Letter

Jon Cwiok, a longtime worker at Myopic, used to call that store “the book hole.” It’s always stayed with me. Now I’m in my own book hole. Well, it’s not really mine, but I’m alone in it for three days in a row. Joe is taking time off because he’s about to build ten bookshelves next door and I’m minding the till in his stead.

Sometime during the first day I experienced something similar to the burst-balloon feeling I had during a shift at Bernice’s. Then, I’d had a several-week-long daydream about owning my own bar. It came crashing down once I was in the place alone and could imagine a decade or two like it into the future. I felt trapped and just wanted to walk out the door.

Second day I spend doing overstock. This entails climbing a ladder, taking photos of shelves up near the ceiling, then climbing back down and comparing the lower shelves with my photos to see whether any titles are missing below. I repeat this sequence half a dozen times, yielding about forty books. I used to enjoy being at Myopic when they did this job. There, one worker was on the ladder calling out names to another below, getting a bunch of no’s and the occasional yes. My version is silent save for whatever I have playing on the stereo.

There are also more customers and a guy buys a fancy Folio Society boxed set of Greek myths for $75. It’s a big deal considering most books in the store are $6.95 or less. Kevin from the Duck comes in with a bag full of books to donate and buys a bunch of cookbooks. Preston brings a friend. She buys Paul Beatty’s The Sellout on my recommendation.

On day three, a young woman walks in, looks around, and asks if this is a bookstore. A little later, another asks whether the books are for sale. She thought maybe you had to have a subscription.

This all feels good but I can’t yet imagine doing it day in day out.

I don’t think I’m built to be a business owner. Joe’s excited about all the possibilities of doubling the space next door; all I see is schlepping boxes. It doesn’t mean I won’t do it or that I won’t get some satisfaction out of it, but the dream of expansion and unseen possibilities is not my dream.

I liked Minami Deutsch‘s set at the Bottle so much that I left before the headliner they were opening for came on so as not to blemish the memory.

Ken is retiring from modeling in life-drawing classes for forty years. He told me he just can’t hold the poses he used to hold. He was a school choir director for thirty-five years concurrently, but quit that gig a few years ago. I ask if he’ll be spending all his time on his yacht now, which got a laugh. He said his version is visiting national parks.

The art book‘s off to the printers. Needing something else to do immediately, I guess, I made a zine of all my Duck Inn bottle sketches.

I recorded a talk with Scott Schaaf of Pinwheel Records.

I reviewed a book on Chicago’s taxi wars and a John Singer Sargent exhibition for the screen.

It’s got a cover, ISBN, and will be sent to the printer in the next couple weeks so I figure I may as well put up the pre-order page to make my art survey book feel real. So, please put down some money if you’d like to be the first kid on your block to have a copy.

The thing about revisiting all this past is that, hopefully, after the book is out, I’ll be more free of it. I’m not a nostalgic person but plunging into all this looking back has made me appreciate the work a little more than I had before. That’s a good thing. I just want to make sure I don’t keep living there.

A survey should lead to wiping the slate clean a bit.

At the same time, it’s not like the goal is to return to a child-like state. I didn’t enjoy it much the first time around. There’s no unlearning or unknowing to be had. I don’t want to become any stupider than I already am.

I want whatever I make next to reflect experience but not be enslaved by it. We’ll see if that’s possible. Most artists’ late periods aren’t much good.

A good side-effect of being consumed by putting this art book to bed is I forgot about the looming horror of EXPO Chicago. By the time I realized it was coming up on the weekend my half-hearted attempts to score press credentials came to nothing. So I’m not going. It now costs $45 to get in which is whatever it’s called when something is way beyond absurd. Too busy actually making art (which is a good problem to have).

My goal this week is to send the book to the printer by Wednesday because I’m running the bookstore solo all day Thursday, Friday, and Saturday so Joe can get some rest before building ten new bookcases next door. We’re moving into a space double the size of what we have currently. He’s super excited. This is what keeps him young: the prospect of the next thing.

I should try to learn from that but all I can see for now is schlepping box after box through the door that connects the two storefronts. It will be an epic process. By the time it’s done, I will likely forget that I ever even worked on anything else.

Finished Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual. Didn’t want it to end. It will go on the same shelf as William Gaddis’s JR, Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel, and Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree as books I will always return to.

Mallory and I discussed Relic.

Listening to Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee on repeat. It’s not on any of the streamers; just Lee’s site. This a musician you should support.

Watch this short doc on Lynda Barry’s classroom. She’s a real-life superhero.

I never cared for the set-up still-life. The idea of choosing objects and arranging them on a table to illustrate or allude to some theme or significance always felt like homework. What I’ve always enjoyed is finding order and form in piles of things left after use in everyday life. The cluttered desk or the dining room table with dirty dishes.

I’ve made pictures of improvised domestic scenes since the 1980s but the first piece in this book is circa 1991 or 1992. It’s a large charcoal drawing of my kitchen in Logan Square. I’d recently seen a Velazquez painting featuring a colander and similar kind of light coming in from an unseen side window. The bend in the countertop was made to account for my shifting perspective as my eyes moved from the kettle on the stove to the Palmolive bottle on the counter to the sink and doing rack, ending in the pantry with the hanging pan on the wall. I was going for a cinematic effect, a thing I would return to from time to time. I wanted to account for the passage of time. To make a single image contain and remind the viewer of many different moments.

The painting of a soup bowl and spoon left on a dining room table clearly shows Bonnard’s influence but filtered through Fairfield Porter. I was living through what amounted to a first marriage in my art school days so there were many homely scenes portrayed in my work.

In contrast, the ashtray full of cigarette butts spelled the end of my domestic bliss. My soon-to-be ex hated smoking.

Paintings of paintings have often appeared in my work. In a succession of apartments starting back when I lived with my parents, a portion of wall was devoted to art clipped from magazines and postcards. The Wall of Fame oil, painted circa 1997 when I moved back to Chicago for good, is my most direct tribute to these collections of images from the past. Here the old pictures compete with the pile of crap on a studio table. I’ve always functioned best in an organized mess. As much of a garbage pile as it looks like, I could reach into there and find whatever I was looking for more often than not.

I’ve returned to cups, tubes, and other receptacles in and around sinks over and over as a motif. It’s a setting of daily action that anyone who’s lived with indoor plumbing will recognize. There’s an implied action and a reminder of the passage of time whenever water is involved. Even when there’s no actual water present. Kitchens and bathrooms are places where repeated daily rituals leave a patina. I don’t have to pose a person at a stove or sink to get a viewer to imagine themselves into what I’ve painted. All I have to do is portray a rack of knives or a cup holding a toothbrush next to a spigot more or less accurately to make the picture something anyone can see as something they know for themselves.

I read a long list from Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual into a microphone.