Letter

I watch a lot of movies. I have for a long time. It probably became a lifelong thing from working in a movie theater in high school. Movies are easy to get lost in, especially if you’re unhappy in your everyday life. But it’s always bothered me that I was taking in all these images and sounds and ideas made by others and doing nothing of my own with them.

I never had any movie-making aspirations of my own. The idea of collaborating with dozens of others on something creative was unthinkable. It remains so. I’m mostly a one-man-band. It’s the scale I’m comfortable working on. Still, I wanted to do something with all that was coming at me from the screen.

I used to write film reviews and that scratched the itch a little. But reviews and essays about movies are secondary. An add-on rather than their own thing with rare exceptions. The shittiest flick is more valuable than the greatest review because a review can only exist as a response. Sure, there are films made in response to critics but this isn’t a chicken and egg situation. Everybody knows which came first.

A couple years ago I tried to keep a film diary in which I wrote a sentence or two about every movie I watched. I gave up after a few months because it felt like homework. A chore. I didn’t want busy work, I wanted to make something of all I was taking in. There will be no prizes given for who saw the most movies or read the most books or listened to the most records. There’s a nagging feeling that to just watch all the time is passive and kind of pointless. A narcotizing time killer and nothing more. There has to be a better reason to keep taking it all in.

The solution I came up with a few months ago was to take screen caps and to try to make paintings of them. It started with Fassbinder. I watched a bunch of his movies on the Criterion Channel and they’re brimming with memorable moments. I especially liked the early black-and-white gangster ones. They’re bleached out. Overexposed. They were made after he saw the French New Wave tributes to American post-war hard-boiled crime films. Fassbinder’s version is like a degraded copy of a copy but they’re somehow more human and intimate anyway.

I tried it with some other directors with mixed results. Then I started bringing my sketchbook to the bedroom, where the TV is and just pausing the movie to draw directly from the screen. This feels the closest to an active engagement, a little like drawing people playing music, even if, more times than not, the people I’m rendering are long dead and the environments depicted long ago drastically altered.

I wanted to do this with Aleksey German’s great Khrustalyov, My Car!  It hit me like a ton of bricks when I saw it at Facets twenty years ago. Even though I probably missed many of the references I felt connected to it on an almost genetic level. Unfortunately, when I paused the version on YouTube that I was watching, the screen was littered with auto-suggestions for other things to watch.

So I couldn’t draw German’s high-contrast snowglobe version of Stalin’s hell. I had to go back to screen caps. The domineering military father in the story reminded me this time of what my own father told me about growing up. His father was older and distant and he was afraid of him.

The next night I watched The Deer Hunter. It wasn’t on YouTube so I took out the sketchbook again.

I hadn’t watched it in probably thirty years. I still had Khrustalyov knocking around in my head. I’d totally forgotten all the Russian stuff in The Deer Hunter. Now there was a connection.

Something linking what I watched the night before to what I was watching this night. It’s tenuous, but the drawings and paintings make it tangible, at least to me.

I think I’ll keep doodling while I watch. Here are all the ones I’ve kept so far. It’s not like going to the movies, much less making them, but it’s a record of having been present.

—I made a painting of the Green Mill for a friend.

—I had a really good time talking music on the 3 Songs podcast.

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.