Letter

I go to LA to see my brand-new niece and to put up some art in the house my folks bought nearby. I haven’t been on a plane in a couple years. Last time I went to NYC for a day in order not to lose a $300 COVID-time cancellation credit. The return flight arrived in Chicago around 3am. It was a miserable experience.

I’m not afraid of flying. I just hate it and don’t think we’re supposed to be up there. I also like to feel the distance traveled when I leave town. I’ve driven to California a couple times. I don’t have the right window or I’d be driving now.

I read most of Eugene Marten’s In the Blind on board. It makes me forget about everything else. The only bad part is once I’m done, there won’t be any Marten books left for me to read.

There’s an overlap of a day or so between my arrival and my folks’ departure back east. For that period it almost feels like I’m in Brookline with a few palm trees thrown in.

Raya is very small. She’s still in the early stages of becoming a person. Arms and legs are clearly not quite under her control yet. Sleep is fitful for everyone involved. I don’t know what to think about it. Even in the same room it all feels very far away.

I spend three days mostly alone in the new house. I hang art and make a couple new paintings. Views from the front door and the office window. Being in a recently-furnished place makes me think about all the crap in my own home. What would it be like to start from scratch? I resolve to cull more belongings when I return.

Ever since the advent of Raya was announced and the idea of their buying a place in California was first broached, I’ve been agitating for my parents to leave Brookline for good. Part of it is undoubtedly out of self-interest—the chance never to return to Massachusetts is very attractive. But I truly believe shedding a bunch of baggage and wiping the slate by starting in a new place will do them a lot of good. Having one of their sons a few minutes away is a big selling point as well.

When I’m not puttering around the house, I’m driving somewhere. Most people’s lives here revolve around the automobile. It’s one of many reasons I could never live here permanently. The endless freeway jams are stultifying and nothing is ever any nearer than half an hour away.

I have lunch with Eva at a diner called Snug Harbor in Santa Monica. It’s been there since the 40s but when Eva asks for quarters to feed the meter the waitress says they don’t have any.

Eva’s been out here twenty years. Her kid just started seventh grade. The last time I saw her was on my disastrous West Coast book tour ten years back. It’s good to catch up. I’m happy anytime someone from my past seems to be thriving.

I have dinner at Max and Lauren’s a couple times. He wants me to draw her but it’s not until the second night that she cooperates.

My coffee with Bruce falls through. He’s just back from Europe and jetlagged and under the weather. I try to think of anyone else in LA I want to see. I text Emmett and he answers right away. I’m surprised because he’s usually on tour.

We meet up at a nondescript bar on La Brea a couple hours later. He used to live in Chicago and play guitar for someone I painted a record cover for.

The next morning I drive to the Watts Towers. I’ve been trying to visit them for thirty years. The first time the friend I was staying with was terrified of the neighborhood. After that there was no time or there was a plague or construction shutdowns. This time the only obstacle was an obnoxious group of seniors who shared my tour of this unique landmark. There’s nothing else quite like this thing an illiterate Italian immigrant constructed in his backyard over years of afterwork evenings. It’s true the neighborhood is rough around the edges. But it has a lot more character than most of the moneyed places I pass through the rest of my stay.

Emmett invites me to his place on the outskirts of Korea Town. We talk about working on something together and he shows me a drawing he recently acquired. It’s an oversized charcoal self-portrait made by his namesake—one of the most famous circus clowns in history.

I try to see City of God at Tarantino’s movie theater but it’s sold out. So instead I sit in rush hour traffic all the way back south to Lawndale.

I have my one and only celebrity sighting in the Southwest departure gate at LAX. A very exited man in a floral shirt asks the woman sitting across from me for a selfie, then gushes when she adds him on Instagram. I have hours to kill and no idea who she might be so I look her up. Turns out to be one of the Little Women of LA. Can’t say I’m starstruck but I like how gracefully she handles the attention.

I read 70 pages of De Lillo’s Great Jones Street on the flight back. Eugene Marten is often compared to him but putting this book next to In the Blind makes me think this De Lillo is no Marten.

I wrote a bit about Maggie Umber’s Chrysanthemum Under the Waves.

In case it’s not clear by now, I’d very much like you to come to my book-release thing Saturday.

Frank says there’s a Stanley Lewis show in Terre Haute and I say we should go. Then I insist it will take less than two hours to drive there from Chicago. I’ve driven past Terre Haute a million times en route to Boston, I say. I’m 100% sure of this. When I get home I look it up and realize I’m thinking of South Bend. Notre Dame is not in Terre Haute, it turns out. The Old Timers’ is really starting to kick in. Wherever it is, I wanna go.

Lewis came to Chicago when Frank and I were at the Art Institute at the beginning of the 90s. He and our teacher, Dan, led a tour of the museum. They debated the space within a Courbet for many minutes. Then there was a drawing trip where we focused on Indian sculptures. Lewis was an intense, red-faced man who communicated a rabid desire to catch whatever was in front of his eyes in marks on paper. His quest was a ceaseless trying rather than any true hope of success or endpoint. It felt completely true and relatable to me. When he looked at my sketch, he said something like Oh, you’re like me.

The drive takes three hours but it’s a breeze. We listen to music and gab. We’re friends nearly thirty-five years so it’s second nature.

The show is amazing. Reproductions don’t begin to do these pictures justice. The big drawings, especially, are like topographical maps up close. I say to Frank that if you rollered ink over the topmost level and lay down a piece of paper, you could pull a pretty good print.

They’re all about a ceaseless hunger to catch the everyday with eyes and hands. Lewis’s subjects are always humble and ordinary but his attention makes them a miracle.

I know very few pictures that communicate moment-to-moment living in quite this way.

On the drive back we wonder why the Art Institute doesn’t have shows like this. Sometimes you have to go to Terre Haute for the real thing.

Mallory made me watch a really boring folk-horror flick that reminded me of Xena, Warrior Princess.

I talk with artist/writer Maggie Umber about her nearly-wordless book, Chrysanthemum Under the Waves.

Sometime in 2023, I read an open call on Submittable from Taco Bell Quarterly. They were soliciting art and writing somehow connected to the fast food chain after which they’re named. I hate Taco Bell but I thought it was perverse and funny enough to kill a couple hours on, so I Google Streetviewed the restaurant that replaced the shitty Mexican joint across Western Avenue from where I used to live.

The Taco Bell replaced the building with the arched windows in the middle-right of the old painting above. It was demolished sometime after I moved away in 2012. It would be years until the Bell rose from in that empty lot.

I painted the painting, scanned it, and sent a digital file to the magazine. Then nothing happened and it kept not happening for over a year. Then the form rejection came. This is how it mostly goes. I lose count of the contests, open calls, et al I go for and don’t get. I long ago stopped getting upset or stewing about it (present case excluded).

What I wonder about is why I keep bothering. I look at sites like Submittable and Chill Subs less and less. But some late nights a bug gets up my ass and I start scrolling through the “opportunities”. These things are mostly for beginners and I’m definitely not a beginner. Yet, who wouldn’t want a little acceptance now and then?

The funny thing is that in the rare instance that a picture or piece of writing is taken I forget about it almost as quickly as the myriad rejections. Perhaps the only reason the Taco Bell failure stays with me is the ludicrousness of the proposition and the fact I made a painting especially for their call.

It’s buried somewhere in my flatfile. I don’t know if I could even find it.

A kid bought a copy of Soviet Stamps at Tangible and talked about it for fifteen minutes into a camera.