Thank You

There is a lot of grace in the exchanging of gratitude. I always wonder whom to thank for the birds, the stars, the sound of my kids laughing, the tree on my street. . .one that every autumn, without fail, turns into this luminous yellow fire, leaf by leaf and for the cool collection of ’70s funk and slow jams on my iPod.

I try not to measure this world by what I don’t have and be grateful for what I do have. Sometimes people will ask me where I want to “take my career” next. The truth is, right here is fine. If you’d have told me 30 years ago that on this day I would have six of my etchings hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago in the same show with David Hockney and Robert Rauschenberg, Alex Katz, and Picasso, I wouldn’t have believed you. It didn’t seem possible. But I got here.

And here is just fine.

A lot of you helped me along the way, and I hope I thanked you. And if I didn’t, then I’m doing it now.

The show is called, “The Artist and the Poet.”

I haven’t gone to see it yet, truth be told I never thought I’d get to hang in this amazing institution in my lifetime–or deathtime for that matter.

Chances are when I roll up on my pieces, I don’t know what will happen. There is a good chance I will bitch-up and start crying. There is also the very good chance I’ll find my effort wanting. Whatever happens, I want to be ready for it.

But for over 30 years I’ve been doing this for a life.

It isn’t a “living,” it’s a life.  And if you’re reading this, chances are, in some way, you helped me get here.  Thank you for walking the miles with me.

Three Aces

One of the best things about Three Aces on Taylor Street is the number of bike clubs that visit and co-exist happily. It’s that kind of joint. It’s a bar where even people who can’t drink anymore can find a comfort level.

Half-Fast, the Boozefighters, the Southside clubs and many others stop in from time to time because it’s motorcycle friendly. The truth is, it is everybody-friendly (unless you’re a chooch). . .unless you’re a mental midget who doesn’t act right.

I’m amazed at the variety of people Three Aces attracts, and I know why.

Anthony Potenzo.

There is no better front of the house guy anywhere. This place has always been what he wanted and he relishes it. I never met a guy more happy to go to work. He is the Toots Shor of Taylor street.

In the summer, the patio is wide open and it is a study in urban sociology– aldermen, models, bikers, actors, tattoo artists, tradesmen, gearheads, writers, and people from the neighborhood mingle and laugh and drink, and for a time, the whole hurting world is on the other side of the fence.

I love this place.

 

Hells Angels

“It’s like this; every baseball player wants to be a Yankee, and every biker wants to be a Hell’s Angel. . .” – Steve Earle

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter–bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”

— Stephen Crane
From The Black Riders

There is a dense mythology that surrounds the Hells Angels. They are mythic–they are barbarians, pirates of the road, killers, bangers and bastards. They are are all of these things, and none of these things at once. The Hells Angels are a beast unto themselves.

One can watch Gimme Shelter and be rightly horrified by the actions of the California Angels, and then one can pull alongside the double-file, miles-long line of Harley Davidsons packed with toys for kids every year and, oddly, be touched by the actions of the Hells Angels. A woman I know in London recently wrote me and said that where she lived, the Angels were more likely involved in charity works than any real criminality. They are the most well-known of motorcycle clubs; the first to be designated as an”outlaw motorcycle gang” by the American Motorcycle Association.

Any reporting or historical information regarding the Angels is bound to be rife with errors and half-truths–even the stories they’ve written about themselves; in fact, especially the stories they’ve written about themselves. they’ve always known not to rat themselves out with inflated braggadocio and to protect themselves from the man.

When they thought Hunter S. Thompson resorted to a little too much embroidering in his fascinating, if flawed, Hells Angels, they warned him. When it persisted, they stomped the shit out of him. The Angels felt like Thompson fictionalized and revealed a bit too much.

Honor. Respect. Loyalty. These are the code words of the Angels, and to be deficient in any one of these traits disqualifies you from the possibility of membership among their number.

The Hells Angels are named for a Bomber squad in WWII some of the original members came from. A bunch of Air Force combat veterans returned from the war only to find themselves without jobs in the aviation field for which they’d been trained. It seems, in many cases, the returning vets’ hearing loss was a mitigating factor in their inability to any longer perform these jobs. Some, disillusioned by this, bought big American motorcycles and leather boots and made nomadic runs between San Bernadino and Oakland in search of day jobs and fun.  The only motorcycle club that pre-dates the Angels is the Booze Fighters, another group of Air Force vets who wanted little to do with the Angels, whom they sensed were a different, more outlaw, breed.

The Booze Fighters are whom the gang in The Wild Ones are based upon, particularly Lee Marvin’s role, “Chino,” who is based on a real-life biker named Wino Willie. After The Wild Ones, both the Angels and the Boozefighters became legendary presences in Southern California, spawning a culture of non-conformity that inspired everyone from other bike clubs to the beatniks.

The leader of the Hells Angels, for as long as I’ve been alive and aware of them, has been Sonny Barger. Barger, a native of Modesto, California, with a long history of delinquency has been the leader of the Angels since 1957. He has remarkable charisma and is resolutely patriotic. Barger once wrote then-President Nixon a letter informing him of the Angels willingness to go and “finish” the Viet Nam war for America. He and fifty Hells Angels.

He also tangled with anti-war protesters, whom he despised for their lack of patriotism. There are some very telling Sonny Barger quotes. Here are a few of them:

“Treat me good, I’ll treat you better; treat me bad, I’ll treat you worse.”

“The greatest thing that I have learned is probably the simplest thing any of us can learn: I am who I am.”

“My most basic credo is: I never said freedom was cheap. And it ain’t. Never will be .It’s been the highest priced and most precious commodity in my life.”

