Tim Lane's Blog, page 16

Works on Canvas: Tim Lane

The shop has art representing many of my series. #worksoncanvas #contemporaryart #paintings

Why Can't I Be You (Me), 2022, 20"x16" $145.00 Add To Cart Finding Away, 2020, 30"x22.5" $325.00 Add To Cart Spooky Action at a Distance, 2020, 20"x16"x1.5" $275.00 Add To Cart Now Streaming, 2020, 20"x16" $200.00 Add To Cart Staging (Stag), 2018, 20"x20" $485.00 Add To Cart sale #blacklivesmatter, 2016, 35"x35" Sale Price:$250.00 Original Price:$500.00 Add To Cart sale When You Only Show One World, You Are Hiding Another, 2018, 24"x24" Sale Price:$245.00 Original Price:$485.00 Add To Cart

#contemporarypainting #worksoncanvas #art #painting #yoursilentface #lovelansing #quantumphysics #spaceart #space

Works on Paper: Tim Lane

The shop has art representing many of my series. #worksonpaper #contemporaryart #paintings

Cant Get There from Here, 2022, 12"x9" $100.00 Add To Cart Singularity, 2022, 8"x8" $125.00 Add To Cart The Shape of Things to Come, 2021, 30"x22" $325.00 Add To Cart Leaving the Children Behind, 2021, 30"x22" $325.00 Add To Cart Original Art for Sale Your Silent Face Available Now

from Phil, a Novel in Progress

This is from Phil. Book Two, Chapters 5 & 6. Setting is Flint, MI, in the late 80s. Novel is narrated by the Your Silent Face character, Phil McCormick. Story picks up roughly two years after YSF concludes. Phil, and his best bud, Joe—the unofficial underground mayor of Flint—live in a rental on Stone Street.

Phil, the character, spends a lot of mental energy on Stuart and Nigel—two of the main focuses of Your Silent Face.

The things I think you need to know that will help with this excerpt which have already been established are as follows: Phil (a young adult who was an emancipated teenager) is a drug dealer of soft-core party drugs (deals mostly out of a trendy dance club called El Oasis); Joe works at a downtown plaza as a face-painter (he sucks); Phil took Sid Vicious (their ornery cat) for a car ride to Ann Arbor to meet his supplier and nearly lost him (Phil left the car window cracked too much and Sid escaped).

_

Sometimes a chapter does not require a ton of rewriting; other times a chapter receives an obsessive amount of rewriting. These two chapters are examples of the latter situation.

I hope you enjoy this preview of my new novel in progress.

from Phil, Book Two, Chapters 5 & 6

5.

Joe and I have met in the living room with drinks in hand. The conversation revolves around the observation that Sid has been MIA. Neither of us has seen him lounging around this disaster of a place, licking his nads. We have let the house go to hell.

Roxy music is playing on our second-hand stereo.

“Do you think he got outside?” I inquire.

“Don’t know, man.”

“Should we look?”

I have not told Joe that I nearly lost Sid in Ann Arbor. It would be like finding out that Black Flag’s van had a flat tire just outside of Flint before their show at Danver’s Hall and they almost didn’t make it. This never happened. Even if it did, it’s extraneous information. My feeling is that we cannot be damaged by what we don’t know. This makes me a very different fellow in some ways from Stuart who is always waiting for the other shoe to drop. He has these dreams in which he is terrorized by a black German shepherd. Sometimes he can see it; other times only senses it.

Joe has finally turned on the heat here on Stone Street. Wearing a coat around the house for the past couple of weeks has finally gotten old.

Outside, one of our beloved neighbors revs a Harley. The motorcycle idles for a while until I almost forget about it, forget about how annoying it can be when the bikers rev their motorcycle engines at eleven o’clock at night, or two in the morning.

The growl of the motorcycle’s engine fades as the biker speeds up the block. At the same time, the last track on the Roxy Music album ends. When the motorcycle reaches the corner, the engine sputters, and then momentarily picks up.

I have no idea when the houses in this downtown neighborhood were built, but I do know that the walls of this house are thin. The insulation is poor. Our utility bill steeply rises in the winter.

At the corner, the sound of the accident is unmistakable. Joe and I exchange knowing glances. The only real question is whether somebody is dead.

We put on our coats and go out to the porch. The midnight air feels winter thin. Joe goes back into the house to call 911. He is, after all, the underground mayor of Flint; has some clout. He actually doesn’t, but we like to joke about it. I mean he does but this is out of his jurisdiction. This isn’t a poetry reading or punk rock show.

I light a cigarette.

When Joe returns, we saunter down to the corner. The wail of a siren grows as an emergency vehicle approaches.

