Letter

A photobooth is an anachronism. In a time when every digital device we carry in our pockets is capable of shooting a feature-length movie, a box with a seat inside and a privacy curtain, which produces four black-and-white shots of unpredictable quality and takes five minutes to do it, would seem obsolete. And yet, both the Rainbo Club and the Skylark both have them, and in both bars they are used multiple times nightly.

A few weeks ago I was a guest critic at a final thesis show at a local college. One of the kids displayed a wall of Fuji Instax snapshots with his messy scrawl underneath to indicate the date and subject. Some of the pictures were blurry, others looked barely composed, but all together they presented some sort of visual diary. In his talk before his classmates and teachers, the kid talked about how permanent and unalterable these pictures were. In a time when every image can be ceaselessly altered and manipulated, these crappy little photos felt more real to him.

I think it’s a similar thing that keeps drinkers coming back to the photobooth. They feel as if the wet, curling, chemical-smelling strips of photo paper capture an actual moment of their lives. Then they lay out all the finished pictures on the table next to their drinks, take out their iPhones, and take pictures of their pictures so they can share those frozen moments with all their friends who are probably at other bars, where there may not be a photobooth.

The fact that people still feel the need to have tangible souvenirs in this way may be a fetish or relic or affectation, but just the fact that there’s any interest at all in images which aren’t just flitting past our eyes, barely differentiated, one after another, gives me some small bit of comfort.

p.s. I went to the M.F.A. show at my alma mater and lived to tell about it.

Tuesday afternoon I rang the bell at Bernice’s and was buzzed in. The bar’s closed on Tuesdays but I was there to paint a portrait of Steve, the guy who runs the place. I’ve only been coming to the place a little over a year but it feels like a regular part of the routine. Steve and I developed an easy rapport pretty quickly. That’s not what usually happens when I meet people. Maybe it’s his many years behind the bar or perhaps the fact he’s been making his own art for decades. In any case, I’m not in a position to take any friendship lightly these days.

After the painting was finished, his mom, Bernice, came out from the back to take a look. She stared at it a minute, then said, “You found the secret Steve…” I took that as a good thing. 

Saturday my friend Bill put me on the guest-list for his gig at Lincoln Hall. Him and his friend Ryley were opening for a couple touring bands. I stuck around for a song or two of the band which followed them but it was the kind of thing where you can tell from the band members’ haircuts what their music would sound like. I was happy to’ve heard my friends play at a larger venue anyhow.

p.s. I wrote a review of Alex Abramovich’s Bullies. An entertaining account of how he tracked down the kid who tormented him in school, who went on to found an Oakland motorcycle club.

Painting a picture of a person’s face is a chance for a conversation. Most of the portraits I’ve done over the past few years have been commissioned and often from photographs but in the past few weeks I’ve started on a series of familiar faces painted from life. I shlep my paper and paint to people’s houses, they sit in their favorite chair, and we see what happens. Sometimes the talk is like a therapy session, other times more like a comedy routine, but in most cases it’s a chance to reconnect. All the people who have agreed to pose are friends of one kind or another. Sitting and looking at them for a few hours is a chance to gage the changes in them and the changes in me. 

Thursday at the Hideout, Eszter Balint came to sing her noirish tunes and play her violin. Like most people my age, I first got to know her as John Lurie’s Hungarian cousin in Stranger Than Paradise sometime in the mid-80s. More recently she was Louis CK’s non-English-speaking paramour on the last season of his eponymous show. Now she was singing in a bar I’ve been to hundreds of times. Up on the screen she of course seemed mythical and unapproachable, but after her set, in the emptied room, leaning casually against the lip of the stage while talking to another fan, she looked just like any of us. I thanked her for playing and asked if she was in town for a few days. She said she’d be driving to Rockford tomorrow, then Dubuque the next day. Such is the singer’s lot. Turns out she’s only four years older than me—an unthinkable concept when I saw her all those years ago in black-and-white in a movie theater somewhere in Boston.