(Referring to Keith Richards during the Altamont Concert in December 1969.) “I stood next to him and stuck my pistol into his side and told him to start playing his guitar or he was dead.”

“If I ever get too old to ride my motorcycle and have pretty girls, I’d rather just rob a bank and go back to prison.”

It is also a credit to Barger’s stewardship of the Angels that he has led them effectively through their decades-long blood feud with the Outlaws, a motorcycle gang formed right here in Illinois in 1936. The Outlaws, for years, did all they could to keep the Angels from opening a Chicago chapter, which inevitably happened in 1994, despite the Outlaws’ president, at the time, blowing up their clubhouse on Grand Avenue. The Angels came here, patched-over the Hells Henchmen and there has been a Chicago chapter of the Angels ever since.

It is very hard to know what to believe of the Hells Angels. Those who hate them will tell you they are savages and animals. Those who revere them will tell you they are the last generation of American men who truly own themselves. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. I do know the the Angels are the original  “One-Percenters”–the one percent that doesn’t fit in and doesn’t care to and, in this cookie-cutter world of conformity, there is no small amount of grace in that.

I’ve known a few Angels over the years, or I should say, I’ve met a few. Except to each other, maybe,they are unknowable. They remain our nomads. . .a culture of men who wish to belong to nothing except themselves and each other.

Chicago Mermaid

 

As proud as I am of my Irish heritage, I will admit that we believe in some pretty goofy shit.

We are fishermen from way back and believe in any number of aquatic phantasms–nymphs, Jenny-Linds, Selkies, sea serpents and many other manifestations of floating apparitions.

Mermaids are the killers though. They are beautiful and imperiled, and many a Mick dipshit has dove overboard to “save” one clinging to a rock only to find that by the time he gets to her after fighting off a rolling sea.she actually looks like Don Knotts with tits.

I decided to make a Chicago Mermaid, a blues girl. Who wouldn’t do you like that. Who wouldn’t hide her beauty.  No. . .she would save you with the blues in shades of blue and green and velvety black.

This one too, is for my pal and fellow Mick, John Manion.

Every Radio In America

Thinking about summer; when one sometimes walks down the street at night and every radio in the world is tuned to the same song. . .magic like that and the Chicago sky and all of its sparkling jewelry. . .

Wint-O-Green Moth (for Etta James)

“All the good ones die or get murdered.  Jesus: murdered.  Martin Luther King: murdered.  John F.Kennedy:  murdered.  John Lennon: murdered.  Malcom X: murdered.
Ronald Reagan? WOUNDED.”–The late, great Bill Hicks on fate.The great Etta James has died. Her baby face and angel’s voice are gone.

The Sun came up.  The mail got delivered and life goes on, but the world is at least one shade more gray.  If her soaring, soulful rendering of “I’d Rather Go Blind” doesn’t break your heart, well. . .you don’t have one.  If  “At Last” doesn’t bring a sad, mournful smile to your face, then you’ve never been in love.

Miss Etta was the real thing. You know it when you hear it. It freezes you in your tracks and makes you stare at the radio. She was only like herself.

Jamesetta Hawkins faced no small amount of turmoil in her 73 years; addiction, obesity, poverty and finally Alzheimer’s and leukemia.  None of it could dim the thousand-watt smile or the spine-tingling contralto.  If one believed in the music of angels, Etta James was their evidence.

Winter has finally showed up in earnest in Chicago.  Nine inches of snow fell and again my fellow Chicagoans are running around with sparks shooting out of their asses, acting as if they’ve never seen the stuff before–driving like retards, putting all manner of shit in the streets in the name of “dibs” wherein, because you shoveled your own car out.  You now take over ownership of that part of the street; a basic “fuck you” to your fellow citizens and taxpayers.

Myself? I LOVE when people put out folding chairs.  I always need folding chairs.  Some of them even put out step stools which, as an artist, I’m always in need of.  I do like when guys with service industry trucks just run this shit over.  Was that your Lego table?  Sorry. Maybe you shouldn’t put shit in the street, asshole.It’s also fun to watch the Ukrainians swing shovels at each other.  Shoveling your walk in my neighborhood is a big deal.  I have my assistants or a couple of wine-soaked Mexican dudes shovel mine and the old Ukrainian ladies down the street a few houses…some of the Ukie’s get pissed at me.

“Why you not shovel your own fucking stoop, Meester Beegshot?  Why somebody else walking your dog and cutting your grass?  You too good for this jobs, huh?” I get this shit from Uli, who has lived here for 30 years and always shoveled his own walk.

I tell him he is right; I’m way to good to be shoveling snow out there with the cabbage-eaters.  Hell, somebody might see me and think I’m. . .Ukrainian!!!!

He laughs and tells me I’d have to have a bigger dick to be Ukrainian.  That the Irish.  . .”They are hung like fucking CASHEWS.  Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.”

Uli is a funny motherfucker who is also not fond of people leaving stuff in the middle of the street.  On occasion he knocks back six or seven shots of Stoli and grabs his aluminum baseball bat and lays waste to some of the crap left out to preserve parking spots.  It is funny as hell because he shouts and swears while he is having batting practice and nobody tries to stop him.I don’t shovel snow for one reason.  Every year, the first time it snows heavily, all over the nation, there are 50-year old guys, red as a monkey’s ass, face-down in snow drifts, dead like a fucking hammer from massive heart attacks.

No thanks, Bunky.I want to die like my grandfather, peacefully, in his sleep. . . not screaming in terror, like his passengers.

It always fascinates me at the reaction.  This is Chicago.  We get an assload of snow every year, but people still drive like morons the first snow of every year.  Without fail, a senior citizen T-bones somebody at a stop street, or drives up on the sidewalk and kills some poor asshole from East Bumfuck, because they confused the brake for the accelerator.  Inevitably kids go “skeeching,” which is when you gab onto the bumper of a CTA or a school bus and slide down the street with it.  This, actually, requires real balls.  I’ve never done it.  There are a myriad of ways to wind up fucked-up or dead from skeeching.