A police car arrives on the scene before we do. The blue flashers bathe the corner in a profound light.

“That was fast,” Joe says. We can see our breaths. We pass beneath the street lights.

We pass from shadow to light.

The biker’s boots are still on the pegs of his motorcycle. He is unconscious and bleeding on the sidewalk. The motorcycle is fucked; the front end of the pickup truck has sustained some minor damage. The driver of the pickup stands in the street, itching the back of his head. More vehicles with sirens and flashers arrive on the scene. The EMTs relieve the police officer who has been hovering over the biker. Now, he can turn his attention to the driver of the truck. Another police cruiser arrives, and together the officers begin to take control of the situation. I shake my head to dispel the sound of metal impacting metal replaying itself in my head on a loop.

Joe shakes out his arms and legs like a dog that has just been hosed as others come out of the darkness to gather on the corner.

“We left the house open,” he says, turning away.

I stand with the others. I cannot look away. People arrive; people leave. The branches of the maples and oaks on this corner are nearly barren. I slide a few papery leaves around with my shoe. I cannot detach. Un-look. I watch in silence until the man is loaded into the ambulance.

I cannot tell you how long we stand here, close but not touching, a group of strangers united by this tragedy—fifteen minutes, thirty, forty-five?

A few people engage in undertones of fall conversation.

“Who is it?”

“Do you know him?”

“It doesn’t look good.”

“Damn, it’s fuckin’ cold out here.”

“What am I doin’? I gotta work in the morning!”

I do not enter into any of these pockets of community dialogue. This need to console one’s self. This sudden grasp for connection.

I do not allow myself to get any closer to any of this shit.

“None of this shit is voluntary.”

I am helpless.

6.

I am doing my damned best not to give the motorcycle accident more significance then it deserves. But accidents are tricky. They are loud and unsettling by nature.

Joe has poured himself another drink. He is watching TV. “I wonder if it will be on the news,” he says.

“Was there a news crew?” I ask.

Sid is grooming himself under the dining table. “Hunh,” I can’t help thinking. He hides for days on end until one of the bikers from across the street gets drilled at the corner by a pickup.

Our relationship has been strained ever since I nearly lost him in Ann Arbor. Perhaps he is experiencing feelings of abandonment. If I could counsel him, I would tell him that it isn’t fucking worth it—dwelling on abandonment. It doesn’t get you un-abandoned. Yes, if I were Sid’s therapist, I would advise him to get the fuck over it.

What the fuck?

The observation that Sid has been hiding for several days and suddenly reappears after the brutal motorcycle accident is a quasi observation, I tell myself. A quasi observation is when you observe two or more disparate things or events, bind them together and then inject them with a significance they do not possess. I am trying not to fall into this trap. Trying not to embrace the accident as an ominous message.

“Maybe the morning news,” Joe says. “I don’t know. I’m tired. I need to work on my face painting. The requests are becoming ridiculous. Today, this kid wanted me to paint Count Duckula on one cheek and Baby Scooby Doo on the other. Like I can paint, dude.”

I laugh. It is totally a hollow laugh. I am still distracted. I am still on the corner, staring at an empty pair of boots on the pegs of a toppled, mangled motorcycle while people who are not me try to save some poor biker’s life.

Incidentally, I do not think our house is actually that much warmer now that we have turned on the heat.

A perfect example of a quasi observation is the significance Stuart puts into how he met Nigel. He gives their introduction way more meaning than it ought to possess. I had thought that they had grown up together, that they had known each other for a long time, but neither is the case. During the summer before Stuart left for his first year of college, he spied Nigel at a bus stop on the West Side, and then he saw Nigel walking along Leith Street on the East Side, near home, about an hour later. Then he discovered Nigel reading at the Nail during a poetry reading two weeks later. In Stuart’s mind, these three events could not be a coincidence. It was divine intervention or some shit. This story fits right into Stuart’s theory that coincidences do not exist, that there are no coincidences, that coincidences are the last remaining proof of the existence of a God. In Stuart’s own words: “Coincidences might be God tapping you on the shoulder, man.” But this is simply the development of an idea coupled with the swift execution of finding items or actions or events to support it. The findings are quasi observations.

I am careful not to do this.

“Did you see how badly that dude was bleeding?”

“Yeah, dude.”

Joe is carefully watching Letterman with the volume turned down low. My guess is that it probably felt like too much effort to turn the volume up. I am carefully watching Joe carefully watching Letterman.

“Is there any vodka left? Dude, that was a lot of blood.”

“It was.”

“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that much blood.”

