Letter

It was my birthday Friday. I turned forty-eight, in case anyone’s keeping score. I woke up and started a new painting out the window. Then I went to Lou Mitchell’s for breakfast and ordered toast, which I’ve been not eating for months now. Then I walked east to State Street and took the #29 bus to Navy Pier.

EXPO Chicago was there and, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, it is my own personal Yom Kippur. The fact it fell on my birthday this year is just an atonement/reflection/misery cherry on top. The thing which set this year’s fair apart from every other is that Sue, from Richard Norton Gallery, kindly gave me a pass, thus saving me from paying $20 for this annual hairshirt/bed-of-nails. Also, I can’t recall a show I liked less. I usually tally at least five or six paintings or drawings that appeal; this year there were two. A little Harold Haydon cityscape at Richard Norton and a Charles Burchfield watercolor at DC Moore. I stayed long enough to thank Sue for the free pass and to eat an overpriced cannoli from Eataly, then got the hell out of there.

I bought a book called The Nix at the Dial and started reading it on the outdoor patio of a Michigan Ave coffee shop as the skies darkened and the raindrops started to fall. Then I went to Five Guys and wolfed down a bacon-burger and fries for no other reason than to kill the half hour left before work.

I opened the bar at 4pm and not much happened until Shay came in with pomegranates and chocolate for my birthday. A couple hours later a procession of two candle-lit birthday pies came at me, followed by half the bar singing “Happy Birthday to You” and cheering, with many whiskey shots after. One of the reasons I agreed to work this night was to avoid acknowledgement of the blessed occasion. I obviously failed at that completely.

With every passing year celebrating my birthday feels more ludicrous, but ignoring it completely is impossible with living relatives still around, and in a certain way, pretending it’s not happening is even more of a conscious effort than just surviving the well-wishes. One day I’ll figure out some way to make it just another day, but I haven’t figured out how yet.

The next day I met Marie at Gene and Georgetti and we ate a feast of prime rib, carpaccio, a bunch of sides, a bottle of wine, cannoli, spumoni, espresso, and shots of limoncello to top it off. If I have one birthday tradition, it’s a trip to Gene and Georgetti, maybe my favorite restaurant in town. I always look around at the other diners and wonder whether they and I have anything in common. While I waited for Marie to arrive, I watched a bunch of aging, drunken bros pile out of a limo and press bills into their Asian driver’s hand. Several murmured apologies into his ear as they did it. Several of them were about my age and I’d bet money they were bribing the driver’s silence for being racist, obnoxious pricks. The news these days is full of men just like them being called out for behavior that they always assumed was their birthright. Lets hope their time is coming to an end. Whether it is or not, I felt like a Martian compared to them, which, I hope, counts in my favor.

I woke Sunday morning and worked on the computer a bit. Then I went to something called The Other Art Fair, which was even more depressing to me than the “real” art fair. I left after about fifteen minutes, feeling my year’s atonement ritual was now complete. Now it’s time to live through another year. Maybe next year I’ll figure out how to skip all this altogether.

Aaron and Mary, who run Pilsen Community Books and the Dial Bookshop, are having a book fair. I won’t be there because my brother is getting married in California that weekend, but you should go. Over 7000 books priced to go, a bunch of bands, and a few book-themed prints specially created for the event.

Each artist was asked to choose a particular book to make their print about. I chose Oleg Kashin’s Fardwor, Russia!—a book I wrote about a few years ago and which seems pretty relevant today. Kashin was beaten to within inches of death for writing it. We’re not there yet in this country but the creeps at the controls would be happy if we got there. I don’t have the knack or inclination for directIy political art, but that doesn’t mean the events of the day don’t inform what I do as subtext. It’s impossible not to be swayed one way or another by the larger world; not even the staunchest art-for-art’s sake purist is immune.

I haven’t made a screen print since high school, so when I was asked to make something for the fair I had to ask around. The way color is applied in printmaking is totally alien to what I do. In my paintings color is applied all the way from start to finish in ever-changing combinations and proportions, whereas in printmaking you have to decide on colors beforehand and apply them in layers, in a particular order. Luckily, my good pal, John Forbes, was willing to work with me.

He told me to draw out each color section on tracing paper with indelible ink; I painted them on semi-see-through vellum. He made it work anyway. A couple days after I dropped the sheets off at his studio, he showed up with 29 prints at Firecat Projects, while I was there for gallery hours. He told me working on this print he felt like he was inside my head. I apologized the best I could and thanked him for his work. The print looked like it could’ve fit in with the CTA drawings up on the walls.

