Letter

I met Chris Connelly in the late 90s. He was a regular delivery customer of Thai Lagoon. I brought food to his Humboldt Park apartment every few weeks, it felt like. He was also the friendly guy at Reckless Records—which set him apart for sure. Makes sense that the one guy who doesn’t have to be kind is the one who is.

I wasn’t any kind of expert on industrial music but even I knew that Connelly was already kind of a legend by then. He’d been in Ministry, Revolting Cocks, and Pigface. Plus many more bands I’d never heard of. And yet here he was ringing up my record with a smile on my face.

Chicago has been this way the whole time I’ve been here. It’s full of people with amazing resumes who don’t wear them like a billboard the way it’s done in other cities. Here people keep their heads down and go about their business. It’s a place to get things done, not to be noticed.

Connelly is preternaturally prolific. Even without keeping close tabs, I’ve listened to plenty of his music over the past thirty years. He’s tirelessly searching and rarely content to repeat himself. Also, many of his projects aren’t under his name. It would be a full-time job just to catalog all his work. But I hadn’t seen the man in at least a decade when I got together with K last year and found out that he was her work pal at the record store.

It was definitely one of those small-world moments. If you hang around long enough making art of almost any kind, you’ll eventually run into all the other lifers. There is always an influx of the young and an ever expanding exodus of the discouraged, but the ones who keep at it in spite of everything form an exclusive club. Seeing Chris again was one of those affirming episodes. We barely said a word apart from greeting one another but there was a recognition, a welcoming sighting of a fellow traveler.

K bought tickets for us to see Chris’s David Bowie tribute show in April. I have very mixed feelings about Bowie but this concert was a stunner start to finish. It was not a cheesy waxworks impersonation but a fully-embodied interpretation from a lifelong fan. And somehow, even as he interpreted another’s songs, Connelly’s own rang through as well. I have no idea how he did it.

Chris and his wife Shayna came to the Ornery Cuss book-release at Tangible and I asked him if he’d be up for recording a talk. He agreed and came over my place a few weeks later. I don’t know if I asked the right questions or whether fans of Connelly’s music will be satisfied but it was a lively conversation between two guys still chipping away at the craft.

I had a good time and I think he did as well.

You’re invited.

I didn’t know the British kitchen-sink painter John Bratby wrote books till a couple weeks ago. A podcast I like mentioned a novel called Breakdown and I picked up a cheap copy on eBay.

What I knew of him before was his grubby canvases of apartments full of crap. They’re gleefully messy and look like they were painted in a fever. I also know they used his paintings to stand in for Gulley Jimson’s in the movie version of Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth—one of the best written/filmed portrayals of an artist’s life I know.

When I text Frank about the book, he says Bratby claimed The Horse’s Mouth was based on him but that can’t be true as he was only sixteen when it came out in 1944. Whatever the case, I’ve swallowed up the first third of Bratby’s book, which I assume is based, however exaggeratedly, on his own life.

It’s a vulgar, messy, laugh-out-loud trainwreck of a narrative about a successful painter who can’t control his own desires. But the best thing about it are the vivid, seen descriptions of the surroundings and denizens of “John Brady’s” world. I recognize these as the words of someone who’s spent his life looking.

Then, of course, there are the meaty ink illustrations throughout. I think this is a book I’ll hold onto.

I wrote about Colin Asher’s The Midnight Special.

I have some copies of The Sound and the Fury now if you’d like one from me directly. Or you can come to Tangible Books on the 18th for the book-release.

Lucy sent me her new book and I pretty much inhaled it. I’ve been reading her so long it feels like second nature. I wrote something about it, but it’s not so much a review as a kind of thank-you note.

Donna’s been in town fixing up her building to sell and she relented and let me tape a talk with her. We cover her restaurants—Leo’s Lunchroom, Bite Cafe, and Feed. All had a significant impact on my life. She claims the stories are boring but I disagree.

Been drawing K at her new place. Tomás sat for this one as well. He’s jealous of the attention she pays me when I’m over, ignores her when I’m not there. In other words, he’s a cat.

There’s a band we both like that’s blown up lately. They announced a presale for shows in November and we signed up to be notified to try to score some tickets. At the appointed time I wasted precious minutes because Ticketmaster made me change my login password. By the time I hit the virtual queue, there were 80,000+ ahead of me. I kept the window open just for laughs, but, miraculously, forty minutes later I got through. Then I looked at the seating chart. Standing-room only with a capacity over three thousand. I texted K and asked whether she was up for standing around in a mass of humanity for two hours for maybe forty minutes of novelty noodling and she gave me an emphatic thumbs-down. So I closed the window and gave up my chance to be wedged in with the cool kids in the former salt factory. I felt alright about it. I was happy to get through but also to let the chance go.

It felt like catch-and-release.

My old friend Jason was in town that night with his band. I was kind of worn out after a bookstore shift as I pedaled north to the Burlington. Then he texted me that I was on the guestlist. That was extra motivation to keep going.

The last time I was at the Burlington, I had to help the bartender count out the drawer at the end of the night because he was too trashed to see the bills clearly. Then I drove him home in my cab.

The band had been dormant for a bunch of years but you wouldn’t know it from this night’s set. They made a fierce racket and I would have been sorry had I missed it. There may only have been thirty or forty people there but I bet they’ll remember it better than the sardines in the crowd next November.