Letter

A house down my block burned up nearly a year ago. I remember they cut power to the entire block while getting it dowsed. I read Avner Landes’ WWII Soviet writer propaganda tour novel by candle-light waiting for the electricity to return.

Riding home through the alley a couple weeks ago, I saw a bunch of cool stuff in back of that house. They were finally emptying it out. Must be doing a gut-rehab to get it habitable again. I scored a Van Gogh-looking chair, a nice big mirror, and a shitty but very large palette-knife landscape. I have a show coming up at the bar and I figured if I could “correct'” it, this would take up a good chunk of wallspace.

This show will be a bit of a grab-bag. Collages, book illustrations, and figure studies. A taste of the different modes I’ve worked in this year. I usually try to make my Rainbo Club shows thematically coherent but it’s not possible this time. I’m going in different directions, switching from this to that instinctively, and I want to acknowledge that.

This fracturing is my old fashioned analog response to the way most of us live now but the thing is that my life has reorganized itself nearly completely the last two months. This art show will not be about that. Too soon as the saying goes.

Finding unique names for these newsletters becomes a challenge after fifteen-plus years. This one references the same Chet Baker number I paid tribute to five years ago, but it’s because I put the song on a mixtape a couple weeks back.

The valence of a song in one’s life can change entirely. Something picked out of the alley can become art, maybe. Nothing and no one ever sits truly still for very long.

Recorded a talk with Krystle Ratticus about zines, art, and the rest of it.

I’ve been painting animals the last week or two. I don’t know any of them. Most are for the Faulkner book I’m illustrating so you could say they’re imaginary. But they’re real to me. At least for the time it takes the ink to dry.

I never met Simone the cat but know she died and that her owners miss her. I painted her portrait for money, but, I hope, it doesn’t look like it.

I’ve had a few animals in my life but none for very long. Dex the rottweiler from the street had to be put down for heartworms; Porkchop the chihuahua/papillon mix hated me; Gustav the cat was old when I met him. I had to dig him a hole in the backyard.

K has a cat called Tomás that I hear stories about. He likes to run away and has to be brought back sometimes. He’s a stray who was caught and fixed by her neighbor years ago. One day he broke into K’s house and decided to stay.

Animals are like that sometimes.

K and I ran into each other on a Friday outside the Music Box five weeks ago. We’d both gone to the matinee of Cronenberg’s The Shrouds. I’d clocked her before the movie, sitting a couple rows back from the front row, my customary spot. I didn’t say hello because I thought we weren’t talking. It had been many years. I figured I’d said or done something to upset her so I wasn’t going to bother her now.

Outside, still shivering from the thunderstorm I’d ridden through to get to the movie, my clothes still damp after two hours of a disappointing movie; she came out of the theater and stopped. We started talking and haven’t stopped since.

Our first date was the following Friday. She invited me to see a show of prisoner kerchief art at the Mexican Museum. Neither of us paid much attention to the stuff on the walls. Couldn’t stop yammering at each other. Lunch afterward was the same. I knew she wanted to be kissed but I waited till the following Friday. The first time I invited her over.

Every Friday since has been like a holy day. We spend the days leading up to them texting and pining away. My week now revolves around our Fridays together.

My whole life is upside down over this but I don’t care.

I wrote about prisoner kerchief art (looked at the art this time) and Bill filmed me sketching at a show. The Newberry Library bought ten Moby Dick drawings for their collection but there’re still some left for you.

* “True Love”—X