Letter

I don’t believe in ghosts. Not the invisible ones or the bed-sheet-wearers. But I have no doubt that memories and traces of family and friends gone haunt us, whether alive, dead, or undead. I know the past has never left me alone.

Sometimes that’s a good thing. I saw Todd Haines’ amazing Velvet Underground documentary and realized that a couple of parts of “European Son” play on a loop somewhere in the background of my consciousness at all times. Also, that I want to try playing guitar again.

The horror podcast is going great guns this month because of Halloween. We’re recording every week. Makes me think about what I actually find scary. It’s definitely not horror movies. Go read up on cryptocurrency if you wanna be scared shitless. Read a news headline or three. Or watch Forrest Gump. Vampires, ghosts, zombies, and make-believe serial killers are comedy relief by comparison.

I took a walk with Wendy in Pilsen the other day and she reminded me about the time we met on Halloween at the same spot many years before. I was still driving a cab and had gotten a rubber clown mask from the Batman movie and worn it on my shift. I scared the shit out of people. Somewhere there are photobooth snaps of me and Tracy from that same night. I tried to wear the mask the following year, but it had shrunk. Probably just cheap material, but maybe the universe telling me not to do that again.

I don’t think I’ve ever been asked to draw a ghost until just recently. It was to illustrate an article about ghosting. That’s the kind of apparition I’ve become intimately familiar with. A very contemporary monster, conjured and coaxed to propagate by technology. Our communication devices give us a thousand novel ways to avoid one another. No matter how high the resolution or wide-spectrum the audio, silence is still silence; it hurts as much, maybe more. That’s what keeps haunting me. I’m probably as guilty as most. For all the time I sit and wait for someone to answer, there must be at least one or two people that sit and wait on me. The trouble is that it’s so rare that the waiters ever match. We’re always waiting for those who don’t wait for us.

Bet you have a disappearist or three in your life. What if one of them actually came back? Now that would be some scary shit!

[I read an excerpt from my book in progress for a Hello America compilation.]

Behind the door of an easy-to-miss corner storefront, at the edge of a city park, four guys gather to make music.

I’ve sat in on the recording process a few times. The amount of time it takes to set up mics in relation to instruments, the arrangement of effects pedals, the nudging and tweaking of things I don’t know the names or functions of, all feels so far out of anything I’ve ever been part of.

I can zone out just following the path of all the cords. They run alongside one another, then veer off this way and that. So many cords…

They start playing and I’m completely mesmerized. It’s like a magic trick whose secret I never want revealed. But when they take a break to listen back to what they just did, I ask the engineer why I couldn’t hear the two basses.

He points to the cords leading out into the front room and an isolation booth. They’re connected to amps that emit sound into mics behind closed doors as everyone plays. This way, in the recording, the instruments don’t bleed into each other.

Then it’s a couple hours later, though it felt like just a few minutes. They’re done with the song. They’re outside smoking, talking about some bit on SNL, where they’ll get dinner.

I say goodbye and bike it to the bar for my shift.

I mentioned in April how I was working on some kind of book-thing made from Russian poems my father sent me. Now I’ve done it. I found folders at Staples with metal prongs so I could spindle pages rather than bother with binding. That made the thing more feasible. That’s often the case——if I can picture a container or form, everything else tends to fall into place.

There are fourteen pages of poems typed out in Russian on the Cyrillic Smith-Corona, with hand-written, occasionally illustrated facing pages on which I attempt to explain something about each poem.

A friend suggested I translate the poems, but that’s far beyond my linguistic abilities. It was all I could do to understand them as a reader. I’m sure I missed a lot of the references. Some are from over a hundred years ago. Many reference other poems that I haven’t read. But I got the gist of a lot of it. With some, it was just a rhythmic musical thing, while others addressed themes that hit close to home.

I spent this weekend collating all the mismatched pages, while half-watching every playoff baseball game go the opposite from what I’d hoped. Then, Sunday morning, I stenciled and collaged each folder cover. No baseball games were on, so it went much better.

I probably used around half of the poems my father sent me. Because they were addressed to his son, the painter, many are concerned with the artist’s lot. I could fill tomes with rants about how artists are shit on in this society. Maybe that’s obvious and self-evident, but when you’re living it it doesn’t hurt any less knowing that so many others suffer the same way.

Anyways, I made twenty of these things. I don’t know (as I never do) if there’s much of an audience for this, but it absorbed me for a good part of the last half year. I’d like $25 for them. Get yours here. I also have one extra-special folder of originals for $200 (just send a note if you’re interested.)

Now that this is done, I’ll go back to my art-world satire book. Less hand-typing and collating involved, but it’s along the same well-worn path. We do what we know, I guess.

[Talked to Rick Kogan on the radio and to Mallory about The Thing.]