shows and trade showrooms (imagine multiple airplane hangars of electric knife demonstations and jacuzzi displays), you’d see jewelry booths selling custom-made bling specific to the major gangs of Dallas/Fort Worth, “mammy” dolls in the craft fair, women in Liederhosen yodeling “Yellow Rose of Texas,” an mechanized bible that turns its own pages, the world’s smallest horse (it’s pretty tiny), the world’s biggest shark (it’s pretty huge), Jerry Jeff Walker, roving Gang Patrols, and the spot where the corndog was invented.

This year, the Fair unveils Fried Coke, described as such: “smooth spheres of Coca-Cola-flavored batter are deep fried, drizzled with pure Coke fountain syrup, topped with whipped cream, cinnamon sugar and a cherry.

Every year this woman shows up to sculpt enormous statues out of butter, which are shown on a revolving platform in a chilled, windowed room. After the Fair, the sculptures are melted down. The last one I saw was a life-size rendition of Roy Rogers and Trigger.

I’m only 30 years old, but when I was a kid they had actual freak shows, with the amazing handpainted signage and everything. I remember the fat man, the sword swallower, and the elastic lady. It cost extra to see the really freaky stuff.

There’s a chicken there that will tell your fortune. And another one who will play tic-tac-toe with you (and probably win).

Thorrific has taken the best (if meanest) photos of the Fair I’ve ever seen, but his fancy website won’t allow me to grab the jpegs. (Just navigate to the Photos section.) His site will probably make you never want to step foot in Texas, but that would just be your loss. Where else is a dancing chicken tell you if you’re going to get rich or not?

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You know those big vinyl banners that museums hang outside to promote their exhibitions? Turns out you can buy them. The question, though, is who, exactly, is going to be impressed by a huge (and expensive) plastic sheet advertising The Mysteries of Egypt grommeted to your living room wall?

(OK, that Bill Viola one looks pretty awesome.)

Gibtown is a long-fabled but very real community of roughly 7,000 people just south of Tampa, FL, famous for being the country’s premier retirement destination for circus performers and freak show acts. Roadside America describes Gibtown as “home to Percilla the Monkey girl, the Anatomical Wonder, and the late Lobster Boy, who was murdered. The Siamese twin Hilton sisters ran a fruit stand here. It’s got the only post office with a counter for midgets. Aside from the agreeable winter climate, Gibsonton offered unique circus zoning laws that allowed residents to keep elephants and circus trailers on their front lawns.”

Joe Richman visited and came back with this beautiful recording: gibtown.mp3

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All I know is that this video apparently aired on public access television in Schenectady, NY. If you know anything else about it, please let me know.

Welcome to the “Flat Daddy” and “Flat Mommy” phenomenon, in which life-size cutouts of deployed service members are given by the Maine National Guard to spouses, children, and relatives back home. The Flat Daddies ride in cars, sit at the dinner table, visit the dentist, and even are brought to confession, according to their significant others on the home front.
“I prop him up in a chair, or sometimes put him on the couch and cover him up with a blanket,” said Kay Judkins of Caribou, whose husband, Jim, is a minesweeper mechanic in Afghanistan. “The cat will curl up on the blanket, and it looks kind of weird. I’ve tricked several people by that. They think he’s home again.”
At the request of relatives, about 200 Flat Daddy and Flat Mommy photos have been enlarged and printed at the state National Guard headquarters in Augusta. The families cut out the photos, which show the Guard members from the waist up, and glue them to a $2 piece of foam board.
“He goes everywhere with me. Every day he comes to work with me,” said Judkins, who works in a dentist’s office. “I just bought a new table from the Amish community, and he sits at the head of the table. Yes, he does.”
In the car, her husband’s image sits behind the driver’s seat so Judkins can keep an eye on him. A third-grade class writes to him as their “adopted” guardsman. And Judkins even brought her husband’s cutout—which she calls Slim Jim, because he’s not—to confession at the local church.
When asked what her husband had to confess, Judkins laughed. “That’s private,” she said.

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They say Spain is pretty though I’ve never been
Well Daniel says it’s the best place that he’s ever seen
Oh and he should know, he’s been there enough
Lord I miss Daniel, oh I miss him so much

Daniel

(This really works best if you look out the window and see rain.)

David Byrne recently spent some time in Marfa, TX with a slew of TX musicians like Joe Ely, Terry Allen, and Guy Clark. Marfa is one of my favorite spots on the American map (top 3, easy), and David Byrne is one of my favorite living artists (top 5), so this confluence of favorites fills my body with inspiration and longing. Byrne writes about Marfa here (part 1) and here (part 2).

Inhuman, post-human or spiritually transcendent? I sense the utopian ambitions of the 50s and 60s here, paired with a spiritual yearning and Protestant need for control. No sloppy hippie shit here. Libation and self-denial, simultaneously. Push and pull. A bundle of contradictions if you ask me, but fascinating.