When I was in high school, there was a kid named Tony Rogles who was the most fearless skeecher I ever knew.  He’d mosey up behind the bus and grab on, riding it a quarter mile until it intersected a really busy intersection, where the pavement had been plowed and therefore no good for skeeching.  I remember he’d go skeeching by as I walked to the corner to hitchhike home. He’s have this crazy smile and a Kool hanging out the corner of his mouth.  I don’t remember another thing about Tony Rogles except this.

On winter days, he looked into the icy face winter–and spit in its mouth.

The Hobo Smelt

At the end of March and in early April of every year, the smelts of Lake Michigan decide to kill themselves.  The little fish haul ass from the deeper parts of this treacherous lake and head for the shore.  On the way, they spawn, which means they bust one more nut on their way off this mortal coil.

For a great many generations, working class, immigrant Chicagoans were ready for them. Polish, Greek, Irish, Mexican, Ukrainian and Italians waited on Montrose Harbor and other docks lining the lake with fine mesh smelt nets full of nylon loops in which the smelt would oblige the hungry immigrant by voluntarily hanging themselves.

Every April in Greektown there was a special “smelt plate” featuring a dozen or so of the slimy fuckers, deep-fried and infused with garlic.  There are people who swear by these.  I watched Steve Earle gobble down a plate of these a decade ago and he was truly grateful.

“I love smelts, man.  Greeks make the best ones.”

I reminded him that they caught these in Lake Michigan; the beaches of which were once in a while closed because of “fecal grease balls.”  He just shook his head and said, ” Oh man, quit being a girl.  All of the hoo-ha cooks OUT.  Are you that big of a pussy that you won’t eat a fish out of Lake Michigan?”

I told him I wouldn’t eat Uma Thurman if she came out of Lake Michigan.

My friends Donnie Madia and Paul Kahan own a few wonderful restaurants in Chicago.  Madia is the restauranteur and works the front of the house at Chicago’s Blackbird and Publican; and Kahan is the James Beard Award-winning chef whose food is as much a meditation on American working people’s culinary history, as it is a reinvention of dishes we thought we knew, such as bacon, oysters and pork.  He is as much anthropoligist and historian as he is chef.

One night at their fine pork and oyster house-cum-Belgian beer hall, Publican, the always dapper Madia brought me and my daughter an elegant plate with two very hearty smelt on it.  I was amazed.  I’d never seen such robust examples of the Lake Michigan garbage fish.  they were plump, shiny and meaty as hell.  Madia assured me they were from Lake Michigan and Paul Kahan backed him up .

“The Lake has really come back,  T,” Donnie assured me, “Not every part of Lake Michigan is like. . .ya know. . .Indiana”, he said with a furtive glance over his shoulder.

These were the best smelt I’d ever eaten and, of course, they were–Paul Kahan had made them.  You could toss him a road-killed dachshund  wrapped in a moldy jockstrap and he’d find a way to turn it into haute cuisine.  Hell, one night he fed me duck hearts and I’d have crawled through broken glass for more of them.

For years, smelting was one of those Chicago phenomenons that transcended tribal boundaries.  The Mexicans fished right next to the Ukrainians and Greeks and Blacks.  Everyone was thrilled at each other’s haul.  Cans of Old Style and Schlitz got passed around and inevitably someone would cook up a bunch of smelt in buckets with coals and smear them on Italian bread, or in tortillas with chopped onions and tomatoes.  And you just ate the little bastards–bones and all.  It was a people’s celebration of the coming spring and the new warmth in the air.  One of those ephemeral and regional joys that happened every year without any great expectation or complicated definition.

My father would walk me from one end of a dock to the other and tell me to close my eyes and see how many different languages I could hear.  At the end of the dock he’d point out the North Star and explain to me how the captains of sea vessels would “box the compass” around it.  And under the dock, the smelt were a whir of silvery light. . .indecipherable as the tails of comets.

It is remembering things like this that allow me to hold out hope for this city.  Those moments when we are not at perpetual odds with each other. . .those instances of  community that bind us as  a species instead of a mere collection of ethnic collectives. . . those moments when we look out over that magnificent shimmering lake. . .we all see the same waves, bathed in  the light of our city.

Star For the Yellow Cabs

In mayoral politics, Chicago has a fascinating ongoing narrative.

When I was born, we had a Mayor Daley.  When I graduated grade school, we had a Mayor Daley.
When our country’s bicentennial occurred, we had a Mayor Daley.  The day I got married–19 years ago–we had a Mayor Daley.  I am now 52 years old and guess what?

We still have a Mayor Daley.

Not for much longer though.  Unlike his father, Richard M. Daley has chosen not to die in office.  If you’d have asked me a year ago, I’d have told you that the son, like the father, would have gone out on his shield.

I have complicated feelings for the father and the son; among them, a feeling of great debt, because of both of these men, this city still stands tall among the world’s great cities.  In the 60′s, when Detroit, Cleveland and all of the other rust belt cities were abandoned by their middle class and falling into disrepair and despair, Chicago did not.  We had our period of furious “white flight,” but Daley senior did not lose the industrial and manufacturing base those cities did.  Daley did not lose his city.  He attracted jobs and built and built and built.  Chicago expanded ever outward and upward. While others shrunk and ran for cover, Daley built skyscrapers, bridges, highways and schools.  There were always jobs to be had in Chicago.

