Letter

Thursday night I bring a table, folding chair, and rolling suitcase to Union Park on the Ashland bus. I get a wristband and am let in past security to a large tent set up where the tennis courts usually are. I put out my wares, tape a couple prints to the chainlink fence at the back of my assigned area, then take the bus back home.

It rains hard overnight. Friday morning when I return, the pieces taped to the fence are ruined and the pillow I’d brought to sit on is soaked through. 

I make it through all three days of Pitchfork but don’t hear much music. Aside from trips to the port-o-potty or for food, I stay in the tent. I watch young people walk by. 

I tell a twenty-year-old not to go to college. She looks through all my stuff, then asks if art school is worth it. I tell her higher-ed is a pyramid scheme. She thanks me, then asks my neighbor, who’s selling buttons, about one he’s wearing that says, “Don’t Ask Me About this Button” —What does that mean? She walks away without an answer that satisfied her.

A group of high school boys is very excited about a print of my Silver Jews sketch. They buy the two I have, then another kid comes by and wants one. I promise to print one for him the next day. To my surprise, he’s at my table promptly at noon to fork over his five bucks.

People of all ages ask me to explain the things I’m selling. “What is all this?” I’ve never successfully winnowed it down to an elevator pitch. If they pick up a book, I try to explain what it’s about. They put it back down, puzzled, nod maybe, then walk away. The branding isn’t apparent. The ones who get it, get it. It’s a lot easier to sell a beer than a book.

The fashions are a randomized remix of the last sixty years of American pop culture. An alien familiar with the twentieth century would never be able to tell this time period by what these fair goers wear. The technology’s the giveaway. Every hippie/punk/rave kid has an iPhone.

Saturday afternoon families with young children stroll by as CupcakKe is on the mic telling the crowd if they don’t deep-throat they should go home. My neighbor sells an eight-year-old a Garfield pin that says, “I’m Here For the Gay Sex”. He tells me he now gets by just making pins and selling them on Etsy. Says Morrissey has sent him multiple cease-and-desist letters. He’s proud.

I walk the whole grounds and don’t find a single vendor selling coffee. My old friend Mat, who runs the craft fair with his wife, who started it, scores a cold-brew for me from the VIP tent. All my neighbors are jealous. Helps to have friends in high places. Twenty-five years ago when Mat and I worked at Thai Lagoon on North Avenue, this would not be the future I’d have predicted for either of us.

It was worth it, I guess. I came home with a lot less stuff than I went there with. But it’s hard to smile at people for three days. 

I watch a weird movie about João Gilberto. In it, an obsessed nerd stalks the Brazilian legend around Rio and other places he’s lived. He talks to friends who haven’t seen the man in person in a decade or longer. He’s following in the footsteps of another fanatic who did the same without success, then died an untimely death. I love João’s singing and playing but this movie creeps me out. What do these guys hope will happen when they meet their hero? He’s given them music but that’s not enough.

I think back to 2003. Deborah bought the tickets. We didn’t know we were supposed to bring our own food and wine. In the cafeteria off to the side from the music pavilion, we bought a mediocre overpriced dinner before going to find our seats. The majority of the crowd was on the lawn with elaborate spreads, tasteful blankets, and sturdy folding chairs. The hushed songs of the old man on stage was beside the point. This was rich-people outdoor happy hour. I was a smoker then and the no-tolerance policy—you have to go outside the gate of their hallowed grounds to light up—didn’t endear me to the place. I didn’t feel welcome there and could not see any way I ever would be.

For newlyweds who didn’t really know each other this outing was one of many hurdles we couldn’t clear. Deborah didn’t understand why I hated the place so much and I couldn’t explain it or understand why she didn’t instantly sense how awful it was.

The marriage didn’t last but João’s whispered songs are never far away. In the movie, the singer’s old friends say he’s supernatural. That he knows things without being told. That he will haunt you. Why does he rarely leave his hotel room and refuse to see anyone anymore? 

I knew nothing about João when listening to him in that wealthy suburban venue. The town it’s in was just in the news because of a shooting on the Fourth of July. I don’t know much more about him after watching the movie. Neither does the filmmaker, I’d guess. In the last shot, he puts his ear to a hotel room door as his hero plays on the other side.

I don’t know Portuguese yet his songs move me. How does he do that? It’s best not to know. That word that comes up all the time, saudade, is commonly translated as longing but has to be more than that. It’s some kind of all-over emotional state. Not just a desire for a single person. Other singers sing the songs in the movie but it’s not quite the same. 

It’s no use trying to a capture another’s magic, their secret. Even if João opens his hotel door you will never get what you’re longing for. He’s given you everything he could with his song.

—I talk to the cartoonist Laura Park on Wednesday. In the meantime, listen to the one with Leor Galil or some others.

The only way I learn is by wrecking. Since relaunching my interview podcast a few months back, it’s been one thing after another. I can’t leave well enough alone. After spending long days migrating dozens of episodes going back four years from one hosting platform to another, I didn’t like the layout in the new place, so I made a whole new subsite on my art site dedicated to the show. This meant that every time I recorded a new talk I had to upload audio to two different places and tweak the formatting in each. Totally unnecessary extra busy work that was noticed by no one but me. With good reason.

I tried in vain to automate this process. Watched tutorials and read help forum articles. Either I’m too thick to understand most of the lingo or there are no good answers for what I’m trying to do because no one in their right mind is trying to do it. All I know to do is to keep hammering away at it until I can’t see straight. Then either it gets to a marginally acceptable level, or, more often, I’m just too exhausted to go on and have to accept defeat.

Then these losses eat at me. Sometime last week it dawned on me that there’s no reason for the audio episodes to appear online in two places. The free six months hosting deal was about to expire too, adding an extra motivating factor to egg me on to another bout of coding lunacy. I read a half dozen articles about attaching RSS feeds to websites. I understood perhaps a quarter of the information therein. Many of these articles of course conclude with a pitch to join this or that platform and have them do this grunt work for a lesser or greater fee. I’m trying to use fewer services rather than more, so few of these sources offered satisfying solutions.

I downloaded a plugin that claimed it would relay episodes to Apple, Spotify, and all the other places. But then, when I changed the feed code, all the episodes I’d sent out disappeared. I sat for many hours reformatting posts to work with this new thing. It felt like deja vu all over again. Two talks showed up on Apple out of sequence, but not the other twenty or so. The light was fading outside. I decided to go for a bike ride to clear my head.

It worked. In the short-term, at least. I went to a diner, ordered a Monte Cristo sandwich and read some Denis Johnson. No screens or technical mumbo-jumbo. Just a sandwich and a book. I’d ordered onion rings, got French fries but didn’t complain. Felt good to have someone else make a meaningless mistake after a whole day of making my own.

The next morning, tech support got back to me with a seeming fix for the glitch with the podcast feed. I was so grateful. But by afternoon half the episodes were still missing. I decided not to fixate on it. So many other tasks to attend to rather than an audio program that five people listen to. It’s only a matter of time though till this itch must get scratched bloody once more. 

I know myself. This is how I am. Can’t say I love it, but I more or less understand.