Letter

I moved to a studio apartment at 5200 North Sheridan Road in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago in the fall of 1990, just ahead of my sophomore year at the School of the Art Institute. I’d lived with a crazy Russian pensioner for a roommate in Brooklyn and a whole floor of art kids in a dorm in downtown Chicago, but this was the first place I’d have all to myself.

The building was old and fraying at the edges. It had likely been a residential hotel early in the century, judging by the small apartments and the ornate Orientalist décor in the lobby. But in the last decade of the twentieth century its carpeting was matted and worn and some of the hall light fixtures flickered ominously. David Lynch could’ve used the place in Blue Velvet, it had that kind of vibe. But perhaps I only saw the place this way because I’d watched that movie so many times that its look was imprinted on my psyche. Art can have that kind of all encompassing effect, especially on a young man’s mind.

I set about filling the place with thrift-store and alley furniture. The only thing I had was a futon mattress which I just put on the floor. On Lincoln Avenue near Roscoe Village there was a sprawling used furniture place presided over by two ever-bickering sisters. Their domain stretched over two storefronts with a lot glutted with merchandise in between. The place was more junkyard than Marshall Field’s but if you put in the time you could find some treasures and not pay an arm and a leg. I scored a kitchen table there, as well as a ceramic Abraham Lincoln lamp which I read by in bed. A few blocks away on Belmont Avenue there was a bunch of antique and resale shops. Among them was one store which had no sign but furniture and flotsam piled to the ceiling visible through the window. Out of the chaos inside I was able to extract a set of four old wooden chairs. An octagonal Art Deco design was hand-stenciled on to their backs and a zigzag cross-brace supported their legs. They were solid wood and barely all fit in the taxi I’d flagged to get them home.

That year was my first using oil paints on a regular basis. I had made some tentative tries in high school but had mostly stuck with gouache, acrylic, ink, and charcoal. Oils were intimidating not only for their technical peculiarity but also for the nearly five hundred years of others using them better than any art student could ever hope to. Nevertheless, after full days of making mud on canvases in school, I’d come back to my studio apartment on Sheridan and do it all over again. After dabbling in the usual teenage-angst-inspired expressionism for the requisite amount of time, at twenty, I was starting to settle into the subject-matter which continues to draw me to this day. What I wanted to paint was what I could see with my own eyes.

Caroline and I got together a couple days before I left Brookline, where we’d worked together at the movie theater all summer, to go back to school and move to this studio apartment on Sheridan. She came to visit in September for my birthday, then moved in the following January, but that fall I lived there alone, pining for her. The painting of the two chairs in front of the futon on the floor is undoubtedly about that longing. It was the first oil painting outside of school which I didn’t throw away. After I graduated and moved back east I gave the painting to my parents and it’s been hanging over their fireplace ever since.

I’ve lugged the chairs with me to Boston, Indiana, and back to Chicago. They’ve made appearances in countless paintings and drawings. Sometimes in the foreground, other times in the back, stand-ins for people in one picture, nothing but furniture in another. Twenty-six years on, I’m in another little apartment by myself. I’ve graduated to separate living- and bedrooms and the rent is more than double what I paid on Sheridan, but much is essentially unchanged. The carpet could use vacuuming, most available surfaces are cluttered with books, papers, napkins, and things which should’ve been thrown away weeks or months ago. The walls serve as an ever-shifting display of work in progress. I keep trying to paint what I can see nearby. But it’s entirely different too. I’m not looking forward to anyone moving in here with me. After trying to live with women and failing each time, I have to believe we’re all better off with me in my own place with these old chairs. I didn’t arrive at this conclusion through self-pity or despair, though getting to know yourself better is certainly an unpleasant slog more often than not.

