Letter

My problem with art openings goes way back. I don’t think I’ve ever successfully navigated one. The gap between expectation and reality never closes.

Colin was in town a couple weeks ago and came into the bar with some friends during my shift. I joined them on the patio after I got off and the subject of success came up. I told them I’d find something wrong with a parade thrown in my name down Michigan Avenue. But more than likely, I wouldn’t go. To me, success would be making a living off the work, have it seen and read, but divorcing it entirely from me as a person.

Tuesday Paolo and I hang the work in a couple hours. Paul generously buys us lunch. Then I go to the coffeeshop around the corner to wait until 4pm when the bar opens. It always feels like the countdown to an execution, the last few hours. I’ve tried all kinds of mind games to stop thinking of it like this but the dread never lifts. Not until I’m on my way home and replaying all the ways I failed.

This failure feeling has nothing to do with who does or doesn’t show up or with how many pieces sell or don’t sell or anything else external. It’s all on the inside. I just can’t match the moment in a way that is satisfying or gives me peace.

K is already there when I walk in. I sit down next to her and don’t move around the room for the following four hours except to use the men’s room.

Brian tells me the work looks good. Then John comes in and sits with us for a while. In the picture he takes we look happy.

Tim comes and congratulates me on the show, as does Tom and a few others. Nat walks around and looks at the show. He doesn’t stay for a drink but thanks me for inviting him. Frank hangs out awhile. Then Jasmon walks in. He’s driven in from Nashville just to see the show. The highpoint of the night is that he and K meet. Then it’s over and the two of us share the Damen bus south.

The familiar autopsy rolls out in my head. I should be able to enjoy and appreciate this but I just can’t. The only relief comes from switching the subject.

Despite whatever foolishness knocks around my head, the show isn’t bad. You can go see for yourself through October 5th.

I’ve painted portraits of Lilliput, Crackers, Buttercup, Che, Romeo, and Grendel. Even a cat named Johnny Depp. Now comes a dog called Stevie Nicks. The afternoon after the opening, I load her onto the bike rack and peddle to a beautiful house off Elston & Grace. A little boy answers the door and smiles at the framed picture in my hands. Stevie Nicks died a couple months ago but my painting of her makes him dance around in place.

I leave to catch ‘Round Midnight with K at the Music Box.

Reading Saturday at the Old Town Ale House to mark the 75th anniversary of Algren’s Chicago poem.

Read an interview with K and I about her book. Thanks to Don for this.

I will hang two shows at Rainbo tomorrow, then hang around from 4-8pm in case anyone wants to come have a drink and a look. If you can’t make it, I’ve made this cheat sheet for you to follow along from home.

I wrote a description here and even more there so I won’t go on about it except to say that these two bodies of work are what has occupied me the most over the past year-plus. I expect an in-between/transition/hangover period to follow unless I dive quickly into the next thing. I have a couple ideas and will surely settle on something soon.

The prospect of having nothing to work on and just sitting here is terrifying enough to get my ass in gear post-haste.

I’ll have something more clever or interesting to say next week once this art is up, I promise.

We log onto Zoom and start talking right away. Nate offers to use his since the school he teaches at offers an institutional account that doesn’t kick you off after forty minutes.

We talk about many things including his new book, which I’d recently read and was going to write about. We have an easy rapport. Our first conversation went an hour and a half but felt a lot shorter.

We talk about comedy, the literary scene, the pains of being edited, and the reviewing racket. He tells me he and his ten year old son watched Modern Times the night before and the kid had enjoyed it. How when he was a kid he was mostly allowed to watch westerns. How he and his son watch John Wayne movies together. I tell him how I can’t stomach John Ford’s sentimentality. He suggests Howard Hawks’ Monkey Business if I need a laugh and I promise I’ll watch it that night.

We talk about what it would take to feel like a success. I say if they threw a parade in my honor down Michigan Avenue I wouldn’t go. He says if they threw him one he’d go. When his wife asked him what he expects when his book comes out, he told her he wants to be carried aloft through the streets.

It’s a good time just as the first one had been. We’re at about two hours when he says he has to go pick up his kid from school. I thank him for his time and ask him to send me the recording. That’s when we realize there isn’t one. We both assumed the other had hit the button. But it’s his invite so it’s on him. Still, this isn’t my first rodeo, so I might’ve noticed. We have a laugh about it and schedule an encore. I joke that we’ll reproduce the first one verbatim.

We talk again two days later. There’s a recording of it but the link Nate sends is password-protected, accessible only to students and teachers of the Tennessee college he teaches at. Perhaps he’ll send me a password sometime. then I’ll share it with you. It’s a good one so far as I remember.

*update* here it is!

Made a page of (mostly recent) posters and another of the 45 RPM record sleeves I decorated for menu holders at Charis Listening Bar.