Letter

I don’t have people over. There aren’t many places to sit, not even a proper table, except for drawing. One armchair, one bed. I like people—in manageable doses—I just see no reason to invite them to where I live. The one reason to occasionally have others over here is to look at art. Last Monday, Keith came over to do just that.

I’ve written several articles about shows at Keith’s Rare Nest Gallery. Though it’s only been around a little while he consistently shows interesting work. He’s also one of the very few gallerists I’ve ever gotten along with. Because I’ve been writing about art shows more the last year or two I now get a pretty steady stream of press releases from galleries and museums. The vast majority of it is utter crap so getting news of something up at Keith’s is usually a treat. Making art then also writing about it is an ambiguous place to be. Writing criticism and reviews often feels like working for the enemy but I’m too old and tired to hold myself to high ethical standards anymore.

So I invited Keith over to look at some art to maybe get a show at his gallery. This is how it works. It’s all about who you know. No meritocracy and little rhyme or reason, just who you happen to run into and when. Do them a solid and maybe they’ll do you one back. I probably always knew this on some level but it’s taken till the last couple years for it to sink in that this is the way of the world.

Several weeks back I ran into a younger painter. I told her of my upcoming show at Firecat Projects and she got a sour look on her face. She said something dismissive about the scene around that gallery being “my crowd”, as if it was a clique from which she was being excluded. It made me laugh because I’m pushing fifty with barely any artworld acclaim to speak of. The idea that I’ve got an in somewhere is a novelty to me, but maybe it’s about time it happened. All I know is what little success I’ve had has never come at some other artist’s expense.

I tidied up the place, cleaned the bathroom, and set out a bunch of pictures. I don’t know what other artists do in these situations. Some likely have a line of bullshit to convince others of their genius to get them sales and representation. I don’t. My pictures will either speak for themselves or be ignored and forgotten. Can you be forgotten if you were never known?

Keith came up, took a quick look around, drank a glass of water, then invited me to lunch. We ate at a Chinese place a few blocks from my house which has a pretty good $6 lunch special. He talked about pairing me with a photographer of Chicago cityscapes for a show sometime this winter. Did the visit go well? Who knows. It felt odd having another person in my rooms. But if the result is an exhibit then I suppose it was worth it. A few of the pictures I put out for Keith to look at are still out, but bit by bit the apartment is returning to its private state.

The morning after his visit I was woken by pounding sounds which felt like they were coming from directly outside my forehead but turned out to be tuckpointers smashing away at the bricks around the roof, about ten feet above my skull. They kept at it all morning till there was a layer of brick dust on every surface near my living room window. I wiped down the armchair and the art books, marking the second time in a couple days that I’d had to clean the place—likely a personal record. It’ll likely be months before anyone other than me sets foot in here again, so I’m free to let the housework slide.

Once the heat breaks, I’ll be able to paint here again, which, after all, is the only reason for anyone to be in these rooms.

A couple Sundays ago—maybe the hottest day of the year so far—I went to 18th Street to get a tattoo. My last was nearly ten years ago—a Noah’s Ark adapted from a Russian block-printed tapestry I’ve had on walls of places I live since childhood. The new one came from a newer source but still from the past.  

The Spindle was a sculpture which stood on the corner of Cermak and Harlem in Berwyn for twenty years until it was unceremoniously leveled to make way for a Walgreen’s in 2008. To me, it was a Chicago landmark. I’d drawn two versions of it on coffee bags while working at Hardboiled Coffee a few years back. The cars suspended on a spike seemed like a good way to memorialize my cabbie career, as well as paying tribute to a symbol of the city now gone.

Justin is dating my friend Tracy and works out of a shop in Pilsen, which is close to where I live, so I asked him about doing the Spindle tattoo and he agreed. I got to Studio One at 5pm, then walked with Justin down the street for a cup of coffee before getting started. We talked about the other shops he worked at, other artists I’d gotten tattoos from, and about Tracy, while he was getting the stencil and his gear ready.

The needle didn’t hurt much but made my mind wander. I’d forgotten that about getting tattooed, you sort of drift away, maybe to remove yourself from the low-level but persistent pain of the process. Tracy walked in when Justin was about halfway done. We talked about grabbing a bite afterward, since I had about an hour before my Skylark bar shift.

We decided on the newish Vietnamese diner down the street but it turned out to be closed, so we went back west up 18th to a new spot next to the tattoo shop. It was a cavernous place named after a no-doubt made-up person. I recognized a regular from the coffeeshop as one of the waiters. We put in our order and waited. After about half an hour I ran out and Divvy’d it to the bar, Tracy and Justin agreed to bring my food later in a to-go box.

