Letter

I wish podcasts weren’t called podcasts. I like them very much otherwise. I’ve been fooling around with the medium the past four years, but in the last few weeks something changed and I decided to focus on it ‘for real’. What that means on a practical level is finding a program that records audio conversations remotely without the horrible video component and lousy sound quality of the ubiquitous conferencing apps, investing in a new mic, and inviting writers and artists to test their patience for technical incompetence by talking to me through the screen.

I’ve recorded three long talks so far, with varied success. The first took three tries. We spoke for an hour and a half the first time. I thought it went great. Then, when I played back the audio, I could only hear my voice, with long pauses in between, where my guest used to be. It reminded me of Garfield Minus Garfield. During our second attempt, there was equipment failure on his end; the third time was the charm. There were still hours of watching tutorials and banging my head against virtual compressors, faders, gains, and echoes, but in the end, I had a conversation that I think a few people will be interested in hearing.

Just as I’ve refocused on podcasts, Substack—which also hosts my newsletter—began to have a glitch where audio wouldn’t upload. It went on for days, and, because they have virtually no customer service, I decided to move my podcast elsewhere. Then, as so often happens in my life, I started pulling on that thread of dissatisfaction, and decided to move the newsletter as well. It’s never sat well with me that they pay already successful/famous people to write letters. Feels like a fancy tech-bro era infomercial. That’s not my scene. The audio glitch was the proverbial straw that pushed my frustrations with the company over the camel’s broken back and off a cliff.

The last time I did this was November 2020. It was a colossal amount of tedious busy work. Took me about a week to push, pull, lurch, and haul a five-year archive across town to the new digs. It worked pretty well for awhile. I made a little money and clarified as time went on what the purpose of the whole newsletter project has been. It’s a kind of episodic public diary and sketchbook, to be plundered for more coherent expression later in other forms. It’s been a valuable if sometimes grueling exercise. I would have never guessed I could crank out two a week for so long. Now it’s become a matter of pride and expectation to maintain the pace and routine. I expect I’ll slip at some point, but it won’t be for lack of effort.

I hope to post podcasts more regularly than I have up to now. I’m relaunching the show on a new platform. I’m not sure yet how frequently episodes will be published but will do my best to keep you apprised in this newsletter. Please subscribe there if you like what you hear. The first episode features a talk with my favorite living writer, Lucy Sante. In the second, I talk to Chicago painter Frank Spidale, who is one of my oldest friends. Talks with more painters, musicians, and writers will follow. I’ve also reedited episodes from the old version of the show into something that is hopefully more coherent. Scroll through the archive if you’re curious.

These talks will be an extension or expansion of the newsletter project, in a way. I don’t expect to become Terry Gross or Marc Maron. I remain a painter, first, second, and third. But these recordings are another way to connect, for someone who has such a hard time doing so.

Stay tuned.

[Mallory and I continue talking classics. George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead this time.]

[Does your bookshelf need an art show? I’ve got something for that. Save wallspace by getting either one or the other of the two collage books I put up for sale.]

[A few of my favorite podcasts: WTF w/Marc Maron, Know Your Enemy, Gift Horse, Virtual Memories, You Must Remember This, Drifter’s Sympathy.]

I’ve missed looking at people’s faces these past couple years. It drove me to draw them off TV freeze-frames, that’s how much I’ve missed them. Sitting or standing in some public place and surreptitiously drawing strangers is one my main occupations in life. So for two years I’ve been underemployed, so to speak.

I’m doing my best the past few weeks to make up for that lost time. I’ve doodled at bars, coffee shops, and concerts. All the places I used to go before the plague closed them. It’s like a renewal.

It feels good to once again be antisocial in public. To be with but apart. That’s my comfort zone. The sketchbook is both a way to connect with and protect myself from other people, as well as our shared surroundings. I think maybe the word I’m looking for is liminal. Never used that one before. Maybe that’s not what I mean. Times like this I’m reminded that I’m just a dumb painter.

I’ve drawn enough lately to finish one sketchbook and start another. Cracking open a blank book is like the changing of the seasons. The added wrinkle this time is that it’s a different brand. Different paper, very different feel. I almost have to relearn how to draw to accommodate it.

Feels right in view of all the other upheavals, no matter how minor a change it may sound like to you.

Music gear takes up most of a makeshift stage in what is usually the audience area in the middle of the floor at Thalia Hall. I’m early like always, but because it’s an all-ages show, there are a few eager adolescents milling about. This is one of the times when being ‘the old guy at the show’, a thing I’ve been for well over twenty years, may as well be broadcast via blinding neon light. I almost didn’t come. Not because of the being old thing.

I hate buying tickets in advance because I never know what mood I’ll be in day of. I’ve arrived at venues, looked around, then left before a single note was played more times than I can count. I wish there was some way to game it out but there isn’t. I fight myself over this one all day. Glad I made myself go after all.

Lightning Bolt played one of the loudest shows I’ve ever experienced at the Empty Bottle ten or fifteen years back. My hearing’s fucked from way back because I never wore earplugs over decades of earsplitting music. I have periodic but persistent ringing in one or both ears, but I don’t really care. I love being in the room where the sounds are being made so much that the damage is more than worth it. But Lightning Bolt that night was a lot even for me. I was pinned against the window, as far from the stage as you could be while still being inside, but it was like a jackhammer inside my skull.

Thalia Hall is many times bigger than the Bottle so I hope the volume of the band will disperse and spread in a more traditionally enjoyable manner. I don’t mind getting beat up a little, but, please, take breaks, and let me remain on my feet.

The old theater begins to fill up as the opener climbs up onto the makeshift stage. He’s a very fat bearded man from Nebraska who makes house music with words almost exclusively about his Pekinese dogs. Before hitting the electronics for the first beats, he takes off his button-up shirt and swaps it for a tee specially printed with his face on both front and back so that the audience on both sides of the stage can have eye contact. I run into him later at the merch table and he gives me a CD for free because he likes the German Shepherds on my t-shirt.

The Lightning Bolt set is a thing of beauty. Overlapping riffs and drum fills vibrate and waft up toward the rafters. It’s very loud, but the big softens and almost shapes the sounds as they disperse. I watch most of it from the balcony, then go downstairs for the last couple numbers. I can’t see the band, just the dark roiling mass silhouette of people with the occasional crowd surfer interrupting the headlight-like strobes panning the room off a vacant stage.

I forget about being the old guy. I forget almost everything. This is what music is for.

[I wrote up a theater piece of old people telling sex stories and distweeted the Oscars.]