Letter

The Friday KMR drawings keep changing. Better? Worse? Don’t ask me. But I don’t feel like I’m repeating myself yet and I want to keep going, which are about the only criteria I know to not stop doing a thing.

There are about thirty of them now. Ten or twelve will go up at the bar in September.

I scribbled the quote in a notebook while illustrating Moby Dick. Something about the soul being a useless thing, like a fifth wheel to a wagon. It was Elijah, the mad street prophet warning Ishmael and Queequeg about the man whose ship they’d just signed on to.

I used the scrap of paper with the quote in a collage whose base is a drawing of a pantry on 24th Street I made twenty years ago. Ripping up old stuff gives me a kind of buoyant pep nearly every time I do it. Whether the resulting picture flies or crashes, disposing or attempting to “fix” the old thing never feels like a mistake. I’ve never once regretted it or wished I could undo what I’d done.

The white whale’s been on my mind again because a tape of excerpts I read from that book will come out sometime later this year. More details when it’s official.

We went to listen to a couple bands play in a venue that used to be a Latvian social club according to one of the players. I’d been there once before. Both that show and this one were top drawer. Older people playing music that pushed and pulled genres. Probably not very marketable in any mainstream way but just right for me.

I made a page of all the drawings from The Jungle. Will make them available for sale soon. The book will be out in November. The Sound and the Fury first, in July.

When I lived in the Heart of Chicago (2004-2011), there was a cafe round the corner that kept very odd hours. It would be open very early in the morning and then be closed all day and reopen at night. The days that even these hours were kept could be random and unpredictable.

The cafe’s namesake and proprietor was a man named Bill Duvall. I became a regular at his place and attempted to get to know him, which wasn’t easy. Still, there were memorable evenings, like a screening of Murnau’s Sunrise—A Song of Two Humans, accompanied by an improvised electronic music score, and, of course, the mostly-weekly tango classes. Like every coffeeshop I’ve ever haunted, I had an art show there too.

Bill always had grand plans, like having a fully-functional kitchen, which was never built out. Some mornings I’d find him passed out at one of the little tables.

One day I walked up and found the picture window covered in brown paper taped from the inside. I never saw the place open again, nor ran across Bill. I still have no clue what happened nearly twenty years later.

I do know the man loved to dance to tango music just like his very famous uncle, who passed away the other day.

After I finished writing the above and posted it to Substack, I read a notice of Frederick Wiseman’s passing. I don’t know that I ever wrote much about the experience of watching his unique nonfiction films. It’s an insult to call them documentaries.

I made a few drawings from freezeframes of Titticut Follies during COVID lockdown when I had no access to living models. They did the trick even as frozen black-and-white shades of people long gone.

Yesterday, I came home to a package with international postage left by my landlord’s gate. It was a book of Solomon Yudovin’s Jewish folk ornament designs. Yudovin was big interest of my grandmother’s. She collected and championed his work. Now her daughter has put out a handsome art book which will serve as a tribute to her mother. The introduction is a transcription of a speech my grandmother gave at the opening of an exhibition of the artist’s work in Israel, where my grandmother spent her last years.

There’s no cheating the actuarial table. It’s truly the only thing we can completely depend on. Still, how to react, what to say or do when it happens to someone you know or care about has never been simple or obvious.

Just because I don’t know what to disappear into doesn’t mean I stop. There are still concerts to draw at. Sometimes there doesn’t need to be any larger aim behind putting pen to paper. Not to say that it’s an exercise but whatever underlying meaning there might be to catching a couple musicians doing their thing with a few marks isn’t very obvious. The sketchbook in which this drawing is just a couple pages may add up to something when it’s filled. Then this fifteen minute sketch will become part of a bigger whole.

But none of that is in my head while it’s happening. I’m just trying to listen.

In the past couple months we’ve processed about a hundred and fifty boxes of books at the store. Many have been sitting waiting for two years since we moved from next door. Roughly a third went back out the door to a bottom-feeder who takes the books we don’t need. The second third was priced and shelved. The third went back into boxes scrawled with ‘TBPU’ on top and sides and stacked in the newly-emptied back closet. This area, formed by walls on two sides and the backs of bookcases on the other two, with a narrow opening on its northwest tip, had been inaccessible since our move.

The ‘To Be Put Up’ boxes are full of books to be photographed, described, and put up for sale on eBay. We don’t have enough display cases in the store to sell expensive books here. Even if we did, I doubt our clientele would fork over $50 or $200 or more for some rare or out-of-print volume. It’s not that kind of store. Not yet anyhow.

As I carted the sixty ‘TBPU’ boxes to the back, I thought of Sisyphus and of the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I wondered not for the first time if all the efforts I’ve expended here add up to anything except marking time.

At least there are occasionally weird castoffs like a set of oversized US president portraits that I can take home and ‘improve.’

Most Fridays K poses for a drawing or painting. It’s become part of our routine. I look forward to it and I think she does too. There are nearly thirty of these now. About a dozen will go up on the walls of the Rainbo Club in September.

I’ve started writing out the fragments I’ve gathered about the bookstore over the past five years in an old ledger I found in one of those dusty boxes. There were a couple notations about expenses circa 1981 but otherwise the pages are clean. I want to fill it with my scrawl, editing and adding here and there as I go, to see if it can become a book.

I’m not all the way convinced yet but it beats staring at a wall or watching TV or whatever else I would do if I wasn’t doing this.

I talked to Sam Bodrojan about her writing, movies, the internet, and more. Juliet Escoria interviewed me and Mallory about our Maudlin Classics project and then I recorded the book-release at Tangible Books.