God bless the neighborhood bar. Local dives abound in Chicago, and each is a guaranteed trip to what-the-fuck-land, a place where those guys who normally hang out near highway exits come in to sell tube socks, a punk-rock dude gives in and swigs the packaged goods he meant to take home, it’s OK if Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer” comes on the jukebox twice in a row, and a Latino man in a T-shirt embroidered with an American flag knows one word to “Sweet Home Alabama”–and it’s “Alabama.” I like to visit that place as often as possible, so I was thankful when my friend Daniel recently showed me the doors to his local joint: the Two-Way Lounge, so named for its separate entrances on Milwaukee and Fullerton.
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At first I was too distracted by Europe’s “Final Countdown” blasting from the jukebox to look around, but once I stopped galloping in my seat and waving my arms around I took in the details. The whole place was dim, covered in wood paneling and mirrors, and there were Christmas lights twinkling above the bar. Over frosted $1.25 mugs of Old Style I started telling my friends about this guy I’d run into at Pizza Metro earlier that night who’d told me that my eyes reminded him of his gorgeous cousin. When I got to the part where he claimed to have had an eye transplant as a child–“My parents gave me brown eyes, isn’t that cruel?” he’d said–a glazed-eyed woman in a padded flannel shirt to my left burst out laughing and didn’t stop for a good two minutes. When we started laughing with her, not at her, she stopped abruptly, stuck her index finger in the air like a philosophizing scholar, and mouthed some words, presumably of wisdom, but no sound came out.
“Did she steal your beer?” the bartender asked. Daniel nodded, laughing. “She does that all the time,” she said with exasperation, and poured us a round on the house.
In eight years he’s had about 25 solo shows, here and in Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Paris, Tokyo, Madrid, London, Nairobi, and the Dominican Republic, among other places. Many of them sold out immediately. “Staring at the Sun,” his first solo show in Chicago in two years, is up until the end of January at Monique Meloche. With clean curlicue graphics and polka dots in a soothing palate of radioactive colors, the work is simple and catchy. The paintings’ rigid lines and immaculate curves are blurred with layers of glass beads.
