Letter

They spoke to me right off. Something about the proportions of the window shapes felt instantly familiar. Like something I’d known a long time. Intrinsically. Those windows point to countless lives in cities, over decades, maybe centuries.

Somebody posted a picture on some site, with a link to an eBay page, and I clicked through. The price was ridiculous. There was hardly any documentation aside from some vague claim to the Art Deco era. No packaging. Just a few photos. I filled in a low bid, then deleted it. Closed the tab. Read an article about some forthcoming book or cryptocurrency or maybe another scam or fraud. I tried to put the blocks out of my mind.

Then I looked at my windowsill. There’s a lot of room there that I hadn’t fully utilized. The space was partially obscured by the bins of crap I use for collage, but now I could see how the high-rises of blocks would stand there. I searched through History, found the eBay tab, and pulled the trigger.

The box arrived about a week later, lightning-fast by current USPS standards. Columns of blocks were carefully wrapped in crepe paper, then bubble-wrap. I unpacked and piled them on the floor next to my chair. Then I took six or seven cubes and stacked up my first tower. I pushed the rest toward the windowsill and sat on the floor building the rest of the city.

I sat back and looked at it. It was a lot like what I’d imagined, but something was preventing me from enjoying my toy city fully. It took a day or two to figure out the problem.

When I go to watch movies and read in my bedroom at night, I like to look down the length of my place to the studio. Usually the lights cast by passing cars create a kind of intermittent snowglobe/aquarium feel——it’s soothing and helps me drift off. But now I wanted to see the silhouette of the block city on the sill. The piles of collage flotsam were in the way.

It was past midnight, but I got out of bed and started moving furniture. An hour later, my drafting desk, wheeled cart of art implements, and bins of crap were neatly arranged against the far wall of the studio. There’s an open living-room type area in front of my armchair. The rug is swept of cuttings and dust bunnies. The room feels twice as big.

I move the genie bottles I’ve lugged from apartment to apartment for eighteen years and set them behind the blocks, to form a kind of beyond background. Now, when I get up in the morning, this model cityscape is the first thing I sit looking at when I need a break from the computer screen.

I can’t pretend to know why this old child’s toy grabbed me this way, but if it could make me rearrange this room, who knows what else a set of blocks with window shapes painted on can inspire?

I’ve mentioned Steve Keane before. In addition to having the best artist website ever, as the video in the first link says, he may be the most prolific painter ever. Aside from possible inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records (if that still exists), does making a lot of things count for anything? I think about this a lot because I make a lot of things.

I long ago let go of the hope of agonizing over one perfect precious masterpiece over eons; that doesn’t work for me. I throw a bunch of shit against the wall and hope some small percentage sticks. Since diving into the collage thing last year, there’s a new wrinkle to the process. Now, after I finish something I find lacking, instead of ripping it up and tossing it in the trash, I rip it up and make a new thing out of it. Perhaps, eventually, I’ll refine the technique to the point that I can just keep building up and tearing down the same picture over and over. That’ll be my great gesamkunstwerk. Probably not.

I’ll keep cranking out stuff until the well runs dry. Like book covers for books that I’ve only just started writing.

It’s my “process”, I guess.

I bought a stack of old hardcovers at a church sale in a tiny Wisconsin town. I picked them for their covers or illustrations within or, sometimes, the title on the spine. I chose them with the thought that I could make something new out of them.

We Three is a reading primer for children. I picked it for the three kids printed on the cover and the cookie-cutter illustrations of conformist WW2-era American life throughout.

As I set about ripping out and defacing the book’s pages, I occasionally stopped to read random phrases. In the four previous collage books I made, I rarely left printed text from the book I was using as an armature, or staging area, visible. But something about the simple phrases about Mother or Father or children kept grabbing at me as I glued construction paper and my own childhood art onto the pages. I started scribbling and painting out half paragraphs; leaving a sentence or two per page. Sometimes I’d paste in text from elsewhere to sort of match up with or contradict these primer words.

The more I did it, the more I wondered how coherent a string of sentences I wanted. Some pages started looking like blackout poetry. I’d flip back to the start and read it as if it was a story. But in the end I wasn’t interested in revealing a set meaning. These sentences are frosting on the cake, not the filling. If you read it cover to cover, no mystery will be revealed to you. Maybe a couple laughs or eye-rolls, but that’s about it.

“New Attack Words” came from the series of vocabulary tables in the back of the book. I only noticed the phrase when I was coming to the end. As I said before, I didn’t read this book before mangling it. Would early-reading teachers use terminology like this now? Unlikely. We “attack” differently these days.

I’m still getting my sea legs with this way of working. I don’t know all the notes, all the rules. Still only making an alphabet. But this book pushed me further into considering what the recycled remnants I build the collage books out of demand. I chose these neglected, discarded hardcovers intentionally. When I see them in thrift stores or church sales, they speak to me and what they say demands thinking about.

As I add bits of my past to the past printed on their pages, I’m hoping to make something present.

See the whole book here.

— Summer of Soul is the most joyous thing I’ve seen in a long time. The concerts were filmed the same year as Woodstock, but inexplicably forgotten for fifty years. Nina Simone, The 5th Dimension, Sly & the Family Stone, The Staples Singers, and much more of the best music of the time. I loved every second.

—I wrote about the Chicago comics show at the MCA. Also, posted a bit from the new thing here.