This is an essay about learning Photoshop. I have to learn it for a class. I am in graduate school, see. I still have a hard time believing this. I’m in this multimedia experimental MA program in Specialized Journalism The Arts at the University of Southern California. I’ll tell y’all more about tall this later. So, [...]
1988 was a rotten time to be a teenager. During the Reagan-Bush era, you had to put in a lot of work to hear something other than Bon Jovi. There was no internet, and the indie revolution in film and music and fashion and new media was still years away. A girl interested in [...]
Hey y’all. This morning, I went to an intro to meditation workshop held at Shambhala Center Los Angeles. I woke up early to go! To a meditation workshop! it felt vaguely like I was going to church except the Shambhala Center is in a sort of Zen late midcentury low-slung combination office residential compound in [...]
That’s Wolverton! They’re a San Antonio art-rock band made up of Caralyn Snyder (vocals), Kate Terrell (vocals, keyboards), Jeremiah Teutsch (vocals, electric bass, fiddle, banjo), Hills Snyder (vocals, guitar). If you follow that first link, you’ll get to hear their music, which I like a lot. It’s got a durable alt-rock-folk-country top hand and is excellently [...]
There’s been a grave interruption in my tour reporting, I realize. Rigoberto Gonzalez Facebooked me thusly the other day: WTF? (I’m paraphrasing). Here’s what happened: from January through May, I amassed more than eight hours of video footage, about that many hours of audio field recordings, including interviews and some highly trippy bits of RGV AM [...]
Basketball season brings out the aggrieved San Antonian in me. I am a Spurs fan, of course. Not a basketball enthusiast, necessarily, but a Spurs fan. This is a congenital condition. It’s brought on not just because San Antonio has no other major league sporting teams to diffuse our ardor, but because San Antonio is [...]
Hello, and thank you for joining me for this, the inaugural blog post for the Chupacabrona Tour. (For some background info on the tour’s mission and plans, you can read this post if you want — in recap, I wanted to travel around South and West Texas and document art making in places with [...]
Did you go to this thing? Houston’s Art Ball — aka Disaster Ball, a fundraiser for this here publication, it was. I went all the way from San Antonio. I was impressed by the breadth and inventiveness of the costumes, the tipsy friendliness of the crowd, and the funky hauteur of the Colombe D’Or. There [...]
Justin Boyd’s Window Works installation at Artpace is called “Natural Black, Sprinkled With Cosmic Iridescence.” This title struck me as maybe unnecessarily long when I first heard it, but after “seeing” the installation several times and talking to Justin Boyd about it, it’s won me over. Because not only does ”Natural Black, Sprinkled With [...]
This is Guillermina “Gisha” Zabala, an artist and filmmaker from Argentina who makes her home in San Antonio with her Uruguayan husband Enrique Lopetegui, music editor of the San Antonio Current, and their daughter Shanti. You can watch an excerpt of her San Antonio Artist Foundation Award-winning film, F-Watch, here. “I, Me, Light,” Zabala’s [...]
Hi again, Glasstire readers! This is what I think y’all look like: And also like this: Hello to you all. This December, I embark on The Chupacabrona World Tour (of South and West Texas). Over the course of five months, I aim to make ten two- and three-day trips from SATX to urban centers [...]
So, the Texas Contemporary Art Fair is over. (Which gives me an excuse to post the above image. This particular Rachel Hecker piece is impactful and funny in-person, too.) So I’m still processing everything I saw, PLUS I’m recovering from a bout of dog-days writer’s block, which I blame on 9/11, heatstroke and having watched [...]
Look, these are all gonna be iPhone photos. I’m sorry about that. Soon as I can, I plan to purchase a real camera, but meanwhile, this is what I’ve got to work with. Also, I’m posting this as fast as I can because it’s timely. Part 2 will come this evening, as I have to [...]
Aaron Forland, San Antonio visual artist, SA’s unofficial DIY/underground/punk rock historian and creator of the “Keep San Antonio Lame” meme, has been and continues to extol the paradoxical and decorate the prosaic. Some of my favorite “undocumented” works by Forland, the clandestine installation of small but potent abstract works affixed to the doors on [...]
Who am I kidding with the asterixes? Anyway, several months ago I began to write a review about San Antonio Draws, a “night of a thousand stars” variety show at the McNay Art Museum. Then I stopped writing it for reasons that are completely emotional and not rational at all. I’ll tell you why at [...]
EXTRA FALL RECOMMENDATIONS! If I had my druthers, the climate of Central-South Texas would chill the fuck out starting September 1st. We’d all wear long sleeves and closed-toe shoes, and brrrr cheerfully from under our wool hat brims, our noses tingled by keen breezes a-glitter with wintry promise as the foliage turns (not-literally) to flame… [...]
Hills Snyder, artist, Glasstire contributor, and director of small non-profit gallery Sala Diaz, made a short speech at the City of San Antonio Office of Cultural Affairs (OCA) City Council Appointed Cultural Arts Board (CAB) * meeting on Saturday. The speech was occasioned by criticism of a production this Spring of Terrence McNally’s play Corpus [...]
This is Tapanga Jansen, a San Antonio video and social networking artist. I’m a big fan of her idiosyncratic, deliberately lo-fi, subversively sophisticated short videos, as well as her penchant for speaking in all LOLCats-style pidgin. Here’s the first video of Tapanga’s I saw, “Where’s Lori?” (2010) As you can see, Tapanga [...]
I’ve been in a hopeless mood today, semi-flattened by a multiple sucker-punch of sad and horrifying news — massacre in Norway, the continuing fiasco of waste, loss and futility in Afghanistan, the budget talk breakdown and brinksmanship, a train disaster in China, the shocking failure of the genuinely talented Amy Winehouse to find her way [...]
Performance art. Performance art made by an avowed and politically-engaged feminist. A feminist who is a new mom to a 5 month old daughter. Who (the new mom) went to U. Penn, and completed a residency in Scandinavia last year. Performance art about gender/frontera issues, sex work and South Texas sexual colonialism. With guitar and [...]
