Dmitry Samarov—CTA Drawings

Firecat Projects, 2124 N. Damen, Chicago, IL 60647 8/24/2018—9/20/2018 Opening Reception: Friday, August 24th, 7-10pm

Every time I get on a CTA bus or train is like the curtain parting on a brand-new play. I never know who will be the star or just a bit player. Every passenger who gets on and sits down or stands in the aisle can be the subject of a drawing.

I’ve been drawing on subways and buses in my sketchbooks for as long as I can remember but always wanted to figure out some way to use color and make them more finished pictures. I hate working from drawings and prefer to work on site and directly whenever possible, so taking the sketches back home and using them as a jumping off point never held much appeal. There was no way I could lug my paints on the bus, that’s for sure.

Then, sometime early last year I watched some kids using crayons to draw outside and had a eureka moment. It was a way to have color and drawing all at once. But crayons weren’t quite right for what I had in mind. I hadn’t used colored markers to draw since I was a teenager but thought they might do the trick. I went to the art store and bought a few colored Sharpies and tried them out on the Halsted bus. I kept going back and getting more and more colors. I’m used to mixing primaries to make color so markers are a totally different way of working for me. It’s been both exciting and odd. Like opening a guitar case and noticing that the instrument suddenly has forty strings instead of the six I’ve known for so long.

I feel a little bit like a crazy person riding from end to end of a bus or train line with a thrift store purse full of markers around my neck, but the few people who bother to look up from their cellphones usually like what I’m doing. It’s a way to capture fleeting moments of city life in a novel way. It’s also a great way to get some relief from the heat and humidity of Chicago summers.

I’ve taken the Green Line west to Oak Park and south to Cottage Grove, the Orange Line to Midway and back to the Loop, the Halsted bus south to 79th Street, then back north to Broadway, among many dozen rides over the past couple years. My aim isn’t to ride every single bus and train route in Chicago; that would take too long and would be more of an endurance challenge rather than an attempt to paint a portrait of the city. I expect to keep taking my purse of markers on the CTA for decades to come.

FLIGHT OF THE PIGASUS

Thursday, August 23, 2018 7:00 PM 9:00 PM

This event is HOSTED by Co-Prosperity Sphere at:

Maria’s Packaged Goods and Community Bar

960 W. 31st St., Chicago, IL 60608

coprosperity.org

A re-staging of the infamous “Pigasus” press conference held at what is now Daley Plaza on August 23, 1968, in which the Yippies nominated a pig for the president of United States. This moment of political theater set off almost a week of political unrest and remains a key memory of the counterculture. Fifty years later, “Pigasus” flies again in a live theatrical event that uses the 1969 Chicago Eight trial as a frame for re-examining this story and the benefits and limits of using theater, performance, and disruption to effect political change. With musician Bill MacKay as musician and Yippie Phil Ochs; City of Chicago historian Tim Samuelson as Judge Julius Hoffman; National Lawyers Guild lawyer Jerry Boyle as defense attorney William Kunstler; author Pat Thomas as Tom Foran; artist Dmitry Samarov as magazine artist Franklin McMahon; Petunia the Pig as Pigasus; and Judy Gumbo and other witnesses of 1968 as themselves.

—I wrote a profile of Chicago painter Brian Wells for the Reader. 

—I designed a t-shirt to go with my CTA show. You can get yours here.

Monday night at the bar.

A guy in his late twenties sits left of the taps, right where the sinks are. He orders a PBR and thanks me profusely, then goes back to casting his serial-killer eyes around the room. He comes to the bar pretty regularly but usually takes a table in the back. Where he sits tonight there’s no way I can ignore him.

He tries to make small talk but it comes off as veiled insults. He’s going for jocular humor maybe, but the results are the non sequitur ravings of a lunatic. I can’t tell how aware he is of what he sounds like. I look back down at the pint glasses I’m rinsing, then wander down the bar, acting as if I have something to do, aside from getting away from him.

He orders a Schlitz tallboy, then summons me back a few minutes later and sticks out his thumb for me to look at. He claims there was a piece of glass on the lip of the can, but I see nothing on his skin. I pass my fingers over the remaining cans in the cooler just to make sure, then offer him one on the house for his trouble.

A couple beers later he’s well into muttering to himself and attempting conversations with neighboring drinkers, who do their best to pretend not to hear him. He asks politely for one last beer, and, after hesitating a moment, I comply. Fifteen minutes later he asks for another. I tell him I think he had the right idea last time. He wants to know why. I explain that in my professional opinion he’s had enough, that he’s talking to himself, and harassing other patrons.

