Letter

I don’t watch as many movies as I used to but I still watch too many.

I forget most of them before the credits even roll (provided I get that far, which is not the case at least fifty percent of the time.) The natural question to ask is why I even bother at this point and I don’t have a ready answer, except to say that habits are hard to break. Movies have been a mainstay of my life since I was a kid. I’m not ready to quit them. Not yet.

I can’t remember a worse year in terms of theatrical releases. It’s seen career worsts from PT Anderson, Lynne Ramsay, Ari Aster, Darren Aronovsky, and David Cronenberg, and dud after dud from middling or unknown directors. The medium is on life-support for a lot of reasons but this avalanche of mediocrity is beyond my analytic capacity to explain. And yet I keep trudging to the theater hoping for the best.

I loved Magic Farm and wrote a whole thing about it and Ulman’s other movie. Radu Jude’s Dracula was a filthy hoot and Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind was a sweet shaggy-dog story about a really shitty guy. On becoming a Guinea Fowl cast a weird spell, Misericordia seduced and Secret Mall Apartment made me laugh while mourning the damage ill-conceived urban renewal wreaks. Nearly every other flick I can think of that I got something out of was old or seen on my TV, in bed.

Because of K, I enjoyed a couple trips to the theater despite the horrid shit onscreen. We laughed through most of 28 Years Later and heroically outlasted both Eddington and Frankenstein. I’d have skipped out on all three less than an hour in if I was solo. I paid for a month of HBO so we could watch the Paul Reubens doc. It was worth the fifteen bucks, even if I deleted the app after a couple weeks for want of anything else to watch.

The only upcoming release I’m sort of looking forward to is the new one from Jarmusch with Tom Waits looking like the Crypt Keeper. Could be great or complete schlock. There’s just no telling anymore.

RIP Tony Adler. He was my first theater editor at The Reader but I got to know him better through his yearly Whitmanstide readings and frequent meet ups at art openings. He was a sweet guy and I’ll miss him. I don’t know what he’d have thought of this Trap Door production, but I loved it.

I reviewed a great travelogue of cemeteries.

Here’s the checklist for my Fire Cat show, just in time for the shopping frenzy season.

I’ve spent the past couple weeks buying thrift-store frames, ripping out whatever art is in them, then taping in my own. I’ll be hanging my show at Firecat Projects a couple hours after this letter is posted. This is a sequence of activity I’ve repeated more times than I can count. The thoughts, hopes, and wishes throughout the process vary but in the aftermath I always find a way to pick up the pieces and do it again.

I don’t know what other artists, writers, musicians, whatever expect out of their events or publications. I’ve caught myself daydreaming all kinds of pie-in-the-sky scenarios. It’s probably necessary to play these mind-games in order to keep going. Each new thing is the one that’ll change everything. But what does that even mean? What’s the greatest possible outcome from an art show or a book published or a show played?

I’ve had shows that nearly sold out and others where nothing was bought. I can’t recall any particular reason one caught on and another didn’t. The process of making things is a lot of stumbling in the dark where audience or expectations or market forces are concerned. I’ve never had instinct for what people want or don’t want from me. I just keep going.

In the case of this show, the pieces are all illustrations for books that have recently been or will soon be published. Which means that framing and putting them up in a public place isn’t what they were originally made for. Usually, my artwork only does the one thing, that is, hangs on this or that wall. It’s a little bit of an experiment to display these artifacts from publishing projects as their own standalone thing. I did put a bunch of these in my summer Rainbo show and about half of them sold. So there’s reason for optimism, even if that’s not my inclination.

Stan Klein, who runs Firecat, is trying to sell the building that houses the gallery and MCM Framing, so there’s a chance the show might be cut short. I’m fine with that. Stan is a friend and maybe putting some of my stuff up on the walls will help a little. For all my other shows, there were posters and postcards printed at Stan’s expense but I told him not to do it this time. I made my own stenciled posters and flyers and left them a few places. That’s enough advertising this time around. I’d rather people discovered the show on their own. Maybe that’s naive or defeatist but I just don’t want to push it too much this time around.

The opening is this Friday, 7-10pm. Each piece is $50. I’ll have a checklist up on my website later this week for those who’d like a piece but can’t make it to Chicago.

Hope to hear from you one way or the other. That’s what it’s all about, even if I don’t always make that obvious.

K gave an in-depth video interview about her life in zines.

At Village Thrift, looking for frames, I come upon a boxed jigsaw puzzle that catches my eye. It’s a two-sided job. One side is a small town with lots of people and activity, kind of poor man’s Richard Scarry-style. The other is a police lineup with the townsfolk attacking the suspects with tomatoes, a rake, a bicycle wheel, and a purse that looks more like a turkey due to poor draftsmanship. The label says Grand Theft Auto but it looks nothing like the popular video game. It’s $5 so I buy it.

I tell K about it and she’s as baffled as me. We assemble it the next time she’s over. Now it hangs in the bathroom, perp lineup side out. Almost all the decor in there is from thrift stores—couple paint-by-numbers, some embroideries, an old print, a silly vintage PSA illo about wiping your ass.

I float the idea of going to estate sales sometime. A half hour later we’ve got a list of stops in a rough loop around Chicagoland and I’ve booked a car from Hertz for the next day.

The first stop is a very yuppie Lakeview house, the second, a gay couple’s pop-culture-filled treasure trove, the third, a Glenview home overrun by aggressive suburban bargain hunters. Each one a little microcosm. We don’t feel like we belong in any of them.

It’s not till the fourth place that we get our sealegs. I swipe a “Papa’s Lounge” matchbook from the old Polish house for K. At our next stop she takes a little chef pig fridge magnet in return. She scores a wool winter coat while I only find a couple pieces of silverware and a decorative gravy fat separator.

We eat a late lunch at the Red Apple Polish buffet way up Milwaukee. I feel very old complaining about how much their prices have gone up, recalling for the millionth time how I could eat five plates when I was in art school and that it cost $7. That was a long time ago. Two plates is pushing it now, even at $35 a pop.

The Hertz receipt says we traveled a hundred miles. Six sales and several suburbs. A lot of it was going back and forth on Harlem Avenue. Going into strangers’ houses is worthwhile, even if I didn’t find much. It’s a window into how others have lived and, at this point, I make a conscious effort not to buy things. It’s more amateur anthropology. Even though the occupants are very recently deceased or just moving, there’s a palpable sense of death in these dwellings.

Whatever we buy or swipe from these houses brings a trace of loss into our own lives.

You can now buy art from The Sound and the Fury or Winesburg, Ohio even though the books won’t be out till next year.

Speaking of stealing, I very much enjoyed Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, though thievery’s not really what it’s about.