Letter

The new Melville book is coming together. I’m over halfway done. This one is full of animals so that’s what I’m drawing. He mostly uses them as a way to describe the variety of characters on his ship of marks and grifters and that’s the way I think of them too.

I don’t know how to embody another person so another species isn’t even on the table. I portray these birds, insects, and mammals as a person looking at another person. It’s the only way I can do it. They have faces, trunks, and limbs, so it’s not too much of a stretch.

The only pet I ever had was a dog I had to have put down because of heartworms. I lived with a dog and cat for a couple years once after that. They weren’t mine and with the dog especially it felt like they were waiting me out. Nevertheless, I dug a hole in the yard and buried the cat when he went.

Now I see a cat a couple times a week. He lives at K’s house. I can’t say he’s ever happy to see me but he’s okay as cats go. We divide up the room and coexist the best we can.

Melville’s animals are nothing like them. They’re just literary devices. We’re meant to think of people when he writes about possums, toucans, and bats.

K tells me Tomás acts completely different when I’m not there and I believe her. Why shouldn’t I?

I don’t how anyone or anything is when I’m not looking right at it. Even then, it’s not entirely a sure thing.

I liked Cassatt’s prints and Vladimir’s set-changes.

First Jungle poster is out in the world.

K and I discuss Village as well as Children of the Damned.

Feels like another in-between time again. I took down the Rainbo show, changed out some art at the bookstore and updated my published crap page. I put the presidents and alley paintings up for sale in my store. I don’t know that any of this shifting about has any effect really but it gives me a feeling of motion, of not just sitting still. There’s now too much artwork in this house. It needs to go away for good, one way or another.

The Melville book is coming together. Feels different somehow than the seven I did before but I’m enjoying it.

There’s a new monthly poetry series at the bookstore. Young, serious people. They have their own scene and don’t wreck the bathroom. I’ve gone to three of their nights and heard a few good things. But even the bad stuff is clearly done by people who’ve spent time wrestling with phrases rather than just nursing imaginary grudges against a world that doesn’t give a rat’s ass, doesn’t even know they draw breath. These are not the delusional types who take up three seats with their plastic bags of precious belongings and talk through one another’s performances.

Their series is called Comportment after all.

There’s an article about the alphabet book in a local rag and I’m quoted in this one about shitty Elena Ferrante covers and you can buy this book about Midwest miscreants I did a cover for.

You can now buy a cassette of me reading from Moby Dick.

K and I started a movie podcast.

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.