Letter

My friend Bill—a lifelong Cubs fan—wanted to get a group together to take in the Sox opener. Since I live a 15 minute walk from the park, I was enlisted to score the seats. We were hoping to avoid the “convenience fees” and sanctioned or unsanctioned scalpers hawking tickets online.

Thursday, March 3rd—the day before tickets officially went on sale—Bill emailed me a link to a Ticketmaster pre-sale deal. Clicking around I quickly ascertained that six seats together could not be had. In fact, no seats in the outfield boxes where we wanted to sit seemed available. After perusing Stubhub and being put off by the mark up and handling, convenience, and other nameless, but very real surcharges, we decided to take our chances the next morning. I’d wait outside in the cold like a true fan.

I got to 35th and Shields around 9:00am, an hour before the box office was to open. Only five or six bundled-up people were idling around the ticket windows, along with a helpful elderly employee handing out season schedules. It was a sunny morning in the 30s so waiting around for an hour could not be classified a true hardship. After half an hour the line lengthened to about thirty shivering souls.

At five minutes before 10, the helpful usher spread us out between about eight shuttered ticket windows. I was first in line before Window #3. Behind me, an old codger couldn’t contain himself. He kept going up to the schedule posted on the wall in front of us and pointing out the Sox-Cubs game he hoped to get seats for in July. He said he’d been a Sox fan for over fifty years and couldn’t wait to get in there and give the Cubbies hell. “Been a Cards fan almost as long too. So I’m gonna go and yell at Jason in the outfield for leaving us,” he promised, talking about new Cub-for-life centerfielder, Jason Heyward. I told him I wished the crosstown game went back to being an exhibition and that Interleague Play was repealed but got no reaction whatsoever.

Then the window opened and the harried woman behind the glass spent a fruitless ten minutes trying to fill my request. After asking several of her colleagues for assistance, she was only able to locate a couple obstructed-view spots, instead of the six outfield box seats I asked for. I thanked her for trying and walked back west up 35th Street and home to get back on the computer.

Two minutes after logging on to Stubhub, I found six seats together in left field for a mere $25 over their list price. It made me wonder, and not for the first time, why sports teams even bother to list set prices for their games, when—between the hidden fees and scalpers’ cuts—hardly anyone will ever pay them. It certainly does little to perpetuate the nostalgic, old-time aura which Major League Baseball has peddled since time immemorial.

Irregardless of all that—as some wise man once said—me and my friends will be at opening day to see the Sox take on the Indians. And even though a couple of them are Cubs fans we all expect to have a good time because it’s the beginning of baseball season and who wouldn’t be happy about that?

From 2004 to 2011, I lived in an apartment at the corner of 24th Street and Western Avenue. I made a lot of paintings and drawings there including a series of large charcoal and ink interiors and window views. Seven or eight of these will be on display at Rootstock starting tonight. Though few people outside the neighborhood knew it, the area was was called the Heart of Chicago, so that’s what I’m calling the show. Rootstock is a really good restaurant so I hope you stop by over the next few months and check out the work. Even if the artwork doesn’t do it for you at least you’ll have had a good meal with some good wine! 

I’m dipping my toe back into the t-shirt racket. This pigpen illustration I did originally for a talk about Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is one of the two designs currently available (the other is of a couple of dogs). You can buy them directly from Threadless in a variety of sizes. I got a couple for myself and they’re pretty nice shirts. I’ll add more designs if this goes alright.

My friend Mark commissioned a portrait of his wife for her 50th birthday. That reminded me I hadn’t done many portraits in the last few years (save for those of dog and cats), so I’m thinking of doing some more for an upcoming show this fall at a bar in Rogers Park. Unfortunately, for the moment, only a model of last resort is available. 

Lastly, I wrote about Werner Herzog’s new meditation on the internet for the Reader.

About 8 or 9 years ago, on MySpace, I got to be friendly with Edgar Breau, the singer and guitarist of the legendarily forgotten ’70s Canadian band Simply Saucer. He liked my paintings and told me he’d like to use one for a CD cover for a forthcoming solo recording. I did some sketches and the painting above and Edgar sent me some money, but nothing happened for a few years. In 2012, “Patches of Blue” was released, but without the cover I designed. Some of my sketches were used to decorate the disc itself though. A couple years ago, while cleaning out a drawer, I happened on my cover painting and decided to send it to Edgar, figuring it was doing no one any good sitting in storage. Last week he emailed me to say he’d decided to use it for the remaining stock of “Patches” CDs. You can hear the songs here but if you want to buy one with my cover you’ll need to contact Edgar directly: breauscr (at) hotmail (dot) com. 

Last December I heard Gint Aras read from his newly-published novel, The Fugue. I decided to review it for the Tribune but the day after the editor gave me the green light the book’s publisher pulled it from circulation, citing financial insolvency. Luckily, Tortoise Books came to the rescue and the book is available again. Read my review.  I also wrote a bit about the new season of “The Americans” for the Reader. Both deal with Eastern Europeans in America, albeit in very different ways. 

Saturday I went to hear Ran Blake play at Constellation. His music is a mix of jazz and classical but really is its own animal. He played some standards but even recognizable melodies were mutated to fit his own voice. Blake is 80 years old and needed a walker to get to the piano, but once he hit the keys all frailty flew out the window. Like Mavis Staples last week, Blake made it clear that old age doesn’t have to mean retreat or defeat or diminishment of creative power. They show me reasons to keep going.