The Lamentable End of Domy

Robert Boyd



A rumor had been going around that when Domy closed at its current location that it would be moving into the location of Space around the corner. Space had been evicted (and is moving across the street), so it seemed reasonable to believe that Domy would be moving into the smaller space while the Brandon art gallery opened in Domy's old location. However, yesterday Domy officially announced that instead it would be permanently closing.

Alright folks, in case you haven't heard by now, Domy Books - Houston will be closing our doors this month. The owner, Dan Fergus, made a small statement regarding it:

"We would like to thank everyone who has supported Domy over the years. Please join us for our going away party on Sunday , July 7th 6-8pm. Everything in the store will be on clearance from July 7-July 14"

So there you go. All of us at Domy throughout our seven years would like to thank you for your patronage and support. Come out on Sunday, July 7th and give us a good send off and a hot slap on the ass. Food, drinks, music, and tons of cheap stuff. And yes, things are already being marked down so if you wanna get a jump on things pop on by.

And many thanks to everyone who did time behind the counters in both locations these years: Russell, Seth, Patrick, Nick, Lane, Lisa, Bucky, John, Stewart, Sam, Matt, Brandon, Whitney, Ariana, Ali, Travis, Mikaylah...i know i'm missing some Austin folk.

But you get the idea. You all helped make Domy what it is/was. Thanks.

Now come buy some books!!! I can't take them all home!

This announcement on Facebook caused wails of dismay in the comments section. As well it should. The problem with Domy closing is not just that an interesting bookstore is going away, but that there is no substitute for it locally. When an art gallery in Houston closes, I feel bad for them but I know I'll still be able to see art in Houston. But what Domy sold was unique--no other store in Houston carries this stuff. 



In Chicago, you have Quimby's. In Portland you have Reading Frenzy and CounterMedia. In Los Angeles you have Family. Austin has Farewell Books, Austin Books & Comics and Guzu Gallery. Domy had a wide variety of art comics, some zines, an unusual and interesting selection of art books (including a lot of street art and lowbrow art), a bunch of "psychotronic" videos, an oddball selection of other books and lots of toys.


If Domy had a problem, it was that it stocked goods in its various interests shallowly. Its merchandise was a bit scattered. I think it would have been better to have one or two specialties and a super-deep selection of each. (Personally I could have lived without the toys, but I know lots of people loved them.)



And occasionally the "toys" are pretty amazing, like this hot pink bust of Ho Chi Minh.



I was at Domy yesterday and bought a lot of books, including Nobrow 8. Without Domy, where will I find books like this? Nowhere in Houston, it seems.



So I am selfishly mourning the demise of Domy because a book store which carries a lot of books I like is going away. Now I can probably find what I'm looking for online or in other city's good bookstores when I travel. So for me, the closing of Domy is a sad event. But for Houston, it's a tragedy. It removes the one place in Houston where someone can stumble across a copy of Nobrow serendipitously. Maybe the days of finding something obscure in a bookstore or record store or wherever is an archaic experience, obviated by the coming of the internet. But I don't believe it. Until you see a copy of Nobrow and flip through it, how will you know this might appeal to you? In other words, finding these kinds of things by accident in a funky old store off the beaten track can expand your mind. Especially if you're young.

When I was 16 and got my driver's license (in 1979), my buddies and I started coming to The River Oaks Theater, which at the time was a repertory theater--a new double feature every night. Initially, we were going to see rock and roll movies like The Kids Are Alright or Yessongs. But eventually we started discovering weird movies that we had never heard of there. Likewise, we started haunting the Half Price Books & Records on Waugh, buying records just because they had cool covers. I mention this because these places were part of my cultural education--they opened my eyes to new ways of reading and seeing and listening. And I would be amazed if Domy hadn't had the same effect on many a young person, seeking something without exactly knowing what it was they sought until they found it at Domy.

