Letter

I started illustrations for The Jungle. A bird’s eye view of the stockyards with countless cattle corrals and smokestacks in the distance. Portraits of Sinclair and the other contributors. The first of what will likely be many pictures of men posing with ripped-open carcasses. This is the sixth book I’ve undertaken in the public domain series. I wonder how many there will be when I’m done. Thinking about Melville’s The Confidence Man or maybe Tristram Shandy next. But four are already queued up for next year. Who knows? Maybe I should take a break. But what would that even mean? How would I spend the hours, days, and weeks?

The hardcover of Old Style is gone but for a couple copies at Tangible. Should I make a paperback? Would anyone even want it without that foil-stamped blue cover? The thing with each of the four hardcovers I made is that many people who pick them up are disappointed that there’s text and pictures inside. They want them to be blank books with a cool cover that they can fill with their own important thoughts.

I recorded a talk with John Tottenham. As soon as we were done I jumped on the bike and raced downtown to the Siskel to catch Fassbinder’s Fear of Fear. He made it for German TV in 1975 and there’s still not much on TV like it. Right between Polanski’s Repulsion and Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman. So painful, but I couldn’t look away.

Thursday and Friday, K and I started a new Thanksgiving tradition of watching the entire run of Horace and Pete. Hadn’t seen it since the awful year it came out but it’s lost none of its despairing power. Notwithstanding its creator’s fall from grace or the horrific political era it anticipated, as great art is wont to do.

The preorder’s up for Winesburg. Buy early and often.

Trying a different t-shirt company. Here’s the Chicago Sewer shirt.

Ben asked for a cover design for his new zine, then for an ad for my own things to be placed inside. I put something together without a second thought. That’s strange because I come from a time when artistic integrity was put in opposition to commerce. Getting called a sell-out carried some meaning and consequence. It’s laughable to look back on now, when every scrap, actual or virtual, is up for sale to the lowest bidder.

I’m reading a book about Margaret Anderson, founder of The Little Review, which started in Chicago and is best known as the first publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses. The lengths and depths to which she and her colleagues had to scramble for funds to keep the lights on is equal parts familiar and depressing. Has there ever been a time or place where artist were valued and just allowed to do their thing in peace? Does the practical difficulty of getting the work done necessarily give it value?

Every creative person I’ve ever known or heard of serves at the pleasure and whim of some master or other. Either they have independent means or they bend their craft to a patron’s will. I tend to romanticize anonymous or barely known artists like Andrei Rublev or Albert York; guys about whom little is known, who functioned according to somewhat mysterious or unknowable rules. But the first could only operate at the pleasure of church and state and the latter was free to spout commercial chores because of family money.

I work my ass off putting the work out there but often fall short of meeting my meager financial obligations. I’m fortunate to have a family to help when needed. There are also longtime supporters of my work who step up over and over. I have little to complain about. I just can’t help wonder if there’s some better way to fund the work of people like me, whose work doesn’t easily fit into market slots.

I recently published an essay/review on a comic strip compilation about indie movie theater employees who foment a revolution. It’s a funny/untenable fantasy but I don’t have any brighter ideas for a way forward. The publication in which this article appears is on Substack, a platform that started as a paid newsletter service but has more recently expanded to include more social media features. I’m grateful to the people who run the publication and wish I could do more to help them grow their readership but don’t have the slightest clue how to do that.

I’ve tried to figure out how to use the subscription thing any number of ways with very mixed results. I hate quantifying my work in any way as it prompts dark thinking and stifles any kind of creativity but there’s just no way of getting around the fact that day-to-day life costs in units not measured by brushstrokes or word-count.

This newsletter, which I’ve kept up in various formats and on numerous platforms for over fifteen years, has lately been losing readers. I don’t know why and don’t want to know. Nothing good could come of hearing the answer.

My persistent fantasy of a government (or whatever other colossal entity) sending a truck to my front door every month and taking away what I made in exchange for chits or allowance keeps not coming true.

If you have any bright ideas about any of this, I’d love to hear them.

I don’t watch as many movies as I used to but I still watch too many.

I forget most of them before the credits even roll (provided I get that far, which is not the case at least fifty percent of the time.) The natural question to ask is why I even bother at this point and I don’t have a ready answer, except to say that habits are hard to break. Movies have been a mainstay of my life since I was a kid. I’m not ready to quit them. Not yet.

I can’t remember a worse year in terms of theatrical releases. It’s seen career worsts from PT Anderson, Lynne Ramsay, Ari Aster, Darren Aronovsky, and David Cronenberg, and dud after dud from middling or unknown directors. The medium is on life-support for a lot of reasons but this avalanche of mediocrity is beyond my analytic capacity to explain. And yet I keep trudging to the theater hoping for the best.

I loved Magic Farm and wrote a whole thing about it and Ulman’s other movie. Radu Jude’s Dracula was a filthy hoot and Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind was a sweet shaggy-dog story about a really shitty guy. On becoming a Guinea Fowl cast a weird spell, Misericordia seduced and Secret Mall Apartment made me laugh while mourning the damage ill-conceived urban renewal wreaks. Nearly every other flick I can think of that I got something out of was old or seen on my TV, in bed.

Because of K, I enjoyed a couple trips to the theater despite the horrid shit onscreen. We laughed through most of 28 Years Later and heroically outlasted both Eddington and Frankenstein. I’d have skipped out on all three less than an hour in if I was solo. I paid for a month of HBO so we could watch the Paul Reubens doc. It was worth the fifteen bucks, even if I deleted the app after a couple weeks for want of anything else to watch.

The only upcoming release I’m sort of looking forward to is the new one from Jarmusch with Tom Waits looking like the Crypt Keeper. Could be great or complete schlock. There’s just no telling anymore.

RIP Tony Adler. He was my first theater editor at The Reader but I got to know him better through his yearly Whitmanstide readings and frequent meet ups at art openings. He was a sweet guy and I’ll miss him. I don’t know what he’d have thought of this Trap Door production, but I loved it.

I reviewed a great travelogue of cemeteries.

Here’s the checklist for my Fire Cat show, just in time for the shopping frenzy season.