Could I have predicted when I found them in that Belmont Ave junk shop that the chairs would still be with me? I never thought much about the future. I still don’t. Nor do I ascribe any magical meaning to objects, no matter how long they’ve been in my life. The Lincoln lamp and the rotary phone and the futon are long gone, but the chairs are still here. When I look at them now they don’t always send me down this or that memory spiral but they always have the potential to. One minute they’re just hunks of wood, the next they’re portals to the past. 

I’ve never been much for traveling or celebrations but sometimes it’s good to do the opposite of your fallback impulse, so I booked a trip to New York for my birthday. My problem with travel goes back to immigration—my gut feeling whenever I have to leave any place is that it’s a punishment or exile; as for holidays, I just rarely feel up to the occasion when I’m told to be up for it. The better a time and the bigger the group, the more miserable I tend to be. But for my 46th birthday I decided to mark the occasion and try to enjoy it.

I flew into LaGuardia in the morning, took a bus to Jackson Heights, and the F train to Manhattan. I had a 1pm lunch date with my podcasting pal GIl at Katz’s but was about an hour early so I got off at 34th Street and started walking south down Broadway. Walking is probably the main reason I come back to New York. To navigate its ceaseless sidewalk stream is one of life’s special pleasures. No one walks like a New Yorker—each and every one goes forward with little to no acknowledgement of anyone else, focused entirely on their own unique and vital destination. The fact that more than half now have their faces magnetically drawn to glowing screens adds another level of complexity to the enterprise.

Greeting Gil in the roped off waiting area/holding pen at Katz’s, I was surprised to learn he’d never been there before. It’s often the case though that a local will ignore landmarks and popular attractions. This was my third visit. I like the place for many of the same reasons I like the city it’s in: it is brusque, loud, overpriced, and out-of-date, but carries itself as if it is the center of the universe and will continue to be so until it serves its last latke. Gil insisted on paying for my $19.95 pastrami sandwich after learning it was my birthday, then led me to a Soho bookstore. Going to an unfamiliar bookstore after these last years of being involved in the literary racket is a different experience. Now the jackets of books I’ve reviewed call attention to themselves like forgotten friends. It’s similar for Gil, as he sees past and future interviewees all over the shelves.

He left me outside a coffee shop in Union Square where I was to meet Alina. It was much too loud to talk inside so we walked to a nearby park named after Peter Stuyvesant. She told me about the article she was working on about a couple of explorers who were building their very own spaceship after already colonizing the North and South Poles and I told her about how the book review racket had suddenly dried up for me and about how I was at a loss on what to do with the book I finished a year ago. Then we walked toward Chinatown to pick up her daughter from daycare. 

I peeled off at Canal and made my way toward the Jane Hotel in the West Village. I’d stayed there a couple years ago with Shay and there was a possibility that that fact would be a drag on the festive occasion of this visit. Was I trying to wallow in past failure? No, luckily, as it turned out, she’d just had good taste in hotels and I wasn’t familiar with any others so I went with a known quantity. A single at the Jane is tiny and resembles a ship’s quarters with shared showers and latrines down the hall. It was ideal for my purposes. I rested an hour, then went back out.

On 8th Avenue in Chelsea I stopped at a dumpy tavern I recognized and had my first birthday drink. The Billymark has countless photos of the Beatles and other bygone rockstars on its walls but little else in the way of charm to recommend it. It’s the kind of place you go because it’s on the way to somewhere else and the drinks will be cheaper here than the place you’re going. I gulped down my Wild Turkey and kept walking. 

It was a little early to meet my folks for dinner so I stopped at a sports bar next door for another drink. I paid about double the Billymark’s rate for a whiskey and watched a couple innings of a Mets game on the TV. I’d chosen Keens after a quick online search for oldest New York steakhouses and it didn’t disappoint. The ceilings were covered with upside-down churchwarden pipes, the walls with old portraits, newspaper caricatures, and hunting scenes, and our plates were entirely occupied with expertly-prepared pieces of beef.