“So it’s because I’m being aggressive, not crazy, right?”

I let it hang there, then start to walk away. He mumbles something about remembering how he was treated here and stalks out.

Can’t wait till next time. There’s always a next time with ones like him.

I get home on Wednesday, take off my clothes, and get ready to turn on the TV, when Elliott texts, “What time is Peter’s band on tonight?” I didn’t know what he’s talking about, but a quick internet search yields the Minibeast gig at the Hideout. Minibeast is Peter Prescott’s solo act of the last few years. I got both their records but figured they’d never tour. It’s harder and harder to do so these days unless you have a big audience. I love the soundscape-y thing Minibeast does but doubt it’s for the arenas.

I’ve loved every one of Prescott’s bands. From the Volcano Suns in the 80s, to Kustomized and the Peer Group in the 90s, and the reformed Mission of Burma and this new thing in the last couple decades. So I put my clothes back on and pedal across town to the Hideout.

I see Peter a few minutes after walking in, sweaty and panting. “I had a feeling you’d be here,” he says. The room is practically empty, except for an oblivious couple on a very loud date and four or five people there for the music. Watching Prescott on stage takes me back. Over thirty years of going to see this guy and it’s made me happy every time. “I’m sixty years old…way past my sell-by date!” he tells me.

Hardly. I would’ve been mad to have missed him. I see Elliott at the bar thank him over and over for the head’s up. 

I’ve always loved swimming but haven’t gone much the last few years. One of the reasons is that I don’t like the beach. Nothing about roasting in the sun among hundreds of other people is appealing. The burning ball of fire in the sky has never been my friend and worrying about things getting stolen while you’re in the water is a drag. But I love being in the water. It’s one of the few things which make summer bearable.

Shay was in town last month and she invited me to go swimming at the Dvorak Park Pool. It’s bizarre fact that in my twenty-four years in Chicago I’d never been to a Park District swimming pool. Shay was staying at a friend’s vacated apartment in Pilsen so Dvorak Park had the closest pool. We met at the entrance on May Street and went to the lockers to change. I didn’t even have a combination lock to store my clothes in the lockers, so I met Shay back out on the street and gave her my stuff to stow away before going to swim.

The men’s changing area at Dvorak is a weirdly large and empty space. There’s a bathroom next to the showers which lead out to the pool, a wall of lockers, and two walls of shallow wooden stalls, with no doors or curtains, for changing. Through the dozen or so times I’ve now been in this place there’s never been more than three or for other people in it with me at the same time. It resembles some sort of corral or holding pen for animals who have been gone for decades. I can’t quite put my finger on what makes it so odd to be in but it always makes me think of one of those De Chirico paintings, which are unpeopled but still ominously portend of doings just out of the frame. 

Out by the pool all my misgivings disappear. I recognize several people right away as regulars from the bar. They don’t acknowledge me, but that’s not surprising since I’m out of context and have nothing but blue swimming trunks on. It’s sort of like art kid happy hour here, minus cocktails or much clothes. I see an older guy who I’ve had to kick out of the bar twice for harassing women and don’t make eye contact. Fortunately, thanks either to his alcoholism or to my “disguise”, he doesn’t register my presence. In the water I’m talking to Shay about my upcoming art show at Dominican University, when an older man comes up to the edge of the water and tells me he teaches there. Small world. Shay teases me about being famous. Does being spotted at a neighborhood swimming pool constitute fame?

Whatever the social situation, being in the water is remarkably calming. Even in this artificial, chlorinated version of the sea there is a sensation of being closer to where we all come from. It’s a primal feeling, like some sort of equilibrium being restored which is unavailable while on land.

I’ve been going back to Dvorak Park at least a couple times a week since. I try to go during Adult Swim but don’t really mind having kids splashing about in the shallow end. I clumsily try to swim laps. It’s been so long since I did this regularly that I don’t really know how to breathe in the water correctly. But each time I go back it gets a little easier. I aim to make it a regular thing. One of the things I like best about swimming is that unlike other forms of exercise sweat is instantly reabsorbed into the environment. There’s few things I hate more in my life than sweating.

On my last visit, I had the place to myself for a few minutes. Then a guy who used to cook at Skylark showed up with his girlfriend. I recalled running into them awhile ago at Rossi’s downtown and telling them to avoid Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper, which I’d just suffered through at the Film Center. Then I swam the length of the pool a few times, trying to remember how to repeat strokes I haven’t practiced since I was a child. I’ll keep going back until the weather turns.