Letter

Daniel Knox put on a David Lynch retrospective at the Music Box last week. I was just gonna see Lost Highway, but I got done with work early, so I decided to catch Eraserhead as well. Lynch’s movies have been with me nearly forty years. My memory for dates is suspect but I’m pretty sure I saw Dune in the theater in 1984. Whether I saw Eraserhead or Elephant Man before, I can’t say. The thing is time goes haywire in all his movies, so a linear chronology’s kind of pointless anyway. Better to peg his movies to biography.

True art will change with you. Whenever I first saw Eraserhead, it was too soon. I know it scared me. But as a teenager I had no inkling what it was about. As I aged and had experiences with others, the movie came into sharper and sharper focus. Last week at the Music Box, it struck me as much funnier than I remembered it. Also, note-perfect in the way it showed bedtime for a couple about to break up as a kind of battlefield.

Daniel Knox came into my life a little later than Lynch. He was the opener for my friend, Azita, at the Hideout sometime around 2007. He was a big man who sat at the piano and belted out twisted tunes in a booming baritone. I found out soon after that he was a projectionist at the Music Box. We became sort of friends. Sort of, because Daniel held people at arm’s length. Yet, for whatever reason, he respected my work, and thus considered me worthy of his acquaintance. He liked to let me into the movies for free. We’d chat in the lobby of the theater. He was always good for an odd ugly anecdote about a nasty neighbor or a detailed description of whatever dead crushed animal he happened upon in his nocturnal wanderings about the city.

I remember sitting at the Harvard Square Theatre in 1986 next to a woman having a full-on panic attack as Blue Velvetrolled. I loved every second. Later, when it was released on VHS, I stayed home sick from school one day and watched it three times in a row, back to back.

Daniel kept working at the Music Box, but his star slowly rose. I’d catch him whenever he performed in town. His records became more accomplished, elaborate. He composed a great score for a production of The Glass Menagerie. His girlfriend bought him my first book for Christmas.

David’s movie, Lost Highway, came out on a Friday in March, 1997. I caught a matinee at a theater in Boston, then got into a U-Haul van and drove west to Chicago, to stay for good.

In 2006, David brought his latest, Inland Empire, to the Music Box. He invited Daniel to accompany his presentation before the screening on the theater’s organ. I missed out on tickets but went to see the movie the following afternoon. Then returned the next afternoon to see it again. I bought the DVD and watched another four or five times over the years. It’s David’s crowning achievement, a summation of everything he’s about, and perfect bookend to Eraserhead.

In the late ’90s/early ’00s, my next-door neighbors, Anthony and Lisa, held a Lynch-themed Halloween party. The Log Lady, Laura Palmer, several Lynches, an Audrey, and assorted Dune creatures were there. Several years later, I married a Dorothy Vallens for a short spell; ten years on, I shacked up with a Radiator Lady.

I introduced her to Daniel’s music and she was hooked. After we broke up, he asked her to help him find a new record label after the one he was on went kaput. She wondered aloud why he chose her for the task. When I told a mutual friend about this, she laughed and said they were fucking. It had never even crossed my mind. I hope they both had a good time.

One time, Daniel showed up at the Skylark. I put on one of his records—a thing I often did when recognizing a musician who’d come in. He looked around suspiciously from the table where he was sitting with his friends. Then he trudged up to me and asked whether I was playing a prank on him.

Before Eraserhead on Monday, I spotted Daniel and came up to say hello. He told me he’d recently moved to Portugal—the only country his music is truly appreciated. The theater was packed and he was in his glory.

I soaked it in, thinking back all the while about David, Daniel, and me.

Listen to my playlist on Apple Music.

—I wrote about the Bob Thompson retrospective, one of the best art shows of recent years. Then I talked with Mallory about Silence of the Lambs.]

