Letter

A guy jumps into my cab near Fenway Park. He keeps looking back where he came from. Tells me to drive.

A couple blocks down the street he directs me to pull into an alley and stop. He gets out, then stoops to feel around behind a light pole in some weeds, pulls out something I can’t make out, then gets back in the cab.

Tells me to drive.

We leave the Fenway, go past the hospitals. He isn’t saying much besides an occasional direction. Left. Right. Straight. Soon we’re in Roxbury. He looks out the window sometimes then drifts off, high or half asleep, I can’t tell which. The meter keeps ticking away.

I haven’t been a cabdriver long enough to get the destination before putting the car in gear. He’s a white guy who looks like he has money so I just keep driving. I know these neighborhoods a bit now and wonder why he wants to go here. Would it have mattered if I’d pointed the cab towards the suburbs rather than the inner city?

We’re deep into Dorchester now. He keeps giving the occasional direction but there’s no rhyme or reason to what he says. Where is he going? It occurs to me that maybe he’s looking for a quiet spot to kill me and take my cab. I rehearse jumping out of a moving vehicle in my mind a few times. It’s been nearly an hour and the meter’s up over thirty bucks.

I tell him he has to tell me where he wants to go. He says to take him back where I picked him up.

We’re by the ballpark again twenty minutes later. He fumbles through his pockets, then hands a bunch of crumpled bills through the pass-through window, thanks me, and gets out of the cab.

This happened in in the mid-90s in Boston. Closest I ever felt to being a dead man. I remember this while watching Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train at the Music Box on a Saturday afternoon. 

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—Vol.1 Brooklyn published an excerpt from the new book. 

—Took nearly three years but Soviet Stamps earned out.

—I reviewed a graphic novel about a community center acting class that takes a turn.

—Listen to my talk with Alicia Martinez, then tune in Wednesday for one with Max Samarov. Mallory, Duncan, Dave, and I talked Halloween.

—Got some new bookmarks for sale.

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Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera played at the Music Box with live accompaniment the other day. I get there early like I always do but can’t sit in the front row like usual because the keyboard player/composer’s rig is set almost against the seats. It looks more like a command module than a musical instrument.

A guy in a leather jacket sits down and place some jazz as people filter in. Then he stands up, turns around, and introduces himself as the composer of the music we’ll be hearing with the silent film.

I spend the next seventy minutes with my mouth open. This was made ninety-three years ago but is still eons ahead of much of what passes for movies these days. How could that be? Is progress or evolution total fiction? Vertov communicates so much without a single word. Now we fill hours and hours with gum-flapping to say very little.

A friend asks the next day how I could enjoy the movie when it was made under the auspices of the USSR and I tell her it’s the same as appreciating religious painting without an ounce of faith. Artists have always have to work under political and ethical restrictions. The Lenin shit flies by lighter and quicker than the recurring streetcars.

The day I write this I read Jean-Luc Godard’s obituary. Godard loved Vertov enough to found a film collective called the Dziga Vertov Group. I love a lot of his movies despite his stupid politics. It’s harder to excuse a wealthy Frenchman idolizing Mao than a naive Jew thinking he’s helping build a workers’ paradise. Less than a decade after Man With a Movie Camera, Vertov was barely allowed to express himself at all, while Godard kept being an apologist for a genocidal monster for an embarassingly long time. 

Still, he was one of the very few filmmakers who kept Vertov’s spirit of innovation alive to the end of his days. He was never satisfied to repeat himself or just push product like most of his contemporaries. I remember being amazed by his 2014 film Goodbye to Language—a 3-D tone poem that I couldn’t begin to describe. It pointed a way forward that no one in mainstream filmmaking has taken up. 

They’re too busy making content.

Thursday a surprise email arrives from the printers. The books are ready a week early. I immediately start to look for a car to rent. All the regular companies can’t accommodate on such short notice unless I’m willing to pay an arm and a leg. I’m not. So I try a site I’d never heard of called Kyte. They promise to deliver a car to my doorstep and pick it back up when I’m done with it. There’s no way I can make it to Saline, Michigan by 4pm EST today so I book the car for Friday.

The online form is mostly by-the-numbers except for the insurance part. They don’t seem to offer any basic liability insurance like every rent-a-car company does. Instead, there’s a blank where you put in your own, without any verification, then move on to the payment page. I hesitate, then type ‘State Farm’ and keep going.

McNaughton & Gunn printed my last four books but I picked them up in Wyoming, Michigan at Dekker Bindery. This time, since it’s a paperback, I’m going straight to the source. It’s a longer drive and I don’t know any weird family restaurants nearby to have my post-pickup lunch in Saline. Also, there are only four boxes rather twenty-plus as before. I listen to “Cat Person” and Other Stories on the way there; Ill Will on the way back.

Back home by mid-afternoon I pack and address preorders while I wait for the Kyte guy to pick up the Jeep SUV that I got instead of the “economy” car I’d booked. After I hand him the keys I get on my bike and pedal to Palette & Chisel to put in an appearance at the cityscape show opening.

Next morning I get on the Archer bus with a rolling suitcase full of books. The driver turns onto Polk as usual, not knowing Dearborn’s blocked for the book fair. I tell him as I get off. Hope he maneuvered his bus down Plymouth Court okay.

This year for some reason they’ve shunted the small press tent off to the outskirts of the fair rather than being in the thick of it on Dearborn as before. I joke with Jason about who he pissed off to get us banished this way. it’s good to have Mallory and Bulent here to shoot the shit with. I cover the table fee in a few hours so the dark feelings mostly keep at bay. It’s still not easy to smile at people for so many hours.

Crazy people come to street fairs. One clearly unhinged character insisted on my signing his petition to get on the ballot for Chicago mayor. I did so only after he bought a book. Quid pro quo. Toward the end of the day I saw Jerry Stahl stalk by, looking like a nervous dying vampire. I ate a couple of slices of pizza and took the bus home.

The forecast for Sunday is hard rain. Who knows how long I’ll last out there under that tent. Maybe I’ll update this letter tonight when I get back home but probably not. I’ll be too spent to write anymore by then.

Read an excerpt from my book at Maudlin House, then get yourself a copy.

—Here are some sketches from Joe Meno’s book launch at Book Cellar in Lincoln Square. His book’s well worth your time.

—Listen to my talk with Keefe Jackson then tune in Wednesday for one with forensics student and former mixologist Alicia Martinez.

—I made a new page for film clips and video ephemera on my site.