Did he allow corruption?   Almost certainly.  The old man was not interested in money much himself; his Achilles heel was power–and he had an immense amount of it for a city mayor–in fact, enough to hand John F. Kennedy the 1960 election.  It seems some Cook County votes were lost  during the long election night (perhaps as much as a truck full).  Oh, well.  Did the Irish cronies he counted among his supporters do well financially?  You bet;  so did the Polish, Lithuanian, Italian, Jewish, Black and Hispanic supporters.  The old man rewarded loyalty and punished disloyalty.  If one got caught, he disowned them.  There is an old saying in Chicago politics: “Pigs get fat.  Hogs get slaughtered.”

If guys got greedy and subsequently caught, the Old Man fed them to the wolves.  Whatever they did, he let them know that God, and more importantly, Daley, had forgotten them.

He was vain, boisterous, patriotic, modest, vindictive, religious, and loyal as a soldier.  And he loved this city.

Other Chicagoans– African Americans chiefly among them–will tell you he was the embodiment of white institutional racism and they would not be wrong.  He lagged far behind other city mayors as far as equal opportunity initiatives went and a great many of my black friends will tell you they believe the Dan Ryan Expressway was built to keep blacks from coming downtown. Still others will point to his membership in the Hambourgs as a young man, an “athletic club” of Irish young men that was known to have participated in the bloody 1919 race riots on Chicago’s Southside, touched off by the murder of a young black man who’d inadvertently crossed the color line at Rainbow  Beach.  One could easily make the case for Daley the Father’s racial insensitivity.  One would  also have to acknowledge the fact that Daley senior was elected six times carrying all of the African American wards every time.  The evidence suggests that the old man was a racist.  I’ve never been so sure of this.  Did he share the unfocused bigotries of men of his generation?  Almost certainly. And let us remember that the old days were awful and bigoted speech was not only winked at, it was expected and it was institutional.  I make no excuses for the old man, but the key word here is old; the zeitgeist moved faster than he could. . .or would.

Was Daley a better man than his times?  Sadly , no.  Chicago was, and in some ways still is, a bastion of racism.  We are still one of the most segregated cities in the world.  One can also not blame Richard J Daley for this.  This was a city of tribes long before he got here.  We almost always soft-pedal this shit.  We say coded and rote things like, “We’re a city of neighborhoods,” which is Chicagoese for, “Stay the fuck out of mine.”

We are not unlike other places; we want to be with our own.

Under Daley the son, the power was distributed differently.  Every group got its own power franchise of sorts.  The son was and is a brilliant tactician and like the father, woefully easy to underestimate, which is a mistake.  He also must be praised for holding this complex, contrary and vindictive place together for better than two decades.  He is slightly more eloquent than his father, who gave us gems like, “I resent the insinuendoes” and “I’m here to preserve the disorder.”  Nobody ever backed ass-first into a sentence like the old man.

Richard M. Daley also saw this city through its storms.  He also had an ugly temper, losing his shit at press conferences, his whole head turning purple.  I love his freakouts.  There were not a lot of them like his Dad, but some of them were choice.  A constituent threatening to sue the city over the snowfall and Daley junior going mental on the guy, “That’s an Act of God.  Whattya gonna do?  You gonna sue God?  Huh?  Huh, smart guy?  Call your lawyer up and sue God.  Sue  God.  Tell me how that goes for you.”

You can’t make shit like this up.

Suffice to say the son didn’t have to preside over as much tumultuous history as the father did, but he fought his battles–believe that–and he won them all.

I think what you can say of the Daleys, father and son, is that for absolute good and despairingly ill, they are and were men of their corrupt, magnificent and transcendent city.

Star for My Black Irish Heart

Almost every year in Chicago, it’s the same story on St. Patrick’s Day–a bunch of drunken, green-wearing slap-dicks spilling out of bars all over the city and projectile-vomiting foamy green puke on everything in sight.

There is an impression that the Irish are a bunch of happy-go-lucky dipshits with fake brogues and cheery dispositions.  Let us dispense with this myth right now.  There is no darker heart than that of the Irish, Boyo.

We gave the world Whitey Bulger, The Westies, Michael Collins and Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, as well as Owney Madden and Legs Diamond–not a bunch to fuck around and try to ‘high-five’ with.  They were all poor kids who had to beat, steal and kill their way to a small piece of the world, and they new well that the “luck of the Irish” was a myth and the cruelest of jokes.

You don’t want the luck of the Irish. Poverty, famine and the oppression of the British Crown are some of the components of this “luck.”  Still, from time to time, our boys managed to get their licks in.

Vincent Coll was an enforcer for both Dutch Schultz and Owney Madden, and both were scared shitless of him.  He was the blackest of the “black Irish,” with dark eyes that never blinked.  Owney Madden, who owned the Cotton Club and the gambling and policy (numbers racket) in Harlem, once asked Coll what it was like to be able to kill a man without so much as a second thought.

Coll looked at him with those unblinking eyes and said “Boyo, it’s like anythin’ really.  A fella’ must love what he does in order to do it well, and I love my work, and I’d do it even if no one ever tossed me a quid.”  It was then Owney’s fear of Coll began in earnest and, over the next few years, tried many times to have Coll murdered.  It wasn’t Madden, but Dutch Schultz’s gang that finally got Mad Dog Coll. . . in a phone booth at 23rd and 8th in New York City, but not before Mr. Coll dispatched at least 50 people off of this mortal coil.

The Irish have been conquered, raped and pillaged by the Spaniards, the English and the Vikings.  Some “luck.”  They still managed to take the language imposed upon them by their conquerors and use it better than they did.  The Irish gave us James Joyce, his secretary Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan and Keats.  We are the best storytellers on the planet.  We endured a famine so atrocious almost a quarter of our countrymen perished while the English raided our surviving potato crops.  Nothing really grows on our boggy pile of rocks (in the North) except grass and potatoes and some scraggy trees.  Our grass is so rich with minerals, we raise the finest thoroughbreds in the world.  Book-making is legal in Ireland and damned near everybody is on the dole.  The best thing though, is that artists pay no taxes.  The place is a knot of contradictions.

