T Kerschen

Writer, editor, proofreader, and curator.

United States Minor Outlying Islands

Houston based re-visionary. Trying to regain my office complexion after ten years on the road.

Portfolio
Houston Press
Editorial clips, Music events

Each of the clips below was originally published as an editorial recommendation in the calendar of the Houston Press. When they make the inevitable Hot Tub Time Machine reboot that sends the gang back to the beginning of the 21st century, a time of big dreams and total bangers, you can bet there'll be at least one montage to DMX's "Ruff Ryders Anthem."

Houston Press
Editorial clips, Art events

Each of the clips below originally appeared as an editorial recommendation in the arts calendar of the Houston Press. The Dream Colony: A Life in Art by Walter Hopps, reading and book signing at The Menil Collection Anything about the legendary art curator Walter Hopps is worth reading, but his long awaited memoir, The Dream Colony: A Life in Art, finished posthumously by Anne Doran, takes first position for art reads this year, particularly for Houstonians.

Houston Press
Editorial clips, Film events

Each of the clips below originally appeared as an editorial recommendation in the calendar of the Houston Press. Before director Tim Burton became lost in the beautiful abyss that is Johnny Depp's brown eyes, he came out swinging and connecting with his first two directorial features, Pee Wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice.

Houston Press
Editorial clips, Literary events

Each of the clips below originally appeared as an editorial recommendation in the calendar of the Houston Press. Someone, somewhere described Olivia Clare's fiction as Carver-esque, meaning, presumably, domestic, spare and emotionally resonant. But that's not it entirely.

Houston Press
09/14/2017
CAMH's Telepathic Improvisations Spotlights Legacy of Pauline Oliveros

Telepathic Improvisation, the title of this show at the Contemporary Arts Museum, the first U.S. solo exhibition by the collaborative artist team of Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, takes its name from a score in Pauline Oliveros' collection of Sonic Meditations.

Houston Press
05/23/2017
2017 Summer Music Guide

Kendrick Lamar's July 15 show with H-Town's own Travis Scott at Toyota Center may be Houston's single hottest concert of the summer. But don't stop there... If the brain-beating, mind-hammering heat of summer could build anything, we might all live in palaces and never again leave the house.

Houston Press
11/07/2017
Domokos + Ciriza: Double Action Reversible

The first show in Civic TV's new, new Northside digs, "Double Action Reversible" is the most mysterious best-bet on the table for Houston's fall arts calendar. Purportedly, this is the kind of collaboration (hence the 'Double' in the title) in which both artists are pulling out the stops.

Houston Press
08/30/2017
Hot Trash: Houston 2

What I am excited about is Houston 2. That's my name for it, at any rate, and I allude to it incessantly. With all the heavy weather we get, combined with the lack of infrastructure, of long-range planning and base-level attention to detail and conscientiousness, disasters like this flood and continuous crises like the instances of flooding before this are inevitable, however hard to imagine on a sunny day. But Houston 2 awaits us, never closer than right now. All these artists polluting real...

Houston Press
11/10/2017
Jodorowsky's Dune

For a fairly straightforward piece of sci-fi, essentially an orientalist fantasy ala Lawrence of Arabia, minus about 80% of that epic's fun, Frank Herbert's Dune has attracted some of cinema's least straightforward, most visually exciting storytellers. David Lynch's Dune almost, almost makes sense if you've already read the original novel, nonetheless it is a dull, piece of b-movie stodge...

Houston Press
11/10/2017
Night of the Living Dead

In memoriam of director George Romero, who died this week, the Alamo Drafthouse presents this special screening of the world's all-time best zombie movie, for the special low cost of a five-dollar food and drink voucher.

Houston Press
04/10/2017
Hot Trash: More Please

The guy at the window says, What do you want? The monk says, One with everything. Summer's coming up. Like so many people who came of age with CDs, I am a sucker for quantity. I like to look into the dull animal eyes of the future and whisper the words of Leonard Cohen: "Whatever you give me, I seem to need so much more."

Houston Press
11/07/2017
Dahlia Elsayed: Flag Days

As the exhibition title "Flag Days" suggests, Apama Mackey Gallery presents an exhibition of conceptual flags by New Jersey based artist Dahlia Elsayed. Lest that scare you off, the images radiate warmth and good humor.

Houston Press
04/12/2017
Bama Lama Bama Loo: An Interview With Soul Clap's Jonathan Toubin

If you were to ask a metaphysical sketch artist for a draft of the general coordinates of the area of psychic activity overlapping Genesis P-Orridge, Archie Bell, Kid Congo Powers and Gibby Haynes, the result would bear an uncanny resemblance to Jonathan Toubin's hair.

Houston Press
05/30/2017
Hot Trash: Waggle Dance

A few weeks ago I came home to discover a hallway in my home filled with bees; some living, some dead. Being the most Texan Texan you'll ever meet, my first thought was to kill them all. I keep a quiet home, and I keep it in a state of lockdown.

