Letter

I’ve been going to the Unique Thrift down Halsted from my place regularly since I moved to Bridgeport a year and a half ago. In the last few months I was mostly looking for frames I could use for the portrait show I just put up. More often than not, the artwork I remove before reusing these frames is forgettable, but the other day I stumbled on a Rembrandt. It was signed and everything. I didn’t really need any more frames but curiosity got the better of me. It was marked $4.99 but that Saturday was half-price day so I paid only $2.74 tax included.

When I got home I popped the print out of the frame. The backing was water-damaged and the paper had spotting, but there was an indentation to indicate that at the very least it was printed from a plate rather than copied digitally, so I scanned it in and emailed an image to my friend Mark, who’s a curator of prints and drawings at the Art Institute. I knew enough to be under no illusion about this find. For one thing, Rembrandt didn’t sign his prints in pencil with the date the way mine was signed, for another, the paper was obviously at least a couple hundred years too new. Still, this was a lot more interesting-looking than the average machine-produced color copy which is passed off as a print these days. 

On the back of the print was a stamped name and address in Rotterdam, Holland. A Google search turned up a couple auction records of prints from the 1920s and not much else. Mark emailed me back suggesting I forward my query to a colleague who works on Rembrandt to figure out whether what I had was an original etching or a photogravure (a forerunner of modern photocopying).

The question of what any artwork is really worth is practically unanswerable. Or, rather, it has endless answers. As an artist, more often than not, the value of my work is whatever I can get for it on a given day. That varies according to who the buyer is, how broke I am, and many other factors which I have little control over.

When a piece of art ends up in a thrift store it has gone the entire length and breadth that a consumer item can go in our society. Someone made it and marketed it to someone who bought it and took it home, then, they either resold it or kept it in their home until their death, at which point some unlucky relative was charged with carting off their unwanted belongings to the thrift store. It might sound macabre but I’ve always hoped to find one of my own paintings on the shelves at Unique or Salvation Army. It would be a sign that something I made went through the culture, in a manner of speaking.

I don’t know whether my $2.74 Rembrandt is worth any more than what I paid for it or whether it’s “authentic” to any degree. I also don’t know whether a painting I sold for $1000 is any better than one I got $10 for. Whatever price you pay, if you think enough of a picture to decorate your home with it, it must be worth something.

Last Monday at Experimental Sound Studio, pianist Dave Bryant played a set and gave a talk about harmolodics (what Ornette Coleman called his way of composing). Dave played for a time in Coleman’s band and studied with him before that. But my connection to Dave isn’t musical. About 30 years ago, when I was still in high school, he was my manager at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.

At the movie theater, Dave was low-key almost to the point of sleepy. I didn’t know much about him until going to a gig of his at some little club in Somerville. Up on stage, leading his trio, Shock Exchange, the mellow, floppy haired guy I knew was transformed into a wild man. He beat the hell out of those keys. It was one of the first times I realized there could be a difference between how you act on a job and how you act when you do what you love. It was kind of like that thing Flaubert said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” 

I haven’t seen Dave since Coolidge days so when I saw his Chicago gig listed I made sure to be there. I even tracked down his website and wrote him an email, but I never heard back. There’s a good chance he had no memory of me. Lots of high school kids worked at the theater and his time there was obviously just a means to an end.

The music he played Monday wasn’t as raucous as the stuff I remembered but it had an intelligence and grace which only comes from doing something a very long time. The bassist and drummer who backed him were much younger but you could tell they had to work to keep up with him at times. After a short break he came back out and gave an hour-long talk about the music philosophy Coleman had taught him. A lot of the technical stuff went way over my head, but the stuff about wrestling with tradition and keeping engaged creatively in every waking moment definitely hit the mark.

Afterwards I thought about coming up and introducing myself but thought better of it. Even if he remembered me after a little prodding, what would be the point? To remind him of a time he had a shit day-job with a bunch of high schoolers? I was just happy to see he was still doing his thing all these years later.

Also: I sat through the horrendous new Bourne movie so you don’t have to.

If you grew up in the ’80s and had any interest in punk or alternative music, you would’ve heard the songs of Daniel Johnston. They came on cassettes decorated with odd line drawings of frogs, eyeballs, and superheroes, with titles like “Hi, How Are You?” and “Yip Jump Music”. Bands like Yo La Tengo covered his songs and many others, like Kurt Cobain, became ardent fans. But what were we all so captivated by?

The Incantations of Daniel Johnston is a graphic novel with art by Ricardo Cavalo and words by Scott McClanahan which attempts a personal and idiosyncratic explanation. In his introduction, Cavalo writes that he admires Johnston’s ability to fight, as well as the sincerity and innocence in his work, and considers him a personal hero. Johnston’s fight is primarily with himself and his own demons so Cavalo’s brightly colored illustrations are full of people who appear to be turning themselves inside out. Eyeballs are a signature part of Johnston’s iconography, so there are eyes all over every page of this book. The effect is of a pulsing, overheated consciousness, always aware of the viewer’s presence, always trying desperately to hold it together.

In the original, Spanish version of this book, called El desorganismo de Daniel Johnston, Cavalo provided his own mostly straight-ahead biographical text. What the writer Scott McClanahan has provided for the new edition is a kind of prose poem on mental illness, fame, and the battle between good and evil. Rather than regurgitating the facts of Johnston’s life, McClanahan takes the man’s struggle and makes it his own.“Daniel went to the mental hospital and there wasn’t anything fun about it. It was just another prison like our minds.”

There’s always a danger when people glorify mental illness. When Daniel Johnston was embraced by the rock underground back in the ’80s, what they loved about him was his innocence and unvarnished honesty. But those raw, open emotions came with a psychic toll which wasn’t always acknowledged by his admirers. Johnston often went off his meds in order to be able to sing, but he would sometimes become violent afterwords. One of the strengths of Cavalo and McClanahan’s book is that it acknowledges the complicated and likely unresolvable relationship between genius and insanity.

As the book tracks the many ups and downs of Johnston’s life, the authors’ affection for the man is evident, but so is their knowledge that romanticizing his treacherous journey will lead to a false picture of a unique artist, who deserves his due, but not through rose-colored glasses. “It’s all a lie. There will be no happy endings waiting for any of us. There are only the stories we tell ourselves about shooting stars in the sky.”

But wait! I also wrote a review of Martin Seay’s great debut novel which takes place in three different Venices…Needless to say, I highly recommend you buy multiple copies of that and the Daniel Johnston book immediately!