Letter

My wife left me and all I got was this crappy website. Thirteen and a half years ago, after she married me and showed me how to turn on a computer for the first time ever, my ex-wife, Deborah, suggested I should make a website for my artwork. My gut reaction was to fight the idea with everything I had. After all, I had serious doubts about photography, so what the hell business did I have messing with the internet? But in the fall of 2003 I would do about anything Deborah asked and, after all, she was a computer programmer.

She hand-coded all the initial pages of the website and my brother, Boris, a photographer, helped me digitize the hundreds of slides I’d amassed over the nearly twenty years I’d been painting and drawing at that point. It was a tedious process and because I was the only one involved with no expertise in the endeavor, I felt a bit helpless as pages piled up and up and up. My main early contribution was the cut paper welcome page (above) and the very consequential decision to only use type- and handwritten text on the site.

At the beginning of 2004, we were more or less ready to launch our weird cut-and-pasted baby into cyberspace. The web-hosting company which initially provided it a home was run by an artist couple we met at Jinx Coffee. I traded them a large framed charcoal drawing called “The Battle for Space” in exchange for a year of hosting and some tech help.

The look of the site was part ransom note, part crummy collaged scrapbook. Everything was scanned in, then hotspots were added if links were required. This made every little update laborious. A month or so after the site went live Deborah decided she didn’t wanna live with me anymore. She left town and the website became part of my coping therapy/self-torment. I’d get home from driving cab fourteen hours and wrestle with html for a few more before drifting to sleep. I wrecked the site repeatedly and cursed the entire world until eventually finding the missing comma or parenthesis without which the site apparently couldn’t function. If nothing else, this work scratched an itch I had heretofore been unaware I possessed. Dealing with the inner workings of a website is not unlike dealing with an autistic child in that neither can tolerate an iota of deviation from previously established rules. It is completely unintuitive and pedantic and thus totally unlike art-making as I’d always known it.

Then, after many weeks of frustration and banging my head against the wall, I began to actually figure out how to keep the thing running. This gave me some satisfaction, so then I decided to see what other people on the internet were doing to further their art careers. I joined every art site which sprang up and disappeared just as quickly, all the while tweaking my own in little and not so little ways. I signed up for MySpace mostly for self-promotion but wound up actually making some friends. Every social network after that first one was diminishing returns as I look back on it now.

The internet kept getting faster and faster and more ephemeral with every new iteration. But my website remained slow and simple. I spent a couple weeks trying to figure out CSS before giving up and deciding to be satisfied with occasional cosmetic changes. I have no interest in making it ‘optimized’ for mobile phones, nor in adding the myriad annoying features which plague so many websites these days. I tried for awhile to make the thing a money-making entity but the aesthetic and ethical compromises necessary were several lines in the sand over the point I was willing to go.

So thirteen years after it was born, I’m satisfied with my website being an archive for my thirty-plus years of making art in the same way a shitty thrift-store photo album is adequate to store old memories. It’s like the rusting classic car under a musty tarp in the back of the garage; it runs more or less, but you wouldn’t use it to earn a living, much less win any races. Does anyone even use websites anymore? Seems like online most things start to be forgotten before they’ve even registered in our conscience. In the end I’m still just a dumb painter, so dabbling with this technology will always feel somewhat suspect. But I’ve put in so much time and effort into the thing that killing it now would hurt too much.

Deborah and I are friends again. It took about ten years for that to happen. Since the website was created when we were together, whenever I work on it I’m reminded of that time. I have no idea if anyone gets much out of it but me at this point but see no reason to stop. It keeps me off the street, as my father’s fond of saying. 

Regulars are the blessing and bane of every bar. Bernice’s has its fare share. After a time you know what they drink, how long they’ll stay, whether you have to talk to them, what, if anything, they’ll leave for a tip. The bar has become part of their daily routine and the bartender is just an appendage which comes with the bar. We need them and they need us but neither would call the other a friend.

