Letter

The red-and-black papier-mâché mask hung on the wall of my brother’s childhood bedroom for years before I asked my folks on a recent visit if I could take it home. It’s been a decoration in their house for decades. I don’t know if anyone ever used it as a mask.

I think we got it on a trip to Italy when I was twelve or thirteen. I don’t remember the circumstances but I’m pretty sure I picked it out. It’s a Capitano or Scaramouche, I believe; one of the stock characters. Who knows what attracted me to it?

When Preston says he’s dressing up as a wizard this Halloween, I decide to dress up for my bar shift as well. I know exactly what I’ll wear. The mask’s been decorating my studio the past year or so.

When I take it off the wall, it barely fits my face because it has warped inward from humidity. I stack three oversized art books on top of it to flatten it out. A day later it fits fine.

I buy black hairspray and face paint at CVS and wait to put it on until just before leaving the house. When I get on my bike for the ride to the bar I feel cold rain coming down so I go back inside for a stocking cap. I don’t want the cheap black dye to run.

This is the first time I’ve dressed in a costume in a decade or so. The last time was with Shay. She loved Halloween. I was a creepy ghost-faced priest.

A few cars honk as I ride north to the bar.

Some drinkers are a little disconcerted, others pay me compliments. Someone asks what movie I’m from. Another, whether this is my Halloween costume (which, I suppose I should be offended by). Only one woman recognizes it as a commedia mask. When I mention commedia dell’arte by way of explanation, I mostly get blank stares.

After last call, I peel the mask off my face. The inside is coated in sweat. Over the course of the night I could feel the mask molding its shape to my face. Mike jokes that he could clone a dozen Dmitrys from the DNA on its surface. I say that one is more than enough. He doesn’t disagree.

When I get home I shower the black hairspray off me. It takes a lot of soap and shampoo to get clean. It gives me a renewed appreciation for women who wear makeup every day out in the world. Having that layer between my skin and the world is a true challenge.

Some use it as armor but to me it feels like a barrier or obstruction. To disguise or transform a face can be a powerful thing but I mostly felt trapped. It’s a useful exercise but I don’t feel changed; only relieved it’s not my everyday.

A couple days later I bring in my other commedia mask in to the bar to take photobooth pictures. I don’t wear it while I work as it’s a little too tight to function in. I’m not interested in a repeat performance either.

It’s no surprise that the pictures in the old mask turn out better. If you don’t commit to the bit, the results can’t help but turn out half-assed. It’s not the same if you don’t suffer at least a little.

Listen to The Story of RR 1: Healing Fantasies.

All the shows are over and done and I feel emptied out. From June till last Saturday, some part of my attention was occupied with a room away from my house filled with my artwork. Thinking about if anyone was looking at it, how to get more people to do so, then, hopefully, to inspire them to take some of the artwork home with them so I wouldn’t have to bring it back here.

The stacks of pictures returned from exhibitions are like an epitaph or obituary reminding of how my efforts fell short. The goal is always to bring back nothing, even if I’ve rarely managed it.

Now that all this crap is back here, I have to recharge and rethink. To decide what’s next. To assess how I failed this time and how it was different or similar to previous failures.

Don’t assume that this talk of failure is necessarily negative; it’s just my process. Most of anything and everything fails, I believe. It’s the nature of the beast. The consequence and price of trying anything at all.

Three exhibitions back to back to back. I’d never done that before and probably won’t ever do it again. I pushed myself harder and in more directions than I had before. There was also the publication of a new book as the cherry on top. That process is unfortunately not yet in the rearview, as the printer hasn’t completed the entire run I ordered. Once that little disaster is behind me I hope to truly have a clean slate to work with.

I don’t really know how to do nothing. I don’t meditate or take long walks by the lake. The last few Sundays I’ve been going to Wormhole Coffee and doing one-shot gouaches before my bartending shifts. I expect to tire of this soon. It’s sort of a throwback to a thing I used to do. Like covering an old favorite rather than writing a new song. It’s low stakes. Muscle memory more than anything else.

I’ve laid out a book surveying my paintings and drawings the last thirty years. I need to write short essays to go with each section, then think about how to publish it. Considering the mess with my current printer, more research will be required. I’m not all the way in it yet. Hoping that something else will hook me. The prospect of sitting on a dozen more boxes of books very few people want isn’t so attractive.

A couple days ago I ripped out half the pages from a young adult book and started collaging in my personal detritus. So there’s that. I’m reading the epic new Lou Reed bio.

The near future is cloudy but I’m okay with that. Something will present itself demanding my engagement. It always does.

Listen to The Story of RR 1: Against the Wind. Then Mallory and I get lost in The Fog.

I thought after eight years it would be different. That I’d changed or maybe something changed but nothing has. That’s not entirely true; it’s much worse than I remember it being.

It started sometime in July in the run-up to my Firecat show. I noticed that the gallery’s Instagram hadn’t been updated several months so I asked Stan for the login and said I’d try my hand at it. I updated the links in the bio and otherwise tidied up, then began posting. It went okay. At first.

A week or two in I started feeling that old itchy feeling. I started logging in even when I wasn’t posting anything. Looking around. I’d never cared much for Instagram in the old days; it was the methadone to Twitter’s heroin. Awkward and not user-friendly. All the evasive action necessary just to share a link to anything outside the Zuckerverse.

It’s ten times worse now. Flashing ads, autostart videos, the whole thing feels like a desperate discount mall. Everyone screaming from their virtual kiosk to LOOK LOOK LOOOOOK. But it hooked me once again.

I signed up for my own account ahead of the Buena Vista show. In the more rational moments, I justified it as the price of doing business, as everyone always says of social media; they all claim to hate it but insist it’s a necessary evil.

Soon I was spending hours editing images to suit the platform.

I’m one of those unfortunate types who can’t do much casually; I’m either in or out, off or on. Now that I was back on social media, it was a serious chunk of my life and consciousness. The trouble was the more effort I put in, the worse it felt.

The envy and jealousy are baked into the algorithm. The irritation and lack of patience as well. I found myself culling my ‘following’ list almost as soon as I’d created it. The playacting of friendship and support on the platform was making me nauseous so I found myself ‘deleting’ people I was actually friends with in real life. Nothing about this felt right.

Everyone that uses these services knows the score. They know they must perform their lives in photos and videos in such a way that both strangers and loved ones will want to be or to have what they have. No matter the level of irony or cynicism with which it’s done, it’s still a sales job and whatever the venue, I’m just a piss-poor salesman.

Even when I did a good job——a bunch of friends said they enjoyed what I put up——it felt hollow and terrible to be doing it.

But the bottom line was the bottom line. The only reason I went on Instagram was to make money and it wasn’t happening. After nearly two months, I’d sold only one picture and didn’t get a single additional subscriber to my newsletter.

On my last long bike ride back from Buena Vista on a windswept Saturday evening I decided to pull the plug. Within hours of deleting my account the itchy feeling began to subside.

Now I’m back to my tranquil easy-going self.

Guess this constitutes a happy ending to last week’s letter, though, of course, artists don’t get a cut of work sold at auction.

The Story of RR 1 continues and Mallory returns from Egypt to talk about two Nosferatus.