Letter

The Liver Spot sits near a major intersection. The Point Diner and the Chicago Dispatcher used to be in the next building over. But that building was demolished several years ago. The Blue Light is still around the corner but it’s unrecognizable. It’s for yuppies now. Or preppies or normies or whatever. I don’t know. I haven’t set foot inside in twenty years. The Liver Spot isn’t what it used to be either.

Back when Carey would show up for unscheduled sets——acting like he was the Stones playing the Double Door——to an audience of five or six blasé whiskey drinkers who’d never heard of him, the Liver was decorated with mismatched furniture and horrible thrift-store art. It was like a cabaret in a junkyard. The bartender never knew my name and I loved him for that.

It’s austere, minimal now. The old owner sold when he saw the neighborhood changing. The new guy thinks it’s Jazz at Lincoln Center. It’s a “listening room” now. The seats have sleek lines and are profoundly uncomfortable for anyone weighing over 140 pounds. It’s no longer a place to linger. The good whiskey at rotgut prices is but a wisp of a memory. So it goes.

Carey now announces his appearance on Twitter, Snapchat, and IG Live. He can’t blow his horn, but he’ll spin you a yarn if you let him. He’ll do it even if you ask him not to. He doesn’t listen too good. He has an insatiable need to tell anyone within earshot about what once was. Who he used to be. Who he’ll soon be again.

The new guy’s thinking of dropping the Liver part of the name. Sacrilege to old-timers like me. We used to ask each other,

——Gonna be at the Liver later?

Knowing full well the answer was always yes, even when we said no. The new guy doesn’t want any of the seedy associations for his jazz temple. He puts up with a few of us still coming around out of charity or compromise or goodwill. But there’s no love lost and no one who looks like me will attract the crowd he’s after. Carey’s a legend so he gets carte blanche, whereas I’m a nobody, so tolerating my presence holds little benefit.

The bartender——the 22-year-old son of the singer of a popular band I hate——has Stereolab on low. Carey’s holding court tonight. Telling us about the last time he was on Carson or Conan, some late-night show. He describes in vivid, wrenching detail how he fought to stay upright on the bandstand. The sickness was coursing through him. Sending lightning shocks that blinded him every few seconds. When he could see, it wasn’t the clapping studio audience, but vibrating electric-tinted worms in dayglo rainforests. He kept blowing the standard the censors approved before he hit the stage, but it was practically out-of-body. He’d played the number so many times his conscience was only nominally required. He has his other four listeners on the edge of their seats. Out-of-towners. They’re at the Liver tonight after reading up about it in an airline magazine. They hoped to run into an authentic jazzbo. It’s their lucky night. What they don’t know is that Carey tells his harrowing tale word for word in bars and coffeeshops all over town night after night. I don’t tell them. I don’t want to burst the old blowhard’s balloon.

When he’s done talking, he signs the records they brought, works up what passes for a smile for their selfies. He’s exhausted. I finish the last of my drink and help him out to the car. He stopped driving long before the sickness. The last time he was behind the wheel he drove into someone’s living room. He’s been paying others to cart him about ever since. He likes it. Makes him feel important. I have a rolling deal with the Liver Spot guy to bring Carey over in exchange for a break on the bar tab. Maybe that’s why he tolerates my presence. If I can get the horn player here a time or two a week, it ups his cred a bit, even if these tourists hardly ever order more than a glass of his box wine or a light beer.

(another excerpt here)

She doesn’t seem like the talkative type. She murmurs her order——a Belgian ale——then slips the one headphone she’d pushed back to speak back over her ear. No eye contact or acknowledgment when I set the tulip glass on a coaster before her, except to edge a dollar bill back my way.

Then Poppin’ Fresh (not his given name)——my least favorite coworker——bops through the front door and parks himself right next to her. She shudders when he taps her shoulder, then removes the headphones and smiles at him. Looks like I have the front row seat for yet another Tinder date.

He packs away a couple Lites to every one of her ales, but they seem to be getting along well enough. They duck out to smoke or make out or whatever patrons do outside the bar, away from my eyes. It’s an unusually busy Sunday, so I don’t eavesdrop on them too much. Got my hands full with others. But after an long absence——long enough that I move their half-drunk beers and money aside so others can sit——she returns alone.

It’s not like Poppin’ Fresh to leave three-quarters of a can on the bar, much less a $10 tip for his least favorite coworker, so I know something’s wrong. She tells me they got into a fight and he went home. Now I have to know more.

