Happenings in the press

BOOOOOOOM just put up a little interview with me on their site and they managed to make my book look very attractive. I think I might start requiring people to gather a nice rock, some tea and a bit of crochet before reading my work. Also there has to be a bit of sun coming in the window. How good does that look? Damn. They are also giving away a couple of copies of the book to people who leave a favorite poem in the comments section. I managed to shout out some favorite people in Chicago and elsewhere, and work in a little thing about how Benjamin Franklin supposedly had to be naked to get any writing done.

Ratko Ikic

On Saturday morning I had breakfast with Nick and Nadine of Sonnenzimmer. Afterward, on the way South to CAKE we were distracted by a row of huge, colorful paintings leaning up against a wrought iron fence on Ashland avenue. We immediately pulled over for a better look and ended up talking to the artist, Ratko Ikic. He didn't have much English and none of us speak... Bosnian? So very little was really communicated (he has a book of English Castles that he references... and that's about all I got). These are a few of the paintings. They are kind of stunning.

Clearly he's self taught, I'm guessing he came to painting late in life. But they really had a pretty amazing, idiosyncratic sense of mood and light and color. And the guy is ambitious. They were big. And there were a lot of them. It was pretty amazing in about six different ways at once.

That's him in the cowboy hat. He's got a gallery/studio at 4036 N Ashland. Go knock on his door if you're curious. He might actually try to give you one.

The End: Outtakes and Curiosities

Apropos of the release of The End  this week, below are a few outtakes and curiosities from the book, beginning with the layout 'map' of post-its that I used in the last few weeks to keep the overall sequence of pieces straight in my mind while moving them around. It can be a bear keeping everything flowing just right – balancing the rhythm and content of the individual pieces with chronology while also keeping two-page spreads on even/odd pages... there is also one 16 page color section (signature) that had to begin on a page number that was divisible by 16 (the pages in red outline mark the beginning of each 16 page signature). Keeping all this straight can be a little crazy-making.

One of the main anchors of the book is the piece solve for x. An early draft of the piece was done originally for a show at Junc in L.A. in 2006, curated by Mark Todd and Esther Pearl Watson. They sent participants a small accordion book to draw in for the show. I used mine to adapt and rework some of the messy venting I was doing in my sketchbooks at the time.

The piece always worked in a way, but felt ever so slightly incomplete, even as I was laying it out for The End #1 later in 2006. It was late in the editing/proofing process for that book that the idea for a parallel algebraic monologue fell in my lap. This is a sheet of corrections to be scanned and inserted, which includes that parallel monologue for the first time. I've always liked how these corrections sheets can become like weird poems all on their own.

One of the main pieces that didn't make it into The End #1 is this piece, You Were Born and So You're Free. Originally I did this as a screenprint in an edition of 120 (I think) on a collection of topographical maps of Cheryl's, though it also existed as a slide reading, which is closer to how it appears in the new book.

There is one section from The End #1 that I ended up cutting from the new book. A few months after Cheryl's death I went to Europe – Dogs and Water had just come out in French and my publisher brought me to Angouleme to promote it. I extended the free trip to just get away from my life for a bit. My friend Ryan met me in Spain for a week to skate, and I went to Berlin after that to visit my friend Nina. The End #1 had a few pages of sketches and lists from that visit. I included them in The End #1 half as filler and half as a sort of juxtaposition of normality.
The last few images are included to give a sense of how this material existed in my sketchbooks, where it began, and a few of the half-finished fragments that didn't make it in the book for whatever reason (there are many many dozens more pages in that category). Even most of what did make it in was not originally intended for publication, so there are no 'originals' in the usual sense.
Below on the right is a drawing of me and Mike McGinley working brunch at Lula. Which has nothing to do with anything.

In 2007, about a year and a half after Cheryl's death my sister had a son. I wrote a piece for a family gathering in his honor. Later that year I added visuals and it was turned into a six color screen-print in collaboration with Sonnenzimmer, this image is an early version of the idea for that print. It was probably this piece more than any of the others that made me feel like there might be a good reason to publish the material as a whole – finishing the story started in The End #1 – that it might add up to something greater than a well-crafted, but bitter, self-pitying lament. This piece also appears in substantially altered form in the book.

One More Week

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, the painting/drawing collaboration I did with Sonnenzimmer comes down next weekend. You have five days.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

Below are images of some of the finished paintings from my recent collaboration with Sonnenzimmer. In general the process involved the folks at Sonnenzimmer starting the paintings, then handing them off to me to draw on and finish. for the last image in this list, though, the order was reversed. To see an earlier stage of the first one (immediately below) look here. The show is up through July 2.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

Over the last several weeks I have been busily drawing on top of a number of half finished paintings given me by Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi of Sonnenzimmer. The opening reception for the resulting show is being held at Fill In The Blank Gallery this Friday, the 20th of May, from 7-11. above is an unfinished painting, below are details of several more. You can read more about what the hell we were thinking here. The process has been, by turns, a delight, an ordeal, an education... It has turned out to be a vigorous conversation–and at times a vicious internal argument–between abstraction and representation, between painting and drawing, and between playfulness and planning. Come listen in. 5038 N Lincoln Avenue in Chicago.

ten by ten

Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi (AKA Sonnenzimmer--I've done posts about them here and here) just did a series of ten posters for Insound's 10x10 series. They are @#$%&x* brilliant. They are up now in Logan Square at Longman & Eagle (best ceiling in the city) and should be available at the Sonnenzimmer and Insound sites if they haven't sold them all already. Eighties Trapper Keeper art made smart, sharp and sublime. I also recommend the Sonnenzimmer blog.