Letter

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.

Chicago ills, indeed.

An old photo of an imposing long-gone building caught my eye while scrolling some site the other day. I look closer whenever Chicago is mentioned. It was the caption that stopped me cold: The Chicago Home for the Friendless. What could that be? I looked it up and it turned out to be a social services organization for women and children. They ran orphanages and the like from the mid-19th well into the 20th century. Then I stopped reading because this wasn’t what I imagined when I read the caption under the old photo.

I looked at the photo of the building and saw empty corridors. Many rooms uninhabited. The few residents rarely meeting, spending their days in silence, alone. I pictured my own room in there, maybe on one of the upper floors so I could have a good view out the window.

What passes for friendship these days is largely mediated. This last year’s plague has exacerbated our reliance on connection through screens and other technology rather than face to face. I’ve avoided it more than most. I’m deeply disturbed by the video-talk services. Using them I feel further removed from the person on the other end than if I was just thinking about them.

I quit social media six years ago but it’s impossible to avoid all contact with it no matter how hard I try. My ears burn when someone mentions me like anyone else’s do.

The other day I delivered a dog portrait to Beverly. I’d assumed the woman who ordered the portrait knew somebody from my time in that neighborhood but it turned out she heard my name on Instagram. She said Marc Maron mentioned me. I raced home and opened an Instagram account so I could see what she was talking about.

About twelve minutes into the video Maron picks up my music book, calls me some kind of genius, and puts it in a small pile of things to bring home. Then he talks about the painting I’d sent him months ago. Says he needs to get it framed. It’s of his old garage where he used to record his podcast. I’ve been a faithful listener for years. Maron is sort of the Johnny Carson of today. His interviews have been constant companions. They introduce me to people I’ve never heard of and give new insight to ones I know.

I scrolled through Maron’s Instagram timeline and found where he’d posted the painting. There were thousands of likes and many many comments. I read all of them. Then I searched for other people I knew had Instagram accounts. I started feeling that old itchiness. I logged off, then logged back on minutes later. I was dazed. Unable to concentrate on my work. I deleted the account and gradually came down off the false high. The video was jarring. But then I wrote an email to thank him, got no response, and things are back to normal.

You can’t expect friendship from the faces on the screen. I’m fine with that. I have this amazing view out the window of my haunted house and that’s all I need.

p.s. I made seven pictures for this interesting project. They pair an artist and writer and give each two hours a day over seven days to produce something. We made this awhile ago, sometime in the summer, I think. It was a unique challenge to come up with a quick response under strict time constraints with little forethought aside from each previous page.

I’ve used a portable Smith-Corona from the 50s since the late 90s. I bought it at a store way west on Fullerton Avenue. It was full of electric typewriters which I had no interest in. Apparently many city institutions were still using them then. The store is long gone.

The typewriter wasn’t entirely an affectation. I didn’t own a computer but wanted to write something about my adventures driving a taxi in Boston. I made ink drawings from memory, then cut-and-pasted sentences, paragraphs, sometimes single words, underneath. It was a laborious, often frustrating process. But I didn’t know any better. I’d never taken a writing class, knew nothing about how it was done aside from schoolwork or my own reading.

I’m into my third decade with this old machine now. It’s been a faithful and trusted tool. When I designed my website seventeen years ago I used the Smith-Corona for all the text. I scanned typed pages, then made hotspots for hyperlinks. I do it the same way to this day. A friend asked recently what platform I use for my site. I had to tell her the “platform” is just a bunch of html pages my ex-wife made that I’ve been copying and readjusting for nearly twenty years. My method is nearly as outmoded as a manual typewriter at this point.

But the Smith-Corona retains its attraction and maintains a few mysteries. One is why there is no exclamation point key. There’s a question mark but no exclamation point. Maybe the makers didn’t want its users to get over-excited. I typed a question about this into a search engine just now and learned how to fake it: Type an apostrophe, do a backspace, then type a period. Why I’ve never bothered to look into it before will give you some clue into the strange workings of my psyche.

I typed out the first forty pages of my book in progress. I’m such a poor typist that it took almost two weeks. But slowing down the rereading process is the whole point. The old typewriter keeps giving and giving.

Now I’ve bought another Smith-Corona. It’s from the 70s and has a Cyrillic keyboard. The idea is to type out Russian poems in order to improve my comprehension and spelling. Above is my first effort. It’s a New Year’s Eve poem by Boris Ryzhy from 1995.

Thanks so much for subscribing to my newsletter and for looking and reading.

Happy New Year!