Letter

I had my last drawing class and did my last Sunday shift at the bar the same week. I’ve been spending more and more time at the bookstore, so something had to give. It’s sort of an embarrassment of riches but too much is too much.

The story of my life is the search for balance between paid jobs and real work (which is often unpaid or virtually so). The art and writing (including this letter you’re reading) is difficult to price. I’ve tried and failed repeatedly. It always feels too much and not enough.

All the time I’ve spent packing and shelving books lately may finally break me of wanting to publish any more books. Maybe there are enough already. Yet, every day, people come through the front door to bring us boxes and bags full of paperbacks and hardcovers to free room in their basements and garages. They empty out their dead relatives’ shelves. Forests have been felled for these things that are so quickly forgotten. I think about that as I go up with full stacks of milk crates and back down with empty ones.

It took most of a week to recreate the Mystery section in the new space. It’s still mostly wide open but won’t stay so for long. In a month or so 60,000 books will have made the move from 3324 to 3326 South Halsted.

I’m not a big planner but rearranging the shape of my days this way gives me an inkling of the path forward. I could see going to the bookstore most days to see what needs doing and getting my own stuff done around the margins of that. I used to drive a cab 80 hours a week and still painted a lot, so time management isn’t a problem.

I get to stay in the neighborhood which is a big plus. I have little use for the North Side for the most part. Wicker Park to me is the Rainbo Club, Myopic Books, then mostly sports bars & strollers. Maybe I’ll like the neighborhood better when I go there less often.

I asked my students on the last day of class if they got anything out of drawing a person once a week for a couple hours and many answered that they did. They found it relaxing. A reprieve from the high expectations of the rest of their course load. That was gratifying to hear. I guess I did what I set out to do there. It’s so the opposite of my relationship with drawing. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

It’s not a reprieve in any way, yet I can’t imagine doing anything else.

“If birds couldnt fly they wouldnt sing” writes Cormac McCarthy in Stella Maris. I listened to it on audiobook part of my drive east. It surprised the hell out of me. I tried reading The Passenger and barely made it 30 pages. McCarthy is really important to me, especially Suttree, but The Passenger felt like a caricature of his worst overwrought, over-stylized tendencies. Stella Maris is completely different. Basically a monologue told from a female point of view, it’s stripped of all his tropes and tells its sad story more or less straight.

There’s a connection to Labatut’s The Maniac in the Atomic bomb/mathematics theme and not a single mute cowboy killer to be found. There are references to The Passenger but I probably won’t try to go back and read that because it might ruin the good memory of Stella. It’s quite a note to go out on. A left turn in the best way.

I updated my resume. Got a few pieces in a group show that opens Saturday night in Beverly.

RIP Steve Albini.

I hadn’t heard of James Bolivar Needham until a couple months ago when a short article in the Sun-Times mentioned an upcoming exhibit at the Chicago Maritime Museum (which I’d also never heard of) featuring some unattributed Chicago riverscapes believed to be painted by him.

Turns out Needham was a Black painter who worked on ships in Chicago around the turn of the 20th Century and made these pictures in his off-hours, often painting them on the backs of crate sides. They grabbed me right away because of the sensitivity of brushstroke and the subtlety of tone. They look like they were hung on the wall fresh from the easel yesterday, were it not for the old architecture and vessels depicted.

Not much is known about Needham. He was born in Canada in 1850 at one of the termini of the Underground Railroad. He worked various low-level jobs around Chicago and helped with decorations for the 1893 World’s Fair. He died after inhaling smoke trying to rescue his paintings from a fire that destroyed his studio in 1931.

I went to the Chicago Maritime Museum—which turns out to be a few rooms of ship and shipping artifacts in the basement of the Bridgeport Art Center—and looked at what are likely Needham’s little paintings of ships in the harbor. He rarely signed his paintings which accounts for why these aren’t attributed to him. The curator is convinced they are his and I can’t disagree. I looked up every image of his online and the ones in this exhibit look like they were done by the same hand.

I pitched an article to my editor at the Reader but wasn’t met with too much enthusiasm. Still, I queried the Chicago History Museum about taking a look at their collection of Needhams—they have more than any other institution. A month or two later their curator wrote with a link to some of their holdings but rejected the idea of letting me see them in person. The reason given was lack of staff and the low priority of my request.

I’m not important enough to waste time or resources on according to her. Fair enough. I’ll have to admire Needham’s work through screens for now.

I feel kinship with this guy I’ll never get to know. He documented modes of transportation around Chicago like I have a hundred years later. I rarely sign my paintings either. Maybe one day a future painter will be refused entrance to a crypt holding the remains of my work.

I’ll watch and laugh about it from my nook in Hell.

I wrote about an amazing storefront Hamlet and an awful Flannery O’Connor biopic.

I read a 1950 essay by Willem De Kooning included in a tiny book I bought from the collection of Tom Verlaine into a microphone.

The phenomenon of gods continuing to exist outside children’s books has baffled me since I was little. Fairy tales serve their purpose but to go on believing in flying, morphing, deathless entities guiding lives seems like a sick joke.

Strangely, I enjoy stories about believers. The more outlandish the better. Larry Cohen’s 1976 classic, God Told Me To, is a good example. I chose to revisit it this week with Mallory. Tony Lo Bianco plays a tormented Catholic cop trying to figure out why a bunch of random murderers (including Andy Kaufman, in his first film appearance) are terrorizing New York City. The invocation of the movie title as their explanation is the refrain throughout.

Cohen tacks on an extraterrestrial subplot/reveal, but fanatical faith is very much the product of creatures down here on planet earth. Mass murder in the name of metaphysical belief is thriving despite advances in science, technology, etc. Why do gods keep telling people to kill and why do those people keep on believing anything/anyone that commands them to do that?

The day after talking to Mallory about the Cohen flick, I recorded a conversation with the novelist/screenwriter, Bruce Wagner. I’ve been a fan since seeing Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, which Wagner wrote. His books are filled with phantasmagorical monsters and he pushes boundaries of all kinds. We didn’t get into religion, though I’d hoped we might. It’ll have to wait till our next conversation. His new book comes out early June and I’ll post our talk then.

The closest I ever come to any feeling of higher powers is through art and the most efficient delivery system is music. Saturday night I got to see Mute Duo and Emily Rach Beisel cast some spells at Constellation.

That’s all the god I need in my life. You can keep your Zoroasters, Yahwehs, Vishnus, Jesuses, et al to yourselves.

Now I’m off to see a storefront production of a play in which a Danish prince talks to a skull.

The signs and wonders never cease.

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