Letter

They were showing La Belle Noiseuse at the Siskel and I couldn’t resist. Four hours of a weird old painter trying to recapture his fire by painting a beautiful young woman and the repercussions her posing for him had on everyone dear to them. This is my idea of good way to spend an afternoon.

When Jacques Rivette’s movie came out in 1991, I was drawing or painting nudes a few times a week in school. It was like a superhero version of my everyday. I think I went to see it three times at least. I loved the real-time slowness of it even while cringing at Frenhoffer’s absurd, pompous pronouncements. I wanted to live in a crumbling French villa with Jane Birkin wandering barefoot through its countless rooms like he did.

Twenty-seven years later I no longer wanna live in a French vila and, as a middle-aged man, the decades-long conflict between Frenhoffer and his wife read very differently than they did when I was in my early twenties. But the artist-model scenes brought back how much I’ve missed drawing and painting naked people. 

So a few days after seeing the movie I found a drop-in figure drawing session online, bought some newsprint and cheap drawing paper and showed up at a loft building on Hubbard at the appointed time. I haven’t drawn in a room full of others drawing in twenty-five years yet it all started coming back to me within minutes of dragging an easel to a spot and glancing around at the other arrivers. There’s a unique ritual thing that every artist does while setting up their gear. They fuss about how far this thing is from that thing, pace around, move things around again, then finally settle in.

From the casual conversation I overheard it was obvious most of the others were regulars. Someone turned on a boombox and the guy in charge said there were PBRs in the fridge for a dollar a pop. He reminded everyone to throw $10 in the pail for the two-and-a-half-hour session. Then a thin blonde walked up to the model stand in the middle of all the easels and chairs, took off her robe, and struck the first of about ten one-minute poses.

It all came back. That thing of reckoning with a body through charcoal marks on newsprint. I was sixteen the first time I did this; now I’m forty-seven but it’s the same as it was back then. There were no masterpieces made this night but it didn’t matter. The girl drawing in a chair to my left turned out to be a bartender at Soho House. She’d gone to SAIC for awhile and was planning to go back to school for medical illustration. She said she loved the Skylark and I invited her to come visit me there some Sunday. Maybe she’ll come by, maybe she won’t. I told her I’d never go to Soho House and she completely understood.

Being in that loft space for a few hours, drawing that girl, brought home how much I’d missed it. I won’t wait another twenty-five years to do it again.

—I wrote about Otto Neumann’s prints and some Roman Egypt mummy portraits for the Reader. 

I met Luc Sante a couple years ago when he came to town on book tour for his amazing Other Paris. A few of us went to Cunneen’s afterwards for drinks and Indian takeout. Bill Savage was our bartender and it felt altogether like a true literary evening. Since then Luc and I have kept up a correspondence via email and the occasional postcard.

I write him after seeing some Lino Ventura flick or when I’ve read something he wrote which grabbed me. Every now and then we write about the same subject, like Vivian Maier, and can compare notes. I’ve been reading his stuff for over twenty-five years, so to now count him as an acquaintance and colleague is really something.

A few weeks ago he wrote saying he and his girlfriend, Mimi Lipson, were taking a tour of places she’d lived and would be in Chicago a couple days. He wanted to know if I’d meet them for a drink. Name the time and place, I quickly wrote back.

Early on a frigid Saturday evening I walked into the Green Mill. The Paper Machete crowd was still milling about, yapping loudly, coming down from the high of putting on a show. Luc, Mimi, and an uncle (or perhaps more distant relation) of hers named Terry, were looking around for a spot to land. I led them back toward the entrance, to a booth further away from the loud talkers. We ordered drinks and took a look around. The Green Mill is a bar I don’t go to much but always appreciate the look of when I do. Especially at that hour when the crowd was thinning, in the short time before it would fill back up again for the evening’s jazz set. “There’s no place left in New York that looks like this,” Luc said. And he’d know. I pointed out the window toward Lawrence and told him the Aragon Ballroom was just half a block down. He’d sent me a great old postcard of it a few months back. In my nearly thirty years in Chicago I’ve never been inside that place. 

Soon the hostess came around to ask if we were staying for the music but we decided to go next door to Fiesta Mexicana for some food. Turns out Luc and Mimi were staying at Terry’s place a block away from the Rainbo Club. Terry looked so familiar and now I could swear I’d seen him there a week or two before.

Talk turned to the publishing world and we all took turns telling our tales of woe. Mimi had a book of short stories published by an indie press the same year my second book came out. Our complaints were so similar as to seem redundant.

