Letter

The book’s off to the printers. I always look forward to this part, when it’s out of my hands. A couple days later I start getting impatient for it to be printed already. It’s like ordering delivery when you’re already hungry. Seems to take forever even though it’s only been 45 minutes.

I don’t know what to expect with this one. I guess I never do, but more so with this one. It’s a more opaque or maybe obscure subject than my other ones. Everybody’s taken a cab, listened to music, and been to a bar at least once. But the average person doesn’t give a flying fuck about the art world. Nor should they. By whatever accident of fate or roll of the dice, I’ve spent my life drawing and painting, so I have to at least pay lip service to the industry, gatekeepers, and self-appointed geniuses of this sphere.

Every kind of endeavor has its share of assholes and blowhards, but few have a higher percentage—against any actual accomplishment or skill—than the art world. It’s a place where all you have to do is announce your ambitions and dreams and a chunk of the audience will accept them as gospel without your having to lift a finger.

So I’ve tried to put together an indirect, somewhat fictionalized but very fractured narrative about some people I had dealings with over the past couple decades in that racket. It’s not a pretty picture and I don’t come out smelling like a rose. I’ve engaged in my share of the horseshit. I feel bad about it sometimes. Other times I decide it’s inevitable. The price of playing the game. A small part of me still has impossible ideals connected to art. I want it to be beautiful and pure. But then people get their grubby paws on it and smudge and grease it up so it’s ugly.

Anyways, if you’re curious about any of this, please preorder my book, buy its cover art, some of the collages within, or a cassette of some excerpts. That’s a lot of goddamn shilling, but that’s what the art world’s all about. It’s a sales job. You could do a lot worse and spend a lot more of your hard-earned money elsewhere. 

Of that I have no doubt.

—A reedited version of the Cézanne show review I wrote here a few weeks ago went up at the Reader, as did my take on a book about the history of the Method.

—Wednesday, my interview with the great writer Lindsay Hunter goes up. In the meantime, listen to the one with guitarist Jonathan van Herik and catch up with some other talks. Many more good ones coming—queued up all the way through September as of right now.

—Talked with Mallory about A Nightmare on Elm Street.

—My show of collages at the Rainbo Club is up through July 23rd. Still happy with it, oddly enough. Hope you can see it.

Listen to Los Bitchos. They’re killer.

I’m not an anxious person. The future doesn’t torment me much. But I obsess over dumb shit like unresponded-to email and USPS tracking that doesn’t update correctly. Then, once a thing is done—no matter how big or little—it disappears from my consciousness.

The last couple months, the most important upcoming thing was my collage show at the Rainbo Club. I dug through my stash of thrift-store frames, laid out dozens of pictures all over the floor and walls of my studio, and pictured the walls and display cases in my mind’s eye, swapping, rotating, and rearranging the show over and over. Because I’ve hung art there for twenty-five years, I can pretty much curate an exhibit virtually, in advance. 

The morning of the hang, I wake early. It’s hours till I can even go get brunch, so I do something I haven’t done in awhile: I start a painting. I’ve made a bunch of sketches of the crap on my studio table. It sits between my armchair and the studio wall, where work-in-progress hangs, so I look at the bottles, jars, brushes, tape rolls, and assorted detritus, a million times a day. More accurately, it’s not that I look at it, but past it or through it. This is exactly how I get the vast majority of my subject-matter. It has to be around and unremarkable a long time before I actually notice and think to maybe draw it. 

The painting goes okay. The main thing it does is get my mind off the task ahead. By the time I’m out the door to go eat, I’ve forgotten I’m hanging a show in a couple hours.

The Zipcar I pick up in Pilsen is all smoked out. Whoever had it before must’ve invited a bunch of their friends to ride all night blowing blunts. They were murder on the Subaru’s brakes too. The poor thing screeches and howls anytime I touch the pedal. But the thirty collages fit no problem once I put the backseats down and that’s all that really matters. The hang itself goes off without a hitch. I’m done in under two hours. Then I return the bruised and battered SUV to Pilsen and pedal back to the bar in Wicker Park.

