Letter

Young, idealistic people opening up a coffeeshop in a “bad” neighborhood is an evergreen human interest story. I’d been meaning to check out the new one in Back of the Yards for a while but the article in the Reader sealed it. I took the Halsted bus south to 47th Street, then stood waiting among the dirty snow mounds with a few others for the bus west.

I’d barely settled into my seat when the driver punched the gas and we hurtled forward. A few blocks west past Halsted, 47th becomes industrial, rows of train containers stacked imposingly on either side of the road. From spending so much time on CTA buses, I can gauge when they’re going too fast without even looking up and this one was flying. I made eye-contact with an older man across the aisle just as he was shaking his head in disapproval. “This driver’s in a bigger hurry than any of us,” I said. Just then, the driver squeezed to the right of a long line of backed-up traffic and gunned it along the curb. Approaching Ashland, we heard a loud thud and saw the right-side rearview mirror fly off after it clipped a light pole. That slowed him down a bit. He announced it would be his last stop a few seconds later. Everyone on that bus was grateful to walk the rest of the way.

It was bumper to bumper the last five blocks so I was doubly glad to get away from that death-wish bus. My main point of reference for this neighborhood was the time I drove mentally-impaired young adults from St. Rose’s on Hoyne as part of the Mobility Direct program. Cabbies were hired to pick up the slack from handicap vans. I lived on 24th Street, a couple miles north, so I often started my shift with a ride from St. Rose’s. If I was early, I’d sit a block north of the center and draw the view out the window.

The fares were flat rates which started at $10.40 for rides ranging from a couple blocks to a couple miles. In the best case scenario, I’d get a short one first, then speed back to pick another kid a few minutes later. Several lived in Back of the Yards. In the early aughts the neighborhood was not one which would appear on any tourist map. While dropping passengers off, I had to be mindful of idling double-parked cars and young men scanning their blocks for customers and enemies. Because the people I was driving were mentally and often physically impaired, I had to make sure they made it into their houses, sometimes walking them to their doors. I never had any problems but often felt eyes on me.

Walking west up 47th now, thinking back to ten, fifteen years before, I wouldn’t’ve guessed I’d be coming here to try out a fancy coffee joint. The sidewalks were full of people shopping or coming home from work. Many signs were in Spanish, as were many of the voices I overheard. I turned south on Hoyne and saw the shop. There was a brand-new looking school and library across the street. None of this was imaginable in the years I drove here. Inside the shop, Edison bulbs and repurposed wood made it look like a place which could be in Logan Square or the West Loop or Portlandia, for that matter. I ordered a pour-over and a ham-and-cheese sandwich called Decima Musa. I wanted to ask if it was a tribute to the shuttered bar in Pilsen or just the 17th Century nun and poet, but doubted the young girl behind the girl would know so I didn’t ask.

I sat down at a little round table and took out my book but ended up just eavesdropping on the counter girl and her coworker, a high-school-age boy. I didn’t catch much of their banter but they were definitely flirting and it sounded like a thing which had been going on for awhile. I wanted to ask how long the school across the street had been open, whether St. Rose’s was still open up the street, how the neighborhood was these days, but just watched night fall out the window instead. “What time do we close?” the girl asked the boy. I bought a bag of coffee beans and walked out.

Neither the 47th Street nor the Halsted bus drivers tried to kill me or anyone or thing else on my way home. The route skirted the former stockyards. I guess Bridgeport, where I live, could be thought of as Front of the Yards. They’ve been gone a long time but retain some magnetic force. Passing them is not unlike passing a cemetery. The absence is palpable.

I hope the next time I return to Back of the Yards Coffee I won’t just sit there and think about the past. Nearly six years have passed since I drove a cab and almost a decade since I last picked a passenger up at St. Rose’s. It’s time to make some new memories about this part of the city. I hope I’m not too old to do so.

—I wrote about Gertrude Abercrombie’s sad, creepy paintings and interviewed the show’s coordinator for the Reader.

The experience of reading Chris Ware’s Monograph is inextricably tied to what it’s about. Its inordinate size transforms a grownup into a child. One can set the book down on a table or on one’s lap, but it will take up all available space and make it impossible to do anything else but turn its pages, often having to stick one’s face within inches to catch some of the infinitesimal detail or tiny text. It’s a rare accomplishment these days to make a work of art which demands complete physical and mental attention to be appreciated but Ware has done that with this volume. There’s no casually flipping through while checking Twitter and watching a TV show; one reads this book or sets it down and does something else.

