When I was in school I used to scour art magazines for paintings to cut out and stick on the walls of my apartment. After a few months there were dozens of pictures. Rembrandt next to De Kooning next to Bacon next to Breughel next to Bomberg and so on and so on. This was 1990 and not much contemporary stuff interested me. One of the few exceptions was the work of Ignacio Iturria. He’s sort of a South American Philip Guston, though maybe that’s selling him short. But like Guston he has the rare knack for making cartoonish figures feel real. He was regularly in Art in America in the early 90s so both my first two Chicago apartments were decorated with reproductions of his paintings.
I had a flashback to those school years when I read an article about an Iturria retrospective a couple weeks ago. It was taking place at SUNY Purchase just north of New York City and would run through February. I was about to visit my folks in Boston for a few days and on a whim I looked up how much it would cost to rent a car to drive down to New York, then fly back to Chicago out of LaGuardia so I could catch the show. A phone call and a few clicks of the keyboard later it was all set.
Wednesday morning my father drove me to pick up my rental and I drove west. Three and a half hours later, after a couple minor wrong turns, I was paying at an automated kiosk in the sparsely filled parking lot on the edge of the university grounds in Purchase. I followed the signs to the Neuberger Museum without passing another soul along the way. The door to the museum had a holiday hours sign saying the offices were open on the 2nd but the galleries wouldn’t reopen till the 23rd.
I went inside and the man at the desk confirmed the bad news. There’d be no trip down memory lane for me this afternoon. I went back the car and started for LaGuardia five hours early. The museum’s site said nothing about holiday hours; it simply said they were open 12-5pm Wednesdays. But seeing as it’s part of a university, I should probably have called to make sure they weren’t on break. I was annoyed at myself but strangely resigned to just going home. One of the dangers of revisiting something you liked when you were young is being disappointed by it years later. Maybe it’s better I didn’t get to become disenchanted by Iturria. Maybe that’s just a way of consoling myself for poor planning.
Here are a few things which distracted me for an hour or three from the relentless shitshow that was 2017.
MUSIC I listen to music every day. It’s one of the main things which keeps me (my version of) sane. I ripped probably a couple hundred CDs from the library this year. Helps that they let you take ten out at a time. They were mostly jazz, but also disco and soul and blues; stuff I wouldn’t normally buy. It’s a great resource for somebody like me, who doesn’t use streaming services like Spotify, et al. I bought a bunch of records too. That’s how I usually listen at home. But the rest of the time I listen on an iPod. I use it to play music at the bar too. It’s one of the best parts of the job. Here are a few new ones I bought that’ve stuck with me.
Circuit Des Yeux “Reaching for Indigo”—Solemn, haunting, spacy sounds from someone I’ve served beer to many times at the bar. Probably the record I’ve listened to more than any other this year. Hard to describe or compare, which is all to its credit.
Mathew Lux’s Communication Arts Quartet “Contra/Fact” —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.
Bill MacKay “Esker”—My old pal Bill rarely plays a false note. This is one of his best (which is no small accomplishment.)
Chris Brokaw “The Hand That Wrote This Letter”—Another guy who can do no wrong in my book. Here he plays Bowie and Prince tunes on acoustic guitar and makes them sound like he wrote them.
Makaya McCraven “Highly Rare”—Jazz/soul/funk/ambient/trance/and all but the kitchen sink. It just moves and moves and moves.
The Florida Project—A buoyant, sunny, pastel nightmare full of feral children and their infantile parents scraping by just beyond the parking lots of Orlando’s vacation theme parks. Somehow Sean Baker manages to make this obit of the American Dream go down so easy.
Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992—John Ridley details the decade which culminated in the Rodney King beating and the riots that followed.
mother!—Living with an artist is a goddamn nightmare. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Just watch this if you don’t believe me. I loved every last second.
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail—This documentary made me so mad I took all my scant savings out of Chase and put it in a tiny local bank.
Columbus—Brutalist architecture and lovelessness in an Indiana college town. Thought I’d hate it when I read about it but loved it when I saw it.
Ex Libris—Wiseman casts his unsentimental eye on the New York Public Library system. I could’ve watched this one for several more hours even after the three-plus he gives us.
Endless Poetry—Jodorowsky continues the remarkable autobiographic phantasmagoria started in The Dance of Reality. It’s a Rembrandt-like late period run he’s on. No artist could hope for more than something like this.
SHOWS
Halt and Catch Fire—No show ever explained the rise of computers and the internet better to me.
Fargo—I was sick a couple weeks ago and ended up binging all three seasons. Just first-class storytelling.
Lady Dynamite—Maria Bamford continued her loopy, fearless comedy self-portrait. Funny, sad, and scary in equal measures.
BOOKS
I read three or four Emmanuel Carrere books. All were good but Limonovwas probably my favorite. Carrere mixes biography, memoir, and novel-like narrative better than almost any writer I’ve ever read. He’s a favorite of Scott McClanahan’s, whose latest book I loved as well. I’m halfway through the late Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smokebut I keep putting it down because it’s so heavy and echoes each morning’s news a little too closely. But I’ll finish it one of these days. Paul Beatty’s The Sellout is a vicious comedic evocation of race relations in America. Listening to this interviewconvinced me he has one of the sharpest minds going. Pamela Bannos’ Vivian Maier biography was a great corrective to the various self-serving fairytales spun about the late Chicago photographer. I wrote a review and then a longer thing about it.
