Letter

All I wanted was a little shop of my own. But I should know by now that I can’t have what I want. Not without pulling a few teeth.

The problem began about a year ago when for some reason the credit card processing company Square switched their online store setup to something called Weebly. I’d been happy with how the store was set up until then. It was easy to update. I didn’t have to think much about it. Weebly changed all that.

Now I was spending extra time wrestling the application over shipping rates and layout. Changes and updates magically reverted to previous versions with no warning or explanation. One day a painting could only be picked up, the next only shipped. Sometimes taxes were added, other times not. No rhyme or reason. On top of that, Weebly somehow convinced me to pay a hundred bucks to upgrade to “professional” level for a year. I’m not a professional on a computer in any way, shape, or form, but dealing with this company made me feel like a rank amateur.

It went on like this for most of the year until I noticed that I could cancel the recurring payment to Weebly for this “professional” scam of theirs. I figured that once they busted me down to “novice” or “peon” or whatever, things in my little store would become a total shambles. So I plotted my escape.

I’m not a tech guy. My brain isn’t wired for the kind of linear logic required for success in the field. Every time something doesn’t work online it sends me into a spiral. It’s deja vu all over again to 2004 when I was left with a new website to run half a year after learning how to turn on a computer. I broke the thing over and over again, staying up days at a time to search for the comma or exclamation point within the code that made the thing not work. I may not know what I’m doing but I’ll keep doing it wrong over and over until I stumble on an answer. Tunnel vision is how I roll.

Cut to last week when Weebly made another simple order difficult and I resolved to make my break. I surfed around for e-commerce software and chose Opencart for reasons which remain a mystery. Over the following days I clumsily attempted to stuff the folders and files into the space I cleared out on my site for the new shop. There were a few victories but many more defeats. I enlisted my good friend, Tracy, who builds websites, to help and bombarded her with questions. I also turned to the company that’s hosted my site since 2008. They were each as helpful as they could be. The whole thing made me feel like an armless man up at bat. Not only don’t I understand the problem but I also lack the tools to even begin to address it.

Somewhere into the the fourth or fifth day of this process I deleted all the files from the server and started over again. My host company offered to help me build my shop and I gladly accepted. I happily cut-and-pasted pictures and text into this new thing for a day or so until it came time to set up a way to accept payments. Square wouldn’t process my credit card info. Was it because I was trying to make a break with Weebly? Who knows.

All I know is this train is in motion and it will either reach its destination or crash and burn trying. Matchbooks with shop.dmitrysamarov.com are being printed in New Jersey as we speak. There’s no going back.

I’ll have my own shop even if it means standing with a sandwich board on the sidewalk and giving everything away for free.

—A chapter from Old Style is included in Neutral Spaces Magazine. Thanks to Giacomo Pope for that and for running a really beautiful site for writers. I bet he wastes no time at all waiting for tech support…

—After all that, the store is gone and the shop is up…

I got to use abecedarian in a book review about dementia. When I looked up the word’s meaning to make sure I was using it correctly I came across abecedarium, which is more or less another word for alphabet. The reason I was looking into all this was that every chapter of Damian Rogers’ book starts with a sequence of words in alphabetical order that together form a kind of poem. That and my reading of Russian poetry were enough for my mind to spin out and ruminate on letters and their sequence.

I brushed these thoughts away for a few days but they kept pulling at my sleeve. I spent a couple hours putting together a playlist with a song for each letter. But in the process I found too many songs I wanted to include, so I added two songs per letter. I sequenced them in a palindromic pattern, so you begin and end with A. I was completely exhausted afterwards. But now, when the men with the butterfly nets come to take me away I’ll be secure knowing my skills at killing time.

After finishing the playlist I turned on the TV and watched a weird documentary about twin girls who may or may not have invented their own language. There’s no way all this alphabet business didn’t influence that choice. Our minds are trained to find patterns. Once you spot one you start seeing it everywhere——like Punch buggy.

Letters, words, and sentence fragments have been part of my paintings since before I tried to write anything aside from homework. Their forms act as punctuation and rhythm apart from any literal meaning. That’s what Rogers’ alphabetical chapter titles made me thing of——how the order of words can have meaning and form apart from dictionary definitions.

Reading poetry has made me pay attention to how words look on a page the same way I look at marks in a painting. It all starts to run together. I don’t know exactly where I’ll end up on this track but it feels like there is a definite direction.

Something where words and pictures are one.

—In case you’re wondering, the image up top is an avatar someone commissioned me to paint for their MySpace page 13-15 years ago.

It’s as if de Chirico went to bed with a hangover and had a Krazy Kat dream about America falling apart…                                                                    John Perrault on Philip Guston, 1970

Philip Guston is never far from my mind. He’s been in the news because a planned retrospective of his work was postponed over worry that his pictures of hooded figures might be seen as an endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan. Following an outcry the museum grandees backpedaled and put the show back on the calendar. I wonder what Guston would’ve made of the inchoate mess of overreach and virtue-signaling made over pictures which are about inner responsibility and guilt. The people who tried to hide these paintings from a public they judged too stupid to decide for themselves were mostly worried about what would be thought of them. I wonder if they’d spent any time actually looking at the art?

I’ve been rereading Musa Mayer’s Night Studio. I remembered the book having a powerful effect on me when I first read it in the early 90s. It details what life is like for the child of an artist. It likely went some way in reinforcing my instinct that having children would be a bad idea if I was to continue on the path I was on. The book stayed on my mind enough to name a painting after it (above). It was made in a studio apartment in Brighton, Massachusetts around 1995.

A few years later in Chicago when I started getting tattoos I thought of Guston again. I almost got one of his Klansman but was talked out of it. Maybe tattooists occasionally get worried about appearances just like museum trustees do. I settled on one of his life of the artist paintings. I couldn’t find a drawing to bring to the shop, so I drew my own version. Bob Lindell’s rendition is on the right side of my gut to this day. It’s also been my avatar on many long-dead blogs and social media platforms. Guston gives and gives and gives.

The only good thing to come out of the controversy over Guston’s retrospective is that my ex-wife read about it and sent me the catalogue for the show that may or may not happen for my fiftieth birthday. It’s a beautiful book full of amazing pictures that I’ve loved for a long long time.

Can’t wait to see the show when we can all take our hoods off.

p.s. I reviewed Damian Rogers’ great book about her mother, dementia, and memory.