Houston Press
11/07/2017
I Love the 90s

Here's something that'll make you go, hmmm. Big waves that broke in the late 80s and early 90s still wallop our little sandbar of time. This tour is for moms and dads feeling the "Vapors," aunties dropping like it's hot to "Scrubs," and creepy party uncles shouting "OPP."

Houston Press
03/15/2017
Hot Trash: Irish Troubles

Bar managers know what Oscar Wilde's alter ego, Algernon Moncrieff, meant when he said, "If one plays good music, people don't listen and if one plays bad music people don't talk." Bad music is good for bar business. Just try to find an empty barstool on March 17.

Houston Press
11/10/2017
Beginning Line Dance

You might dream of dancing with a star, and you might have a hunch that you're a shoe-in for the job, and, yes, it might be that easy; all you need to do is bring along a star.

Houston Press
10/26/2016
Flight of the Conchords in the Woodlands

Flight of the Conchords, Demetri Martin Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion October 25, 2016 To recap, since this show was full of recaps, the Flight of the Conchords had a running gag about Houston's neighborhoods, wherein they roll-called Sugar Land, The Woodlands, Montrose, the Museum District, even Galveston, going back to...

Houston Press
09/28/2016
Dylan Cameron LP release

Dylan Cameron's brand-new LP Infinite Floor may help you help yourself. The good news is in about Special K, which may be the future of depression treatments (taken in trustworthy company), and Cameron's wobbly ear candy is tailor-made for the rabbit hole.

12XU
SNOOTY GARBAGEMEN - s/t LP (12XU 075-1)









“And it weren’t enough one of ‘em pick up a harpsicord, and another a drum or a psaltery or penny whistle, but then they insist on shining ‘em up to start a tune. Cats, caterwaul, howler monkeys, howl, but none so dire as this. 

To the music of harps, lutes, gitterns, they danced and played at dice both day and night. And ate also…though the dustbins be up-ended and their contents piled half to Babylon, this up-reaching company ever lingers about the pub hearth, crowing and plopping...

Houston Press
11/10/2017
Ak'chamel

With Lovecraftian song titles like "The Skull Spat Upon the Maiden's Hand" and "Hearts Melt In Horror," and with the umber tones and cloaked, antlered skull of the cover art, Ak'chamel's new cassette Death Chants might give you cause to expect something heavy and neo-Wagnerian, something like Swans or Sleep, but these local tricksters are more slippery than that, more attuned to sublime...

Houston Press
07/29/2016
Future Blondes, Almost Human

It would be difficult to describe Future Blondes to the kind of ordinary human you often find standing in line at the food truck, vaping. There's a lot of space for common feeling in the glint of the Blondes' sigil, but everyday language isn't there yet. Once, while boarding a...

Houston Press
09/30/2016
Cock ESP

If you think about music in Freudian terms, and you probably shouldn't, most bands express the superego, entirely bound up by rules and restraints, with a little ego thrown in for relief. Cock ESP, however, would appear to be the opposite of music in any terms. Their antic performances resemble nothing so much as the copulative throes of a juiced-up pataphysical id, slapstick and anarchic, as...

Houston Press
09/16/2016
Freak Radar

The freak radar is actually just a crummy low-res screen housed within an average looking blue-gray box. What makes it special is that, in a fit of inspiration, it has been decorated with a 'Hello My Name Is' sticker upon which someone has ingeniously written 'freak radar' in...

Houston Press
08/12/2016
Finally, Summer

Call it the mind-destroyer, Sol Invictus, the great enervator, or the fiery hand of stifled dreams, but by any name it rages on and we cower in the shadows.

Houston Press
07/15/2016
Dancing Machines

Sooner or later we must come to accept that George W Bush is a born dancer as well as a painter. The former president is a Cancer, astrologically speaking, and Cancers are drawn to the arts. It's not uncommon to find bundled artistic talents within Cancers, although often at the...

Houston Press
06/24/2016
Pank Everything

PANK EVERYTHING Blame the mild spring and slow summer, or whatever it is that sets these souls a-reeling, but there does seem to be an awful lot of people who are desperately eager to hurtle a century and a half backward in time. Just think about those Texan secessionists forever...

Houston Press
06/10/2016
International Noise Conference: Houston Edition

Don't let the name fool you: there won't be any PowerPoint, perhaps there will be no laptops at all in evidence tonight at Notsuoh. Die Slow presents the Houston edition of the rambling International...

Houston Press
06/08/2016
Houston's Best Places to See Free Music This Summer

AFTER THE BOOM, THE BUST Here, in post-boom Houston, we're still waiting for the other shoe to fall, but odds are it's a good time to start tucking away small bills. We can't help you with your repossessed large-screen TVs or the interest rates on your super-truck, not in this...

Houston Press
06/03/2016
Concerning Soundalikes, Lookalikes and Certain Unlikable People

HOT TRASH: Soundalikes At a dinner party for a friend's birthday recently, we frittered away the latter part of the night listening to a playlist of New Order soundalikes, the same tracks they've been playing at local nightclubs these past 30 years. Perhaps it's from a lifetime of buying off-brands...