ETC I loved the Saul Steinberg show my old litho prof Mark Pascale put together at the Art Institute. I saw many good plays while reviewing for the Reader. Thornton Wilder’s Ages of Man, Bertholt Brecht’s The Resisitible Rise of Arturo Ui, and Archibald MacLeish’s J.B., to name the first ones which popped into my head. But there were many others.
Podcasts helped too. Though I have to admit there were many past favorites I couldn’t listen to anymore because they were trying to make sense of the bag of piss in human form running the country and I’ve learned that I have to limit exposure on a daily basis if I want to have even a marginally productive day. That said, I continue to look forward to WTF and TALevery week. My friend Gil’s Virtual Memories is consistently interesting. My old pal Aaron has hit upon a unique way to paint a portrait of his city with Out of the Blocks. And, You Must Remember This tells the stories of old Hollywood in an idiosyncratic but compelling way.
All these pieces of art, as well as doing my own, helped me get through the days. But none could entirely erase the ever-present dread which has become everyday life in this country. I can’t help but feel some great reckoning is coming. It can’t continue this way much longer. I have no crystal ball, no idea how it will play out, but now seems as dire as any moment in my lifetime.
I’ll keep doing what I do next year because I don’t know what else to do. I hope you do as well. Maybe we’ll get through it somehow. Thanks for reading and looking.
I never thought much about Walt Whitman or poetry on the written page of any kind for that matter. Of course I’ve heard the famous bits and pieces over the years, they’re almost unavoidable, but I have to admit I’d never sat down and read an entire poem of Whitman’s until a couple Saturdays ago in the basement of a beautiful, art-filled home in Evanston, crowded in with about fifty others, all taking turns reading verses of “Song of Myself”.
Tony Adler, who assigns me plays to review at the Reader, invited me to the 33rd annual Whitmanstide, where as many guests as are willing take two or so hours to read Whitman’s famous poem in its entirety. As a rule, I tend to ignore party invitations. The reasons are many, tedious, pitiful, and not really worth going into. Suffice it to say that I don’t do well at social gatherings. But I wanted to go to this one because I wanted to put some faces to some names. It’s bizarre to work with people for a year or more and never spend time in the same room. It’s commonplace these days, of course, but I’ve never gotten used to it. So, unlike most parties, I could explain attending to myself with the argument that it was important to actually meet a few people I felt like I’d started to know.
Tony greeted me at the door as a total stranger until I told him my name. Then there was a smile of surprise and a handshake. Apparently, few Reader freelancers who get his invite actually bother to show up. But many, many other people did. Every room of the house was full of them. Talking, laughing, drinking, eating people. I squeezed my way to the bar and got a double whiskey.
Tal and his wife Tayler were the only ones I recognized among this throng. Tal’s my main conduit at the Reader. After working together a couple years we have a pretty good rapport. After saying hello to them I drifted around, looking at the art on the walls, the books on the shelves, soaking in the sound of dozens of conversations going at once. A guy named Hank asked me how I knew Tony, then asked if I’d seen Tracy Letts’ latest. I told him I had and also that Tony and I had had diametrically opposite reactions to it. It’s a play about a small-town city council which turns into Children of the Corn. (Tony loved the horror-movie twist; I did not.) Then Hank and I talked about Letts’ recent movie appearances. We both agreed he’s cornered the market on world-weary, put-upon-dad-with-mental-issues roles.
Then Tony announced that anyone who wanted to read should make their way to the basement. The long narrow room quickly filled, with late stragglers finding no place to sit, crowding the doorway. Tal and Taylor ended up sitting on the floor near me. Everyone who hadn’t brought their own copy of Leaves of Grass picked up a photocopy of “Song of Myself” from the coffee table and settled in. Tony read the first of its fifty-two sections, then we continued clockwise around the room. I instantly regretted leaving my sketchbook upstairs. I rarely get the chance to watch this many people sit together in a confined space for a protracted length of time like this. It was kind of like being in a train car, except that no one was allowed to get off and leave for two hours. A captive audience and I blew it.
I followed along as the stanzas crept closer and closer to me. Poetry hardly ever moves me sitting on the page, but hearing it read is another matter. When it’s good it floats through the air, in and around the reader and the listeners. I can’t say I caught every line or even most of the nuances, but throughout the two hours in that basement there were many, many beautiful moments. The fact that so many different voices took their turns definitely added to the experience. This poem, attempting as it states to contain multitudes, benefits by being recited by many rather than just one.
The poem struck me overall as incredibly American in its optimism, openness, and bluster. Its faith in the basic goodness of the world reminded me not for the first time that I’m not from this country. Were I ever to compose myself it would doubtless sound very different. Still, there was much that hooked me anyway.
It’s unavoidable to connect the past to the present, so the nervous laughter anytime Whitman mentioned politics or presidents was no surprise. If I’m thankful to Tony and to Walt Whitman for anything it is for lifting the ever-present malaise of the past year for a couple hours. A gathering like this is the polar opposite of the daily end-times horrorshow of life in 2017 America.
It all came creeping back into my head as I left that cheerful house. I see little to look forward to in the coming year but an invite back to Whitmanstide would be more than welcome. If the kleptocratic thugs running this country leave the path from my house to Evanston passable next December, I’ll be there.