—Listen to my talk with Adam Gnade posted last Wednesday. I sent out around twenty-five invites to people I wanted to record talks with and almost everyone said yes. This means that, even with a few cancelations, I’ll have a new episode up every Wednesday through the summer. Upcoming guests include Gil Roth, Laura Park, Christian TeBordo, Damian Rogers, Emmett Kelly, Kat Sachs, Scott McClanahan, and many more. I’m pretty excited about it, though there’s a shitload of work ahead to make it happen. Meanwhile, listen to the archive and subscribe wherever you get podcasts to hear new ones as they’re posted. Not sure if I’ll end up adding the whole back catalogue, but who knows?

Please spread the word if you like what you hear. It’s the only way these conversations will be heard and I believe they deserve to be.

I get a curious email from a man named Artis. He’s writing on behalf of the United States Postal Service. It isn’t to ask me to stop harassing the post office about delayed or lost packages, as I would have surmised. He’s inviting me to take part in the unveiling of the first-ever stamp featuring the work of Shel Silverstein. It’s an offer I can’t refuse.

The morning of the ceremony, I wander around a rainy Logan Square, looking for a place to eat. I settle on Lula Cafe. I’ve been going there over twenty years, back to when it was a crummy coffee shop called Logan Beach Cafe. Silverstein may even still have been alive then. Though he was long gone from the neighborhood and Chicago.

Darwin Elementary, where Silverstein was once a student, is a few blocks from Lula. I try every red door and find each locked, until I circle the entire building to the parking lot. There, a sandwich board announces the stamp ceremony. I push a buzzer and go inside. I’m shuttled into a holding area serving as a green room. A spread of Dunkin’ Donuts and cubed fruit sits on a side table for the taking. All us dignitaries are introduced and informed about the schedule of events.

We proceed to the school auditorium stage and take our seats. Our MC, Don Evans, welcomes a very tall and skinny letter carrier to the stage to sing the national anthem. There’s also a color guard, remarks from school and postal officials, and recitals of Silverstein poems by students. Some read confidently, while others are barely audible; one kid is so nervous as he waits his turn that he’s trembling and crying. The principal—who looks young enough to be a student himself—ushers the poor kid off stage before this episode can become a lifelong traumatic memory.

Then Don introduces me. This is more or less what I say:

This new stamp is special to me because stamps were one of my first influences as an artist. A Shel Silverstein stamp is a no-brainer.

Like many of the best writers, Shel Silverstein could share complex ideas with simple words. He knew how not to drone on or overstay his welcome. He didn’t waste time or space when he didn’t have to. This is one of the many reasons why his work continues to be loved by so many of us.

I was seven years old when my family moved to this country from the Soviet Union, so I didn’t grow up with Silverstein’s pictures and words. Those first few years I was just learning the language rather than enjoying its more nimble practitioners. My bedtime stories were in Russian. Nevertheless I was predisposed to appreciate Silverstein’s type of poetry because in the Soviet Union many of the best writers found their only means of expression through children’s literature. His wit, playfulness and melancholy were felt instantly familiar. As if I’d always known them. Like Kharms, Marshak, and so many other writers both here and in the USSR, Silverstein never set out to write for children. He worked for Playboy and wrote raunchy songs for rock bands.

He only turned to art and writing at all once it became clear he wouldn’t be in the starting lineup for his beloved White Sox.

Though he did sell hotdogs at Comiskey for a time.

A few years back, in a bar on the North Side, I heard an essay read out loud offering yet another interpretation of The Giving Tree. I’d be willing to wager that the number of interpretations of that book now outnumber its total word-count.

That’s as telling a tribute to Silverstein’s genius as any. His carefully chosen, precise words continue to inspire millions of readers and will continue to do so as long as there are readers and books.

Silverstein tells us with humor and wisdom what it’s like to be a particular person. To be unlike anyone else. 

I’ll leave with you the man’s own words:

My skin is kind of sort of brownish

Pinkish yellowish white.

My eyes are greyish blueish green,

But I’m told they look orange in the night.

My hair is reddish blondish brown,

But it’s silver when it’s wet.

