Letter

I look up bike routes to Lombard, Illinois. It’s 23 miles. Doable. But the wind is whipping around pretty good and I have to carry a framed poster so I opt for Metra.

Commuter rail trips around Chicago always remind me of when I lived in Beverly a decade ago. It’s not necessarily a thing I want or need to revisit in my mind. It wasn’t all bad but represents the end of my last failed relationship. Not the happiest thought for a trip to visit friends.

It’s early evening Saturday, so the train is packed with suburbanites returning home after a day in the city. A lot of beer-drinking and caterwauling children. I feel awkward taking up so many seats with my bike. I’m right next to the bathroom. When a rider leaves without sliding the door closed the stench is palpable.

It’s a ten minute ride to Mallory and Bulent’s new house. The road is not one often used by bicyclists judging by the way drivers buzz by me. The wind pushes at me, slowing the pace considerably.

The little house is just off the main road. There’s a pumpkin on the porch and a few other holiday decorations but otherwise no signs of life. The doorbell is one of those ones with a camera in it. A minute after I ring it, Mallory appears at the door.

Bulent drives up a minute later. He says he saw me riding down the road as he was picking up pizza. I say I rarely recognize drivers or acknowledge when they try to get my attention. I mostly concentrate on not getting doored or run into.

The wind blows down the outdoor screen several times until we tie it down with rope to a tree and a light fixture. We’re about to take the show inside but then it dies down enough for us to watch. The movie stars an impossibly buff James McAvoy terrorizing an unhappy couple and their irritating child. It’s ridiculous. But I’m here for the company rather than art criticism. As something to do with friends, it’s just fine.

Visiting a house makes me think of the one time I lived in one. The same one I think of every Metra trip. It feels like exile. I couldn’t make a world with someone else enough not to notice how cut off I was from the city.

Out here in the boonies it’s worse. But this is what most people want. A place of their own away from others. They build a whole universe within the walls of their domiciles.

I suppose I do that as well. But it’s different than cohabitation and it’s not on the Metra.

I made a couple fonts.

Mallory and I discussed Bell, Book and Candle.

Made an Apple Music playlist of a song from each year I’ve been alive.

I’ve had lots of coffeeshops in my life but Wormhole’s a little different. The main thing is I’ve never been a regular. The shop opened in 2010, six years after I’d left Wicker Park. But when I came back to the neighborhood I’d come in for a pour-over.

I was living in Heart of Chicago, then Beverly in those years. Working at a coffeeshop myself part of that time. Not unlike now, with bookstores, or during my hack days with driving, the impulse to go to a coffeeshop just wasn’t front of mind. Like getting off work, then going to work.

That neighborhood too was a real bummer. Long past the hip old artsy days and even the new up-and-coming chic enclave, Wicker Park in the 2010s had settled into a grim commerce center vibe. Typically, I’d keep my head down except when inside Myopic Books or the Rainbo Club. Wasn’t much on Milwaukee Avenue left for me. Still, a good cup of coffee is a good cup of coffee.

I’d mostly forgotten about Wormhole by the time I took on the Sunday night shift at Rainbo in 2023. Katherine was one of the regulars and after we got to talking I’d come see her at Wormhole before my shift sometimes. Then I brought my box of gouache and made a painting. Now it hangs to the left of the register.

I returned and made others.

But I feel like a bit of an interloper. I don’t know a single regular; just the staff. They greet me warmly and give me coffee on the house but I don’t know a single regular. A coffeeshop is a place to meet people but I’ve never met anyone at Wormhole.

The tables are typically filled by very serious-looking young people completely concentrating on laptops, tablets, smartphones, books, and journals. Some are clearly studying or working together. There’s often a line stretching to the door. The drinks they make here take time.

Since quitting my bar shift, I rarely find myself in Wicker Park. But a couple weeks ago I popped in and mentioned to Sean, the manager, that Katherine had told me they were thinking of swapping out the artwork. I’d never seen anything but the cutesy retro paintings of 80s robots and creatures up at the coffeeshop. I thought they were on permanent display.

Now my stuff is there. That means I’ll probably stop by more often. But Wormhole will never be my coffeeshop the way Jackalope is, or Urbus Orbis, Jinx, Atomix, Mercury, Duvall’s, or Hardboiled used to be.

It’s by far the most popular coffeeshop I’ve ever spent time in but it’s a home away from home for others not for me.

Here’s a playlist of some recent songs I’ve been listening to.

John and I go see Megalopolis the day it opens. There are maybe ten people in the theater. Entertainment gossip outlets have been gleefully forecasting doom for Coppola’s dream project for years. Parasites can’t help but celebrate the misery of others. They never risk saying anything of their own so the failure of those who do is their greatest joy.

I have pretty low expectations going in but the movie blows well past them within minutes. Yes, it’s a big, messy, overly earnest, sometimes unintentionally funny hulk of a thing. But it’s got a heart and it’s sincerely trying to say something. Even if I don’t share Coppola’s optimism about what’s next for this civilization, I have no doubt of his conviction.

Selling off a chunk of his successful wine-making empire to fund a production in a medium that’s dying a very public death is definitely hubris but what else is the guy to do? He’s in his eighties and has dedicated his life to film. If there’s a hill for him to die on, this is it.

Old Jon Voigt deserves to win a bunch of awards too.

A few days later, I bike to the Music Box to see the completely reedited/remixed version of Tinto Brass’s Caligula. For over fifty years, this has been Megalopolis before Megalopolis (even as Coppola has dreamed of his almost that long). I have a dim memory of renting the old version from Videosmith on Harvard Street. It came on two VHS tapes. I chose it because it was a famous trainwreck and because there was porn in it. It’s the reason most people watched it at the time. I don’t recall much except for extravagant, widescreen Roman palace sets and Malcolm McDowell strutting about and leering the way he always does.

The new thing the restorer has fashioned takes out all the porn and puts in a lot of Helen Mirren. It’s worth seeing for that reason, if for no other. It’s a strange, operatic marathon of orgies and bloodletting. I’m glad I saw it as a historical corrective. The people involved clearly strived to right a wrong and in a way they have. There was a good crowd and people applauded when it was over but the larger culture has no bandwidth to sit through a three-hour epic about the rise and fall of a Roman emperor; it’s too busy laughing itself to death in ten or twenty second increments over handheld devices.

The old Rome of Caligula is a lot closer to our own dying light than Coppola’s old hippie vision of rebirth and reimagining. His movie’s a triumph even as the world it proposes to save circles the drain.

Made another little book about the bookstore: original, zine, digital.

Put up some stuff at Wormhole in Wicker Park. It’ll be there awhile.