Kelly Hogan is one of the dearest people in the world to me. But even if I didn’t know her I’d do what I could to push the new Flat Five record on you. Their music is a strangely insistent ray of light in the oppressive gloom of today. Buy it and you’ll feel like maybe we’ll make it through.
I enjoyed the new documentary about Dusty Groove. I met Rick Wojcik, the owner of the shop, at a craft fair where I was drawing pet portraits. He commissioned four paintings for the store. They’re still there today. The film gets at what records mean to people in a heartfelt way. I hope it receives some distribution and gains an audience.
I wasn’t the biggest fan of Nick Cave’s gut-spilling Q & A tour but whenever he sat down at the piano to sing I forgot about the oversharing and remembered why I’ve loved his music so much since high school. Now he’s put out a double LP recorded live in an empty concert hall. Live records are usually not very good. Turns out the trick is to get rid of the audience. Who knew? Some of the songs move me to tears and I’m not a crier. So I’ll push this one on you as well.
I’m halfway through a re-read of Don DeLillo’s Underworld. I read it soon after it was published in 1997 but at that point all I’d written myself were homework assignments. This time I can appreciate the technical skill in addition to getting lost in his polyphonic portrait of America. I stop every few pages and wonder how he could compose on such a grand scale. It’s like he’s steering an ocean liner with just a couple fingers. The recurring theme of waste, of mountains of garbage, read as completely of the moment in 2020.
p.s. The president’s personal lawyer is sucking the last drops of blood from his malignant presidency. What will it take for these ghouls to realize they’re dead? Have some self-respect and sink into the earth already.
When I visit my parents in Brookline I always spend some time in the basement. Like all good parents they keep their children’s old crap with the thought that those children might want it some day. It took decades but I’ve now become the kid that wants to root through his past.
On my last visit I came upon an envelope marked Kickoff Receipts. I didn’t recognize the handwriting—it doesn’t belong to my father, my mother, or myself. But the contents were familiar. They were loose pages from a small spiral-bound sketchbook I kept from around 1993 to 1996. Much of my work prior to late 2003 when I launched my website is spottily documented and archived. I didn’t photograph two-thirds of what I made and never kept a list of buyers, so a lot of it is hard to trace.
Finding these pages was a nice surprise and sparked some memories.
I drew this on a Greyhound bus ride from Boston to Los Angeles in 1994. The bus had to’ve been stopped because I don’t have enough visual recall to’ve done this from memory.
A self portrait done in the darkened window on the same trip. Made myself a dead ringer for Michael Myers from Halloween. I was really into this all-over cross-hatching thing. Probably trying for the effect Seurat got in his drawings. A world made of hairy marks with forms barely visible in the murk.
One of the frustrations for a sketcher on a bus or plane is that you’re stuck with the backs of people’s heads for the most part. The guys with bald spots are a welcome respite from all that boring hair. Also, drawing bus and plane seats is sleep-inducing. Not necessarily a bad thing if you happen to be on a three-day transcontinental ride.
Sleepers make great models. This old man must’ve been motionless for miles.
Anyone who’s spent time on Greyhounds will be familiar with the Mennonites and Amish. I wonder why having someone else drive them in a motorized vehicle is kosher, whereas personal cars are not. What section of the bible legislates such particulars? They’re ahead of the curve in a way. The world would be better off if more of us took public transportation.
This is the last of the bus drawings. There are four more in a frame in my parents’ hallway. Until finding the Kickoff envelope I thought that they were the only ones which survived. Three days to LA, then three days back. It was quite a trip.
I didn’t have a regular coffeeshop/third place/hangout until I moved back to Chicago in 1997 and started logging regular time at Urbus Orbis and the Rainbo Club. But this is definitely a coffeeshop drawing. Maybe the Other Side Cafe on Newbury Street in Boston. I had an art show. First time I had a painting stolen off the wall. It was flattering.
A Greyhound bus station is a great place to get depressed about the state of society. You can’t help looking like a displaced person there. Someone not wanted where you came from with uncertain prospects for a destination. But purgatory places are perfect for someone with a sketchbook and hours to kill.