Pete will drink a dozen cans of $2 PBR. He’ll roll cigarettes compulsively throughout the hours, ducking out to inhale them in what seems like seconds every fifteen minutes or so. He usually has his phone plugged in and charging on the table by the bathrooms. He goes over and looks at it in between gulps and drags. God only knows what part of the world wide web Pete visits. I’ve never had an actual conversation with him, though he’s always listening in to the talk of others. If the subject is old rock bands he usually breaks in with corrections or verification of facts and figures. One time when “Walk on the Wild Side” was playing on the jukebox he confirmed that it was indeed Lou Reed’s only hit.

His face is drawn, eyes watery and unfocused, cheeks ill-shaven. He’s usually got some bags with him, though I don’t know whether he’s actually homeless. He left me a dollar tip last time I worked which surprised the hell out of me.

The Professor isn’t much into hygiene either. Though he’s better than he used to be according to Steve. People used to complain that he smelled, so Steve took him aside and suggested gently that regular bathing and a change of clothing now and again wouldn’t hurt. He comes in every afternoon and pours a half dozen pint bottles of Svyturys Ekstra into a short beer glass while perusing the newspaper. If seated next to an acquaintance he’ll expound on political events of the day, soccer, astronomy, or any of a dozen other subjects. One time I made the mistake of sitting next to him when the Academy Awards were on the TV. He kept up a ceaseless commentary on the dress and physical attributes of every female presenter and performer. He went on long after I’d stopped acknowledging his presence and had emphatically turned my back to him. What he enjoyed best on that broadcast was Lady Gaga performing songs from “The Sound of Music”. He went on to trash Julie Andrews, repeating again and again how Gaga had shown her how it should be done.

When I started bartending at Bernice’s, Steve told me a few regulars got grandfathered prices. So the Professor pays $5 for his Svyturys while everyone else pays $6. I know he’s done when I see a $5 under his empty glass. He hardly ever says goodbye. He probably knows that there’s little point, as he’ll be back in tomorrow afternoon and every afternoon after that until there are no more afternoons for him.

Above the cash register at the Skylark hangs a painting many patrons wonder about. In it a boy stares back at us, bug-eyed, with soda cups stuck to his ears. Every bartender makes up their own story about what the picture means and why it hangs there. I don’t even hazard a guess. It’s one of those things which has become a part of my life and I don’t try to explain or question.

On Christmas Day I got to the bar a few hours before opening. It’s eerie to come into a place which you know filled with people when it’s darkened and empty. After turning a few lights on and putting on some music the room became a lot more inviting. The emptiness belied the promise of all the barstools soon to be filled with clusters of friends and strangers. I made coffee, worked on my painting, and got up every few minutes to answer the phone to say that Yes indeed we would be open.

It turned out to be the busiest shift I’d ever worked there. I was still washing glasses an hour after shuttering the doors. I never expected to enjoy working for other people again, but neither of my bar gigs fill me with dread; in fact, I look forward to coming in, though the two places couldn’t be more different. 

At Bernice’s my involvement goes beyond serving beers, washing glasses, and taking out the trash. The ongoing project of organizing the garage behind the bar makes being out front with the customers like scaling the tip of an iceberg. When I go in the back and draw it’s a bit like surveying an archaeological dig, picking out familiar forms in a vast field of alien terrain. I take my breaks sitting in a vintage Chicago Park District folding chair. It is but one artifact amid a plethora hitting my eyes any direction I turn. When we’re done cleaning this vast room up, most of what pulls me to it will be gone, so I’ll try to document as much of the process as I can before it’s all over.

****

Like most people I don’t know what to expect of this new year but I hold little hope that on the societal scale it won’t turn very, very ugly. I read a piece about the artist Raymond Pettibon the other day and he said the one thing he was hopeful about was that the opposition to the powers that be would be fiercer than ever. If a world-class cynic like Pettibon can be optimistic about anything then I suppose I should try to as well. In any case, everyone with a shred of decency has to fight against the flaming bag of piss about to assume control of our country any way they can.