Letter

Have you ever started a movie or record or book and known within minutes that it’s a masterpiece? It happened to me a few nights ago with Krysztof Kieślowski’s Blind Chance. It’s a hard thing to put a finger on: why does this movie flow as if inevitable, no matter how farfetched this or that plot point or element may be, while any number of other movies which look so similar on paper are dead on arrival? I kept trying to figure it out but then gave up and just enjoyed what Kieślowski made. His 70-80s Poland is familiar to me on a base, elemental level. It feels like part of my DNA. The decor of the apartments, the fatalism, the absurdity of interactions with the powers that be.

The other night, a young woman came to the bar. It took me a few looks to place her. She works at Bite, where I worked twenty years ago. A couple months ago we had a short exchange in which we learned we’re both from the Evil Empire. She came here in the 90s. I didn’t remind her of any of this because a young man soon joined her for what may or may not have been a date.

They talked a lot about tattoos. Both were pretty well covered. Then, about an hour into their visit, she figured out where we knew each other from. We formally introduced ourselves. Then I excused myself because there were other drinkers to tend to and because the guy looked a little put out to have his time with her interrupted. They stayed for a couple more hours. Then he left and she stayed. We talked some more when I wasn’t helping others. She drank more.

I thought she’d gone to the bathroom but when I checked after not seeing her for half an hour realized that she’d split. 

I met Amanda Goldblatt at a radio show recording at the Dial. She was being interviewed. We know people in common. It’s inevitable when you’re in the book racket. I’d just donated a rolling suitcase and a half’s worth to Open Books a day or two before, but bought her book anyway.

I started it on the bus home and got sucked in right away. It’s that same thing as with Kieślowski—it just flows. If I retrace my steps, reconstruct the timeline, I took a break from reading Goldblatt’s book to watch Blind Chance. I don’t know what the connection is. But what are the odds of falling for a book you knew nothing about, putting it down, and turning on a movie which you knew little about and sensing within minutes that it is a masterpiece?

And where does the disappearing Russian girl fit into all this?

A funny thing happened last Monday. My father wrote to ask if the painting I used to illustrate last week’s newsletter was available for sale. When I told him it was from the mid-90s and long-gone, he commissioned a copy. I didn’t ask why this little self-portrait grabbed him, but thought instead back to the circumstances in which it was made.

I was living in an artist loft building on Rugg Road in Allston, Massachusetts with my best childhood friend. Our few months living together would damage our relationship to the point that it never recovered. Living with somebody will do that.

It was a large, mostly open room with occasional sheetrock partitions in place of actual rooms. An industrial blower provided heat ineffectively and the bathroom and shower was down the hall, shared with other semi-legal tenants. After a lifetime of apartment dwelling, all the undefined space drove me a little crazy. I was there less than a year, as I remember.

It’s weird to copy your own work. I don’t know how it is for other painters (and there’s a long tradition of artists cranking out multiple versions of the same popular motif), but it’s not a thing that feels natural to me. Still, as an occasional exercise, it’s not uninteresting. I wasn’t interested in slavishly recreating every last brush stroke, but in making a new riff on an old theme. I made a free new version of the Rugg Road self-portrait, framed it, and put it in the mail. 

When I was choosing art to illustrate Soviet Stamps, I wanted to use one of the charcoal drawings from my BFA Thesis show. They were very dark drawings done at night with the lights off. Unfortunately, the only digital files I had were way too low-res to print. So I took out my Sumi ink and made a new version using the blurry picture on my computer screen as a reference. Once again, making this new picture from an old one made me think back to another time. I was depressed over a recent breakup and didn’t like having the lights on. Hence the dark drawings. 

A few years ago I was working on a series of paintings at the Skylark and made one of the photobooth in the back of the bar. A friend liked it enough to want to buy it. But when she found out the size she said it would never fit in her place—she had the misfortune of living in a New York apartment. So I returned to the bar with my gouaches and painted a new postcard-sized version for her. Unlike the other two painted copies, this one was not done with the earlier one as a visual source. I didn’t have to contend with my own marks, but rather just the same subject-matter. The result is similar but different.

They say you can’t step in the same river twice and that’s true for art as well. At least the way I do it. I suppose I could make the new, copied versions of old pictures closer to the originals, but that would be really boring. I’m not a machine and don’t get anything from mechanical reproduction. In the best-case scenario, the new paintings are reconsiderations or tributes to the old. A way to look back without dwelling too much.

Still, left to my own devices, I’d rather just try to make something new.

I’ve worked somewhere every Christmas I can remember. Movie theaters, restaurants, taxis, bars. It’s lonesome on that day if it’s not your holiday, so it’s better to at least make money off those who celebrate. To perform some useful function.

When my family first moved to the US we put up a tree for a year or two. We got presents from the Soviet Santa (Father Frost). Then, at Hebrew School, they told me and my brother that Jews don’t celebrate Christmas, so we shamed our parents into getting rid of the tree. American Jews have the poor man’s Christmas: Hanukkah. But it was never more than a consolation prize hastily arranged so kids wouldn’t feel left out. It wasn’t a “real” holiday. As time went on, I felt thankful not to be part of any of it.

When my parents moved into their current home, timers were left behind near the light switches by the previous tenants, who were Hasidic Jews. These timers were there to work lights the family was forbidden from touching during the sabbath—a modern version of a shabbos goy. Whatever the Christmas equivalent of a shabbos goy is is what I’ve become.

When coworkers need shifts covered come December, I’m happy to oblige. Sometimes there’s even extra holiday pay. Christmases in the cab could be pretty dire. Empty streets, with the odd fare every hour or two. Somebody you’d never see out on the streets any other day of the year. Or maybe it’s that they disappear into the crowd and only become visible when the crowd isn’t there. The inevitable meal at the Chinese restaurant. It is rarely a good time, but the work makes it go by faster.

The past few years I’ve bartended Christmas Eve and Day. It’s busy once I open the bar, but the hours before can drag. This year I worked a few hours at the bookstore, then went to see the crummy new Adam Sandler movie. People who come to the Skylark on Christmas overtip. They’re grateful we’re open, that their holiday responsibilities are done with. There’s a family who make tortas at home and meet up at the bar. They always bring me one. I was so busy this year that I didn’t get to eat it for about three hours. It tasted so good when I finally got to it. I made nearly two months’ rent covering bar and bookstore shifts, so I have nothing to complain about.

Visiting my parents for New Year’s, as I do every year, their celebration was extra low key. Their friends are all getting older and are less eager to come over. Or they’ve decamped for warmer climes. There were only seven of us around the table. My contribution is always washing dishes afterward. In past years I was still up at 4am, long after everyone went to bed, but this year my father and brother stayed up and helped; we were done by 2am. Once they stop wanting to mark this Soviet anti-Christmas, New Year’s Eve will become just another day. I’ll have to look to cover a shift for somebody who celebrates.

I feel much more comfortable serving people who celebrate than celebrating myself. I like to keep my head down and keep working. Not pausing to reflect on the passage of time. Maybe someone will invent a holiday I can call my own one day. Until then, I’ll be the guy pouring your Christmas drink or selling you a last minute gift. I’m ok with that.

Somebody has to do it, so it might as well be me.