A few minutes into my shift I carded a young woman named Natalie Wood. I asked whether her parents were fans of the dead actress and she rolled her eyes and nodded. She knew about the investigation into the death being reopened as well. Her own Robert Wagner showed up a few minutes later—a poetry professor type probably twice her age—and they retreated to one of the booths. Tracy texted to say they were on their way with my chicken and to expect an apology phone call from the GM of the restaurant.

The next morning the GM left a novella-length voicemail and a text message to match. He’d comped our entire meal and repeatedly intruded on Tracy and Justin’s conversation after I’d left to prostrate himself before them, sending out desserts and drinks one after another. Now he wanted to give me a $50 gift certificate to come back. I texted that it was unnecessary, that I hadn’t budgeted enough time for the meal, but he was inconsolable. I wouldn’t give him my email so he left the gift certificate at the host stand. I asked Tracy to have Justin pick it up and give it to one of the neighborhood borrachos.

I’m already planning another tattoo but will be careful to cross the street when approaching Justin’s shop from the west to avoid getting sucked back into the vortex of that eatery. Maybe by the time I return that place will be history already.

A couple Mondays ago I got on the Blue Line to O’Hare and took a night flight to Florence. My parents have found a place in the hills above that city which they’ve returned to enough times that my father has taken to calling it their dacha.It’s a house down a dirt path, in the middle of an olive grove, and the view of the valley out the second-floor bathroom’s window will remind one of countless backgrounds from Italian Old Masters.

My first trip to this house was on the occasion of my father’s 65th birthday six years ago. I went with Shay and we did a bunch of tourist/cultural things like climbing the endless circular staircase to the top of Brunelleschi’s Duomo. She’d made a list of sites she wanted to see and dragged me along, kicking and screaming. On my next visit, a couple years back, both my brothers came as well. There was a day trip to Venice and I remember doing a lot of driving. This time no one else was coming. It would just be them and me.

I think I have a pretty good relationship with my parents. They’re very supportive and we rarely fight. So when they invited me to come, I hemmed and hawed for a bit but then accepted. My hesitation had nothing to do with them or with Italy but with travel in general. I hate it and have to trick myself into doing it, even when it’s to places I like with people I love. Because travel, to me, equals banishment. I can’t help feeling I’m being forced to leave, rather than being excited to visit some place that isn’t home. My parents, on the other hand, live to leave town. Trips have been the highlight of their lives as long as I can remember. And as the years pass I wonder how many more trips they have left. So when they asked I knew I had to go.

Upon arrival my father asked what I wanted to do during my five days there and I honestly hadn’t given it any thought. Had they been in Boston these five days, my thought process would be exactly the same—I was coming to spend time with them, the venue didn’t much matter. Because this was my third time at this house in Fiesole, there were the beginnings of routine that I require to get anything done. But though I had hopes of making some headway on a new book, I got no writing done at all. The only art I accomplished was five sumi ink postcards done on watercolor paper which fought my every brushstroke. If the Italian postal system is merciful, a few of them will be arriving in the States sometime soon.

I did a lot of the driving again and plugging my iPod into the car stereo had a grounding effect. My folks liked the Dos Santos record I’ve been wearing out ever since I got it a month ago. I rewatched Repentence on my laptop. It’s one of my favorite movies and an appropriate one to watch in another age of totalitarian dictators. I finished reading Molly Antopol’s The UnAmericans and passed it on to my mother. I went back to Gerald Murnane’s epic story collection, Stream System. I have to take breaks from that book to digest some of the stuff that goes on in it. In the last story I read, he goes on at length about his idea that there’s no such thing as time, but only place. Or rather an everchanging array of places. That all we can truly experience is the scenery we see before us. I can’t wrap my head around it entirely but something about it rings true.

I know in my everyday life that I need to keep seeing the same people and places to begin finding the minute changes and differences which make up the subject-matter of my art and writing. When I say I hate travel it’s not entirely the truth. I can’t imagine life without the CTA, for instance. Getting on buses and trains is as meaningful to me as reading a book, hearing a band, or talking to a friend. 

I’m glad I went to Italy because my parents were there and seemed happy to have me, but left to my own devices I may never go back. There’d have to be some compelling, concrete reason. Otherwise I’ll be perfectly satisfied riding the CTA to scratch any stray travel itch.