And now it's gone and there's nothing to replace it in Houston. You can still buy art books at the Menil and MFAH bookstores, and Kaboom! and Brazos Bookstores are fine places to get a book. But if you want to buy (or even just browse) zines or art comics or lowbrow art books or any number of other things, Domy was your only choice.

So they are closing with a big sale. You should head down there and pick their bones. (I already walked off with $160 worth of sale books yesterday...) Here are a few recommendations.



Jack Survives by Jerry Moriarty. Much of this was originally published in RAW. It's utterly brilliant work by a painter who never sells his paintings.



The Nancy Book by Joe Brainard. Joe Brainard was a writer/artist/proto-zinester back in the 60s and 70s. He was obsessed with Nancy and did a lot of Nancy-related artwork, collected here in this great book.



This pretty book about Dan Clowes, the great alternative cartoonist currently having a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, is well worth having. (But you would probably be better off buying some of his actual comics, which Domy also had when I was there.)



This is my favorite collection of comics by Ron Regé, one of the best art comics guys to come out the Boston scene centered around Highwater Books.



Goodbye Domy. It was great while it lasted. Is there another nutcase out there willing to risk everything on a funky alternative bookstore? If so, you have one customer--me--waiting for you to open your doors.

A Tree Grows at the Brazos

by Robert Boyd

Brazos Bookstore used to be my favorite bookstore. Its selection was uniformly excellent. It had the best selection of art books in town. (Now I'd give that honor to the MFAH bookstore.) And they had for a while an exhibition space, Brazos Projects, that had some amazing shows. My favorite was the Joe Brainard show in 2005. But in 2006, owner Karl Killian was hired by the Menil. Rather than let the Brazos go, some moneyed customers bought it from Killian. The problem, in my view, was that what made the Brazos Bookstore a great bookstore was Killian himself. An independent bookstore is in some ways a curatorial project, and Killian was a great curator. The present owners are not.

This is not to suggest that the Brazos Bookstore isn't a fine bookstore. It is. But it's been a long time since I felt real excitement walking in there. But I felt some of that old excitement today.



Samuel Wukusick, "string tree", wood and string, 2011

The front part of the store was partially cleared away and this sculpture had been installed. The artist is Samuel Wukusick, about whom I know little. His website indicates that he is primarily a painter and has been in a couple of group shows in Houston since moving here from Ohio.



Samuel Wukusick, "string tree", wood and string, 2011

I don't even know if "string tree" is even the real title--that's just what the cashier called it. It's apt, though. The piece is clearly meant to be an abstraction of a Christmas tree. I like the upside down "string tree" that is inside the right-side up one. The shapes seem conical when you look at them at first, but then you notice that the base of each "cone" is an octagon. (Maybe Wukusick is a fan of ultimate fighting.)

As an installation, what I like about it is that inhabits the space without preventing the space from doing what it is supposed to do. Usually when you see art in a commercial, non-gallery setting, it feels tacked on, like it doesn't really belong. The paintings you see at certain restaurants and coffee-shops, for example. I don't find these to be venues conducive to looking at art, but I think the reason I feel this way is that the art rarely works in concert with its environment. With Wukusick's tree, it did.

I hope this is the start of a trend for the Brazos Bookstore. I understand that this was a seasonal decoration, but it also was an installation handled with real sensitivity. If they could do it this time, I see no reason why they couldn't accomplish the same feat again.

Poems & Pictures at the Museum of Printing History

Poems & Pictures: A Renaissance in the Art of the Book (1946-1981) at the Museum of Printing History is probably the best exhibit you have never heard of going on right now. The Museum of Printing History is a low key (but wonderful) institution--indeed, unless you are specifically looking for it, you are very unlikely to stumble across it accidentally. Make an effort to find it for this show, though.

I made that effort on Friday for the opening. When I showed up, there were so few cars in the parking lot and so few people inside that I thought I had missed the opening. But no, here it was.



