Letter

Sometime in the spring of ’78, I was taken out of first grade in Moscow because my parents told me we were going to take a trip. They neglected to mention we weren’t coming back. My memories of that time are fragmented and inseparable from my parents’ retellings and photos taken by friends and family. Still, some things have stayed with me through these past forty years which I’m pretty sure were lived firsthand.

The sailor’s outfit my mother made for some school event which was the wrong shade of blue, making me stand apart from my classmates—the teacher threatening to cut my curls short—the hot bubliki bought from a kiosk as reward for surviving a trip to the doctor—being held down so the dentist could drill at my teeth with no anesthetic—mooning passing trains with Pavlik in Pushkino.

In Rome, while waiting to be allowed into the US: running back to the pensione we were living in, needing to take a shit in the worst way and not making it. Then, taking off my soiled underwear and throwing it out the window so as not to be found out. They never found out.

In Billerica, Massachusetts: trying chocolate milk for the first time in school—not being allowed to go to the bathroom except for proscribed times—going to ESL—being put a grade back because I knew no English but knowing every curse word—and using many—less than a year later.

Countless times at my parents’ table with them and their friends yelling about the horrors of the old countr—seeing a Time story about John Lennon’s assassination and mixing him up with the founder of the Soviet Union—my mother telling me about what a happy child I’d been. But that was before we moved to America. I have no memory of being happy; I have to take her word for it.

My father used to tell me about how when he was in school, the heroes and villains in history books would change from year to year, depending who fell in or out of favor in the Soviet hierarchy. I think about that a lot these days. I wonder whether school children today will become inured to the daily lies and absurdities emanating from the White House the way my parents’ generation was in response to Politburo fantasies. Being deceived and acting like it’s normal has become a way of life for many. That’s the way it was in the Soviet Union for seventy-five years and many in today’s Russia wish it were so again.

At the coffee shop the other day, a woman I know asked me what I thought of the turmoil in my home country. Her boyfriend is from Russia and is in the process of applying for his green card. He’s worried that with the tensions between the two countries his status will be imperiled. I told her to tell him to hang onto his Russian passport—at the rate we’re going here, it’ll be more valuable to him than a US one.

When we left forty years ago we were stripped of our Soviet citizenship. When people ask whether I’ve ever been back, I tell them there’s nowhere for me to go back to because the country I’m from no longer exists. But now, bits and pieces of that long-gone place make regular appearance online. The Soviet Union has reemerged in some weird cyber-ghost form. So much of the art of disinformation pioneered and perfected in the Evil Empire is on proud display on all our many screens now.

But I have no plans to leave the country newly-minted novelist Sean Penn calls “a shopping mall with a flag”. Where the hell could I go?

Strangely enough, my parents’ favorite place is neither in Russia nor in America. They love Italy and have returned there countless times over the years. This June I’ll be joining them for a week in Fiesole. We can toast the anniversary of our immigration from one of our pitstops along the way. I’ll try not to shit my pants this time.

Finally made the cover of the Reader after eight or nine years of contributing. It was a nice surprise. A few people texted and emailed congratulations. Good to know the print version still matters a little—the cover, at least. 

I went to see Brokeback play at the Bottle a couple weeks ago and had a nice conversation with Doug McCombs. I’ve drawn Doug dozens of times because he’s played in so many great bands in Chicago but we’ve rarely talked until the last few years. My enduring memory of him is from sometime in the late ’90s at Leo’s Lunchroom: the two of us the only customers in the place not even acknowledging one another’s presence. There was never any hostility or anything like that; just two shy, taciturn guys keeping to themselves. So it was nice to just shoot the shit with him the other night. Brokeback is a great band too, go check ’em out.

I don’t know Marc Ribot but I’ve loved his guitar-playing since at least Tom Waits’ Raindogs. One of my favorite times seeing him was at Constellation a couple years back. He played solo soundtracks to a bunch of short films projected over his head. Last Tuesday he was at the Old Town School of Folk Music to play in a duo with David Hidalgo from Los Lobos. In between one of the numbers he casually mentioned being so down lately that he was barely leaving his house. He didn’t say why but it could’ve been brought on by reading a newspaper any day over the last couple years. It’s a struggle for a lot of us and it made me worry for Ribot. It bothered me enough that I emailed someone I thought might know him to see if he was truly in a bad way.

I’ve been reading Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke off and on for over a year. I picked it up shortly after his passing when it occurred to me I’d only read Jesus’ Son up to that point. Tree of Smoke is a very good book but so heavy and so like the news these days that a couple days ago I finally just threw in the towel and left it at the coffee shop for someone else to wrestle with. It was like having a boulder lifted from my neck. That night I picked up my friend John Hodgman’s Vacationland. I read it over the next two days with great pleasure. I think it’s the best thing he’s done so far. 

Paintings shouldn’t have names. Words shape how people look at pictures, telling them how to think and feel about what they’re seeing, sometimes making them doubt their own eyes. And yet, there’s no way around it. You can just number them, but numbers are a lot harder to remember than words, so an archive of numbered pictures would be a nightmare to use (at least for me.) So I call them things.

With the book paintings, titles are practically screaming over one another to be chosen. Every spine, cover, and back of a book is a candidate. I named this one Pandemonium after a zine published in Boston in 80s. A portion of its black-and-white cover is visible about three-quarter way’s down in the middle of the painting. It was a magazine about underground culture put out by Jack Stevenson, who used to also present evenings of driver-safety and anti-drug propaganda films at places like the Primal Plunge. Seeing stuff like that was a badly-needed antidote for living in Ronald Reagan’s America. I read about Charles Bukowski, John Waters, the Kuchar brothers, and William Burroughs in Jack’s magazine. So sometimes I get to pay tribute to something from the past with my titles. 

This one’s called Fardwor, Russia after Oleg Kashin’s wicked satire for which he was nearly beaten to death. It’s the hot pink one with yellow lettering. I reviewed the English translation back when I wrote reviews for the Trib.

Most of my cityscapes are boringly just named after the places they portray. Thus there are now about fifteen Lituanicas, dozens of Jackalopes, and countless Skylarks. With room pictures I’ve occasionally gotten a little more fanciful. In A Lonely Place is named after my favorite Bogart flick; Night Studio after Musa Mayer’s memoir about growing up with Philip Guston as her father; The Mess I’ve Made, a comment on relationship problems. Sometimes I get to have ones with multiple meanings. A series of paintings and drawings of a garage behind a Bridgeport bar is called Excavation, to reference the work of digging through the piles crap which I’d undertaken, but also as a tribute to the great de Kooning I’d looked at a million times over the last twenty-eight years at the Art Institute.

It’s a no-win situation. If I explain where the names come from, it further directs a viewer’s reaction; whether the name itself is obtuse or evocative. If I say nothing and use nondescript titles, perhaps people will wonder if I’m hiding something, that there’s something to get that they’re not getting, or that there’s no meaning at all. I love words, sentences, and even paragraphs now and then. But that love is at odds with a lot of what my paintings are about.

Maybe I’ll just use symbols or sounds to name them. Probably not. That would be even more pretentious than naming one Can’t and Won’t after the great story collection by Lydia Davis. This is just a longwinded way to say that you should take my titles with a bucket of salt.