Remembering Robert Frank and Jason Polan

Black Books 102-103

September 10, 2019

Another day, another hero gone. Robert Frank is dead, and more than any other cultural influence—or perhaps any influence—he introduced me to a version (or vision) of America that shaped what I wanted to do with my life, where I wanted to go, and the sorts of things I desperately wanted to see. I’ve long recognized that it was my first exposure to The Americans that sent me on this journey that has become my life.

I used to sit with a copy of that book at a long white table on the second floor of my hometown public library, staring at those photographs and turning the pages slowly, and I had an almost immediate and urgent recognition that what I was looking at was somehow the America of my oldest boyhood dreams. At that point in my life I’d had a very limited experience of the country beyond my then-homogenous hometown in southern Minnesota; my family had taken one camper trip during the Bicentennial summer, and made a couple trips a year to my parents’ hometown in Illinois, but those experiences had provided me with enough of a glimpse to kindle the nagging suspicion that there was so much out there—somewhere—that I needed to see.

We were not adventurous travelers, my family; we were tourists, slaves to the guidebooks and brochures, and tended to move without dawdling from destination to destination. The Americans, thus, was my first real road trip, and it’s still the standard for how I want to travel. I am a dawdler, and a gawker, and I was anxious to get out there and see that country, the country where so much of the music and culture I loved had come from.

Much of my subsequent life has essentially been an attempt to find or recreate my own versions of the photographs in that book, or anything that might pass for an outtake (I should say that I’m not a photographer, but pictures are inextricably tangled up with the way I think and write about whatever version of the world I’m traveling through). And on hundreds of occasions I’ve had the sudden and thrilling feeling that I was inhabiting The Americans, and that the country Frank discovered for me and so many others was still alive, still out there for anyone willing to go looking for it.

Yet someone could drive out into the country in any direction, every day until the end of time, and the best they could hope to pull off would be a pale imitation—and it would always be an obvious imitation—of what Frank accomplished.

At this point in my life I’ve spent countless hours with that book, looking at it, talking about it, and writing and thinking about it (I wore out my first copy years ago), and I still find things in it that surprise me, details I’ve never previously noticed.

Frank lived a long and supremely interesting life after The Americans, of course, and I love that he never stopped trying new stuff and pushing buttons. In many ways he struck me as the first true punk; he skipped rock and roll and went straight for jamming econo. And to the end he seemed suitably unimpressed by anything other than real artistic freedom.

I’m grateful that I discovered Frank when I did, and grateful that I followed so many of the obsessions his work sparked in me. I was always more infatuated with the idea of the Beats than with anything they ever actually wrote, and I recognize that I owe Frank for that as well. I’m pretty sure I discovered Jack Kerouac from his introduction to The Americans, but I probably didn’t even need to read anything he wrote before or after that. What I was looking for—and what I went out in search of (“like a boy thrown from the furnace of a star,” in the words of Denis Johnson) was pretty much all there in Frank’s masterpiece.

Photography and music, I now know, were the two things that made me—and still make me—helplessly American, and all my life—starting with that first encounter with The Americans—they’ve reliably taken me to the places in this country where I needed to go to become the person I am today.

I was once walking around New York with my friend Jason Polan, and we went by 7 Bleeker Street, the house Frank shared with his wife, June Leaf. Jason had made dozens of drawings of Frank over the years, and on the day we encountered him he was sitting on a chair on the sidewalk in front of his home. He had a pile of papers in his lap, and whenever he finished reading one of the pages he would toss it aside, let it flutter to the ground at his feet, and stomp on it.

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January 27, 2020

I’m lost in the stars tonight, lost in the clouds. This afternoon I learned that Jason Polan died today, and I am floored and heartbroken by the news. He was just 37 years old, and it had been much too long since I had seen or talked to him. I learned a week ago that he was sick, and though I guess I didn’t realize how serious it was, I’m regretting that I didn’t immediately reach out to let him know that I loved him, was thinking about him, and felt so blessed to call him a friend.

It’s one of the great gifts of my life to have so many interesting friends, but as I get older and more isolated it’s become more and more difficult to be a good friend to all of them, and lately, I know, I’ve been falling down on the job.

Jason was one of the sweetest, most generous, and most curious people I’ve ever known, truly a one-of-a-kind character straight out of Joseph Mitchell. He always seemed like the kind of guy who would be eaten alive by New York City, yet he adapted it to his purposes, thrived there, and his work was both a celebration of the city and testament to its enduring myths.

One of the keys to Jason’s charm and his success was his old-fashioned sense of decorum and humility. He wrote letters, sent thank you notes, was generous and open hearted to pretty much everyone he met. He always left you with something, a token to remind you of him and the pure pleasure of his company. That sort of thing, of course, was both quaint and charming to people in this jaded world, especially in a place like 21st-century New York. It was also disarming. He was an enthusiast, sought out people he admired, and they tended to become lifelong friends.

From the outside, his career trajectory and success would seem to suggest some sort of unseemly hustle or indefatigable drive, yet for Jason it all seemed to happen organically, thanks to his uncanny ability to build and nurture unlikely communities. He also, though, had the quiet competitive fire of a paparazzi—he was sort of Forest Gump meets Weegee (and I mean that in the best possible way). He was gentle and unintimidating, yet as creatively dogged as anyone I’ve ever known.

I honestly can’t believe he’s gone, but I’m also so thankful our paths crossed in this huge and impossible world, thankful that I got to spend so much time with him in New York and Minneapolis, and that he got to spend some time at the Murray in Livingston (and that he sent me such a beautiful and treasured thank you gift).

The really good people (to paraphrase E.M. Forster) make you realize how many ways there are to be alive, and teach you to see the world and the people around you in startling new ways. By that standard—and by many others—Jason was one of the really good people. His mind was capable of synaptic leaps that were a source of regular and reliable delight to me and to countless others. One of the last times I saw him we walked by Robert Frank’s house (which we always did) and then we wandered around the lower East Side of New York and came across an abandoned hot dog stand in a scrap pile.

Jason went into a nearby store to buy a pair of scissors so that he could cut up the umbrella to use as canvases for his amazing art. A few weeks later I received a characteristically kind and wonderful package in the mail.

I love you, sweet friend, and I’m really going to miss you. I believe you got what you wanted from this world, but I wish like hell you’d gotten a whole lot more of it.