We are a combative bunch.  We love our mothers and fear God.  We revere the water and the fairy tales about Selkies and Jenny-Linds.  We believe in luck and are eternal optimists in games of chance.  My father burned at least 10 bucks a day on Lotto tickets and, being a child of the Irish Sweepstakes, always believed he was going to win the big one some day. Three days before he died of skin cancer in 1998, he had me running down to the pharmacy for scratch-offs from the daily game.

We’re full of shit.  We’re the biggest braggarts in the world.  Ours is the sin of Pride.  To this end we produce politicians, especially in my city.  Daley, Burke, Hanrahan, Danaher, Touhy, McGann, Dunne, O’Malley, Durbin, Mell, Finley; these are just a few of the names of politicians who hold or recently held office in Chicago, and I could go on.  They ain’t Swedes.  They are also damn near half of the police force and when I was a kid, they were some brutal motherfuckers.  Some of you are probably old enough to remember the warm embrace the hippies got here in 1968; the tender mercies extended to them in Grant Park while the whole world watched.  In 1996 I ran into a copper I knew at the ’96 Democratic Convention.  He was wearing a T-shirt that read:

“Hi Asshole, I kicked your Dad’s ass 20 years ago — now it’s your turn”

The Irish have a ferocious sense of boundaries.  Reach for mine?   I’ll cut your hand off.  It was either Shakespeare or a Chicago Pol that said,  “Kiss only the hand you cannot sever.”

Still, somehow we have been burdened with this jolly-asshole reputation.

There is a marvelous, overlooked movie from 1981 called, True Confessions. It stars Robert DeNiro and Robert Duvall, as well as a host of brilliant Irish American actors like the late Ed Flanders and Kenneth MacMillan, Burgess Meredith and Cyrill Cusack, and the great Charles Durning, in what I think is his best screen role, which is saying a lot.  The movie is based on the great John Gregory Dunne’s novel of the same name and in it, Durning plays Jack Amsterdam, an avaricious, psychotic, dying gangster who is in cahoots with the Catholic Church.  He is the worst kind of hypocrite; a murderer and pimp and corrupter of other men.  He is also the worst kind of Irish; sentimental and blustery with the cheap not-so-charitable boosterism and racist to the core with a murderous temper.

There is a point in this film, at Durning’s daughter’s wedding, where this awful man finds a moment of grace.  The great Durning is standing around glad-handing and shit-talking and all of the sudden, the band starts to play a slow and mournful Irish song.  And Durning, who had to go at least 300 pounds at the time and was about 5 foot 9, starts to dance a traditional Irish jig and he is letter-perfect.  Not just “good for a big man”; hell, good for any man.  One moment he’s Jabba the Hut, the next. . .as fleet and graceful as a Celtic rhyme.  It is a marvelous moment in American movies; a rare moment of beauty from a bad man.

This is the way with us Irish.  We contain great beauty; that which history has not been able to take from us, and we wield it with the best and worst intentions.  Get in the way of our dance in this life, Boyo?  And we’ll knock your dick loose.

Star for the Eternal City

Chicago is never more beautiful or dangerous than it is at night.

The workman-like, bustling, hurly-burly like endless hustle of daylight becomes a fleet and sleek animal at night.
Dressed in lights and stars, come-hither reds, yellows, and greens, the dirty carpet sky leans back and reveals a skyline of glittering skyscrapers like gangsters dressed in diamonds.

It whispers,”We’re bigger than you” and “There are more of us than there are of you” and still, “We’ve already won.”
On occasion, I ride the Chicago Avenue bus from downtown to Damen Avenue and this ride is always a miracle of languages and sights,  if not smells.

The CTA buses lurch along like tired old mutts ambling from one skinny tree to the next.

At night you can see the 5-Stars lit up in neon from the new bar with the old-style signage as well as the endless taco joints and the pink horse of Alcala’a Western Wear.

This is my favorite street in Chicago; one where you are as likely to hear Polish and Ukrainian as you would English.  It is a street about business–small business–nail joints, drugstores, tattoo parlors and cut-rate furniture.

It is  an avenue of tribes.  The Mexican joints are supported by Mexicans; the Polish and Ukrainian, the same.  The influx of hipsters and artist types go to hipster and artist coffee shops and the newer eateries.  Eckardt Park is there. Once a renowned boxing gym, it is now mostly a community center with a beautiful pool and park district programming. The old Goldblatt’s building, long dormant, is now one of the city’s hidden jewels awaiting a new definition.

There is a coffee shop called Lorraine’s where the food is truly shitty and the sign promises “Bitchy Waitresses.”  Only on Chicago Avenue could this be considered a plus.  The Edmar’s grocery store was knocked down in favor of a new Dominick’s, complete with an on-site Starbucks that despite the scorn of the local nose-rings, does a brisk business.
Chicago Avenue is the new and the old city right on top of each other, yet not as mismatched as you would think.  The colors and signage from a half a block away dissolve into a Babel of urban language; urgent, seductive and unstoppable, yet visually comforting if you think of this city as your home.

One of my favorite things to do is to walk my dog down this street late at night.  When I can’t sleep. . .when it is peopled by kids staggering homr from the bars, old guys leaving for work or coming home from 3rd shift jobs, it is an avenue of American stories intersecting at a swift pace and all happening at once.  It seems to be an avenue in a big hurry to get wherever the story takes it next.