My parents had taken the bus down from Boston and my mother had brought along a garment bag full of birthday clothes which now awaited in Keens’ coatcheck. We made plans to meet at the Whitney the next day and went our separate ways. They were going uptown to stay with friends, while I was going to the Lower East Side to have a final birthday drink with a new acquaintance. Boris is a fellow emigre whose second book I reviewed earlier in the year. He met me outside the East Broadway station and took me to a loud place filled with young people. He told me he was sick of New York and couldn’t wait to leave. The group playing pool just behind our backs kept screaming at the top of their lungs and Boris wearily pointed to them as the perfect embodiment of everything he hated about the city. I asked where he wanted to move to and he said the West. He was attracted to barren expanses. The novel of his which I’d written about took place in just such a locale, so perhaps he was giving his characters his own dreams. Willing them to go to the places he himself wished he could go.

The Whitney was just a couple blocks from my hotel. I sat on the windswept plaza outside reading a book while waiting for my folks to show up. A steady stream of taxis and towncars dropped off well-heeled museum visitors as hopeful cafe workers set up outdoor tables for lunch service. It had been drizzling and overcast all morning, so I doubted they’d have many takers. Despite the weather everyone was taking pictures of each other with expensive-looking cameras or selfie sticks. One man passed by several times, trailed by an entourage of young people, seemingly narrating his walk into his phone.

When my parents arrived we took the elevator up to the eighth floor. We spent more time on the decks of each level, looking out at the city, than any of the art inside, though the oversized candle wax sculpture of Julian Schnabel slowly melting—the remnants of his face already at his feet—was a highlight. We walked a bit along the High Line, which begins outside the museum’s entrance, then stopped for lunch.

We flew into Kennedy Airport when we came to this country back in 1978 so visiting New York with my folks will always have a particular resonance, but that journey felt even further away than the thirty-eight lapsed years as we said our goodbyes on the subway platform at 8th Avenue and 14th Street. They’d stay in town another day while I was headed back to LaGuardia and on to Chicago. After a couple days away I was ready to go home. I’m glad I went though. Maybe this traveling thing isn’t as bad as I always assume it will be. So long as it comes in small quantities.

I called this new painting “Waking Dream” in honor of my friend Laura Park‘s comic book, Do Not Disturb My Waking Dream, which sits near the top right corner of the composition. But this picture has little to do with what Laura draws and writes about and probably little to do with any of the other books it depicts. One of the reasons I’ve kept revisiting the bookshelf motif is that it allows me to think about some of the words, pictures, and thoughts between the covers of my books while rendering them as near abstractions. I’ve been doing these for almost twenty years now and I have less and less interest in nailing details or making any of the spines, covers, or backs recognizable to anyone but myself. They’re not scavenger hunts or puzzles to be solved. That’s not to say that my interest is purely formal; a painting like this wouldn’t have the same meaning to me if it was done without looking at a shelf of books I myself collected over the decades.

What it might mean to someone else is another thing entirely. I’ve never spent much time consciously embedding messages or meanings for viewers to uncover in my pictures. They’re not puzzles or whodunnits. But painting is nevertheless a kind of communication, however indirect, poetic, or elusive. The reason to put marks on a surface—be they words, lines, or paint strokes—is a desire to connect to others in some way. Otherwise there is no reason to keep these things around. I’ve never understood artists or writers whose only audience is themselves. If anything, almost everything I’ve ever made is an attempt to get out or past myself. But what others get from my efforts isn’t anything I could, or would ever want to, shape or control.

Painting is a solitary thing but its purpose is the opposite of solitude. It would be horrible and profoundly disappointing to learn that all these years I’ve just been talking to myself. I hope and have to believe that isn’t so. 

What paintings try to say was probably on my mind already because a few days before I finished “Waking Dream”, I went to 57th Street Books to hear Eric Plattner and Kathleen Rooney present the first English edition of Rene Magritte’s writings, which they co-edited. I’ve never been much of a fan of the man’s work but perhaps reading his words will help me make a little more sense of my own paintings.