“Do you think I should put up with this shit?” Joe has moved on because he accepts our hometown on its own terms. He is a cherisher. A superior homegrown product.

“What shit?”

“I’m sticking with animals, dude. No more complicated requests. No superheroes. No dream catchers. No sombreros. No gang signs. No weed. No weapons or comic strip characters. Just animals. Cartoon-ish animals. Shit, man, I can’t paint real animals.”

“Maybe you should only offer cats. You can paint cats, man. I’ve seen it. Portraits of Sid.”

Joe’s cats actually look more like—Oh, fuck, I don’t know. He sips his drink and slowly nods. The idea is compelling. It grows on him. It blossoms. I am brilliant. I am thankful for Joe. His preoccupation with his face painting gig thwarts the gravitational suck of the accident. Accidents have a dangerous magnetic pull, but Joe’s ambivalence about face painting is helping me counteract the residual force of the accident.

The residual crumbs of the motorcycle accident are thoughts of how one wants to believe that we can sense things, feel things—that we should be able to see shit coming—and I believe there is something to this. I think we are surrounded by the past, the present, and maybe the future. Events that have happened, things that are happening, moments yet to happen. But we should not take an accident and turn it into a messenger. There aren’t any wake up calls. Let’s be real. Nobody is tapping your shoulder.

I think Stuart returns to the summer evening when he saw Nigel on two separate sides of town in a matter of minutes—as if Nigel had materialized out of the thinning evening air—over and over (he tells this story whenever he is drunk) not because it is objectively meaningful but because he is looking for somebody to share in his awe. He has filled this moment with meaning, like the center of a cream stick donut, and wants somebody to confirm it.

I will not dwell on the motorcycle accident. Sid hops onto the couch and curls up beside me. I will not let him fool me. You can’t fool me, Sid! Don’t fuck with me, man. He is searching for a warm body. It is almost Thanksgiving. I am anticipating a profitable bar night.

An intelligent drug dealer picks and chooses the best nights to sell his candy. It isn’t fucking rocket science, although I firmly believe that I am rocket scientist material.

I will sell an inordinate amount of candy on that night. I always do.

What is awe, anyway. Stuart’s awe? Shit. He often speaks of Nigel as if he were sent.

There are no accidents, Stuart might say.

There are plenty of accidents.

Look around, man.

Look down the street.

After patiently listening to Stuart’s drunken rants, I sometimes question his mental health. Especially after meeting his uncle Charles—I mean wearing the Indian headdress, wrapped up in the Indian blanket, drooling. While it is true that I am not always the most sympathetic character, I think that I can honestly and objectively boast to possess an unusual amount of mother fucking patience.

I had never seen the aftermath of electric shock therapy. Stuart has lived with it. But I will not buy into Stuart’s awe.

An accident, however—an accident can be unsettling. But you cannot let yourself pair it with a hunch, an idea or some nagging itch. You can’t read into it. You can’t give it awe.

I do think, though, that our minds collect data and piece it together like a dot matrix printer. Eventually, after enough collection and retrieval, the image appears. You see the image, or the idea, in your mind. It is a revelation. You suddenly understand something that you did not even know you were puzzled about. Or you quietly say to yourself, in an undramatic fashion, Ah ha, it is happening again. You suddenly recognize something you didn’t even realize you were striving to recognize, and you think to yourself, Well, now. Well, now, indeed.

But this is just our minds doing what our minds do. It might be awesome, but it shouldn’t include awe. Nothing to worship. No false gods. No inauspicious translations.

The pickup drilled the biker. It was random. You can’t predict shit like that. And that is why we are stunned. We are stunned until we get used to it. But there is a part of our minds that does not want this to happen. Fights acceptance of bad shit. Stuart clings to awe. I will sell my candy until I can get the fuck out of here. My mother clings to jerks, which is precisely why I left home when I was roughly sixteen.

#fiction #flint #yoursilentface #literaryfiction

Jan Worth-Nelson's Ruminations about City Life in Flint, Michigan

Longtime Flint writer, poet and resident, Jan Worth-Nelson, has written a post for a Flint mag, East Village Magazine, in which she includes her experience of our recent Buckham Gallery reading, Steal This Stage. You can find the article, “Village Life: Romance of City Life Sometimes Falls Short, but Neighborly Life Can Be Full of Grace,” here.

Jan is a writer and poet who figures into my teenage Flint art scene personal mythology of the 80s, even though she had no idea until recently. But I finally got to meet her officially at the Buckham reading on September 17, and we had a great chat! This is the beauty of the arts. It forges connections.