En route to Rite Liquors on Division for a nightcap, Mimi remarked how cozy and warm it was in their car. Luc said we could thank Bob Dylan for that. He had wrecked his old one when someone had smashed into him and sped off. Then, like a guardian angel, Dylan had hired him to write some liner notes and he bought this car. I was hoping he was gonna say Dylan was the hit-and-run driver.

At the bar Terry and Mimi were greeted like family. There was immediately a free round of shots. Luc sat back taking it all in. He said there weren’t many places like this in New York either. But I gotta believe there’s still some shitty taprooms left somewhere on the outskirts of the outer boroughs. Maybe near LaGuardia. Then he admitted he wasn’t really much of a drinker. Pot was his bag. I told him I hadn’t had pot in almost twenty years. But truth be told I’m no longer much of a drinker either. I need to be clear to get my work done and, despite what they show in the movies, you can’t really paint drunk.

We spent the rest of our time admiring the wall of aging spirits in front of us. I pointed to a tall dusty Galliano carton up near the ceiling and wondered how long it had been there. I don’t remember the last time I heard anybody order a Harvey Wallbanger in a bar. Bet that bottle’s been up there decades. Luc bought a t-shirt which said RITE LQUORS: CASH ONLY! in bright yellow on a black background. I told him he should wear it to his readings so the audience knows what’s expected of them afterwards.

We said our goodbyes and I wished them luck with the rest of their tour. They were headed to Akron, Ohio, next, then back home. I walked east on Division to take the Blue Line, but when I got to Ashland I put up my hand and hailed a cab. It had been a good night but I was ready to be home.

—RIP Joe Frank. One of the best storytellers ever, who couldn’t keep up with his medical bills toward the end of his life because our country’s fucked.

— I reviewed the show of J. Maloof’s latest discovery. This one’s a third-rate Chicago Imagist.

I drew these turkeys to be used as part of a t-shirt design for a friend’s restaurant. I’ve waited a week and haven’t heard whether any of ’em struck his fancy. I asked whether they weren’t cartoonish enough for his purposes, but he hasn’t answered either way.

Waiting on email response is one of my least favorite aspects of our current way of life. I don’t like the thoughts which settle into my head and eat away at my equilibrium in that purgatory time while my correspondent takes their time to answer. I think uncharitable thoughts about them and about myself as well. No one is spared. I’ve often wished there was an auto bounce-back feature built into unanswered email. Say if it sits in someone’s inbox a day, you get a message that it’s been ignored and it self-destructs. That way you’re free to weigh your options rather than waver in limbo for days/weeks/years before finally throwing up your hands in despair and giving up.

Last week I finished reading two very different autobiographies. The first was R.B. Kitaj’s posthumously published Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter, which annoyed me to no end. Imagine making a good living off painting straight out of art school, being collected by museums, which also organize retrospectives of your work, being friends with Philip Roth, David Hockney, and many other genius-level characters, bedding beautiful women left and right, yet writing a three-hundred-page kvetch about being hated and misunderstood. Prior to reading this book I didn’t even know the man was Jewish, but I’ll never forget the fact now, since he mentions it on every damn page. And yet, even though he uses the word ‘Jewish’ thousands of times, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what makes Kitaj’s paintings particularly Jewish. He’s no Chagall. That, at least, is to his credit.

The second book was Bud Smith’s Work. It is pretty much the polar opposite of Kitaj’s. It is unpretentious, humble in simply trying to tell of a workaday life. He describes working construction and at power plants, writing on his phone on lunch breaks. It’s inspiring. 

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I wonder whether there’s much crossover between the readership of these two books. I don’t know who would enjoy Kitaj’s book. His collectors maybe? Those like me, hoping for anecdotes of a richly lived life filled with interesting personalities will be bitterly disappointed. It’s also an expensive book full of full-color reproductions of Kitaj’s shitty paintings. One of the most irritating things is his repeated boast of being one of the best Jewish artists who ever lived. I don’t know why anyone would make such a list, but if they did, he’d be nowhere near it.

Smith’s book was published by a small indie press and he’s got a reputation in that cloistered world. But I don’t know if anyone outside it has heard of him. They should.

Now I’m on to Chris Ware’s epic Monograph. More on that one later, but suffice it to say, he’s no turkey. Neither is Bud Smith. Just old R.B. And these ones I drew. Standing around, waiting to find out if they’re wanted or needed.