Letter

I’m sitting in the basement of a suburban home. Outside there’s a snowstorm but I can’t see it through the frosted windows. I’m here a couple days, then I’m driving west. The reason is that today or tomorrow construction workers will rip a hole through the wall above my kitchen sink to get at the nerve center of the house’s plumbing. If all goes well, I’ll be back home ten days from today.

The contractors hadn’t decided whether they’d go in through the bathroom or the kitchen, so I took down everything off the intended walls on both sides. Dish rack, mirror, shelf of coffee cups, paintings, drawings, and many many pushpins and nails. It’s strange to remove these things that together help make up my daily environment. Disconcerting. I wait until the very last day so I won’t have to live with those stripped walls.

I pack all I think I’ll need into a rolling suitcase and a couple courier bags, give the contractor my house key, ask her half-jokingly to leave the place somewhat the way they found it, and leave. I kill some time at the coffeeshop, hoping to get some work done but feel too unsettled to do much but answer a couple emails.

I take the bus to a favorite old breakfast spot by the train station but find it closed. The plague has changed the working hours of everything. Get a sandwich instead, then catch the Metra. It’s five hours before my friend will be home to let me in the house where I’ll be crashing.

A cold rain is falling when I get off the train. A precursor of the storm which will close everthing the next day. I thought there was a coffeeshop nearby, but either it has closed or I’ve misremembered. I catch a bus northbound till I spot a Starbucks. Never been a fan but itinerants can’t be fussy. This one is clearly configured for carryout service, though there are a few uncomfortable spots to sit. I order a tea and spread out all my crap for a couple hours.

Since I can’t seem to concentrate enough to work, I decide to search for something to listen to on my upcoming trip. I settle on Caro’s The Power Broker. Sixty-six hours of audio. That will do. The download itself takes over half an hour.

I check the directions to my friend’s house and start walking. The sidewalks are lousy and often flooded, so I walk in the roadway half the time. I keep switching arms but there’s no comfortable way to roll the suitcase.

My friend’s town was laid out by Frederick Law Olmstead, the father of city parks in America. He conceived of this town as some kind of enchanted village. For me, the enchantment consists of getting lost every time I visit. It’s one of the few places in the vicinity where Chicago’s beautiful grid completely breaks down. It’s no accident, since Olmstead is from Boston, where streets all started as meandering cowpaths.

I curse Olmstead the entire hour and a half it takes me to find the house. But the next day the ordeal is mostly forgotten. Now I’m grateful to have shelter and try not to think of the workers who are currently wrecking my home.

I miss it even though I’ve only been gone twenty-four hours.

I tell Kevin I lived in Logan Square ‘92 to ‘93. He says he can beat me: he was there a decade earlier. No matter how far back you go, how old-school you take yourself to be, someone will turn up who’s even originaler and authenticker than you. I bet whatever lungfish crawled out of the sea and decided to take a walk had some more ancient monster calling it a poseur.

In Logan Square in 1992 there were no ersatz bistros or repurposed boutiques. There were a half dozen all-you-can-eat Polish buffets, a bunch of taquerias, and shitty old Johnnie’s Snack Shop. If you wanted to put on airs, you went to Abril. There, you’d get your tacos served at a table with a tablecloth.

There was no bar where you could order an overpriced Manhattan inside the Logan Theatre. But you could pay $2 to see some shit Hollywood flick that had been out for a couple months. One of three or four creepy older men in mustard-colored sportcoats tore your tickets and also made change for the concession girl if you handed her a $20. They asked you to take off your baseball cap so it wouldn’t be mistaken for gang colors.

We lived right on the boulevard. The rent was cheap and it was quiet but I’m not nostalgic for that time. I never long to go back. I wonder whether that guy thirty years ago could conceive of his future self living six-seven miles south in the very same city. I can’t recall what that guy thought about.

One of the privileges of staying in a place a long time is tracking the changes. It would be odd if Logan Square stayed just the way it was. The current residents would laugh at the notion of Abril as upscale or chic or whatever they’re looking for in an eatery. In that same storefront right now is a wood-fired pizza joint and an expensive wine bar. If I went in and asked about Abril, I doubt the owners of those establishments will have heard of it. Maybe there’s no reason they should have. Their job is to sell you a good evening, not to be amateur archaeologists.

I have two paintings hanging at the expensive wine bar. I go there from time to time but feel little connection to either that establishment or the neighborhood it sits in. There are certain kinds of time-travel that yield diminishing returns. Not that I’m trying to relive old times when I arrive at Milwaukee and Kedzie.

It’s possible for new memories to supplant old ones in relation to familiar places, but for me, Logan Square will forever be stuck in the early 90s. I saw a shitty new movie at the Logan Theatre a few weeks back and all I could think about was those old men in their mustard-colored jackets. Where are they now? Most will be dead and gone.

When people talk about how it used to be it’s often really about how they used to be. Usually, they see whatever time or place they’re talking about as better than the present. I’m lucky in that I still haven’t gotten to the point of looking back fondly.

I’m glad the neighborhoods I used to live in aren’t preserved in amber. I’m not there anymore and they must become something different and when I visit I hope not to recognize them.

[There’s a new print from a collage and a video shot at my show and a talk about Keanu’s not-so-excellent adventure.]

[Compound Yellow (where my collage show was) is having a fundraiser. You can bid on a few of my pieces and a bunch of other work. They’re good people and deserve the chance to keep going. Help out if you can.]

About the time Jackson Pollock was breaking the ice by dripping and dribbling skeins of house paint over cotton duck tarpaulins on the floor of some barn on Long Island, millions of suburbanites could produce their very own masterpieces in minutes thanks to the miracle of step-by-step instruction. The Craft Master paint kit box tops proclaimed, “A BEAUTIFUL OIL PAINTING THE FIRST TIME YOU TRY.” Craft Master popularized paint-by-numbers in the early 50s.

Per the Paint By Number Museum: “Who is the most exhibited artist in the world? The work of paint by number designer Dan Robbins has been displayed on more walls than that of any other artist. This was true in the past, is still true today and is most likely a record that will stand in the future.”

As the New York Times notes: “In appealing to adults, they are marketed as ways to relax and shut down the brain.”

A few years earlier, Jon Gnagy broke a different sort of ice by going on TV and convincing viewers that that they were the artist. Every week he showed them how. He flamed out after a while, but others picked up his set of magic brushes and added their own accessories to make untold fortunes. All guys like Carey and Orso do is follow a well-trod path. Everyone who’s ever gotten into the art racket has quickly come up against the sobering fact that laboring away in some dingy garret for decades in the hopes of being discovered is a dream left only for the most romantic of fools.

Every new media innovation has pushed painting further and further up into the dusty attic. The only way to cut through the noise is to find the newest loudest megaphone and screech away as long as your lungs hold out.

Every man a Rembrandt, the ad copy promises and why would it lie?