Houston Press
07/23/2016
FreshDark Fest

FreshDark may be a little festival on the make, well-sited in one of the comfiest yards in Houston, but you can still call it a star-studded event. First, because both L.A. New Age R&B crooners J*Davey and our own homegrown psychedelic rockers Space Villains* have seen fit to decorate their own names with an asterisk; and second, because this party is so heavy with groovy local talent...

Houston Press
05/06/2016
Eat Human Flesh

EAT HUMAN FLESH Unless extraterrestrials start podcasting live on 97.9 the Boxx or Jandek makes an album with Terence Trent D'Arby, Mark Flood's Gratest Hits exhibition at the CAMH is the most significant music-related event in Houston this year by a long shot. It hardly matters what you think of...

Houston Press
04/20/2016
Cosmic Slop

ON TUNING UP "You will not be able to gather much if the piano is out of tune and has broken strings" - attributed to Rudolph Steiner When I buy a Tibetan singing bowl as a gift for a friend on the occasion of their wedding, or winning a spelling...

Houston Press
04/01/2016
Animal Data: An Interview with Distant Worker

If you haven't yet heard Distant Worker, fret not, we'll fix that shortly. These beatnik dub-punks work from an esoteric playbook, favoring auspice over practice, and they're 66 percent not from around here anyway. Jen and Richard Kimball, both formerly of the Fiskadoro group, live in Greater Angleton and offer...

Houston Press
03/25/2016
Gym Life

I visit the gym a few times a year, more out of a perversity of spirit than out of an abiding interest in keeping my incipient dad bod in check. From time to time the gym pipes in what my fellow silverbacks and I refer to as good music; I've...

Houston Press
05/13/2016
Maria Chavez at CAMH

Maria Chavez returns to her hometown to scratch a few new suggestions of what is possible into the stainless steel cladding of the CAMH and the crumbling architecture of our own brains with her upcoming lecture and performance, Revisiting Those Words: Failed Attempt as Material.

Houston Press
03/04/2016
Field Recordings From The Abyss

Maybe Alfie was only too quick to call it when he said, "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each, I do not think that they will sing to me" in T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I don't always make enough time for world music,...

Houston Press
02/25/2016
A Dilettante's Guide to Bad Ass Weekend IV

Bad Ass Weekend is a crash-course in time-machining; a hot fling with bands that weren't made by and for the Internet - dealers of rough, jaw-grinding music, more fitted to action-packed rooms than lonely laptop speakers. There's a lot of Killed By Death punk, a lot of crust, sludge, thrash,...

Houston Press
02/15/2016
Acts We'd Like to See at Free Press Summer Fest 2016

Hard to believe it's already that time again, but the blind presale for Free Press Summer Fest 2016 goes live at 10 a.m. tomorrow. After the initial weirdness and ultimate success of last year's flooding-induced relocation to NRG Park's Yellow Lot, the festival has indeed announced that it will be...

Houston Press
02/12/2016
Music For Dolphins

"Nothing says holidays like a cheese log" - Ellen Degeneres Music For Dolphins, feat. Dave Dove and Jason Jackson Galveston Artist Residency, February 13, 6 p.m. Most of the shows I attend consist of a lot of waiting around for things to happen. Imagine how dolphins feel, out in the...

Houston Press
05/13/2016
Skullflower at Bad Ass Weekend IV

Don't plan on getting any work done on your face or starting that master cleanse from February 25 to -28: That's when Bad Ass Weekend IV slouches into our dear Babylon.

Houston Press
01/14/2016
Cleveland Rocks

DISPIRITED CORPSE Let me begin with a digression that is neither hot nor trashy. I used to be in a band that began our show with this sample from the Toxic Avenger: "You said you were going to take me to the David Bowie concert, he's not David Bowie." Heroes...

Free Press Houston
11/12/2015
Indian Jewelry and Prince Rama: Tex talks to the sisters

By Tex Kerschen I'm not much for feelgoodery, but Prince Rama keep getting better and better. The two sisters, Taraka and Nimai Larson, sell crazy like it's closing a run on Vegas. They have a knack for being really funny (and on purpose too) while maintaining their enthusiasm and as well as an incredible amount of sincerity.

Houstonpress
09/08/2010
Lower Dens

Short preview in advance of Lower Dens second appearance in Houston.

Martin Zet: Saluto Romano
2008
Muscling Out

Short essay on perfection for Martin Zet: Saluto Romano art book.

Stationmuseum
2003
Dick Wray

Short essay accompanying exhibition of Dick Wray's paintings at the Station Museum.

Houstonpress
05/05/2010
Growing

Short preview in advance of a concert by the New York band, Growing, in Houston.

Houstonpress
12/16/2009
Damaged

Short introduction and interview with artist and musician Jon Read.

Ineri Publishing
2000
Dirt Paintings

Essay accompanying Jim Hatchett's "Dirt Paintings" exhibition at the Artcar Museum