My dog, Chooch, goes crazy for the food smells carried up and down Chicago Avenue.  Once in a while, one of the guys from Tacos Veloz comes out and throws him a choice morsel of skirt-steak.  This guy loves my dog because when you give him a treat, he doesn’t just wag his tail, he wags his whole ass.  These guys laugh like hell and toss him another piece of the juicy meat.

I sometimes get the idea walking this avenue that all of the platitudes about the melting pot and the American Dream are all true.  It all kind of works here.  There is no ruling population.  It is a community and everyone has a little piece of the great pursuit of happiness here.  Everyone has his or her task.  This is a working city.  We’re happiest when we’re working like sled-dogs so we can talk about how hard we work and what it means.  In Chicago, work is identity.  We are what we do.  It is how we hold on to our place in this city.  It is our very gravity.

I often hear criticism that I try to be all things Chicago, which is actually not really true, but so be it.  I am continually fascinated by the history that unfurls itself on a daily basis here; hard not to be.  This city is one of the greatest ongoing stories that I know of.  It is also the place that has kept me guessing the most.  There are mornings I wake up and I hate this city for its petty vindictiveness, its thoughtless cruelty, and its empty boosterism.  It’s run by clowns, pygmies, midgets, and chihuahuas and suffers from a lack of self-esteem so pernicious, it pushes its truly talented out of town.

Then there are the mornings I look out the window and one neighbor is helping shovel another’s car out of the snow.  Another is helping an elderly woman navigate the slippery sidewalk to the bus stop.  Still another is helping repatriate someone’s idiot dog who escaped the yard.  It is mornings like this when I feel like we are winning.   The big narratives define a city and the small kindnesses. . .hold it together.

Star for Western Avenue

As any good auto thief or auto parts thief can tell you, Western Avenue is home to the Midnight Auto, the night and day marketplace for hot cars and parts (now mostly just parts) in the city of Chicago.  Western is also the longest continuous street in the city.  It is not like Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles; one of those stretches of road that goes from the Out-house to the Penthouse and back.  Western pretty much goes from the out house to the dog house. . .not so many penthouses.

Until 1870, Western was the western border of the city limits.  Western used to be home to Riverview, the much storied amusement park that was torn down in 1967  to make way for a police station.   In its later years, Riverview had an unseamly reputation.  It was full of beatniks, sailors and kids who were to become known as hippies.  Older friends of mine tell me it was a good place to buy pot, and  maybe the last place where one could play Skee-Ball, a poor man’s version of bowling.

Every transit line in the city crosses Western; the Blue Line twice, as well as the Green, Orange, Pink and Brown lines.  Hardwired into the DNA of this street is the whole idea of transportation.  Western once hosted the longest streetcar line in the world.  Green Hornet streetcars zipped up and down Western until the mid ’50s.  My father took this streetcar to school and back.  So much for that bullshit about him walking five miles to school. . .in the snow. . .uphill.  You get the idea.

Western is a working class street, dangerous as hell and, for the longest time, didn’t even have bike lanes.  If you’re going to speed, this is the street to do it on.  In fact, if you are going to run pedestrians over, this is the street to do it on.  If you are going to sideswipe pickups full of junk and pass on the right-hand side; this is the street to do it on.  Western Avenue is a kill-or-be-killed automotive proposition.  It ain’t  for  pussies.

Lane Tech is on Western.  It used to be the biggest high school in the country.  Years ago it taught high school students the trades; plumbing, auto-body work, sheet metal and the rudiments of construction.  A great many of the tradesmen I’ve hired over the years were graduates of Lane Tech.

Between 103rd and around 115th Street once a year Western used to be host to a bacchanal of drunken louts known as the “Southside Irish Parade,” where my people, the Irish, as well as several other, mostly white citizens and suburbanites, would get snot-flying drunk and puke in your front yard.  (To my friends of color, know that these are the white people we never put on the brochures.)  The city shit-canned the Southside Irish Parade a couple of years back to many howls of indignation and ballyhoo  from your professional Irish types.  It seems to me the St. Patrick’s Day parade that occurs downtown, and welcomes everyone, is sufficient.

It is an avenue of pissed-off people going to and from work.  There is nothing leisurely about Western Avenue.  It is the Mud and the Blood and the Beer.  The working-class 500, with a little roller derby thrown in for good measure. The people speeding this 26.5 miles of Chicago’s gut?  They’re busy dying, eight hours at time. . .40 hours a week. . .’til death do us part.

It is the very picture of what Nelson Algren referred to as “Hustler’s Land.”  Grime and shining lights in equal measure.  An avenue with one foot in the gutter and the other dancing on a star.

When I was a kid, I was enthralled by all of the used car lots and their endless neon sequential lights that blinked a semaphore of promise and cash and deals.  I thought of them as palaces of some kind.  The OK used car lot with it’ spires of tiny white-hot bulbs. . .the Cars-For-Less streams of pointy red, yellow, green and blue triangular flags.  When I hear the term “primary colors,” well, these are mine.

To this day, Western is where you go when you want a used car and always, buried in their iconography or right upfront, there is a star.
The stars are a promise of something on this street; something better, something sexy, something closer to the top; something nearer to the heart of the American dream.

Star For The Naked City

Every night at 2 in the morning, the old man cable station, WE, plays an old Naked City rerun.  I barely remember this show because the reruns were old before I was born.  It is a crime drama full of old New Work actors, mostly old stage pros and young upstarts from Stella Adler’s or Lee Strasberg’s classes.  It is kind of a treat to see the young Redford, Duvall, Ed Asner (with hair), as well as Lee Marvin, Burt Reynolds, Ed Nelson, Richard Anderson, and the  recently deceased Leslie Neilsen,  all chewing up the scenery and method acting their asses off.  Some of this work is truly cringe-worthy and some of it is great, like everything.

