Letter

I didn’t know the British kitchen-sink painter John Bratby wrote books till a couple weeks ago. A podcast I like mentioned a novel called Breakdown and I picked up a cheap copy on eBay.

What I knew of him before was his grubby canvases of apartments full of crap. They’re gleefully messy and look like they were painted in a fever. I also know they used his paintings to stand in for Gulley Jimson’s in the movie version of Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth—one of the best written/filmed portrayals of an artist’s life I know.

When I text Frank about the book, he says Bratby claimed The Horse’s Mouth was based on him but that can’t be true as he was only sixteen when it came out in 1944. Whatever the case, I’ve swallowed up the first third of Bratby’s book, which I assume is based, however exaggeratedly, on his own life.

It’s a vulgar, messy, laugh-out-loud trainwreck of a narrative about a successful painter who can’t control his own desires. But the best thing about it are the vivid, seen descriptions of the surroundings and denizens of “John Brady’s” world. I recognize these as the words of someone who’s spent his life looking.

Then, of course, there are the meaty ink illustrations throughout. I think this is a book I’ll hold onto.

I wrote about Colin Asher’s The Midnight Special.

I have some copies of The Sound and the Fury now if you’d like one from me directly. Or you can come to Tangible Books on the 18th for the book-release.

Lucy sent me her new book and I pretty much inhaled it. I’ve been reading her so long it feels like second nature. I wrote something about it, but it’s not so much a review as a kind of thank-you note.

Donna’s been in town fixing up her building to sell and she relented and let me tape a talk with her. We cover her restaurants—Leo’s Lunchroom, Bite Cafe, and Feed. All had a significant impact on my life. She claims the stories are boring but I disagree.

Been drawing K at her new place. Tomás sat for this one as well. He’s jealous of the attention she pays me when I’m over, ignores her when I’m not there. In other words, he’s a cat.

There’s a band we both like that’s blown up lately. They announced a presale for shows in November and we signed up to be notified to try to score some tickets. At the appointed time I wasted precious minutes because Ticketmaster made me change my login password. By the time I hit the virtual queue, there were 80,000+ ahead of me. I kept the window open just for laughs, but, miraculously, forty minutes later I got through. Then I looked at the seating chart. Standing-room only with a capacity over three thousand. I texted K and asked whether she was up for standing around in a mass of humanity for two hours for maybe forty minutes of novelty noodling and she gave me an emphatic thumbs-down. So I closed the window and gave up my chance to be wedged in with the cool kids in the former salt factory. I felt alright about it. I was happy to get through but also to let the chance go.

It felt like catch-and-release.

My old friend Jason was in town that night with his band. I was kind of worn out after a bookstore shift as I pedaled north to the Burlington. Then he texted me that I was on the guestlist. That was extra motivation to keep going.

The last time I was at the Burlington, I had to help the bartender count out the drawer at the end of the night because he was too trashed to see the bills clearly. Then I drove him home in my cab.

The band had been dormant for a bunch of years but you wouldn’t know it from this night’s set. They made a fierce racket and I would have been sorry had I missed it. There may only have been thirty or forty people there but I bet they’ll remember it better than the sardines in the crowd next November.

There’s a de Kooning drawing show up at the museum. I went the first hour members were allowed in. His whipping boomerang paintstrokes have been crucial to me for over forty years. It was like visiting a childhood classroom but unlike that deflating or disorienting experience, de Kooning hasn’t shrunk or otherwise morphed or wasted away. The pictures are still full of motion and mess, graceful and ugly all at once.

What set de Kooning apart from most of his AB-EX brothers and sisters is he could draw. Most of the others were rescued by scale or gimmick, whereas he exploded his European academy training onto the larger, freer canvas of the New World while never losing the rigor and precision.

I loved the clip in Emile de Antonio’s documentary Painters Painting where he talks about how painters don’t have particularly bright ideas. They (we) rarely do. That’s not what painting is about. That’s not an argument in favor of stupidity, only the small point that if ideas were the thing we’d try to be philosophers rather than smearing paint on canvas. De Kooning just knew what the job was and worked away at it.

I remember in art school there were several “advanced” painting students who seemed to take de Kooning and other abstractionists as a jumping off point but all that resulted was a half-baked imitation. The painters in the 40s and 50s were abstracting from something they saw or dreamed or imagined or remembered. Of course students always imitate, but some work is a destination rather than a beginning. To get to where de Kooning ended up was a jagged, personal path. My classmates wanted to skip to the end. I wonder if any of them are still painting.

What the current show makes clear is that de Kooning never went all the way nonobjective. There are faces, limbs, trees, and hills in all his pictures. He never looked away from the seen world.

I don’t know any young painters but wonder whether someone like de Kooning matters to them. I can’t see how if painting matters to you, the kind where gesture and mark-making are up front, that you could be indifferent to him. But I’m not into crawling into anyone else’s head. I just know he has been one of my main guys for a very long time.

The show’s up into September and I already think it’s coming down too soon.

I talked about public domain novels, publishing, and other matters with Kyler Bingham at Salt Lake Dirt.

Framed a couple of the remaining Moby Dick drawings together and wrote about a wrestling play.

This is what the Ornery Cuss book-release sounded like. You should’ve been there.