Letter

I didn’t know about Francis Chapin (1899-1965) until a few years ago, but once I saw his pictures it was like I’d known them my whole life. He painted and drew Chicago cityscapes in a style somewhere between French Post-Impressionism and the Ashcan School. Those are two of the boxes often checked off when my own work is described.

Chapin painted views from Chicago windows which I recognize so instinctively that I might as well be looking over his shoulder as he did them. But the man died five years before I was born, so how can that be? 

Friday morning it was finally cool enough for me to ride my bike, after a week of oppressive heat and humidity. I pedaled downtown to the Merchandise Mart. Richard Norton Gallery, on the sixth floor, was opening a Chapin retrospective that day. It was my first chance to see a big group of his work all at once.

I did a thing I hardly ever do: I introduced myself to the gallerists. Now that I write about art I’m bombarded with press releases so it behooves me to keep my distance. But I wasn’t here in any professional capacity. I just wanted to look at some paintings and drawings I felt close to. The gallery people couldn’t have been nicer. I’ve never had such an easy, enjoyable time in an art gallery in my life.

They told me to come back and they’d show me stacks of Chapins they had no room to include in the show. They even asked about my paintings. I gave them a bunch of postcards. Their focus is Modernism and the cutoff seems to be around the middle of the twentieth century, so I doubt there’s much chance they’d take on my work, but it was flattering that they took an interest anyway. 

One of my favorite pieces in the show was a small ink of a six men on barstools at a counter. It looked like some of my drawings done in bars over the years. In the few photos I’ve seen of Chapin, he’s a smiling Jimmy Stewart type. I’m nothing like that, but otherwise I feel a lot of kinship with the guy. I look forward to going back to the Merchandise Mart and pouring of more of his stuff and finding a few more that look like I could’ve done myself.

When Matt Lux asked me to write something for his record, we met in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago. He parked right where the sorely-missed Lithuanian restaurant Healthy Food used to be. When he was just starting to play, older musicians would take him around town to discover all the special spots. He calls one of his tunes “Paw Paw” after a native fruit which has never gained widespread popularity because it doesn’t travel and must be eaten within days of being picked. Lux passes on knowledge as it was passed on to him.

What do you call this music? I ask and he just shrugs. This isn’t because he doesn’t know what he’s doing or lacks the language to explain himself. Opposites attract him. There are horns, drums, and bass and non-bass guitars on this record but it isn’t jazz. There are electronic blips, wheezes, and barely audible echoes filling the imaginary rooms these numbers conjure. There’s even a human voice or two now and then.

“Space-folk”, he offers, half-joking, I think. This from a guy who’s come to couch his opinions with the caveat that they come from someone who hates Sonny Rollins but loves Culture Club. He tells me that some of the titles of these tunes refer to Biggie Smalls, Colin Kaepernick, and Lester Young, among others. But I won’t tell you which is which because no one wants their work explained away by influences and inspirations. Besides, where one starts is rarely where one finishes, so identifying jumping-off points won’t necessarily help you appreciate where it will end up. I didn’t know any back-stories the first couple dozen times I listened to this record either. Songs must fly on their own wings to survive and his fly their own way whatever he calls them and wherever they came from. 

The places they go are sometimes loud, other times quiet, but they always move around in a ruminative sort of way. When they meander, they meander with purpose. Lux named his band the Communication Arts Quartet after a building devoted to that discipline at Walt Disney Elementary, where he went to school as a child. I have to believe the old imagineer himself would be transported were he to hear the music made by this graduate of his namesake institution of learning.

While Lux’s compositions don’t bludgeon you upside the head with their messages, they aren’t willfully obtuse or obscurantist in the way some contemporary instrumental music can be either. Communication’s in the name for good reason. Lux isn’t about making listeners suffer. He wants to make something his mother would enjoy listening to rather than to impress some self-appointed musicologist. He and his bandmates have done the heavy lifting. Drop the needle and let them take you places.

Get yours here.

Walking down 18th Street one night a few years ago with a friend, I happened upon a new bookstore. The window display of Pilsen Community Books had a children’s book my companion recognized. We promised to check this place out sometime and walked on.

Opening a bookstore these days is sort of a perverse proposition. Few people read books, yet more are printed than ever. Online retailers practically throw them in like packing peanuts with higher ticket item. The U.S, Postal Service is often used to mule these pouches and boxes from giant warehouses in undisclosed locations directly to our doorsteps. Who needs to use one’s own legs to walk out into meatspace when everything one can fathom will be plopped on your lap for a price, often within hours?

I went back to Pilsen Community a few weeks. Aaron and Mary, who run it, used to work at Open Books—a place I’ve done work with. Open Books is part of a non-profit dedicated to literacy and this store continues that mission with free book programs for schools. But the look and feel of the store is different. Where Open Books often feels like a warehouse, Pilsen Community is a carefully considered and organized place. In addition to new and used books, they sell beautiful stationary and pencils. The place was put together by people with an eye. 

I got to know Mary and Aaron after a few more visits. They started carrying my books, then asked for some artwork to hang in the store. Now there’s a rotating selection of my Pilsen drawings above the register.

Not content with one store, they recently opened a second. The Dial Bookshop is on the second floor of the Fine Arts Building, accessible exclusively by human-operated elevator. It is a lot like Pilsen Community, but with views of Grant Park and the patter of little ballerinas’ feet added. The Fine Arts Building is a strange relic of a time when artists, musicians, and booksellers were actually important to our society. The Dial Bookshop is named after the magazine of that name started by Margaret Anderson and based in the building. Anderson would move to Paris and took the magazine with her. Today it’s probably best known for serializing James Joyce’s Ulysses and being prosecuted for obscenity by the US government. That’s Anderson and her partner, Jane Heap, in the illustration above.

I paint a portrait of a Chicago writer each month for the Dial. They are turned into postcards with a quote from the subject on the back. The originals are hung in the store. Visiting one time, the door was locked, a sign saying they’d just stepped out for coffee. I sat down and waited in the hall. A picture window opened onto shelves of neatly displayed books. Past them, the light streamed in from the park on Michigan Avenue. I told myself to come back and try painting what I’d seen.

Aaron, Mary, and I talk a lot about the book business. It’s in complete disarray. Some parts function as if the internet never existed, while others are as fly-by-night as three-card-monte hucksters. The bookstores these two have opened are a possible way forward. You need to offer people something attractive and unique enough to inspire them to unglue their asses from the couch. This isn’t easy when you can buy anything you want with a flick of your index finger but I think and hope they’ll succeed. Not just because I work with them but also because I like visiting the stores they’ve created.

When a bunch of little girls in tutus from ballet class down the hall flutter into the Dial to look at books, I’m almost hopeful.

—I wrote a feature article about photojournalist Nancy Abrams’ memoir and photos of West Virginia and a piece about the Ivan Albright show at the Art Institute and a short review of mentalist Mark Toland’s act. 

—I answered some art questions for Voyage Chicago.