The real star of this show is New York City and the 1950, an era of cheap optimism that this show tries valiantly to tamp down.  They addressed real issues on Naked City; addiction and its root causes, the parallel realities of racism, poverty, criminality and hopelessness, and what these things all have to do with each other.  It was pretty raw realism considering when it was made.  I’m always amazed at the ambition of these scripts and the generous helpings of violence.  And the violence is always ugly and cowardly no matter who is dispensing it.  It was an interesting show where the people looked like real people. . . meaning, ugly motherfuckers like me could get work on this show.  The cops looked like cops and the crooks and harlots looked like crooks and harlots.  There was one episode with the young and very beautiful Cloris Leachman, who was really a dish around 1955, playing a real slut, and Bunky, she could sell the boom-boom.  She was dastardly and way fuckable.

I have a great deal of curiosity about the 1950′s; no nostalgia or sentiment.  I was born in 1958.  I have no love for “the good old days: when institutional racism was law and conformity ruled the day.  People have often told me the think my pieces are nostalgic. I cringe when I hear that.  I am in no way sentimental.  I am interested in history , and these scraps, matchbooks, wrappers and other paper arcana are evidence of how our culture communicated visually.  Do I love Chicago?  Yes.  And I hate it as well; particularly the cheap boosterism that masquerades as civic pride.  About a year ago, this city was willing to go buns-up to get the Olympics.  A bullshit caper that would have made a few developers a lot of money and possibly bankrupted the city itself.  If you don’t believe this, go ask Atlanta and Los Angeles, two cities that are still paying off their Olympic debts.  This proposition was also being bandied about as something that would bring jobs.  Horseshit.  Iit would create a bunch of lousy-paying service industry jobs that would be temporary.  A few thousand Chicagoans would get to pimp Slurpees to the tourists and then three weeks later, they’d be out of that job.  I mention this because of the way cities tend to think of themselves.  We never hear them trumpet the quality of their citizens’ educations or quality of life.  It is about the big events–the Olympics, Millenium Park (which I actually like), Taste of Chicago, where dip-shits from Des Moines come into town, get shit-faced and leave a river of puke from the lake to the Metra station.  This shit is big business here.  If you want to get the power crowd’s attention here, tell them you’re thinking about bringing a convention here and watch how fast they pull their cheeks apart.

I think about shows like the Naked City because there was a kind of realism about them, The city, in this case New York, was realized on a human scale.  They, like us, were boastful to be sure, but their  optimism was tempered with a realization  of the American dream’s trap-doors and fun-house mirrors.  A similar show was filmed here, M-Squad, with Lee Marvin (Lee Marvin!).  At the time, it was thought too grim. . .too realistic. . .a downer.  It too, dealt with social issues like deliquency, racism and criminality.  It didn’t last long, but it wasn’t bad.  I watch it to remember what Chicago looked like a half century ago; to see the lived-in faces and buildings and signs.

It was a portrait of us we’ve tried to forget; one perhaps, too close to the truth.

The Spider Songs

I stopped making etchings about eight years ago.  I’d made a suite called the Autumn Etchings, and at the time I thought that was about as good as I had ever done it and that this juncture would be a good place to stop for a while. I was tired and it had been a rough ten years making nothing but etchings.  I learned a lot about how to make pictures and I loved etching, but also, having to finance a shop and sell the etchings was a full-time job in and of itself.  I was forever traipsing off to New York or New Orleans or L.A. with two portfolios jammed with etchings,flats, and interleaving.  I had a good time, but it was tiring as hell.  I also had missed making one-of-a-kind work; drawings and combing drawing and collage.  After the Autumn Etchings, I decided I’d not make any new etchings until I had something new to bring to it.  I eventually got rid of my presses and made my studio over into a drawing studio instead.

For ten of the years I made etchings I worked with Teresa James.  I hired her from a coffee shop and together, with the help of Stephen Campbell, we taught each other how to build an art business.  Teresa opened her own gorgeous studio, White Wings, about eight years ago and luckily for her, she’s not made all of the mistakes I have.  The years we worked together were hard.  Etchings sold for a fraction of what my one of a kind works did, but I was learning to be a better draftsman and expanding what I knew about drawing.  We had two shops;  one at 13th and Wabash across the hall from World Tattoo, and the one in Bucktown that is now FireCat Projects.  We had to hustle to scratch out a living, but with a shaky economy, we found a new generation of younger collectors that could more easily afford multiples and we were able to make a go of it.   Our collaboration culminated in Max and Gaby’s Alphabet, 26  five-color etchings for each letter of the alphabet that I made for my children.

We learned some bitter lessons about making art in Chicago; that a great many Chicago collectors buy their work elsewhere and that print-making had been relegated to a second-class kind of art-making here depite the rich legacy of phenominal artists who made prints in this city.

We didn’t care; we went about making our work for the best reasons possible. We had to.

In the last few months, I’ve started making some etchings again.  This time, Teresa is my publisher.  She and her assistant, Kari McCluskey, have helped me ease back into it without any difficulty.  I’d forgotten how much fun I’d had working with her.  Her new shop is bright and immaculate, unlike BigCat in its heyday.  It is a joy to work there.  We made a couple of things and I really enjoy them, so we’ve decided to make a new suite of work over the next several months and I’m really excited about it.  She and I were always a good team.  She was measured, patient and methodical and I’m a rabid ape.  Somehow, it all worked.  I’m grateful for Teresa’s hospitality and generosity of spirit.

This piece was inspired by my trip to Tokyo and a lovely, quiet park named Togo Ginga.

Happy Thanksgiving.  I am grateful for all of you.

