Letter

Chris told me about his Lou Reed record when we talked a few months ago. K bought tickets for the release show at a venue I’d never heard of in the near west burbs. I’m not much for cover bands but this is different. Because of the guy covering and the one being covered.

Reed’s music has been with me since my childhood friend, Dan’s, dad dubbed a tape of Velvet Underground & Nico for me when I was about twelve. It’s soundtrack-of-my-life type thing. Even as the man spent much of the last four decades of his career making schlock, the songs that came before make that decline moot.

The couple singles Chris has released from the record so far are not covers but originals. He did the same some years back for Reed’s onetime collaborator, Nico. He’s the rare performer whose tributes work both to evoke their source while becoming their own thing.

At the show though, backed by a band he calls the Dirty French Novels, it’s all Reed ringers and I know each last one by heart.

William Burroughs isn’t as important to me as Lou Reed but watching the freshly unearthed footage that makes up Nova ’78 is a transfixing experience nonetheless. Filmed by an NYU student to document a festival devoted to the man’s work, it’s a nonstop parade of notables. Philip Glass plays a hypnotic bit, Frank Zappa reads about talking anuses from Naked Lunch, poets Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg make actual asses of themselves, and the man of the hour appears now and again to make his grave, laconic pronouncements.

It’s a portrait of a time and place that would be decimated by AIDS and Reagan in a few short years. By the time I got to in NYC in the fall of 1989 even a dumb nineteen year old could tell it was all over.

I knew nothing about the Minyo Crusaders but K has been waiting for them to tour America for years. It’s a miracle they made it under the treacherous conditions imposed on travelers fool enough to come to this stupid country but I’m glad they did it. An unlikely marriage of traditional Japanese folk song and a dizzying mash of Latin instrumentation, their music is all joy all the time.

A sight and sound I won’t soon forget.

I wrote about a play set on a couple planks of wood out at sea.

One of my recurring, self-appointed tasks at the bookstore is neatening, shoring-up, and rearranging the SUSPENSE shelves. It’s one of the biggest sections in the store and more apt to fall into slovenly disorder due to the kind of reader who gravitates to this kind of book and to the fact that popular authors of the genre often have dozens of titles under their name (as well as countless ghost- or shadow-written subsidiaries.) These are not precious literary relics but rather workaday grubby product—gas station roller hot dogs to be scarfed down on shift breaks rather than a multi-course sitdown meal.

Every few weeks I find stacks of Clancys, Christies, Silvas, and Pattersons knocked about or stashed page-side-out without regard to alphabet or any other carefully imposed order.

If Joe or Lisa or Maya are in, I can spend time putting them back into a presentable state. Because SUSPENSE is in the back room, when I’m doing this I cannot help customers check out or answer questions or refuse them entry to the bathroom. It becomes a self-contained, isolated task. It’s a thing that’s welcome from time to time.

Because I’ve arranged and rearranged thrillers, whodunits, et al so many times, I’ve formed associations with many of the more popular titles. But some associations go decades back. Every time I handle the bubble-lettered paperbacks of Nelson DeMille, I think back to the very short-lived newsstand gig I held during summer break from art school, circa 1990-92.

A narrow storefront at one of the corners of the Viagra Triangle, next door to the Ashkenaz Deli, it was a family-run business presided over by a nervous middle-aged man who refused to entrust me with much responsibility, which led to boredom, then to lifting the occasional twenty from the till for lunch at Popeye’s around the corner.

Most of the customers of this newsstand would not make eye contact as I rang up their copies of Cheri or Juggs, along with that day’s Trib or Sun-Times. Every now and again someone would bring up one of the paperbacks from the narrow selection of airport novels that took up a couple shelves along one wall of the room. DeMille was well-represented.

I was let go after a few weeks because, the nervous man informed me, a long-time employee had returned. He wouldn’t say it was for stealing, either because he dreaded confrontation or felt it wasn’t worth the effort. I wasn’t surprised, whatever the true reason.

It’s odd to be reminded of that long-gone place thirty-five years later simply by seeing the cheesy graphics of a mass-market paperback but that’s how memory works.

I’ve inhaled two short Patrick Modiano books over the past week. They’re besotted by trapdoors and unasked-for reminders of forgotten history. I want to read the rest but we don’t have any more in the store.

The ones I borrowed are shelved in FICTION—a section I don’t get to work in much for reasons I don’t entirely understand—even if they are sort of detective stories, albeit without the kind of resolutions or repeatable pleasures that fill the part of the store that is my domain.

These drawings are some of the first few for Melville’s The Confidence-Man. No publishers big or small for this one. I’ll put it out myself in a few months.

Speaking of memory, fifty-six years ago this morning, I began in some hospital in Moscow, USSR. Can’t remember the number but I used to know it.

The presale’s up for the Chicago alphabet book I illustrated.

One week left to see the Rainbo show.

The public domain train keeps rolling. The Jungle is now up for preorder. You can buy drawings from it this very moment. I’m trying to put together an opening event for November.

This one was more of a slog than the others. A prose stylist Sinclair is not and the book is a lot longer than I recall. Still, I enjoyed making the drawings and that’s the not-so-secret purpose of the entire project: to smuggle out a bunch of art to people who wouldn’t have otherwise looked at it.

There was a noble purpose to Sinclair’s book but his kind of thinking has been laughed away and forgotten so completely that much of the book now reads like science-fiction. Fair wages, good working conditions, and such are a fantasy to most these days. I can’t see it getting better anytime soon.

I read Tim’s new book months ago but because of printing delays it’s just now coming out. It’s a novel about a guy he was friends with back when he worked at Jinx Coffee, nearly thirty years ago.

I had a good talk with him about it and wrote a review.

A writer I designed a book cover for put it on a coffee mug. I showed it to K and she said people would pay good money for one with a Chicago alley on it. We’ll see.

Also, she’s decided to stop printing and stapling her classic zine, Greasy Spoon’s Weirdo Du Jour, after sixteen years, but you can get the newly-scanned (for the first time ever!) digital version right here.

Rainbo show is up two more weeks.