Going all the way to back his college days at the University of Texas and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Ware was always wrestling with the language of comics. One of his first widely-circulated strips, “I Guess” was published in Art Spiegelman’s Raw in 1991 while he was still in school. In it, the panels show a superhero’s adventures while the word balloons and captions tell a childhood story about a boy’s fraught relationship with his stepfather. His experimentation would evolve and grow as he moved on to longer narratives about Quimby Mouse, Jimmy Corrigan, Rusty Brown, and scores of other recurring characters.

Ware’s book-length essay serves several functions. It is an introduction to the finished strips, sketches, process drawings, cardboard models, wooden sculptures, and family photographs which fill the lion’s share of page space. It is also a revealing rumination on his childhood, artistic development, and aesthetic philosophy. It is also, at times, a witheringly funny critique of secondary arts education, the art world, and American society as a whole.

One of the more fascinating insights Ware shares into his process is that he works improvisationally, allowing what he draws to suggest the developing narrative rather than planning out the story, then illustrating it. For someone who, as Ira Glass hilariously puts it in his introduction, is a “control enthusiast”, this intuitive method may seem surprising. But since so many of Ware’s stories concern the perils of memory this approach makes sense the more one thinks about it. Scripting the leaps in time and space traversed from panel to gutter, along dotted lines, riding shooting arrows all over any given page of a Ware comic might be too tall an order even for the master himself.

In another revealing passage he talks about comics being a linguistic rather than illustrative art; that rather than just enhancing accompanying words, the drawings themselves must be read to be understood. This is why he works so hard to make them as clean and clear as he possibly can. He doesn’t want the reader to linger over how this or that detail is rendered but rather to register both words and images as parts of the flowing narrative.

Monograph is a rare joy for Ware fans, as it revisits so many of his career highlights while also sharing lesser known work and personal anecdotes. The large reproductions of the automatons, toys, and model houses he builds as a respite from the long hours at the drawing table are a delight to peruse as well.

In all it’s a fitting testament to one of the best artist/writers we have. Read my interview with Ware here.

They were showing La Belle Noiseuse at the Siskel and I couldn’t resist. Four hours of a weird old painter trying to recapture his fire by painting a beautiful young woman and the repercussions her posing for him had on everyone dear to them. This is my idea of good way to spend an afternoon.

When Jacques Rivette’s movie came out in 1991, I was drawing or painting nudes a few times a week in school. It was like a superhero version of my everyday. I think I went to see it three times at least. I loved the real-time slowness of it even while cringing at Frenhoffer’s absurd, pompous pronouncements. I wanted to live in a crumbling French villa with Jane Birkin wandering barefoot through its countless rooms like he did.

Twenty-seven years later I no longer wanna live in a French vila and, as a middle-aged man, the decades-long conflict between Frenhoffer and his wife read very differently than they did when I was in my early twenties. But the artist-model scenes brought back how much I’ve missed drawing and painting naked people. 

So a few days after seeing the movie I found a drop-in figure drawing session online, bought some newsprint and cheap drawing paper and showed up at a loft building on Hubbard at the appointed time. I haven’t drawn in a room full of others drawing in twenty-five years yet it all started coming back to me within minutes of dragging an easel to a spot and glancing around at the other arrivers. There’s a unique ritual thing that every artist does while setting up their gear. They fuss about how far this thing is from that thing, pace around, move things around again, then finally settle in.

From the casual conversation I overheard it was obvious most of the others were regulars. Someone turned on a boombox and the guy in charge said there were PBRs in the fridge for a dollar a pop. He reminded everyone to throw $10 in the pail for the two-and-a-half-hour session. Then a thin blonde walked up to the model stand in the middle of all the easels and chairs, took off her robe, and struck the first of about ten one-minute poses.

It all came back. That thing of reckoning with a body through charcoal marks on newsprint. I was sixteen the first time I did this; now I’m forty-seven but it’s the same as it was back then. There were no masterpieces made this night but it didn’t matter. The girl drawing in a chair to my left turned out to be a bartender at Soho House. She’d gone to SAIC for awhile and was planning to go back to school for medical illustration. She said she loved the Skylark and I invited her to come visit me there some Sunday. Maybe she’ll come by, maybe she won’t. I told her I’d never go to Soho House and she completely understood.

Being in that loft space for a few hours, drawing that girl, brought home how much I’d missed it. I won’t wait another twenty-five years to do it again.

—I wrote about Otto Neumann’s prints and some Roman Egypt mummy portraits for the Reader.