So much so, in fact, that when a coworker of gallery proprietor, Stan Klein’s, showed up wanting to buy art, he bought a print instead of one of the drawings. It helped, of course, that it cost $20 rather than $200. He did try to haggle down the price of one of the drawings, dragging Stan into it to no avail. Art collectors are bizarre human beings sometimes. I was planning to wait till the fair to sell these prints, but since this guy ruined that idea, I figure I’d offer them to you as well. Fifteen will be available at the fair next weekend and I hope you go and buy one there, along with a bunch of books, but if you can’t be there, I have thirteen at home. Drop me a line if you’d like one.

David Schalliol was in town to present his amazing documentary about the battle between Englewood residents and the railroad trying to turn their neighborhood into a parking lot. It’s one of the best movies about Chicago I’ve ever seen.

Thalia Zedek used a sketch I did of her band as inner sleeve art for her new record. I was very happy to see that. She’s been a favorite for a long, long time. Order the record here.

Tuesday morning I took two buses to 46th & Western and picked up a car from Enterprise. Back at my place I shlepped five boxes containing ten framed 16″x20″ drawings down three flights of stairs, filling all available space in the little vehicle, then drove north.

Stan Klein and his dog Ella met me at Firecat Projects a few minutes after I got there. We laid out the drawings along the walls, then Stan put on some jazz and set about measuring and estimating where everything would go. He asked whether I’d prefer to hang them myself but I was more than happy to have someone else do it. I left him to his task and went to the art supply store.

I was hoping to find numbers to stick on the walls but they didn’t have any; I got stencils and a hard pencil instead, after calling to make sure Stan was ok with me writing on his walls. Then I stopped at Mariano’s to order a couple of meat and cheese trays for the opening and headed back to the gallery.

Stan had one wall done, so I set about tracing out 1 through 10 just below each frame. It went fast and easy. Emboldened, I tried to jump ahead and do the opposite wall of the room, which would end with the last piece, number 49, as Stan was done with that side now. I counted and recounted backwards several times over and still wound up making mistakes. Good thing all it to correct them was an eraser. It got worse as I went along—on the back wall I had to redo a sequence of five numbers. But the show looked pretty good anyway.

Several times throughout the afternoon people would pop in to look at the flatfiles Stan was selling out of the back room. A couple were sold and I helped empty them and carry them out to the buyer’s car. They were full of Tony Fitzpatrick’s postcards and show catalogues, left over from when this place had been his studio. 

Wednesday morning Frank Spidale pulled up to my place in a Dominican University short bus. We loaded up about forty paintings and drawings onto the seats and drove downtown. There, my brother Boris, who’d flown in for the occasion, met us at Flax Frame to pick up the rest of my work. We got on the Eisenhower and headed west to River Forest.

There was no loading dock available, so we walked the pieces to the elevator a few at a time. Upstairs in the gallery we laid out roughly what would go where and went to lunch. Frank and Boris hadn’t seen each other in many years but seemed to get along. This boded well for the hours of work ahead.

Back at the gallery, I left them to measure the walls to hang framed pieces while I worked on the opposite side of the room to lay out a wall of unframed charcoal figure drawings. A former student of Frank’s worked on designing the vinyl lettering for the show title, running in and out of the room several times with letters that were first too small, then too big, then, just about right. After that, Boris enlisted her to put the numbered map tacks under the pieces that were already hung. Not the most challenging work but hopefully she got something out of it.

Boris had worked as a gallery installer so Frank and I left him to take the lead on hanging much of the work. He was very thorough measuring and re-measuring each wall as he went. I’ve always just eyeballed every show hang so it was interesting to watch two people who had done this work professionally do their thing on successive days. Stan had it much easier, as every piece was the same size in the Firecat show and the room didn’t have any unusual angles or nooks. The O’Connor Gallery at Dominican is full of alcoves and irregular spaces and the work in the show was different sizes and mediums, some framed, some not. So Boris’s and Frank’s task was much more difficult.

They did it all with good humor and I felt fortunate for their help. Any help hanging a show feels like a great luxury and a weight off my shoulders. Now both shows are up and I’m relieved that the months of preparation and stressing over it are over. I hope a few people see these shows but I’m mostly looking forward to doing the next thing. Whatever that may be. —Here is the painting I did of the Dana Hall Trio performing Pat Metheny’s “Rejoicing” at the Jazz Art Collective a couple weeks back. 

—I illustrated an excerpt from a Marine’s book about his time in the Iraq War for The Rumpus. I used one of my friend Noah Vaughn‘s photos as a reference—not the one below—and he totally busted me.