People from distant parts are moving here. The “Pizza Foundation” restaurant (a pun of the various art foundations in town) is staffed by RISD graduates. Collectors pass through, there are dinners and drinks and late nights. MoMA runs a film program here (they’re thinking of moving to a drive-in to be built on Barry Tubb’s property.) Visiting artists — some invited by the art foundations — stay for a while and create editions and strange new works. The ranchers welcome the influx of cash, but it’s a bizarre coexistence. The real estate prices have rocketed up — especially for the charming and elegantly proportioned old buildings and houses that remain. The prices may be low by Houston or NY standards, but they’re becoming prohibitively high for locals.

Photograph of Marfa by Allison V. Smith.

Imagine that you are able to move like this man for a day. It seems close to flying.

Outdoor Sculpture, 2000

On Boosterism
Promoting all things arty swamps reality with phony art-crap. Right in the place where a real art scene would be.

On Vibrancy in the Art World
It used to be that every time I heard ‘vibrant community,’ I thought of vibrators. I like to read the literature that art organizations publish about themselves, so I used to think about vibrators a lot. Sadly, I recently learned that when the mission statement, or the proposal, or the crop dusting report says ‘vibrant,’ it actually means ‘vigorous, full of life.’ Huh? ‘Vibrant community.’ Buzzwords exist to obliterate reality, so what’s getting obliterated here? Could it be that the art community is not ‘vigorous, full of life?’

It’s the same with prostitutes. That’s what somebody told me. You ask a prostitute if he or she ‘has anything’ and they’ll always say ‘No.’ They’ll yank the bent, borrowed U-100 needle out of the webbing between their first and second toes, spit a little blood, cough a few times, blink their crusty eyes, and say ‘No. No way. I’m clean. I’m clean, baby.’

‘Whores lie!’ my friend Reed used to exclaim. ‘Whores lie!’ They say whatever they need to say to get what they want. Can you imagine a prostitute, or even just an out-of-control sex addict, answering that question ‘Gee, who knows? I’m such a slut and I never use protection. Is that a problem?’ Its no easier to imagine a funding proposal that says ‘We’re part of an alienated, mediocre art scene, crawling with scabby posers and itchy wanna-bes. We tested positive for Acquired Academic Schlock Syndrome and it’s likely we have grant-fever. We probably got it from using a toilet seat right after some curatorial peckerwood!’

On Art Fairs:
For those who don’t know, art fairs are the way of the art world these days. They are as inevitable as kissing the anuses of those more powerful than you, and just as enjoyable. Like the whole world, they make a lot of sense when looked at from the point of view of the very wealthy, because art fairs, like the whole world, are entirely set-up to service the very wealthy.

Then you can enjoy watching a bunch of clueless tourists, blind art professionals, manipulative collectors and gutless dealers walk around feeling important, dissing each other, and equating the state of their personal financial health with the state of Art Today. In the best case scenario, they haggle over your work the way old peasant women at a street market in Caracas might haggle over a particularly attractive gourd. That’s called being a big hit at the art fair.

On Press Releases
‘We will enforce a Zero Tolerance policy for art that is not politically correct, for art that does not need a label or an art professional droning on and on about what it means… and especially for any art that is sensually pleasant without a tedious, rational excuse.”

On Grants
I tried getting money from the Non-creative Arts Council of Houston. Applying for a NACHO grant is as degrading as pathological fraternity hazing. They ordered me to supply the names of all my representatives in the U.S. Congress. Wow. That’s just the kind of information that free-wheeling creative spirits, barely surviving on the margins of society, have at their fingertips. Right next to my perpetually updated resumes, my digital photo studio and my state-of-the-art computer system.

On Systems
This was on Richmond Avenue and, as we all know, Richmond is one of the special ‘boondoggle streets’ created by Houston’s charter. That means that every 3-5 years, however functional or necessary the road may be, it gets scraped away, right down to the earth’s core, and is then slowly, but carelessly, brought back into being by a tremendous expenditure of labor, resources and taxpayers’ dollars. Sometimes they widen it a little, take out a kink there, add one here, but it’s really what I would call ‘process art.’ It’s about the process of making sure the right people and the right companies make lots of money.

Flood’s column, Objects in the Mirror, appears every week on Glasstire.

This is Not a Magazine has always been a beautiful and interesting site, but they’ve outdone themselves with their current cacophony of strobing .gif mayhem.

No, that’s the name of it. Click here to check out its 85 features. (I covet the 300-foot laser pointer and golf divet repair tool.)

Corn Mo and I lived in the same town in the mid-90s, and he remains one of my favorite songwriters and performers. Here’s “Busey Boy.”

gallery (contains drugs, sex, etc.)