The Last 4 Things

Kate Greenstreet

An extended bio from the author

I wrote a bio for Ahsahta when case sensitive came out. Maybe I should sort of pick up here where that leaves off.

I’ve been an artist my whole life, by which I mean I’ve had different jobs but I’ve always been engaged in making things as my main pursuit. I am largely self-taught. I come from a working-class background. My grandparents were all Irish immigrants. My father didn’t finish high school but he was adept at earning money. As a kid he wouldn’t eat in the school cafeteria, preferring the Strand Café’s “businessman’s lunch,” paid for with paper route earnings. After the army, he was hired as an engineer (not the train kind), and surreptitiously took blueprints home every night to figure out how to read them (he’d never seen a blueprint before that). This job was in Chicago (how I happened to be born there). When our family returned to the East Coast, my father became a salesman for a company that built air brakes. He left that to start his own company, called Computer Floors (back when all computers were huge, with huge cables), designing and manufacturing flooring that allowed the cables to run just below walking level. The business went under several years later, squeezed out by a giant competitor. When my father went bankrupt (I was 14), he saw it as a good moment to hire a draftsman to work with him on an idea for making modular kitchen cabinets out of Styrofoam. While he looked for a job in management, he sold encyclopedias door to door. Before long, he found work in a neighboring state, running a tool-making plant. Somehow, in a few years, he bought out his boss, and sold the factory after that, moving on. I remember he could drive across the country in three days. He was on the road a lot.

It’s a wet June morning. I’m in the studio, at the computer. When The Last 4 Things comes out in September, Max and I will hit the road with a box of books and a laptop. I’ve spent a little time today filling in some holes in the tour. We plan to be out for nearly three months, driving from Vermont across to Washington state, down the West Coast, through the Southwest and over to Georgia, then curving up, back to New Jersey, hitting Massachusetts and Rhode Island after the Thanksgiving pause. Looking out the window, it occurs to me that while I’m away, people who watch the DVD that comes with The Last 4 Things will get acquainted with what I see from here (the house in “56 Days”). Max and I are working on another video now, an interview collage that will be up at my site before we leave. The full tour schedule and Max’s tour blog will also be online (at kickingwind.com). If we make it to your town, I hope you’ll come out and say hello.