Letter

Ben asked for a cover design for his new zine, then for an ad for my own things to be placed inside. I put something together without a second thought. That’s strange because I come from a time when artistic integrity was put in opposition to commerce. Getting called a sell-out carried some meaning and consequence. It’s laughable to look back on now, when every scrap, actual or virtual, is up for sale to the lowest bidder.

I’m reading a book about Margaret Anderson, founder of The Little Review, which started in Chicago and is best known as the first publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses. The lengths and depths to which she and her colleagues had to scramble for funds to keep the lights on is equal parts familiar and depressing. Has there ever been a time or place where artist were valued and just allowed to do their thing in peace? Does the practical difficulty of getting the work done necessarily give it value?

Every creative person I’ve ever known or heard of serves at the pleasure and whim of some master or other. Either they have independent means or they bend their craft to a patron’s will. I tend to romanticize anonymous or barely known artists like Andrei Rublev or Albert York; guys about whom little is known, who functioned according to somewhat mysterious or unknowable rules. But the first could only operate at the pleasure of church and state and the latter was free to spout commercial chores because of family money.

I work my ass off putting the work out there but often fall short of meeting my meager financial obligations. I’m fortunate to have a family to help when needed. There are also longtime supporters of my work who step up over and over. I have little to complain about. I just can’t help wonder if there’s some better way to fund the work of people like me, whose work doesn’t easily fit into market slots.

I recently published an essay/review on a comic strip compilation about indie movie theater employees who foment a revolution. It’s a funny/untenable fantasy but I don’t have any brighter ideas for a way forward. The publication in which this article appears is on Substack, a platform that started as a paid newsletter service but has more recently expanded to include more social media features. I’m grateful to the people who run the publication and wish I could do more to help them grow their readership but don’t have the slightest clue how to do that.

I’ve tried to figure out how to use the subscription thing any number of ways with very mixed results. I hate quantifying my work in any way as it prompts dark thinking and stifles any kind of creativity but there’s just no way of getting around the fact that day-to-day life costs in units not measured by brushstrokes or word-count.

This newsletter, which I’ve kept up in various formats and on numerous platforms for over fifteen years, has lately been losing readers. I don’t know why and don’t want to know. Nothing good could come of hearing the answer.

My persistent fantasy of a government (or whatever other colossal entity) sending a truck to my front door every month and taking away what I made in exchange for chits or allowance keeps not coming true.

If you have any bright ideas about any of this, I’d love to hear them.

I don’t watch as many movies as I used to but I still watch too many.

I forget most of them before the credits even roll (provided I get that far, which is not the case at least fifty percent of the time.) The natural question to ask is why I even bother at this point and I don’t have a ready answer, except to say that habits are hard to break. Movies have been a mainstay of my life since I was a kid. I’m not ready to quit them. Not yet.

I can’t remember a worse year in terms of theatrical releases. It’s seen career worsts from PT Anderson, Lynne Ramsay, Ari Aster, Darren Aronovsky, and David Cronenberg, and dud after dud from middling or unknown directors. The medium is on life-support for a lot of reasons but this avalanche of mediocrity is beyond my analytic capacity to explain. And yet I keep trudging to the theater hoping for the best.

I loved Magic Farm and wrote a whole thing about it and Ulman’s other movie. Radu Jude’s Dracula was a filthy hoot and Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind was a sweet shaggy-dog story about a really shitty guy. On becoming a Guinea Fowl cast a weird spell, Misericordia seduced and Secret Mall Apartment made me laugh while mourning the damage ill-conceived urban renewal wreaks. Nearly every other flick I can think of that I got something out of was old or seen on my TV, in bed.

Because of K, I enjoyed a couple trips to the theater despite the horrid shit onscreen. We laughed through most of 28 Years Later and heroically outlasted both Eddington and Frankenstein. I’d have skipped out on all three less than an hour in if I was solo. I paid for a month of HBO so we could watch the Paul Reubens doc. It was worth the fifteen bucks, even if I deleted the app after a couple weeks for want of anything else to watch.

The only upcoming release I’m sort of looking forward to is the new one from Jarmusch with Tom Waits looking like the Crypt Keeper. Could be great or complete schlock. There’s just no telling anymore.

RIP Tony Adler. He was my first theater editor at The Reader but I got to know him better through his yearly Whitmanstide readings and frequent meet ups at art openings. He was a sweet guy and I’ll miss him. I don’t know what he’d have thought of this Trap Door production, but I loved it.

I reviewed a great travelogue of cemeteries.

Here’s the checklist for my Fire Cat show, just in time for the shopping frenzy season.

I’ve spent the past couple weeks buying thrift-store frames, ripping out whatever art is in them, then taping in my own. I’ll be hanging my show at Firecat Projects a couple hours after this letter is posted. This is a sequence of activity I’ve repeated more times than I can count. The thoughts, hopes, and wishes throughout the process vary but in the aftermath I always find a way to pick up the pieces and do it again.

I don’t know what other artists, writers, musicians, whatever expect out of their events or publications. I’ve caught myself daydreaming all kinds of pie-in-the-sky scenarios. It’s probably necessary to play these mind-games in order to keep going. Each new thing is the one that’ll change everything. But what does that even mean? What’s the greatest possible outcome from an art show or a book published or a show played?

I’ve had shows that nearly sold out and others where nothing was bought. I can’t recall any particular reason one caught on and another didn’t. The process of making things is a lot of stumbling in the dark where audience or expectations or market forces are concerned. I’ve never had instinct for what people want or don’t want from me. I just keep going.

In the case of this show, the pieces are all illustrations for books that have recently been or will soon be published. Which means that framing and putting them up in a public place isn’t what they were originally made for. Usually, my artwork only does the one thing, that is, hangs on this or that wall. It’s a little bit of an experiment to display these artifacts from publishing projects as their own standalone thing. I did put a bunch of these in my summer Rainbo show and about half of them sold. So there’s reason for optimism, even if that’s not my inclination.

Stan Klein, who runs Firecat, is trying to sell the building that houses the gallery and MCM Framing, so there’s a chance the show might be cut short. I’m fine with that. Stan is a friend and maybe putting some of my stuff up on the walls will help a little. For all my other shows, there were posters and postcards printed at Stan’s expense but I told him not to do it this time. I made my own stenciled posters and flyers and left them a few places. That’s enough advertising this time around. I’d rather people discovered the show on their own. Maybe that’s naive or defeatist but I just don’t want to push it too much this time around.

The opening is this Friday, 7-10pm. Each piece is $50. I’ll have a checklist up on my website later this week for those who’d like a piece but can’t make it to Chicago.

Hope to hear from you one way or the other. That’s what it’s all about, even if I don’t always make that obvious.

K gave an in-depth video interview about her life in zines.