And all the colors I am inside

Have not been invented yet.

We all sign programs for audience members a few minutes, sitting behind a table hastily set up onstage. I like the little kids passing through who push whatever random paperwork they’re holding at one or another of us. They don’t know what they’re doing there and neither do I.

After that, we reconvene in the green room, where Artis makes us sign more programs, as it turns out, these are so we all have signed programs ourselves. Then each participant is given a framed plaque commemorating the event. I ask Don if he’d take mine so I don’t have to schlep it on the train.

We say our goodbyes and I walk back out into the rain.

Technology’s not my friend. And yet, I’m knee-deep in it all the damn time. How did that happen to a dumb painter? All I’m built to do is smear colors onto flat surfaces, but I spend days battling websites, apps, recording equipment, and whatnot. The past couple weeks, between moving this newsletter and relaunching my podcast, I’ve lost all sense of what it is I’m doing.

Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war…. And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. —Viktor Shklovsky

The trouble is I don’t know how to compartmentalize or pace myself. I dive into the deep end and flail about until I happen onto whatever piss-poor survival tactic is nearest to hand, then go and fuck up something else that was working just fine until I decided for unfathomable reasons that it needed fixing. Don’t ever hire me to do anything you might want to remember in its previous state. I will wreck it and turn it into whatever ragged thing I can manage with my rudimentary “skills”. I’d have fired myself decades ago, but there’s no one else here to do this work.

What’s prompted this current bit of hand-wringing is my laptop going kaput. I plugged it in overnight and it didn’t charge. By the time I recognized there was a problem, it was down to 2%. I took it into the Apple store and the Genius assigned to me futzed with it for over an hour, then threw up his hands and said the problem was above his paygrade and that my laptop would have to be sent in for repairs. I panicked for a moment as I pictured all the tasks I needed to do, that I only know how to do on that machine, being left undone. A few weeks before, like a fool, I traded in my backup laptop for an iPad. I wanted something I could read yet-to-be-printed books on. Also, I wanted to play around with an Apple Pencil, having never attempted to “draw” digitally.

My Genius commiserated with me. He agreed than the iPad is basically a toy. Then he recommended I not waste money on an overpriced Apple keyboard and just get a cheap one from Best Buy. Which is what I did. I’ve been banging my head against the many many limitations of this toy almost-computer ever since. I hate that I’ve come to be so dependent on these damn machines. That when one goes down, I have to relearn everything that’s taken me years to work out. Reminds me of when I was trying to quit smoking. The resentment and spasms are pretty similar. It really is harder and harder to pivot and change as new things come at me. I’ve felt like an old man my whole life, but now that I actually am one, it’s no fucking picnic. I wonder if it was as trying in other eras. They didn’t live as absurdly long as we do, so there may have been less upheaval to contend with. Then again, I picture the man in his horse-drawn buggy cowering as a Model A blows by and figure he didn’t have it so easy either.

Now I’m sitting at Jackalope, manually deleting seven years of posts off Substack like an insane person. Why can’t I just let it be another abandoned site and let it overgrow with the internet digital kudzu? Because the idea of that site sitting there unused won’t let me sleep. I have to either keep working on it or burn it to the ground. 

Am I oversharing? That’s what this soapbox is for, isn’t it? For the past few years, my recurring daydream is to quit the internet altogether. But this is a complete fantasy in the foreseeable future. Virtually all the money I make now comes through a screen, even when the work I’m being paid for is mostly done in meatspace. I’m grateful to everyone who’s stumbled onto my efforts. There would be far fewer such stumblers were it not for the internet.

Once I get my precious laptop back I’ll calm the fuck down. Then some other bee will fly into the bonnet and I’ll freak out about that. It’s what I do.

I like to think of it as my process. 

[I reviewed a fun play set in soon-to-be-shuttered karaoke bar, an awful documentary about Alexey Navalny, and helped introduce the new Shel Silvestein stamp.]