Letter

‌

I’m a faithful listener of Out of the Blocks, my old friend, Aaron Henkin’s, great hyper-local Baltimore podcast.‌ So when I heard at the tail of the last episode that he would be in Chicago, recording some episodes in the North Lawndale neighborhood, I dropped him a line. He wrote back and we made plans to meet and catch up.‌
‌ ‌
‌I met Aaron in 1997, when I moved back to Chicago for good. He was part of a crowd which revolved around a band called the Country Melvins. If you want to know a little about them, pick up a copy of my book. In 2000, Aaron posed for a portrait which was part of a show at the Rainbo Club. Most of the sitters were part of the Wicker Park art and music scene (or at least worked in the bars, restaurants, and coffeeshops in the neighborhood.) Most have long since moved away.‌
‌ ‌
‌When Aaron showed up at the Skylark on Friday, sitting for that portrait was one of the first things he mentioned. He recalled it being a snowy day and that having to be still for a few hours like that was one of his favorite Chicago memories. I asked him if he had the painting, but then remembered that friend liked it so much that she bought it. She’s since passed away, so who knows where that picture is now.‌
‌ ‌
‌Aaron moved away from Chicago with the fiddle player from the Country Melvins. They went to Baltimore so she could go to med school. He thought he’d wait tables and play in bands. Instead, their marriage dissolved and he backed into a career in public radio. I would love his show even without our personal connection, but it adds an extra little something every time I tune in.‌
‌ ‌
‌He told me he was thinking of walking past his old Wicker Park haunts before he left town but I advised him against it. Aside from the Rainbo and Myopic Books, it’s more or less a moonscape over there these days. That’s not a nostalgic dig at that over-gentrified neighborhood, just a statement of fact. Sometimes it’s best to leave the warm memories of the past just as where they are.‌
‌ ‌
‌We talked about Baltimore—a city I haven’t been to since my early teens, when me and my best friend strolled through a ghetto neighborhood blasting Def Leppard from our boombox until an older black man got up from a stoop and told us we should turn around and go back immediately. For Aaron, Baltimore has become home like Chicago has become home to me.‌
‌ ‌
‌Seeing an old friend thrive is one of few fringe benefits of getting older. On leaving, Aaron invited me to visit his city so he could show me around. I think I’ll take him up on that.‌
‌ ‌
‌ ‌‌ ‌
‌ ‌‌—I wrote a review of Unquiet by Linn Ullmann for Hyperallergic.‌

Last Wednesday, I drove to Wyoming. Wyoming, Michigan, that is. Just short of Grand Rapids. I was there to pick up my books. Marc met me there and we loaded twenty-five boxes into the rented SUV. I’d been corresponding with Marc for months about this thing, so it was strange how quickly it was all over. Marc was off to his next appointment and I drove around the corner, down the main drag, to find lunch before heading back to Chicago.

The family restaurant I chose was pretty forgettable. The green beans that came with my chopped steak were boiled so long there wasn’t a hint that they’d once been a living thing. I was a couple decades younger than most of the clientele. At the next table, a couple ladies bemoaned the unavailability of pumpkin pie on the dessert menu. They went over and over all the choices but kept returning to pumpkin. One asked the other if she’d chosen something and the other replied that they didn’t have what she really wanted.

Back in Chicago I lugged about fifteen boxes up the three flights before collapsing into the armchair. An hour later I hauled the rest of them up as well. It’s times like this that I really wish I had an intern. I’d set up a folding table in my mud room in preparation for the arrival of all these boxes and, after another breather, I ripped open the first box and started signing and numbering. 

I took a break to go hear Emmett Kelly and Rob Mazurek play a few blocks from my house. There are drawings of both of them in the book. Then I walked back home and quickly fell asleep.

I started signing and packing books at 7am the next morning. By the afternoon I had the rolling suitcase filled with fifty books and headed off to the post office across the street from where the stockyards used to be. I kept looking back down Halsted for the bus, but it never came so I walked the whole way. I dreaded the attitude I’d get from the postal worker tasked with serving me, but lucked out and got a lady who was pleasant. Not that she was thrilled to process fifty pieces of media mail, but she was cordial about voicing her displeasure. The woman waiting behind me loudly and repeatedly complained about hot flashes, so I must’ve been a joy in comparison.

The next day I hand-delivered copies to some stores and a couple people who had pre-ordered. Everyone seemed happy to receive them. I felt like Santa Claus.

There’s still a lot to do, but it feels like I’m finally over the hump on this thing. If you’d like a copy, you can still use this link, or just write me and I’ll send you one. They’ll stay $25 until we start to run out, then we’ll see what happens. I think they’ll all be gone fairly quickly.

—I wrote about a new movie set in Chicago for the Reader and about all the other movies I saw this week, as usual.  

—I’ve been a fan of Pete Prescott’s bands since the 80s, from Mission of Burma on. He’s featured in my book. It’s a sad commentary on this culture that someone who has done so much still has to come to fans hat in hand to fund his work, but that is where we’re at. Last week in news reports on the death of surf guitar legend Dick Dale it was noted that he had to keep touring just to pay his medical bills. We value all the wrong people around here.

I have a show in August at the Rainbo Club. I’ve lost count how many I’ve had there, but the first was in 1997 and I haven’t missed too many years since. The advantage of putting up art at a place so many times is you get to know the layout, lighting, and walls like the back of your hand. I know how many pieces I need to make it look like enough, but not too much. Some years i even know where each piece will go before I ever climb up on a ladder. 

It helps to have a theme or motif rather than just chose from the grab-bag of work I always have on hand. It focuses the mind and makes it more like an event, rather than just a month where some pictures get parked somewhere that’s not my house. With the past year being revolving around the imminent publication of a book, it was a no-brainer to make the forthcoming show about music.

For this series, I’m doing something I haven’t done much since art school: I’m working from drawings. I never considered my sketchbook drawings source material for other pictures. They’re an end in themselves, a nearly daily visual diary of the places I go and the people I see. But after using them as a source and jumping-off point to write a whole book, I thought I’d dip in to them one last time. 

The colors I’m choosing and combining are more improvisational than my typical paintings. It’s a confusing, sometimes freeing, sometimes conscripting way to work. I’m not trying to evoke the light sources present in the bar or club where these musicians played—that would feel like a homework assignment or a matter of coloring in the drawings. That thing of drawing out a composition, then adding color never worked for me. I want the painting and the drawing to happen simultaneously. That’s hard to do when the only reference point is a ballpoint sketch. 

I don’t know if I’ll ever work this way again once I have enough pieces for the Rainbo, but it’s been a valuable sidetrack. Something of this experiment will reappear once I start painting from looking again. It’s been like going on a diet with all my favorite foods missing. There’s some point to the deprivation, but that point is somewhere down the road.