Letter

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.

I can tell the woman is preoccupied by the amount of time it takes her to decide what to drink. She looks familiar, but in a general sort of way. It’s likely her appearance. Short fedora, conceptual/geometric tattoos, abstract asymmetrical hairdo, men’s button-down shirt and chinos. It’s a personal style very common these days. Call it hipster-nonbinary. I wouldn’t be using feminine pronouns if we hadn’t spoken.

The bar’s not too busy tonight, but there are enough others that I can legitimately avoid lingering near her. I can feel her gaze even when I turn my back. She’s looking for something or someone, and, in the absence of any acquaintances in the room, she focuses on the bartender.

She sips at her shot and beer, mutters to herself, and looks up and down the length of the bar. For a few seconds she engages the couple seated next to her, but they soon get up and leave. As do several others. Now there’s just a cluster of my coworkers, whose shift has ended, and her. She beckons me over.

——So what are you into? What are your passions?

I give her the Cliff’s Notes version of my biography, regretting sharing each innocuous detail as it spills from my mouth. Because I can see her gears turning. She’s sizing me up in order to gauge how much to unburden herself of the weight that’s been crushing her ever since she walked in.

She says she was a performer but had a crack-up. She gives no details, nor shares much else personal. Instead, she wants to talk about a trans weightlifter at the Olympics. How they bested the previous world-record by a hundred pounds. That this is a symptom of a world gone crazy. She says something about young people transitioning being the same as forced sterilization, the destruction of traditional family structures and roles. She insists that we have to admit there’s a clear difference between men and women and that every other gender designation is left-wing delusion.

It’s every bartender’s burden to be amateur therapist, but some cases presented can’t be joked or free-drinked away. The things she talks about are clearly a deflection from what’s truly bothering her. But the heaviness of it is crushing.

She tries to hold my gaze as I walk away without agreeing or contradicting her statements. It’s last call. I start my end of the night clean-up.

——I’m making you uncomfortable, right?

No, I answer, it’s just the end of the night and we will not resolve the entire issue of gender identity in the next ten minutes. She wants agreement or argument, but I refuse to engage and this frustrates her. I tell her to come back next Sunday to continue the conversation, but hope to god she doesn’t.

After the locks are on the doors, I ask Eber and Emma if they know the woman. They don’t, except for seeing her in the bar in the company of a cop who’s a regular. They ask if she was hitting on me. If only. I tell them I feel like I got hit by a ton of bricks.

What’s it called to rage against the thing that’s clearly your own personal conflict? Self-loathing, irony, just the human condition?

——Come by the studio!

Orso’s Honeypot sits on a busy stretch of Robey Ave. There used to be artists in boarded-up storefronts around here, but Orso’s the last man standing. There’s a whiskey bar/farm-to-table bistro to the left and an artisanal eyeglass emporium to the right. Orso’s work table faces the street so he can ogle the young mothers in yoga pants who’ve overrun the neighborhood. Truth is he doesn’t make much art here anymore. In fact, he doesn’t personally make much of anything. He has a crew of young acolytes to take care of the grunt work.

A visitor to the Honeypot couldn’t be blamed for thinking Orso a real art machine. Dick Blick can keep the doors open on all the supplies he’s sold to Orso. But stay an hour or two and you see that the Arches paper, Old Holland paint, rare sable brushes, and fine Belgian linen canvases——stretched to every size——are just stage props. When not regaling admirers with wild war stories, Orso whiles away his work days scrolling through Facebook, Pornhub, and Instagram. Sucking every last fractal of ego boost the algorithms will dole out.

Beyond the “studio” part of his storefront is a gallery. Orso has decided he will now promote the work of others, having himself attained heights of artistic accomplishment accessible to a rare few. He will mentor the younger generation and shine his mighty light on forgotten and neglected masters of the past.

The current show is devoted to Rose Lee-Flecks. Three other galleries have devoted exhibits to the grim snapshots of the infamous recently deceased washer woman, but Orso insists he’s got the inside track on the real gold from the trove auctioned from her unpaid storage lockers. He’s got the stuff stashed in bank vaults and hotel safes about town. When an unknown artist is “discovered”, the vultures descend, then flap their mighty wings away with choice morsels vice-gripped to their beaks, furtively making their way to hidden aeries. They hunch together with fellow scavengers, carefully revealing a few details, obscuring others, in desperate, ever-shifting calculations to maximize return on their score.

Lee-Flecks’s is a sad story. But not to Orso and his ilk. Because they project their wish fulfillments on her and her work. They scrub clean the illness, sweep it under the rug. All they want the public to see is the raw genius. The wall labels with absurd price tags prove it. They want the buyer to feel she’s getting a fleeting miraculous thing. What’s a few grand for a glimmer of the eternal?

One time, Orso paid me $20 an hour to move a bunch of framed prints from one undisclosed location to another. He supervised by chainsmoking Marlboro Lights, leaning on the rented Hertz truck and casting weary glances at passersby. He confided that he’d met Rose once or twice when he was coming up.

——Ugly broad. Rude. Unpleasant. But, boy, it’s like printing money with those pictures of hers now…