Letter

K writes that her good friend, Jenny’s, cat, Bobby, died and asks me to paint his portrait. She emails a few photos of the odd little guy with his smushed-in nose and worried eyes.

I’ve never had any problem painting cat portraits even though I don’t care for them. K doesn’t believe me. No cat-lover ever does. Not only that. She says I’m like a cat. I don’t even know what to say about that.

Now that K has her own place, Tomás and I have to coexist. It’s gone a lot better than anyone expected. She thought he’s hide from me for weeks but he came out and made friends the first night. She’s thanked me more than once for being nice to hime even though I’m not a “cat person”. If she wasn’t there, who knows how it would have gone?

I made K a cat-themed mixtape. If you have Apple Music, you can listen.

We show up at the Hungry Brain a little after 7pm. The bar’s empty and the bartender acts put out to have to serve drinks so early. You here for the show? You know it’s not till 9, right? she says before reluctantly going about her job.

K and I are both compulsively early to everything. It’s become a running joke. When we meet somewhere whoever arrives last, inevitably still ahead of the appointed time, is mock-shamed by the other. This night we’re early together but there’s a reason. I like drawing at shows so I arrive early to get a good spot. At the Brain there are only a couple tables that are suitable.

We sit down to enjoy our drinks in the empty room. Even the bands haven’t arrived for soundcheck yet. I’d bought the tickets a month back. This is the release show for BCMC’s second record. There’s an opener listed I know nothing about. They’re called PXM. They’re local and I find a link online to the drummer’s Risograph printmaking studio but not much music.

After BCMC soundchecks, they push their gear back a bit and PXM sets up. I’m struck by how many effects pedals the guitarist brought and by the dunce-cap-like bell hanging from a piece of yarn above the drum kit.

A couple of K’s record store coworkers show up and a customer she only knows as Jim sits with us for BCMC’s set. It’s Jim Becker, who I don’t know well but who I’ve drawn on stages for many years. K just thought he was a nice older guy. Didn’t know he played music. Chicago is good that way. People don’t insert their resumés into every daily interaction.

It’s a great show but I’ve kept K out past her bedtime. She can barely keep her eyes open on the Western bus home.

The work is done. I’ve put up posters around town and sent review copies to a bunch of people. Now it’s time to celebrate.

I wrote about Scott McClanahan’s amazing new book.

Sometime late last summer, I decided it would be a good idea to record myself reading bite-size chunks of Moby Dick. My illustrated version had recently been published and I was at work on a couple other public domain titles, but I felt like I wanted a final bout with the white whale.

I pitched the idea to Adam at Hello America Stereo Cassette and he gave me his blessing. He warned me it would be awhile till he could give it attention so time might pass till it saw the light of day but that was fine by me. I had plenty else going on and wasn’t in any great hurry. I’ve learned over time to be better about not pushing so hard on deadlines and such. It just pisses people off and makes them not want to work with you. I’ve become accustomed to doing my work and sending it off into the ether, forgetting it even happened until it resurfaces, according to my collaborators’ timeline. Occasionally, it’s even a nice surprise when it returns.

Aside from not stumbling over the words too badly, the big challenge of assembling this recording was cutting down an epic novel down to sixty minutes. I quickly found out that even a chapter was really too long if I wanted to give the listener an overall sense of Melville’s book so what I did was cut out passages that spoke to me most and pasted them into a word doc.

It’s drastically abridged, of course, but I think the fragments I chose give a feel of the heart of the thing. Handling Melville’s paragraphs this way was not unlike the layout process on my illustrated version. It was a way to really get under the hood and see how the thing was put together. It was a rare privilege.

Order yours here.

Early warning for this but the preorder’s been up and the publisher likes it when people buy ahead. Gives ’em confidence in the talent, that they haven’t backed the wrong horse…

I sat through a play earlier in the week.

I’m working on a review of Colin Asher’s forthcoming book about the impact of prisons on American music. There’s a lot to chew over in its quick three hundred pages.

It’s an ugly history, unsurprisingly. A lot or racism and class hatred all the way through. I loved Colin’s biography of Nelson Algren and this one is written with the same care and scrupulous research. A through-line might be the steep odds people who are born poor and challenge authority face in this country. It’s likely the same in other countries but the two books detail the particulars inherent to this one.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Elmo Hope after learning about him from the book. His story is perhaps the lowest key but also in some ways the saddest. This is a guy who just wanted to play piano but New York City wouldn’t let him. He drifted into addiction and died young.

I’ll have more to say once I finish writing my review but in the meantime here’s a conversation I had with Asher about it.

From William Gass’s Middle C

When young and full of fellow feeling, Professor Joseph Skizzen had been tormented by the thought that the human race (which he naïvely believed was made up of great composers, a few harmlessly lecherous painters, maybe a mathematician or a scientist, a salon of writers, all aiming at higher things however they otherwise carried on)…that such an ennobled species might not prosper, indeed might not survive in any serious way—symphonies sinking like torpedoed ships, murals spray-canned out of sight, statues toppled, books burned, plays updated by posturing directors; but now, older, wiser—more jaundiced, it’s true—he worried that it might (now that he saw that the human world was packed with politicians who could not even spell “scruple”; now that he saw that it was crammed with commercial types who adored only American money; now that he saw it had been overrun by religious stupefiers, mountebanks, charlatans, obfuscators, and other dedicated misleaders, as well as corrupt professionals of all kinds—ten o’clock scholars, malpracticing doctors, bribed judges, sleepy deans, callous munitions makers and their pompous generals, pedophilic priests, but probably not pet lovers, not arborists or gardeners—but Puritans, squeezers, and other assholes, ladies bountiful, ladies easy, shoppers diligent, lobbyists greedy, Eagle Scouts, racist cops, loan sharks, backbiters, gun runners, spies, Judases, philistines, vulgarians, dumbbells, dolts, boobs, louts, jerks, jocks, creeps, yokels, cretins, simps, pipsqueaks—not a mensch among them—nebbechs, scolds schlemiels, schnorrers, schnooks, schmucks, schlumps, dummkopfs, potato heads, klutzes, not to omit pushers, bigots, born-again Bible bangers, users, conmen, ass kissers, Casanovas, pimps, thieves and their sort, rapists and their kind, murderers and their ilk—the pugnacious, the miserly, the envious, the litigatious, the avaricious, the gluttonous, the lubricious, the jealous, the profligate, the gossipacious, the indifferent, the bored), well, now that he saw it was so infested, he worried that the race might…might what?…the whole lot might sail on through floods of their own blood like a proud ship and parade out of the new Noah’s Ark in the required pairs—for breeding, one of each sex—sportscasters, programmers, promoters, polluters, stockbrokers, bankers, bodybuilders, busty models, show hosts, stamp and coin collectors, crooners, glamour girls, addicts, gamblers, shirkers, solicitors, opportunists, insatiable developers, arrogant agents, fudging accountants, yellow journalists, ambulance chasers and shysters of every sleazy pursuit, CEOs at the head of a whole column of white-collar crooks, psychiatrists, osteopaths, snake oilers, hucksters, fawners, fans of funerals, fortune-tellers and other prognosticators, road warriors, chieftains, Klansmen, Shriners, men and women of any cloth and any holy order—at every step moister of cunt and stiffer of cock than any cock or cunt before them, even back when the world was new, now saved with spunk enough to couple and restock the pop…the pop…the goddamn population.

It took a long time because I’m so slow, but I wanted to know what it would feel like to type that out…

As of today, K’s book is available in all the usual places, but also Dusty Groove and your local bookstore as well; just type Ornery Cuss into the search bar on their website and it’ll come right up.