Letter

I’ve had lots of coffeeshops in my life but Wormhole’s a little different. The main thing is I’ve never been a regular. The shop opened in 2010, six years after I’d left Wicker Park. But when I came back to the neighborhood I’d come in for a pour-over.

I was living in Heart of Chicago, then Beverly in those years. Working at a coffeeshop myself part of that time. Not unlike now, with bookstores, or during my hack days with driving, the impulse to go to a coffeeshop just wasn’t front of mind. Like getting off work, then going to work.

That neighborhood too was a real bummer. Long past the hip old artsy days and even the new up-and-coming chic enclave, Wicker Park in the 2010s had settled into a grim commerce center vibe. Typically, I’d keep my head down except when inside Myopic Books or the Rainbo Club. Wasn’t much on Milwaukee Avenue left for me. Still, a good cup of coffee is a good cup of coffee.

I’d mostly forgotten about Wormhole by the time I took on the Sunday night shift at Rainbo in 2023. Katherine was one of the regulars and after we got to talking I’d come see her at Wormhole before my shift sometimes. Then I brought my box of gouache and made a painting. Now it hangs to the left of the register.

I returned and made others.

But I feel like a bit of an interloper. I don’t know a single regular; just the staff. They greet me warmly and give me coffee on the house but I don’t know a single regular. A coffeeshop is a place to meet people but I’ve never met anyone at Wormhole.

The tables are typically filled by very serious-looking young people completely concentrating on laptops, tablets, smartphones, books, and journals. Some are clearly studying or working together. There’s often a line stretching to the door. The drinks they make here take time.

Since quitting my bar shift, I rarely find myself in Wicker Park. But a couple weeks ago I popped in and mentioned to Sean, the manager, that Katherine had told me they were thinking of swapping out the artwork. I’d never seen anything but the cutesy retro paintings of 80s robots and creatures up at the coffeeshop. I thought they were on permanent display.

Now my stuff is there. That means I’ll probably stop by more often. But Wormhole will never be my coffeeshop the way Jackalope is, or Urbus Orbis, Jinx, Atomix, Mercury, Duvall’s, or Hardboiled used to be.

It’s by far the most popular coffeeshop I’ve ever spent time in but it’s a home away from home for others not for me.

Here’s a playlist of some recent songs I’ve been listening to.

John and I go see Megalopolis the day it opens. There are maybe ten people in the theater. Entertainment gossip outlets have been gleefully forecasting doom for Coppola’s dream project for years. Parasites can’t help but celebrate the misery of others. They never risk saying anything of their own so the failure of those who do is their greatest joy.

I have pretty low expectations going in but the movie blows well past them within minutes. Yes, it’s a big, messy, overly earnest, sometimes unintentionally funny hulk of a thing. But it’s got a heart and it’s sincerely trying to say something. Even if I don’t share Coppola’s optimism about what’s next for this civilization, I have no doubt of his conviction.

Selling off a chunk of his successful wine-making empire to fund a production in a medium that’s dying a very public death is definitely hubris but what else is the guy to do? He’s in his eighties and has dedicated his life to film. If there’s a hill for him to die on, this is it.

Old Jon Voigt deserves to win a bunch of awards too.

A few days later, I bike to the Music Box to see the completely reedited/remixed version of Tinto Brass’s Caligula. For over fifty years, this has been Megalopolis before Megalopolis (even as Coppola has dreamed of his almost that long). I have a dim memory of renting the old version from Videosmith on Harvard Street. It came on two VHS tapes. I chose it because it was a famous trainwreck and because there was porn in it. It’s the reason most people watched it at the time. I don’t recall much except for extravagant, widescreen Roman palace sets and Malcolm McDowell strutting about and leering the way he always does.

The new thing the restorer has fashioned takes out all the porn and puts in a lot of Helen Mirren. It’s worth seeing for that reason, if for no other. It’s a strange, operatic marathon of orgies and bloodletting. I’m glad I saw it as a historical corrective. The people involved clearly strived to right a wrong and in a way they have. There was a good crowd and people applauded when it was over but the larger culture has no bandwidth to sit through a three-hour epic about the rise and fall of a Roman emperor; it’s too busy laughing itself to death in ten or twenty second increments over handheld devices.

The old Rome of Caligula is a lot closer to our own dying light than Coppola’s old hippie vision of rebirth and reimagining. His movie’s a triumph even as the world it proposes to save circles the drain.

Made another little book about the bookstore: original, zine, digital.

Put up some stuff at Wormhole in Wicker Park. It’ll be there awhile.

I go to the museum every few weeks. Sometimes there’s a specific show to see; other times it’s just because. This is one of those. I don’t know what I’m looking for.

I get a coffee in the weird little pocket cafe on the second level of the Modern wing. It’s situated in a pass-through between the new and old buildings and all but three or four tables are in a dark hallway. I keep peeking around the corner, then pounce when one of the ones in the light opens up.

I spend a bunch of time with Robert Rauschenberg’s Short Circuit. It’s one of his 50s combines, made in the small window when he was one of the best painters going. I think back to the awful freshman art history survey lecture in which the teacher introduced him and Jasper Johns as “those two gay artists”. It was the last one I attended. Spent the rest of the semester antagonizing the poor grad student running my discussion section.

Since getting into collage a few years ago, things like Short Circuit are newly resonant. Art will change with you that way. It’s why a visit to the museum can feel new even when you’re looking at things you’ve seen a thousand times before.

Brice Marden’s Study for the Muses is a long-time favorite. I go up to the wall-label and am surprised to see no death-date. I text Frank to double-check and he confirms Marden’s passing. Yet here in this room he’s alive and well. (He’s dead on the museum’s website; maybe their printer is out of paper.)

I follow the pink, green, and blue vine lines from the edges of the painting into the middle and still can’t tell the moment they go from flat to volumetric. By bunching them along the borders, Marden makes a kind of ornamental window frame, sort of Deco in its gently expanding curves. But in the middle, the continuation of those same strands become plant-like. They form a kind of fence, through which you can see echoes of other lianas in the beige areas in between.

I don’t know that it’s truly possible to make a completely abstract picture. Even something absolutist, like an Ad Reinhardt monochrome, can’t help but suggest physical space. Or maybe it’s that I can’t conceive of anything but seen reality, no matter what I’m looking at.

I’m writing this the morning of my fifty-fourth birthday. I lopped off my beard a few days ago, leaving a dumb handlebar mustache. I saw a photo of myself a decade ago with one and wanted to see if I could still pull it off. The jury’s still out. All I know is that in a few weeks I’ll get tired of shaving and grow the beard back.

It doesn’t mean much but even a silly change like this underlines the passage of time.

I was a guest on the Virtual Memories Show and you can go on a short video tour of my artwork currently up at the bookstore.

There are now digital versions of some zines/chapbooks up on my site. Most of these are long out of print and unlikely to be reprinted anytime soon.