This is what the exhibit consists of--lots of cabinets displaying magazines and books. These are books that were the result of collaborations between artists and poets (and poet/artists). They range from quite elaborate productions--"printing orgies" (as someone once described Raw)--to mimeographed 'zines. Generally speaking, the curator has chosen work where the poet and artist worked in collaboration, although there are some cases where the poem preceded the art. Obviously this made me think of comics, but very few of these items are comics or even comics-like. Still, many feature an interweaving of text and image to a degree that recalls comics.

A lot of these pieces are printed with letterpress. If you come across letterpress printing today, it's likely to be on a wedding invitation. In the art/poetry/small press world, it is a sign of quality, a kind of old-fashioned hand-made printing job one occasionally sees in chapbooks or small press poetry books. And a lot of the books and magazines in this exhibit are printed on letterpress. But as one of the publishers included, poet Tom Raworth, was quoted in the catalog, "I mean, letterpress wasn't particular and arty, particularly in those days, it was just another way of printing." Raworth was speaking of the 1960s, and the impression one gets from the catalog was that there were a lot of old letterpresses around--some over a hundred years old--that one could pick up cheap in junk shops. So while there is an art to letterpress (and certainly a skill), these publishers were using it for much the same reason that 'zinesters of the 80s and 90s used photocopiers, and why I write a blog on Blogger--it's an economical way to communicate with a small number of like-minded individuals.

So you see in this exhibit extreme rarities like Wallace Berman's Semina 2.


Wallace Berman, Semina 2, letterpress handmade magazine

Berman was one of the Ferus artists. In his one and only Ferus show, an illustration he had drawn for Semina was declared obscene by the ultra-reactionary L.A. police. This experienced soured him on working with commercial galleries for life, and also made him very wary of printing up loads of copies of Semina. He only printed enough to give to sympathetic souls. He didn't want a bookstore or art gallery to be busted because of his work ever again. And having loads of people see it was not important to Berman. He was one of those people who is very rare today--an artist who cares not a jot for fame or success or even praise. He was a shamanic character, and only needed to communicate with a select few who were on his wavelength.

This indifference to large print-runs and fame is something pretty common among the poet/artist/publishers here. Not necessarily because they were all like Berman--but they chose a life of poetry and of working in a small-press environment. It is inherently a life and medium for a select few. So if the work was produced on something like a mimeograph, that was OK.

I think when comics fans think about the evolution of minicomics, the small-print-run art-comics that are almost always handmade items, we think about 'zines. And 'zines have a well-established history. But when I think of some of the elaborate comics produced by Fort Thunder and other art-comics publishers, and when I think about their approach to comics as an art, it feels a lot closer to Wallace Berman and Joe Brainard and the teams of Alastair Johnson and Frances Butler or Bill Berkson and Philip Guston than to any zinester.

Of course, Brainard was really into comics, and he roped his friends--basically a bunch of poets who came to New York from Tulsa, OK (weirdly enough)--into doing comics with him. Brainard's big obsession was Nancy (see The Nancy Book for the results of his obsession). His friends played along.


Ron Padgett, Nonsense appropriation of Nancy by Ernie Bushmiller

Brainard published two full-on comics, with contributions from John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, and others.


Joe Brainard, page from C Comics #2, mimeograph, 1966


Joe Brainard, page from C Comics #2, mimeograph, 1966

There are several avant garde experiments with comics that were published in the 60s and 70s, far outside the mainstream of comics (and even outside the world of underground comics). Martin Vaughn-James, Jess (whose illustration work is represented in this show), and Brainard of course. Probably others as well. I really wish some publisher with an eye towards the art history of comics would bring these back into print.

This all barely touches on the riches here. I plan to revisit the show and soak it in some more. It's a little much to absorb in one trip. The curator, Kyle Schlesinger, has a highly personal take on all this. He is one of those poet/publishers. His small press is called Cuneiform Press--indeed, he has one of those 100+ year old letterpresses. (But perhaps the oddest thing about him is that he is a professor at the University of Houston-Victoria. You never know what kind of talent is hiding away in our more obscure universities and colleges.)