Letter

On a hot summer afternoon, I stop at the corner of Archer and Clark, waiting for the light to change. I look down on the sidewalk and see a key, get off my bike, and pick it up.

It’s on a ring with a round label and a door fob. The label says Garofalo above an apartment number and address. The building listed is a couple hundred feet ahead of me on Archer. I ride up. It’s a new apartment house with a vaguely aspirational name, maybe an unnecessary e at the end of one of the words to lend it class and sophistication. No directory by the door, so I use the fob and walk my bike in. I see a woman disappearing into the elevator.

What is my plan here? Before thinking too much about it, I lean the bike against the lobby wall and press the Up button for the elevator. On the fifth floor, it takes me a couple wrong turns before I locate the apartment. I knock but get no response. I have the feeling it’s vacant. Like many of the units may be. The building doesn’t have a lived-in feeling. Maybe it hasn’t been open long.

The other thing I think about is my wallet, which I left in a tote bag on the back rack of my bike. Also, my unlocked bike. Are the few residents of this generic structure trustworthy? Now the empty hallway feels vaguely sinister. What am I doing in here? Am I trespassing? Why didn’t I think about any of this before coming up? I slip the key under the door and go back down.

In the lobby, I run into the woman I saw before and ask whether she knows anyone on the fifth floor. She says she doesn’t but her husband would. I tell her about the key and she says it was so nice of me to do that, then continues through a doorway to the side of the elevator with her basket of laundry.

I check and my wallet is where I left it. I walk the bike out and ride the rest of the way downtown. I’m going to a movie, as I often do, but can’t now recall what it was. 

Less memorable than this random little adventure. 

When news gets too much, I go to the movies. 

I’d heard Marc Maron interview Phil Tippett a month or two back. Never heard of the guy before. He made the creatures in Star Wars, Robocop, so many others. He talked about the movie he’d worked on for thirty years. He funded it with all the mainstream stuff. Got students to do the grunt work. Put it away awhile, then start up again. Now it’s ready.

I see it at the Music Box on a Monday afternoon.

Jesus Christ. If this is the last movie ever made it would be a fitting coda for our dying civilization. There are echoes of Svankmajer, the Brothers Quay, Jiri Trnka, and Lynch’s Eraserhead, but it has its own frequency. The thirty years’ labor shows. As the nameless soldiers descend subfloor through subfloor to worse and worse levels of hell, it’s not unlike tree rounds, time-travel through sediment. But are they going into the past or future? There’s no talking or titles to help the viewer along. Each has to navigate this apocalypse on their own.

The only recognizable human on screen is the great director Alex Cox—go see Repo Man, Sid & Nancy, Highway Patrolman, and Walker, if you don’t know his movies. He was in town for a screening of Walker a few years back and I made a sketch. That was at the Music Box too. In Mad God, he’s a sort of evil scientist, sending the poor toy/automoton soldiers into the depths on incomprehensible suicide missions. Perfect ironic casting to make a guy whose whole career’s about championing the powerless and oppressed a despotic monster.

Watching this thing is sort of like if Bosch and Arcimboldo and Grünewald got together and made a movie. You can almost smell the bodily fluids dribbling out of these nightmarish creatures as they’re beheaded, quartered, and snuffed out in ways few ever imagined. It would all be impossibly grim if it weren’t so obvious how much joy and care went into making this thing go. In any case, reading a news headline these days is so much darker and more hopeless than anything in Tippett’s universe.

Afterwards, I decide to stay because they’re showing Lawrence of Arabia in 70mm. The last time I saw it was almost thirty-five years ago at the Coolidge. I remember my coworker, John Kumpf, put up mind altering 70mm stereo on the marquee. I went out there after he was done and took a picture. I enjoy those widescreen shots of the desert and appreciate the over-the-top homoeroticism, but an hour or so is enough. Alec Guinness’s blue-eyed Prince Faisal is very silly. This weirdly nostalgic colonialist fantasy is too close to this country’s current backwards dream for me to sit through and enjoy. If movies are for escape, this is not any kind of way out. 

Tippett’s lumpy, oozing phantasmagoria is a lot more comforting.

—This Wednesday a talk with Half Letter Press/Public Collectors impresario, Marc Fischer, goes up. In the meantime, listen to the one with Lindsay Hunter or a bunch of others.

—There’s a new collage book for sale and many others up to look at at the Rainbo Club through July 23rd.

They say those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. But what if you’re asked to? Even offered money to?

In a near repeat of a call from a few years ago, my father asks for a copy of an old painting. This time it isn’t for him but as a gift. The original watercolor hangs in my parents’ vestibule. A close friend wants it for her new home but they don’t want to part with it. So my father hits upon this solution.

Does any artist want to copy themselves? It’s a bizarre experience. I have no time machine. There’s no going back. I skip so many steps trying to approximate old marks. The thing that animates the original is a view I have no access to. It’s nearly twenty years ago. I can tell it was winter and sunny. Fresh snow covers cars. Within hours it will melt or grey from passing exhaust pipes and salt trucks. I had to work fast to catch these pristine moments. It’s late June as I make my copy. I’m three homes removed from this view. How can I even pretend to inhabit this picture again?

But will the woman care about any of this when the painting hangs in her new home? How closely will she compare her painting with the one at my parents’ place? Is it because they have it that she wanted it? Will having a different but similar one suffice?

I finish it and put it in a frame. In a few weeks I’ll pack it into a rented car and drive east to celebrate my parents’ combined 150th birthday. They will take it and give it to their friend.

Chances are, I’ll never hear anything about it again.