Letter

This is what happened the first and only time I went to Pitchfork Music Festival.

I don’t like music outside or crowds or summer. I never have. There are usually a couple bands I’m interested in, but not enough to wait through ten I don’t care about while roasting in July misery in a sea of people I don’t know but dislike on principle.

So why am I subjecting myself to it again? A couple reasons. One is that the way I lost my cool seven years ago has been eating at me this whole time. I don’t like that I couldn’t suck it up and take it. The stakes were so low. Maybe that made it easier to flake out and disappoint people who’d been generous and invited me to take part in their thing. Those people won’t be there this time, but maybe if I make it through, it’ll right the karmic imbalance a little. Two is that I have a lot of crap I’d like to get rid of. Books, art, etc. It’s sitting here gathering dust. Because I have no publisher, label, agent, manager, not even an unpaid intern, it’s on me to move this crap out.

I did Renegade Craft Fair once before. It was inside at the Bridgeport Art Center, just up the street from my place. I made a bunch of money and even scored some future commissions but it was sort of overwhelming. I was glad to have the table between myself and the endless slow-moving throng of humanity. After two days I was completely spent. I told myself I wouldn’t do it again. Thought there must be some better way to make money.

In the years since, I’ve found a few new rackets, but the art and books keep piling up, so I’m returning to the fair to hock my wares. I can’t pitch a fit and stomp out this time because I paid for a spot and don’t like repeating myself. Who knows if I’ll enjoy it at all; I’m just gonna try to survive. Hopefully I can hear Spiritualized and Low and Dry Cleaning from where I sit. Jeff Parker too. Good chance I’ll see a lot of people I know. Several friends have worked Pitchfork for years. Trying to be upbeat which doesn’t come natural. If it goes bad, at least I’m secure in the knowledge I did it to myself. No one asked me to be there so there’s no one else to blame.

Friday through Sunday, I have a table at the Renegade Craft Pop-Up. I’ll bring books, prints, bookmarks, maybe a few drawings and collages. I’ll offer to draw pets of most species. Even human.

Perhaps I’ll even see you there.

—Been listening to Daniel Villarreal’s Panamá 77 a lot. Loved his set at Thalia too.

—Wrote about Olivier Assayas’ cool new Irma Vep series and Lucy Sante’s book on how NYC got drinking water.

—Due to popular demand, my show at Rainbo will run through July 30th, so you can go back and see it for a third or fourth time, and maybe consider choosing a piece to decorate your home or office.

—I read some stuff by Denis Johnson into a microphone. Wednesday I talk to music writer Leor Galil. In the meantime, listen to the one with Marc Fischer or some others. Also, I finally found a horror movie Mallory doesn’t like!

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.