This has to be Fenway Park, looking over the Green Monster. I used to go pretty regularly. Back then the Red Sox were frustrated losers. Once they won in 2004 they released whatever sentimental hold they had on me.
A man resting his elbows on the lip of an opened hood of a late-80s/early-90s Chevy Caprice places this sketch at the Checker Taxi Garage on St. Botolph Street in Boston. No way the guy who drew this could imagine driving cab twelve years or writing books about it. I’d only learned to drive a year or two earlier.
Could be the South Street Diner. If so, it was as close to a regular dinner spot as I had as a Boston hack. I was hung up on a waitress there and everything. Just like a generic country song. Can’t even remember her name now.
This was the door separating the box office from the concession stand at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline. I worked there in high school, then here and there afterwards. But this isn’t the “real” box office which faced Harvard Street. The theater was saved by a non-profit foundation a year or two into my tenure. One of the costs of salvation was that the original entrance became an Au Bon Pain and the holdovers from the old days like me never missed an opportunity to bitch about it.
This might’ve been the porch of a group house on Farrington Ave in Allston. One of those decrepit post-college/pre-grownup life places where aspiring artsy types and burnouts fashion makeshift utopias which quickly devolve to way stations for bad behavior and disillusionment. I didn’t live there but my best friend did. It was the center for what passed for my social life for a few years.
Because of the violin player I’m tempted to guess this is from the Dirty Three/Pavement/Come triple-bill in Providence in 1995 or 1996 or so. But I’m not sure. Proof in any case that I used drawing to listen better even twenty-five years ago.
These pages are both familiar and foreign. I see a lot I still do in them, but also a lot I’ve moved away from. They’re a valuable time-capsule to consult as I keep going.
Don Quixote’s in the air. It started with Cervantes, the old man at the polling place Tuesday and has hovered around the edges ever since. The layer upon layer of self-delusion in news accounts of the monster’s reaction to the results of the election have more than a whiff of the old knight-errant’s spirit. It’s clear that he will hold onto whatever shred of hope he can before being dragged from office. The difference is that there isn’t even a pretense of nobility.
A couple days after Election Day I drop off Rae and Khadi’s portraits. It turns out Don Quixote is Rae’s favorite book. She wants to get a tattoo of her hero and I volunteer to make a design. There are many illustrations already but she prefers something new. I mention Terry Gilliam’s star-crossed and much-delayed film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote and it turns out she’s a fan like I am. I use stills from it for reference.
I download the audiobook of Quixote for my drive east. I doubt I’ve read the entire thing but whatever parts I have was long ago. Probably read to me by my father or mother at bedtime. So maybe it’s appropriate that this is the soundtrack for my visit with them now. I may not have the patience for the endless throat-clearing and embellishment of Cervantes on my own time, but trapped in the non-place of a car speeding down toll road after toll road his long-windedness is entirely appropriate. My adventure is far less fanciful but no less well-meaning.
Listening on as the daylight disappears past the hills somewhere in New York I wonder whether Quixote is supposed to be sympathetic. Are we to identify with him because few people’s lives approach their dreams? He torments everyone who cares about him, never listens to anyone who tries to reason with him, and insists on doing it his way when everything in the world screams for him to do the opposite. He’s the butt of most jokes yet he rarely realizes it and plows on undaunted. Is he just a selfish asshole?
The image of the lone man on the horse is burned so deep into the collective psyche of this country. No amount of evidence to the contrary can convince a sizable chunk of the population that the man on the horse may not be the hero. Quixote keeps trying to make his far-flung fantasies into reality. It’s not surprising given the last few years that people believe similarly that whatever words escape their mouths become fact by virtue of their wishing them to be so. I turn the audiobook off when I’m within a few miles of my parents’ house. I try to remember what dreams I had when I was growing up. Nothing specific comes to mind. I never had much imagination. It’s why I never got very far in this world. I’ll listen to the book some more on my drive back to Chicago. Maybe I’ll learn something.
