Letter

Bill asked me to drive him to Columbia, Missouri, so I do. We leave early on Friday and return late Saturday. He plays three shows in between. I drive and haul gear. It’s a good division of labor.

The last couple hours of the ride, the nav system has us on everything but dirt roads. I mapped out the route but don’t recall this plunge into the hinterlands. Because I don’t carry a smartphone, Bill is in charge of steering. We both wonder if this could really be the way to a large college town, but it eventually gets us there.

The main drag is clogged with traffic and street-parking is being closed off for some kind of festivities, so we circle around a bit before finding a spot and going into a storefront commandeered into a makeshift artists’ lounge/info center. We get lanyards, pamphlets, and other material, then go off to another storefront a couple blocks away so Bill can drop off his records and CDs at the merch area. The next stop is a bakery Bill knows, for lunch. It’s as mobbed with humans as every other place on the route. More so. This seems to be one of the focal points of the festival. Bill says hello to a few people he knows. He’s played in this town several times before.

There’s an air of anticipation all over that I can’t quite meet at its own level. Maybe it’s because I’m just here to do a job or maybe because I’m allergic to holiday feelings.

Bill’s first show is at the music school’s recital hall. We’re very early. We stash his gear on stage, then are locked out by the piano tuner who is getting the instrument ready for the headliner. She has been delayed by storms in Chicago and being driven by acquaintances of the organizer from Saint Louis. Scheduled to arrive shortly before doors are to open to the public. Bill soundchecks, then we wait.

I sit up front for Bill’s set. Student photographers flit about snapping and clicking. After a short break, the headliner comes on. I last about ten minutes. Fortunately, I’m stage right and she sits facing stage left, so she doesn’t see me leave. I go back to the greenroom, wading through a mini flood in the hallway. A bathroom incident. The next afternoon the same thing happens at the artists’ lounge. Custodians have to be called. Both times it’s right after the headliner has used the facilities. I’m not conspiracy-minded but do spot patterns…

We check into a hotel just off the highway around 11pm. The lobby lounge/restaurant area is overrun by children and the grownups who pay them little mind. We order food off a QR code and are eventually alerted to fetch it at the bar. It’s all kind of dystopian. The momentary blackout due to the severe storm outside only adds to the feeling.

We set up in a large church gymnasium-turned-movie-hall the next morning at 8am. Bill is to play a short set before a documentary about poet Mary Oliver. We stay for the movie. A few minutes in, the tech lady tiptoes over and leaves a brown bag full of ones, collected from staff passing the hat through the arriving audience.

We have a few hours to kill before his last set, in a grand old theater, before a documentary about a doctor’s experience in Gaza. I opt to skip that one and spend some time at a ramshackle bookstore we’d noticed the day before. In the window, a small sign says hours are Saturdays 1-4pm. It’s called Adams Walls of Books and is everything a bookstore should be. I’ve been trying not to buy books but find three I want. The owner only accepts cash, Venmo, or check. I have Venmo but no smartphone, so she holds my books while I run out to find an ATM.

The original plan was to stay a second night at the hotel and leave in the morning but Bill is done by 4pm and asks if I’d be up for driving back right then.

I’m always up for leaving early.

K reads “Bucket of Pig’s Blood” and I read “Dust Jackets” at Tangible Books, March 5th, 2026.

The Friday KMR drawings keep changing. Better? Worse? Don’t ask me. But I don’t feel like I’m repeating myself yet and I want to keep going, which are about the only criteria I know to not stop doing a thing.

There are about thirty of them now. Ten or twelve will go up at the bar in September.

I scribbled the quote in a notebook while illustrating Moby Dick. Something about the soul being a useless thing, like a fifth wheel to a wagon. It was Elijah, the mad street prophet warning Ishmael and Queequeg about the man whose ship they’d just signed on to.

I used the scrap of paper with the quote in a collage whose base is a drawing of a pantry on 24th Street I made twenty years ago. Ripping up old stuff gives me a kind of buoyant pep nearly every time I do it. Whether the resulting picture flies or crashes, disposing or attempting to “fix” the old thing never feels like a mistake. I’ve never once regretted it or wished I could undo what I’d done.

The white whale’s been on my mind again because a tape of excerpts I read from that book will come out sometime later this year. More details when it’s official.

We went to listen to a couple bands play in a venue that used to be a Latvian social club according to one of the players. I’d been there once before. Both that show and this one were top drawer. Older people playing music that pushed and pulled genres. Probably not very marketable in any mainstream way but just right for me.

I made a page of all the drawings from The Jungle. Will make them available for sale soon. The book will be out in November. The Sound and the Fury first, in July.

When I lived in the Heart of Chicago (2004-2011), there was a cafe round the corner that kept very odd hours. It would be open very early in the morning and then be closed all day and reopen at night. The days that even these hours were kept could be random and unpredictable.

The cafe’s namesake and proprietor was a man named Bill Duvall. I became a regular at his place and attempted to get to know him, which wasn’t easy. Still, there were memorable evenings, like a screening of Murnau’s Sunrise—A Song of Two Humans, accompanied by an improvised electronic music score, and, of course, the mostly-weekly tango classes. Like every coffeeshop I’ve ever haunted, I had an art show there too.

Bill always had grand plans, like having a fully-functional kitchen, which was never built out. Some mornings I’d find him passed out at one of the little tables.

One day I walked up and found the picture window covered in brown paper taped from the inside. I never saw the place open again, nor ran across Bill. I still have no clue what happened nearly twenty years later.

I do know the man loved to dance to tango music just like his very famous uncle, who passed away the other day.

After I finished writing the above and posted it to Substack, I read a notice of Frederick Wiseman’s passing. I don’t know that I ever wrote much about the experience of watching his unique nonfiction films. It’s an insult to call them documentaries.

I made a few drawings from freezeframes of Titticut Follies during COVID lockdown when I had no access to living models. They did the trick even as frozen black-and-white shades of people long gone.

Yesterday, I came home to a package with international postage left by my landlord’s gate. It was a book of Solomon Yudovin’s Jewish folk ornament designs. Yudovin was big interest of my grandmother’s. She collected and championed his work. Now her daughter has put out a handsome art book which will serve as a tribute to her mother. The introduction is a transcription of a speech my grandmother gave at the opening of an exhibition of the artist’s work in Israel, where my grandmother spent her last years.

There’s no cheating the actuarial table. It’s truly the only thing we can completely depend on. Still, how to react, what to say or do when it happens to someone you know or care about has never been simple or obvious.