Letter

Chet Baker looked like Elvis but he didn’t die on the toilet like the King; he fell out a window. He was a junkie. But, boy, could he sing. I probably first heard him in Bruce Weber’s awful fashion shoot/“documentary”. It played at the movie theater I worked at in high school in the late ‘80s. I knew nothing about Baker but sensed it was wrong to that broken-down man in a vintage convertible with members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and have them cruise around like avatars of the cool life was all kinds of wrong. The soundtrack was killer though.

I put on the record with the song on it the other day. He’s singing about the moment of being so in love that nothing else matters. I try to remember if I ever felt that. maybe a couple times. It never lasts. There’s a sad undertone, an ache, in most of Baker’s songs. As if he knows even while it’s going well that it will soon slip away. But maybe that’s editorializing. Maybe it’s because I know he died early and addicted.

Ethan Hawke made a pretty good biopic about Baker called Born to Be Blue. Unlike Weber, Hawke doesn’t make Baker a doomed romantic hero but a talented guy with a fatal flaw. But he left enough beauty behind that when I think of him I don’t picture an addict who fell out a window but a young guy singing about being so in love everything else vanishes.

There are many versions of the jazz standard Chet Baker made famous but the song with the same name that the Boston band Come released in 1994 isn’t one of them. It’s a kind of cold-shower response. After the first, second, and fifteenth bloom of love has withered. A desperate plea to salvage what’s left. A longshot try at staying together. This feeling is a lot more familiar to me than the one Baker sings about.

Come was a band I’d park the cab and go see in the mid-90s. They were a reprieve from my job which was overwhelming and dispiriting and my life which was barely living. So when they sang about getting lost, I was ready to do so.

Even if what you’re mourning wasn’t truly so grand, building it up into a mountain is something we all know about. Because in the mind a molehill can be Mount Everest just like that. And replaying the highlights and lowlights, reediting them into perfect second and third chances, wallowing in it, is a hobby many of us work at religiously.

My guess is that Chet Baker lived this song as many times as he sang the other.

p.s. I made three album covers for Eleventh Dream Day’s “Works For Tomorrow” LP. They will be among 33 handmade covers raffled off for charity today.

I tell myself I’m saving old forgotten pictures from the trash heap by defacing and obscuring them. They become the starting point or maybe the support or background for something new. There’s no two ways about it, I love throwing things I’ve made out. My greatest accomplishment in my ill-fated semester of grad school was chucking six months’ work in the dumpster. But I’m trying to change.

There’s often little to salvage. A couple inches of green here, a not-completely-inert brushstroke there. In the case of the oil painting above, when I came upon it in my parents’ basement a few weeks ago I wondered why I kept it. Why did I bring it back with me after graduating from SAIC in 1993. Was it as a keepsake of my school years? A reminder of good times painting on the back porch of the house on Logan Boulevard with friends? This is what snapshots are for not 3’x4’ oil paintings. My parents probably had the hideous thing up on their walls at some point but I know it’s been in the basement at least fifteen years. It was waiting down there for me all that time.

The first thing I did when I brought it home was take a box cutter to it. I wanted to see if the paint would chip off in an interesting way. It wasn’t much but the slash marks made it a better picture immediately.

Starting with an oil painting on stretchers is different than taking a piece of an old drawing and gluing it to cardboard. There’s a lot more there and it’s much less malleable, so the thing to do is cover up as many bad parts as possible. I doodled over it with markers, attached tape to it, painted acrylic lines which sometimes accentuated, but more often obscured what was underneath.

I kept hanging it back up on the wall and wondering what else it needed. The last big move was gluing pink construction paper to cover up most of a lumpy, badly-painted blue van. After that it was just grace notes and highlights. I sensed I needed to leave the thing alone.

It stayed on the studio wall for days. Then, a few nights ago while watching a movie, I paused it, walked down the hall and came back with the painting and hung it up in the bedroom to the right of the TV. That’s where it is now. I look over at it when the movie I’m watching hits a dull spot.

A lot of what I did to it stays on the surface, like it’s on this side of a window pane. But a few things made it through and I can’t tell them apart from the old marks. It’s probably a failure but it might be a transition point to something new.

Perhaps one day this picture will get recycled and transmogrified again. But maybe it’ll just go in the dumpster. That’s my process.

p.s. I watched Béla Tarr’s Damnation the other day and have been listening to Vig Mihály’s Tarr soundtrack music on repeat ever since. Perfect for clumsy dancing in a sad bar or just being alone in a room.

A couple years ago my friend Stan was selling off a bunch of stuff from the back of his gallery. I bought some jazz records, a beautiful Polish film poster, and a few books. My favorite was a nice old copy of Frans Masereel’s wordless Passionate Journey.

Masereel tells his hero’s tale in 165 woodcuts without using a single word. He works in the simplified Expressionist style which was common in 1919 when the book came out but there’s a buoyancy from panel to panel which moves the eye along.

It’s remarkable how much motion and color he gets out of black-and-white. And even in the scenes when the hero is at his lowest something about Masereel’s staccato cut marks keeps the thing from sinking into a self-pitying mire.

I enjoyed my copy of the book for a few months, then gave it to a woman as a present. I never saw her or the book again.

Masereel inspired others to try their hand at telling a story in pictures. The best known now is probably Lynd Ward. God’s Man, the first of several wordless novels came out in 1929. Though using similar techniques to Masereel, Ward’s work couldn’t be more different. There’s not even a hint of a chuckle in his hero’s journey. This is deathly serious business.

Ward’s isn’t a light touch but I like his book anyway. There’s no questioning his faith in the artist’s mission in the world. Ward’s work is often cited as paving the way for the contemporary graphic novel. Just as it’s a mark of one’s impact to be parodied on SNL or latenight talk shows now, in Ward’s time a cartoonist published an entire wordless novel lampooning his self-seriousness. If they mock you it means you matter.

William Gropper’s Alay-Oop, which was recently reissued, might be my favorite book with no words. Because Gropper didn’t box himself into the restrictions imposed by the woodcut his pictures have a jazz flow which even Masereel couldn’t match.

The story, as with Ward and Masereel, is pretty rudimentary. It’s difficult to nail down complex intellectual notions without words. Art lends itself to

endless personal and emotional interpretation but if you want to direct your reader to specific idea words are the best ticket.

I’m wrestling with this stuff a lot lately while working on collages. There’s no hero’s journey in the two collage books I’ve made but I flip through God’s Man and Alay-Oop all the time to see how those guys jumped from one page to the next, from one moment or era to another. I even ordered a copy of Passionate Journey online.

Because even though the girl is gone the story remains.