Bucktown All-Star (Goat Man)

My neighborhood, Bucktown, is named for goats;  male goats, specifically.  Four or five decades ago, this neighborhood was almost exclusively Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, and other eastern Europeans like Latvians and Slovaks.  Almost everyone had goats for milk and cheese; a hold -over from the old country.  Goat cheese is delicious and the Europeans sold it to Italian and Greek restaurants in the city. Like many new immigrant groups, at times, they felt, intuitively, the disapproving gaze of other tribes that surrounded them and endured the ethnic baiting and slurs that come with being the  newest immigrants.  The phrase “DP” was a hurtful reminder of the xenophobia that was not uncommon, often spewed by other immigrants.

Bucktown was a tight community and there were goats everywhere and they loved running the streets.  Goats are the randiest of creatures and not particularly picky about what they mount.  One older gentleman told me of having to chase off a goat who, in his words. “tried to put the dick to my beagle.”

It was not uncommon to see goats banging like jackhammers in the middle of Damen Avenue.  It is no accident that they are the symbol of the sexually insatiable satyr.  In Bucktown, it was one big goat fuck-fest.  They would bang dogs, cats, and even the odd large opossum.

Still,they produced the milk and the cheese and were in this neighborhood for years and endured the goat orgy as part of the life-cycle; a necessary part, actually.

Bucktown has changed a lot over the 16 years I’ve been here.  It used to be a perfectly good bad neighborhood, full of shysters, thieves, hookers and junkies. . .the good old days.

Now there is a Marc Jacobs store on Damen.  The bodega down the street from me with all of the fighting cocks in the backyard is an interior design studio.  The churro guy is gone and you can get croissants now.

I like my new neighbors; I just missed my old ones.  They were the ones with the stories, and the lives lived curb to curb, and by their wits.   I miss the bakery across the street that made the best rye bread I’ve  ever eaten and also sold salty creamy butter with it.  It was butter that didn’t come in a square or a brick.  It was amazing.

There is a lovely flower shop there now, Larkspur, and its owner, Beth, is my dear friend and I become instantly cheered up whenever I walk through the door and smell all of the  flowers-.  They are the smell of life and repositories of light.

I still love Bucktown.  Once in a while, I’ll walk down the street and hear snatches of Polish and Spanish and realize that the real estate creatures have not been able to wipe out the immigrant flavor of this place completely.  And this thought gives me great comfort.

Jesus of Chicago

I just got back from Maine–Rockland, Maine.  One of those beautiful, bucolic towns that Edward Hopper, Robert Henri, and three generations of Wyeths found so seductive.  It isn’t hard to see why.  The air is clean and you can smell the Atlantic Ocean on the light breezes anywhere in this town.  It is lush and green and there is a brittle, yet sweet, edge to its citizens who describe their weather as, “Nine months of wintah. . .and  three months bad sleddin’.”

They are tough, self-reliant Yankee stock who are always aware that the landscape is friend and enemy, and that the land gives and gives.  This is a fishing town; the best lobster you’ve ever eaten, Pennequit oysters that are a tad salty and deliciously briny, served up with a cocktail sauce that has a bit of a kick to it.

Best of all, are the people. . .a great many of them from somewhere else  who have to prove their mettle to be considered Mainers.  Maine is a proud state.  During the Civil War, the fighting Maine lost more men  than almost any other state, despite there being pockets of southern sympathizers in towns like Camden.  The Maine fighting men were ferocious and defiantly Yankee.  The Maine sense of humor is a contrary one.  You have to be able to take some ribbing to fit in there.  They are  a no-bullshit kind of culture.  The lobster men are for real, no-shit, tough guys.  Cock off to one of them at your own peril. “You’ll be wearin’ yah ass for a hat” if you wise-ass one of the denizens of the Time Out; a road-house style joint right on the water, favored by lobster men and  the heartier townies.

Up the road a bit is Camden.  There is a store that sells the only thing I collect well; carved and painted wooden birds.  The store is called The Duck Trap and there are all manner of carved songbirds and waterfowl. The two older women who run the place can tell you about every carving in the place.  I bought a couple by a 92-year old guy who just whittles them and paints them with a regular pocket whittling knife.  Stan Sparre, is the gentlman’s name, and when you get one of his birds you know that someone who genuinely loves birds made this thing.  They are not perfect; no truly beautiful thing is.  They are  approximate and rendered and cut the way he sees them.  They are his birds and I know how that goes.

My show went beautifully.  It was installed with care.  The young dealer, Jake Dowling, and his wife, Mare gave us a beautiful preview and a lovely opening and the people of Rockland, Maine could not have treated me better.

Afterward, both nights, we retreated to one of those great Irish bars that had the best food I’ve ever had in a saloon; great oysters, lobster rolls, and haddock; a joint called Billy’s Tavern in Thomaston, Maine owned and presided over by two generations of the Burke men–Billy, the father and Chris, the son.  Billy reminded me so much of my father that the first night I spent most of the night on the back lot of the place talking to him and watching the other patrons play bocce.  Yeah, it’s that kind of place.  It always has a great quartet of jazz guys and in the backyard you can play bocce and smoke and have good conversations.  And for a saloon, nobody was drunk.  It isn’t that kind of place, as odd as that may sound.

I got up this morning and boarded the plane home, back to my city of bricks and iron and cruel boundaries.  It is home and I love it for its imperfections as well as its graces; but once in a while, I can imagine a life somewhere else; where winter isn’t as brutal, where the differences between have and have not are not so bitterly apparent. . .where wrought-iron fences are erected to keep the precious things in, rather than the feared things out.  There are churches everywhere in my city and everyone believes in god and nobody believes in each other.  This piece is about that thought.