Letter

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.

A charming rich asshole in Burning got called a Gatsby. After I left the theater I went to the Dial and picked up a copy of Fitzgerald’s book. I’d read it in high school, then again in my early twenties and hated it both times. I didn’t understand the characters, why they did what they did, the world they lived in. It seemed like a lot of fancy people living fancy lives, which had no point of connection with mine.

I tore through it in a few days this time. After having written a couple of books myself, I couldn’t help but admire the language and construction of the thing. A lot of it still rang false, but now it felt like commentary on America rather than a failing of conception. And the self-made swindler at the heart of it is right out of today’s news. Only the real one is old, charmless, and hardly self-made.

When I first read the book, I’d never been to Chicago. There are many references to the city and the Midwest in general. There’s a romanticizing of the region as lacking the pretensions of the East, which we here like to believe to this day. Jay, Nick, Daisy, Tom, and Jordan go east to feel more worldly and seek fortune, as many continue to do to this day.

In America, the eyes of god turn out to be a roadside billboard.

The car crash turns the story from satire to tragedy but it’s the book’s least convincing plot device. It’s the kind of heightened action which plays in operas and fairytales, less so in novels which take on a whole country’s culture. The violent end turns it into a potboiler but also lets Fitzgerald get off some beautiful thoughts about longing for a better world that never was. That false longing is all over our politics. An exultation of some better, purer past, which never was but which so many insist on believing in.

I finished the book admiring it more than loving it. It’s almost a hundred years old but nailed things about America that continue to haunt it to this day. The racism, the longing to be high-class while pretending that class doesn’t exist, the nostalgia, and the absolute worship of money. The hollow type and the center of the story is full of bullshit promises, rotten to the core but unaware of it, building himself up to nobility so convincingly he believes it himself.

It’s all too familiar.

I finished Linn Ullmann’s Unquiet a week or two ago, but it keeps following me around like a polite but persistent ghost. It’s a novel about an unnamed girl and her unnamed mother and father. But everyone knows it’s Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman. By leaving them unnamed, Ullmann somehow manages to make them both particular and universal. I don’t know how she did that.

Last year was Bergman’s centenary, so the Siskel ran a months-long retrospective of his work. I saw many films I’d never seen before but will definitely watch again, like Sawdust and Tinsel and Scenes from a Marriageand got to revisit old favorites like Fanny and Alexander and Wild Strawberries. It was a great surprise to discover Paul Schrader’s great First Reformed from last year lifted most of its set up from Bergman’s Winter Light. It made filmmaking feel like a passed-down tradition the same way painting is. The only major misfire I recall was the dreadful English-language movie called The Touch. It stars Elliot Gould and Bibi Andersson and comes off as a Google-translate/Saturday Night Live parody of an Ingmar Bergman film. I lasted about half an hour. Overall though, it was a joy to spend time in Bergman’s comically serious universe.

I learned of the English translation of Unquiet soon after the film series was over. So, inevitably, I couldn’t help but see the characters and settings in the book as the actors and landscapes from her father’s films. You’d think that would be a problem, that it might make the novel nothing more than a behind-the-scene tell-all or celebrity tie-in. But Ullmann is way too good a writer to stoop so low. She obscures as much as she reveals and certainly doesn’t use the page to settle scores.

The book is an attempt to connect to a man and a woman who were totally wrapped up in their own dramas and rarely had the time or emotional generosity to pay attention to the very needy child that Ullmann portrayed herself to be. In this and many other ways, her childhood was like many others’. The world is littered with emotionally unavailable breeders who weren’t world-famous directors or adored actresses.

I wrote a more formal review of the book for Hyperallergic. It’ll hopefully be published soon.

Seeing Lee Chang-Dong’s Burning was kind of the inverse of my Ullmann/Bergman experience. It’s based on a Haruki Murakami story but transposed to present-day Korea. I haven’t read Murakami in a good fifteen years but Lee’s film brought back the magical cats, disappearing girls, fruitless detective work, detailed descriptions of meal-preparation, and half a dozen other favorite tropes of that celebrated writer.

Lee adds an emotional gravity to this story of a hopelessly lovestruck, lost young man that I don’t remember feeling from Murakami’s books. This guy’s aching need to belong and be understood is as loud as a neon sign even as he barely says a word to anyone. It’s the kind of movie that establishes its poetic universe from the first frame and doesn’t break its spell or internal logic till the screen goes black.

Both Lee’s movie and Ullmann’s book manage the tightrope trick of referring to well-known source material without being a slave to it or existing merely to capitalize from its fame. If I ever read another Murakami, I’ll be reminded of Lee’s masterful movie, and when I watch a Bergman film next, I’ll watch partly through his daughter’s eyes.