A bunch of friends show up for the opening and I even sell a couple pieces. It’s all I could’ve hoped for. Now the show can live its own life the next five weeks. I’ll visit from time to time but my part in it is over. It’s good not to have all that work here. Makes me feel lighter. I’m hoping I don’t have to bring much of it back. Every time I bring artwork home after a show feels like failure. Like it didn’t do what it was made to do. 

I finish the painting of the studio clutter over the next couple days. It’s hanging on the studio wall now, just beyond the space and objects depicted in it. I’m thinking about the book that will come out soon, about maybe illustrating a friend’s poem, about the books I have to read and review. Not exactly worried about any of it, just preoccupied. I should be happy about the Rainbo show but I don’t know how to do that. The fact it came off the way I’d designed it to should be more satisfying than it is. But I just go on to the next thing. 

Is that normal? Is it okay? I don’t know any other way to be.

I used to tell people that on my last day I’d crash the cab into a wall and walk away. That didn’t happen. The date—June 23, 2012—had been settled on a couple months back, so a dramatic exit could have been rehearsed and executed. But instead the day turned out to be a sort of summing-up of my nine years of cab driving in Chicago.

It’s been ten years as of this week. Driving a cab changed my life in many ways but I don’t ever want to go back to it. Fortunately or unfortunately, not unlike the Soviet Union, cabdriving doesn’t exist anymore, so I can’t do it even I wanted to.

I see taxis downtown now and then but it’s rarer and rarer. Could probably play Punch Buggy with them and make a competitive game of it. They’re going extinct and deserve to. It’s an industry from a different era. Like kerosene lamps or public payphones. I don’t want them except in period piece art.

I ride everywhere on my bike now. Even the suburbs sometimes. I only drive to visit family or friends in other cities or when I have to hang an art show or buy something big. It’s not a part of my daily reality. I perceive cars as obstacles and threats now. In the ecosystem of the road I’ve became a smaller, more vulnerable species. I’m not surprised by this but back when I was a cabdriver it was a position hard to imagine.

Because I don’t use a smartphone, I very rarely use rideshare. The times I have, the lingering impression is a combination of embarassment and pity. Rideshare drivers are the barely-competent meatbag components of the evolving automated transport system. They’re the weak link in the chain. They don’t know how to operate their vehicles or navigate the terrain. It’s not their fault, the system is designed to render them useless. Their cyber ghost replacements can’t come soon enough.

I ride regularly past the last Yellow Cab garage I rented from. It’s now a Lyft driver center. There are cheerful graffiti murals on the outer walls and nary a broken wreck to be seen. Very few vehicles are parked in the lot and I’ve never seen a soul enter or exit the building. It’s like a stage set. But for what?

The cars—every make and model, old or new—regularly block the bike path as they pick up and drop off passengers. They’re mutating. They have neon signs and video billboard toplights now. They’re becoming taxis even as their nominal operators will never be taxi drivers.

Eleven years ago, when my first book came out, my friend John optioned it hoping to make a movie. That hasn’t happened and might never happen. If it does, it will be a period piece. Will audiences even understand what they’re looking at? My friend Mallory, who’s in her early thirties, doesn’t know how to hail a cab. Returning from a trip out of town and unable to find an Uber at O’Hare, she didn’t even know where to find a taxi. They’re a relic of another time.

If you want to know what cabdriving was like, watch John’s short film of my last day behind the wheel or buy my book.

—Wednesday my talk with guitarist Jonathan van Herik (Disappears, FACS, Boas) will go up. In the meantime, listen to the one with Tobias Carroll or a couple dozen others.

—I reviewed a pretty good play (set, in honor of my anniversary, in a rideshare) and a pretty bad movie (not set anywhere real.)