I get the details in fragments because I’m running around, but it boils down to a disagreement about the ethics of meat consumption. She’s vegan. He says he wouldn’t eat octopus because he’s heard they’re intelligent; she says it makes no difference and that we’re all animals, so it’s a question of all or nothing. I say I’m with her, not because I care about eating or not eating animals, but because she scared Poppin’ Fresh away. She doesn’t know our history of bad blood or seem to care much. She’s just happy to have a sympathetic ear.

Encouraged by my reaction, she elaborates on her theories. I won’t try to reconstruct her thread of thought because, even if I listened with rapt attention rather than catching a bit here and there in between pouring shots and beers, it makes not a lick of sense. Something about invalid children having less value than pigs or cows, how Hitler had some good ideas, and that, as a Black woman and vegan, she doesn’t understand why people are so upset about fascism. It’s real stew of inchoate outrage. There’s something about being angry with her mother for giving birth to her without the means to provide a safe and loving home. It’s a lot, but it’s mostly comedy relief to me on a hectic night.

——I know humans are delicious. I eat my cuticles all the time…I’m a cannibal.

Eber and Emma see me laughing every time I’m near the woman and they’re jealous. They feel left out. I promise to relay the highlights later. My tormented friend from last week comes in, but is completely upstaged by the newcomer. She leaves without picking up our discussion on gender identity. I’m thankful, as there’s only so many issues that I can handle though a single bar shift.

Then it’s closing time, and, of course, she’s the last one in the bar. I thank her for coming in and invite her to come back the following Sunday. She looks at me with sad brown eyes and says,

——I’m a cow.

Robot walks into a bar/Orders a drink, lays down a bill

Bartender says “Hey, we don’t serve robots”

And the robot says,”Oh, but some day you will” 

Silver Jews, “Frontier Index”

I work on my book most days. When I don’t work on it, I think about it. During this stage of the process——maybe a quarter- to a third-way through——I look for books and movies and art that line up or inform what I’m doing myself. I found the right book a few weeks ago, after a lot of false starts and frustration. It’s not that the books I’d started before weren’t worthwhile, but they weren’t jibing with where my head and heart were at. I’ll try some of them again after getting this current thing out of my system.

Movies are a little different in this regard. Sometimes I want to watch something to check out, turn the gears off. But it’s extra gratifying when I turn to one on that clicks. I binged on Fassbinder last year and even used stills from a bunch of his films for paintings and drawings during the time I had no access to live humans as subjects. I resisted watching his World on a Wire because it was described as sci-fi and my gut reaction is always to reject sci-fi.

I turned it on the other day and it totally upended all my prejudices against the speculative genre. Sure, it’s nominally set in the future and there are scientists messing with a simulated-reality program that, surprise surprise, starts to infect their reality. But we’re now fully living in the dystopia Fassbinder created in 1973.

——Weißt du was Angst ist? (Do you know what fear is?)

A character asks our hero, then, when the hero turns his head, the man vanishes into thin air. The movie is full of unsettling moments where people have to repeatedly question what they assume to be agreed-upon, factual knowledge. The hero thinks he’s on a mission to uncover a conspiracy when what is happening is that he’s just a rat in someone else’s maze. It reminded me a bit the Philip K. Dick thing where the guy who thinks everyone else is a robot is himself a robot.

On the face of it, this has nothing whatsoever to do with a book about artists who just want to be TV stars (or internet influencers, same difference). But something about the way Fassbinder gives lip-service to genre conventions while constantly riding the fence between farce and drama nails part of the tone I’m going for. I want my book to be funny, but have a point. The hero of my book is also constantly hoodwinked and taken advantage of, but he’s not as innocent as he’d like to think, just like Stiller in the movie.

Stiller is sure he’s the good guy fighting to save his world against a cabal of craven opportunists, but he may well be worse than the lot of them. I haven’t figured out the end of my book, but this type of self-delusion might be a part of it.

There’s also the overall feeling of waking up one day and sensing you don’t belong in a world you’d assumed was yours. Nobody wants to be left out of one’s culture. Painters have to cope with this feeling all the time. What use are oil paints, linen, and turpentine when all the means of expression have become intangible, virtual, and ever-shifting. Like illuminating a room via match and candle when it’s equipped with a voice-prompted wall of LEDs.

Still, there’s an irresistible impulse for a few of us to keep on with this old-fashioned shit. If nothing else, when the power grid collapses, my sketchbook will still work.

—I wrote a list of favorite recent things and talked about It Follows and have a few pieces up at Webster’s Wine Bar in Logan Square. Also, went to Kyle Beachy’s book-launch. You should all buy his book.

—Another collage book movie for you.