Letter

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. 

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.  

Mick Harvey interprets Serge Gainsbourg—Have no idea why I didn’t know about these recordings but now I can’t stop listening to them. 

MOVIES  

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 Limonov was 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 Smoke but 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.