Letter

I saw Bill at the bar Tuesday and told him I was going to see Schnabel’s van Gogh movie the next night. He said he’d come with. I see a lot of movies, but mostly by myself. Despite a setting that could include up to a thousand others, film-watching is usually a solitary activity. Because the pictures on the screen hit each individual viewer differently the movie theater is often not a communal space but more like a private personal one, uneasily shared by many.

I’ve been excited about this one since first hearing about it a year or two ago. I hate Schnabel’s paintings but love his movies; it’s a thing I’ve never been able to reconcile. How can he be so bad at one kind of art and so good at another? That and the mental image of Willem Dafoe as van Gogh made this a movie I wasn’t going to miss. I was so I bought a ticket to see it at the Chicago Film Festival on a night I would be out of town helping Kelly move to Wisconsin.

Artist movies are usually very bad. The reasons are many but the basic problem is that artist often lead solitary undramatic lives. Most of the drama is happening internally in ways which are impossible to show on a movie screen. Van Gogh led a life that has been turned into a cliché of the tormented artist. His art has posthumously been used to sell all manner of tchotchkes and his life is regularly milked for awful museum exhibitions like the one at the Art Institute a couple years back, which included the opportunity to stay at an Airbnb outfitted like the man’s bedroom. Then there’s Kirk Douglas chewing up scenery in Lust For Life and Tim Roth chewing up even more in Vincent & Theo. 

Up to now the only narrative film on van Gogh I liked was Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh. Pialat started as a painter so he had the right feel for details of the craft. He also cast an actor who wasn’t trying to do an impersonation. The film gave the man and his moribund pursuit of expression and connection back some of the dignity the speculators and profiteers of his legacy had robbed him of. Dying destitute and forgotten is only a romantic idea to people with very comfortable lives.

Wednesday morning Bill confirmed he was coming so I bought two tickets online. I figured since the movie was opening this night it would be crowded. We had a few drinks at the bar then headed downtown to the theater. We went in and the auditorium was empty. Nobody else wanted to see a movie about van Gogh the day before Thanksgiving in downtown Chicago.

Since it was now a private screening we decided it was ok to talk, but once the film started we didn’t exchange many words. Somehow Schnabel was able to put us in that miserable man’s skin. Through sometimes jarring, blurry, constantly-refocussing camerawork and an utterly committed performance from Dafoe, I could feel every slight, every ecstatic flight, and every blackout as if it was happening to me. But the further it went the more I wondered if anyone not involved in art would want to sit through this thing.

Bill’s a musician and I’m a painter. We’ve both been at it a long time. For most of these many years few people gave a rat’s ass about what either of us did. Lately though, Bill’s been getting some traction. It’s a beautiful thing to see and long overdue. It’s still a grind for him though and he hasn’t forgotten the years of being ignored. On our ride home it was obvious we were both moved by what we’d just seen.

Anyone who’s ever picked up a brush must reckon with the long shadow of the Dutchman who loved yellow and lopped off his ear. From now on, when I think of him he’ll have Dafoe’s face.

Last Monday I got an email from Caroline. She had digitized some footage she’d shot in 1990 and 1991 when we lived together in a small studio apartment at the corner of Foster and Sheridan in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago. 

I watched it a couple times and at first I kept thinking about how young I look and how long ago this was. I’m seventy pounds lighter, I’m wearing a watch, the bed is a mattress on the floor and isn’t made. It’s the North Side, a big apartment building with old-fashioned radiators. There’s an Abraham Lincoln lamp and an Elvis bust with Mardi Gras beads draped around its neck. Nothing like my life now. 

But then I see the round Hammond clock, look up from the laptop and see it on my wall in Bridgeport. It’s stopped running again, maybe for good, but I still have it twenty-eight years later. The whistling Revere Ware tea kettle Caroline gave me is still on the stove, albeit across town, decades on. Though I don’t have that manual typewriter, I have a very similar one I use for many years now. My walls and sills are still full of knickknacks and in-progress paintings. This apartment isn’t much bigger than that one was. 

I can’t see down the alley here but I look out at neighboring city buildings all the same. I can watch passersby out the window.

I have a lot bigger gut and it’s covered in tattoos but otherwise not very much has changed. Watching this old footage I recognize a lot more than I don’t. Not sure whether that should be surprising, disappointing, or something else.

I envy the metabolism of the guy in the movie but otherwise he’s a lot like me.

In certain neighborhoods in Chicago “going to California” means going to jail. That’s because the Criminal Courts Building is at the corner of California Avenue and 26th Street, with the Cook County Jail starting behind it and spreading for blocks around it. 

It’s a somber, sometimes sinister area to be. I used to pick up and drop off lawyers, witnesses, plaintiffs, and other functionaries here in the cab. Not once was anyone eager to go there and most were relieved to be leaving. 

I’ve only been inside the court building twice. Both times for jury duty. I never made it as far as interviews but got a watercolor of the parking structure and a few sketches done in the hours of waiting. 

Last Tuesday, Marc Fischer (of Public Collectors/Temporary Services/many other art concerns) picked me up at 31st and Halsted and we went to California. I am the fourth visiting artist in a residency he’s set up to observe the machinations of Chicago’s criminal court system. One of the reasons I applied to be part of it is that people have said that my sketchbook drawings often resemble courtroom art, so I thought I’d try my hand at the real thing. Another reason is that watching and listening to people as they go about their work is one of my main preoccupations. Courtrooms are fraught environments but what occurred to me as Marc and I spent time in three or four of them over this morning is that to most of the people we observed this was just their workplace. 

A lot of the proceedings were hard to make out because many of the voices were unamplified and we were sitting too far away to hear. I don’t know that this wasn’t by design. I spent most of my time trying to catch the postures and gestures of clerks, stenographers, and litigants. I also tried to make note of the carts of file folders, the empty chairs where juries might’ve sat, and the odd architectural details of these rooms—such as doors between windows which seemingly led to open air. 

Every defendant we saw was black or brown and most of them were taking plea deals. Everybody involved acted like they were going through motions they’d repeated hundreds, if not thousands, of times. 

The last two rooms in which we spent time were circular, had no windows, and the spectator gallery was separated from the judge’s bench and lawyers’ tables by thick tinted glass. Periodically, people would go in or out from where we sat, as their cases were called. Here voices were mostly amplified, but having thick glass between us and them gave the feeling of watching fish in an aquarium. There was an unreality to it which was broken from time to time by the very real pronouncements of sentences and other judgments from the bench. They snapped me out of the dull banality of much of what was happening.

Sitting there as an observer it was easy to forget that people’s lives were being directed and altered through the recitements of often clinical phrases. The drama and consequences was nothing like the exaggerated version most of us are familiar with from TV, movies, and airport novels. 

There is probably no way to relay the gravity of what I saw and heard during these hours. I tried to note the unusual details. In the last courtroom the walls were decorated with many portraits of notable African-American figures like Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman and several inspirational portraits. The one which stuck with me was an idiotic illustration of a black basketball player holding a ball in one outstretched hand and a stack of books in the other with a caption reading “Knowledge is Game”. A couple pictures down there was a female version. I didn’t catch it, but Marc told me the caption on that one read, “Knowledge is Game 2”.

Read Marc’s account here. He’ll be printing a booklet featuring the first four residents of this program soon. I’ll link to it once it’s available.