Letter

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.)

So, the book’s done. I’m waiting for the printer to get back to me with an estimate. I decided it would be a paperback so I can start with fewer copies and have a full-color jacket. It was fun to apply what I’ve been doing the last couple years with collage to this thing.

I’d hoped to maybe have another press put this one out, but I don’t wanna wait anymore and have this bottleneck the projects coming after it. I know from past experience that cleaning the slate as best I can makes new things come out better. I can work on many things at once so long as they’re in different lanes. A painting, a couple collages, a pet portrait, a book review, and a book don’t get in one another’s way. But a finished book not out in the world is like a putt-putt driver in the passing lane.

So I gotta get this grandma out of the way for the greater good. To that end, I’m selling the cover art work. Only one of these, so act now, as the infomercials say. 

—Go see Frank Spidale’s show at Firecat. Buy the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame’s anthology of Chicago poetry (to which Frank and I contributed art) and come see my show at the Rainbo Club this Sunday.

Math’s not my strongsuit. I forget when things happened. What came before what. It hurts my head to trace a timeline and even when I go through and painstakingly reconstruct one, I get parts wrong a lot of the time. All that said, I know for sure that the collage show I’m putting up Sunday, June 19th marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of my first show at the Rainbo Club.

It won’t be the twenty-fifth show, I missed a few years, and, as stated, math is a problem, but if I were to guess, I’d say it could be the twentieth. The first, in the fall of 1997, was in the display cases on the Damen Avenue wall, where the windows would be. I don’t recall what I put up. Probably gouaches and sumi ink paintings of my apartment on Claremont. I was all about interiors then. Maybe a couple views out the windows. I suppose I should’ve kept a ledger with details like that. Sales too. To this day, I don’t note who I sell what to.

I didn’t make postcards for half the shows either. The first six years that would’ve likely been the only material record or evidence that the shows took place as I didn’t learn to even turn on a computer until late into 2003.

After that I posted details on MySpace and the succession of fly-by-night/crash-and-burn art sites. Can’t even recall most of their names which is probably for self-preservation—it’s good to forget all the failure, otherwise, moving forward becomes impossible.

I know two of the shows, likely a decade apart, were devoted to bookshelf paintings, which I started making in the late 90s and have returned to periodically ever since. There were three or four portrait shows, many full of cityscapes and roomscapes; one of paintings done at the Rainbo itself.

There was a time when I had expectations of moving on from putting up art in bars. The art world tells you it’s gauche, only for beginners and amateurs. But after every gallery experience blew up in my face, fell short, or otherwise disappointed me, I began to look forward to putting up stuff at the Rainbo and other bars and restaurants.

The thing about having work up at a bar is that people will actually see it. They’re not there to look at it or judge it specifically, but that’s all to the good because this way when they notice something on the wall it’s without any pressure to comment or appreciate; they’re just drinking or trying to get somebody to go home with them, then, when they look away from their quarry a second they see a painting of a bookshelf and become curious.

A bar is a lot closer to a dwelling than a gallery is. Therefore seeing a painting on the wall at the Rainbo is a lot more the way it will look at your place than it does in some antiseptic white cube. Also a lot cheaper for all involved. Since you’re buying that book painting from me rather the bored girlfriend of a hedge-fund manager or child of a millionaire, I will charge you a lot less. I’m not selling prestige or status. Nor am I presenting you with a good way to hide from the tax man; I’m just offering you a picture I made.

I’ve sold a lot of art off the walls of the Rainbo Club over these twenty-five years. Some of the people I sold paintings to have become friends; others I no longer speak to. Artwork can remind people of good times as well as bad. So can places. I know the reason I skipped having shows at Rainbo a few times was because the place reminded me of relationships that went south. I had to stay away for a time to allow the bad feelings to fade.

But I always return. The bar has been a constant in my life the way no personal entanglement can mar for long. I don’t know how much longer the place will be around but I’ll put up art any time they let me.

It’s a home away from home.

If you’re in Chicago on Sunday, June 19th, come by the bar and say hello. I’ll be there 4—8pm. The collages I’ve made the last two years will be on the walls and in the display cases. I’m looking forward to seeing you there.

—You can now listen to the whole thing online before you plunk down your $10 for my tape. Then listen to Mallory and I talk about Only Lovers Left Alive. Then read my short review of Sergei Loznitsa’s Donbass, which isn’t a documentary but may as well be.

—Wednesday morning my talk with novelist and all-around solid literary citizen Tobias Carroll will go up, but in the meantime, listen to the one with Professor Sonia Weiner and catch up with all the episodes before…