#flint #citylife #poetry #eastside #fiction #yoursilentface #yoursilentfacethenovel #yoursilentfacetimlane #GenX #80s #newwave #joydivision #iancurtis #clubbing #nativeamericanliterature #urbanpoetry

East Village Magazine consulting editor, Jan Worth-Nelson, can be reached at janworth1118@gmail.com.

Your Silent Face By Lane, Tim Buy on Amazon Your Silent Face Available Now Your Silent Face: The Playlist Original Art for Sale The Ultra 80s Playlists Get The Balance Ri-i-ght plus Red Skies at Night

Jan Worth-Nelson's Romantic & Sobering Observations of Living in Flint, Michigan

Longtime Flint writer, poet and resident, Jan Worth-Nelson, has written a post for a Flint mag, East Village Magazine, in which she includes her experience of our recent Buckham Gallery reading, Steal This Stage. You can find the article, “Village Life: Romance of City Life Sometimes Falls Short, but Neighborly Life Can Be Full of Grace,” here.

Jan is a writer and poet who figures into my teenage Flint art scene personal mythology of the 80s, even though she had no idea until recently. But I finally got to meet her officially at the Buckham reading on September 17, and we had a great chat! This is the beauty of the arts. It forges connections.

#flint #citylife #poetry #eastside #fiction #yoursilentface #yoursilentfacethenovel #yoursilentfacetimlane #GenX #80s #newwave #joydivision #iancurtis #clubbing #nativeamericanliterature #urbanpoetry

East Village Magazine consulting editor, Jan Worth-Nelson, can be reached at janworth1118@gmail.com.

Your Silent Face By Lane, Tim Buy on Amazon Your Silent Face Available Now Your Silent Face: The Playlist Original Art for Sale The Ultra 80s Playlists Get The Balance Ri-i-ght plus Red Skies at Night

Photos from Steal This Stage

The reading event, Steal This Stage, which happened on Saturday, September 17, at Buckham Gallery in Downtown Flint, from 2-4 pm, was a blast. Such a memorable occasion! Here is a carousel of photos from the event. Pictured writers: me, Kelsey Ronan, Connor Coyne and Catharine Batsios.

 

Poster by Peter Richards

Literary Reading at Buckham Gallery

I will be reading from Your Silent Face at Buckham Gallery in Flint on September 17th, from 2-4, along with Catharine Batsios, Connor Coyne and Kelsey Ronan. Four writers from Flint with writings about, and influenced by, Flint.

Your Silent Face is an 80s coming-of-age story told by a story-telling character who obsesses on New Wave music, drinking, fantasizing, generational trauma, romance, loyalty, art, college and many things Flint.

#80smusic #newwave #joydivision #iancurtis #comingofage #literaryfiction #fiction #flint #michigan #midwest #nativeamericanliterature #clubbing #contemporaryliterature #contemporaryfiction #genx #lovelansing

“In Lane’s literary novel, a music lover attempts to make sense of his reality in 1980s Michigan…A meandering but vigorous story about wayward youth and the necessity of art.”

— Kirkus Reviews Your Silent Face By Lane, Tim Buy on Amazon

New Exhibit at the Michigan State University Residential College in the Arts & Humanties

Happy to announce you can peep a lot of my work from 2020-2022 at the Michigan State University Residential College in the Arts and Humanities now thru October. Located in the display cases on the 2nd floor of Snyder-Phillips, between the LookOut! Gallery and RCAH Student Center. Please stop by 🙂

Connor Coyne's Review of Your Silent Face

I ain’t going to lie. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Connor’s full review. He took the gloves off. Critical and thoughtful. Please have a look. Full review here.

#yoursilentface #fiction #comingofage #flint #80s #genx #newwave #postpunk #newwavemusic #joydivision #iancurtis #nativeamerican

“It’s also a master class in stream-of-consciousness narrative, where the prosaic and the profound mingle freely in the mind and words of narrator Stuart Page, a halfway burnt out college kid at home for the summer, a musical critic with an obsessive streak, and a young but practiced alcoholic. Someone could write a thesis on hangovers in this book.”

— Connor Coyne Your Silent Face By Lane, Tim Buy on Amazon

Buckham Gallery Reading

We are mega excited to be reading from our work at Buckham Gallery in September! Details below. Jump to Buckham Gallery here.

Link to my 80s coming-of-age and ode to New Wave novel, Your Silent Face, below, as well.

“A meandering but vigorous story about wayward youth and the necessity of art.” —Kirkus Reviews

#BuckhamGallery #flint #literaryfiction #poetry #KelseyRonan #chevyinthehole #ConnorCoyne #urbantasm #TimLane #yoursilentface #CatharineBatsios

Your Silent Face By Lane, Tim Buy on Amazon