Letter

There’s a de Kooning drawing show up at the museum. I went the first hour members were allowed in. His whipping boomerang paintstrokes have been crucial to me for over forty years. It was like visiting a childhood classroom but unlike that deflating or disorienting experience, de Kooning hasn’t shrunk or otherwise morphed or wasted away. The pictures are still full of motion and mess, graceful and ugly all at once.

What set de Kooning apart from most of his AB-EX brothers and sisters is he could draw. Most of the others were rescued by scale or gimmick, whereas he exploded his European academy training onto the larger, freer canvas of the New World while never losing the rigor and precision.

I loved the clip in Emile de Antonio’s documentary Painters Painting where he talks about how painters don’t have particularly bright ideas. They (we) rarely do. That’s not what painting is about. That’s not an argument in favor of stupidity, only the small point that if ideas were the thing we’d try to be philosophers rather than smearing paint on canvas. De Kooning just knew what the job was and worked away at it.

I remember in art school there were several “advanced” painting students who seemed to take de Kooning and other abstractionists as a jumping off point but all that resulted was a half-baked imitation. The painters in the 40s and 50s were abstracting from something they saw or dreamed or imagined or remembered. Of course students always imitate, but some work is a destination rather than a beginning. To get to where de Kooning ended up was a jagged, personal path. My classmates wanted to skip to the end. I wonder if any of them are still painting.

What the current show makes clear is that de Kooning never went all the way nonobjective. There are faces, limbs, trees, and hills in all his pictures. He never looked away from the seen world.

I don’t know any young painters but wonder whether someone like de Kooning matters to them. I can’t see how if painting matters to you, the kind where gesture and mark-making are up front, that you could be indifferent to him. But I’m not into crawling into anyone else’s head. I just know he has been one of my main guys for a very long time.

The show’s up into September and I already think it’s coming down too soon.

I talked about public domain novels, publishing, and other matters with Kyler Bingham at Salt Lake Dirt.

Framed a couple of the remaining Moby Dick drawings together and wrote about a wrestling play.

This is what the Ornery Cuss book-release sounded like. You should’ve been there.

K writes that her good friend, Jenny’s, cat, Bobby, died and asks me to paint his portrait. She emails a few photos of the odd little guy with his smushed-in nose and worried eyes.

I’ve never had any problem painting cat portraits even though I don’t care for them. K doesn’t believe me. No cat-lover ever does. Not only that. She says I’m like a cat. I don’t even know what to say about that.

Now that K has her own place, Tomás and I have to coexist. It’s gone a lot better than anyone expected. She thought he’s hide from me for weeks but he came out and made friends the first night. She’s thanked me more than once for being nice to hime even though I’m not a “cat person”. If she wasn’t there, who knows how it would have gone?

I made K a cat-themed mixtape. If you have Apple Music, you can listen.

We show up at the Hungry Brain a little after 7pm. The bar’s empty and the bartender acts put out to have to serve drinks so early. You here for the show? You know it’s not till 9, right? she says before reluctantly going about her job.

K and I are both compulsively early to everything. It’s become a running joke. When we meet somewhere whoever arrives last, inevitably still ahead of the appointed time, is mock-shamed by the other. This night we’re early together but there’s a reason. I like drawing at shows so I arrive early to get a good spot. At the Brain there are only a couple tables that are suitable.

We sit down to enjoy our drinks in the empty room. Even the bands haven’t arrived for soundcheck yet. I’d bought the tickets a month back. This is the release show for BCMC’s second record. There’s an opener listed I know nothing about. They’re called PXM. They’re local and I find a link online to the drummer’s Risograph printmaking studio but not much music.

After BCMC soundchecks, they push their gear back a bit and PXM sets up. I’m struck by how many effects pedals the guitarist brought and by the dunce-cap-like bell hanging from a piece of yarn above the drum kit.

A couple of K’s record store coworkers show up and a customer she only knows as Jim sits with us for BCMC’s set. It’s Jim Becker, who I don’t know well but who I’ve drawn on stages for many years. K just thought he was a nice older guy. Didn’t know he played music. Chicago is good that way. People don’t insert their resumés into every daily interaction.

It’s a great show but I’ve kept K out past her bedtime. She can barely keep her eyes open on the Western bus home.

The work is done. I’ve put up posters around town and sent review copies to a bunch of people. Now it’s time to celebrate.

I wrote about Scott McClanahan’s amazing new book.

Sometime late last summer, I decided it would be a good idea to record myself reading bite-size chunks of Moby Dick. My illustrated version had recently been published and I was at work on a couple other public domain titles, but I felt like I wanted a final bout with the white whale.

I pitched the idea to Adam at Hello America Stereo Cassette and he gave me his blessing. He warned me it would be awhile till he could give it attention so time might pass till it saw the light of day but that was fine by me. I had plenty else going on and wasn’t in any great hurry. I’ve learned over time to be better about not pushing so hard on deadlines and such. It just pisses people off and makes them not want to work with you. I’ve become accustomed to doing my work and sending it off into the ether, forgetting it even happened until it resurfaces, according to my collaborators’ timeline. Occasionally, it’s even a nice surprise when it returns.

Aside from not stumbling over the words too badly, the big challenge of assembling this recording was cutting down an epic novel down to sixty minutes. I quickly found out that even a chapter was really too long if I wanted to give the listener an overall sense of Melville’s book so what I did was cut out passages that spoke to me most and pasted them into a word doc.

It’s drastically abridged, of course, but I think the fragments I chose give a feel of the heart of the thing. Handling Melville’s paragraphs this way was not unlike the layout process on my illustrated version. It was a way to really get under the hood and see how the thing was put together. It was a rare privilege.

Order yours here.

Early warning for this but the preorder’s been up and the publisher likes it when people buy ahead. Gives ’em confidence in the talent, that they haven’t backed the wrong horse…

I sat through a play earlier in the week.