The smart way to drive south from Minneapolis, presuming you’re not stopping in Chicago for the weekly Sunday Breakfast Party, is to veer south at Madison and take I-39 down through Rockford and Champaign-Urbana and Bloomington so you miss the Chicago traffic. It’s faster, of course, but the trade-off is that it’s very boring. Flat and empty. Not much doin’ along the I-39 corridor.
Also, it’s night, because you’re a terrible planner and you didn’t leave Minneapolis until like 8pm, so now it’s 2am and you’ve been driving for just long enough to be a little punchy. And now it’s flat and empty and also dark.
You’re a little sleepy. You start to see things.
You see, in fact, this magnificent image soaring off in the distance. You see THE BLOOMINGTON TOWER.
The Bloomington Tower rises 700 feet off the prairie. It was built in the ’30s, from the looks of it. Probably a WPA project. Perhaps it was used for docking zeppelins.
Is there actually a Bloomington Tower? Reader, I do not know for certain. Google StreetView seems to indicate that there is not. I have never driven through Bloomington earlier than 1am after being in a car for several hours. So maybe I am not the most reliable witness, but I have also never failed to see the Bloomington Tower, gleaming off in the distance. I can’t verify it’s there with physical evidence — the above illustration is a very sophisticated artist’s rendering — but I can swear I have seen it three or four times, off in the distance near the US-51 Bloomington/Normal exit.
One time, my friends Peter and Jen were driving with me, and they saw it, too.
Maybe it disappears during the day. That would be the most sensible explanation. Those WPA engineers were an awfully clever bunch. FDR knew that there was nothing like constructing nocturnal disappearing prairie mystery towers to get America to work.
Another sensible explanation is that is where they keep all the Adlai Stevensons for future use, in cold storage, stacked up like frozen fish sticks and ready to be thawed when downstate Illinois Democrats need a fresh new egghead.
I’m working on a project now that involves a lot of long, happy hours going through microfilm of long-defunct Minneapolis periodicals.
In particular, I love this bizarre subscription card boast from a 1980 issue of a short-lived weekly called Blueprint. I mean, recycling, solar energy, bookstores, cross-country skis, rental agencies, bargain gift shops and wood-burning…that’s really about all you need, right? I honestly cannot determine whether this list is meant to sound ironic and glib, comprehensive and authoritative, legitimately counterculture-ish, or if the priorities of the mainstream, left-leaning urban consumer at the dawn of the 1980s were just that strange and far-ranging.
Wow, I’d had no idea these were online. This is a pleasant Thursday surprise, reader!
Above is a link to a collection of “radio cartoons” that Ben Katchor created for public radio about ten years ago. I recall hearing them at the time, and then going out immediately and buying all of Katchor’s books that were available. He’s been one of my very favorite writer/artists since then. In fact, if you have ever enjoyed anything I’ve ever written here on S. 12th about cities or city life, you ought to thank Ben Katchor, because a lot of that came from him.
The greatness of his work lies in the fact that it’s very obviously always about New York City generally, and the Jewish experience in New York specifically, but with its idiosyncrasies magnified, and stripped of precise place names and features. The city his characters exist in is a shambling, broken-down museum of decaying ephemera, bizarre small business ventures and crumbling infrastructure, stuck in an idealized mid-century, closer in tone to the New York City of 111 Archer Avenue than anything else (Guy Maddin’s wonderful My Winnipeg was conceived along these same lines).
New York specificity aside, there’s a universality to Katchor’s city that resonates with anyone that has spent time in any urban commercial district that predates 1940. When I am walking in downtown St. Paul, as I was the other night, and I pass the stately old limestone Pioneer-Press newspaper headquarters and see an object on the door labeled NEWSPAPER OBITUARY PHOTOGRAPH DROPBOX, I recognize that as a perfect Ben Katchor moment.
These radio cartoons, which I haven’t heard in ten years, are actually a little dry — Katchor narrates them, and he doesn’t exactly have what you’d call a radio voice. But Jerry Stiller’s up to the task, and it’s a pleasure to hear him mouth those classic Katchor-ian laundry lists of urban decay — “the offices of a wedding orchestra…a bus driver’s uniform supply store…an illegal franchise of a defunct fast-food chain…a plastic slipcover showroom…”
Happy Wednesday, reader. On the eve of our potential Thursday snowfall, here is a photo that captures the precise moment before I learned to ice skate last winter. Under the tutelage of Mount Holly’s own Tammy Dahlke, I seconds later cast the chair aside and completed three perfect, broken-ankle free laps around the pond. Tammy said I was a natural.
On a related note, I was asked last week by Vita.mn magazine to recommend a Christmas gift for their readers . This is what I told them:
A customized hockey jersey from Hockey Giant in Bloomington. They’ll put your name and number (mine is 00) on the back, and any crazy thing you want in big, beautiful block lettering on the front (“ART SCHOOL,” “SOCIALISM,” etc.).
This is still my favorite customized skating jersey, from last winter. The big, beautiful block lettering on the front says AREA HIGH SCHOOL, and the back does indeed say STURDEVANT / 00. Maybe this is the year I actually do have one made that says SOCIALISM, so I can being the long and thankless task of reclaiming ice hockey from the Sarah Palins and Tim Pawlentys of the world. I’ll probably have a punch thrown at me by some jerk with a mullet, but hell, I’m 30 years old now. It’s about time I finally took a punch to the face over something important.
Nate sent me this list last week, and it’s too good for no one to see it. So now you get to see it.
One of the great secret facts about S. 12th (more of a secret shame, actually) is for all its touching tributes to my old Louisville hometown, my readership there is very, very small. I have more regular readers in the borough of Queens, a locality I have visited maybe three times in my whole life, than the entire state of Kentucky put together. Damn it, Jesus Christ, I hate it when you’re right about things!
Anyway, why Nate Sturdevant does not have a Tumblr is beyond me.
The full list:
In which I answer the burning question “how many streets in Louisville bear the names of states?”
Of course, the answer depends entirely on how you want to do the math. I’m surprised there’s no Ohio Street. Perhaps that’s the disdain on the part of Louisvillains to the Queen City hegemony and the Republic’s seventh most populous state. Of course, there doesn’t appear to be a Kentucky Street in Cincinnati so it might just be my imagination.
- California is a neighborhood not street. Except there’s one in Mt Washington.
- Colorado Street is in Taylor Berry.
- Connecticut Drive is in Okolona
- Delaware Drive is in West Buechel
- Florida Avenue is in Mt. Washington next to California and Georgia. Another in Lyndon.
- Georgia Avenue is in Mt. Washington next to California and Florida.
- Illinois Street runs along the zoo.
- Indiana Avenue is in Audobon Park.
- Iowa Avenue is in South Louisville.
- There’s E. Kentucky, W. Kentucky, Kentucky Street and one Kentucky Avenue.
- No Maine Street but there is, of course, E. Main Street
- Maryland Avenue is in the Highlands
- Mississippi Street is in Fort Knox which doesn’t count.
- Missouri Street is in Jeff which also doesn’t count.
- Montana Avenue is in Taylor Berry
- Nevada Avenue is in Beechmont
- New Hampshire Boulevard is in Okolona near Connecticut Drive and—tee hee—Flirtation Walk
- York Street is nothing new.
- North Carolina. Carolina Avenue is in the Highlands, I guess.
- Dakota Street is in Wilder Park which might count once, twice, or not at all.
- Oregon Street is in Park DuValle.
- Pennsylvania Avenue is in Crescent Hill. No 1600.
- South Carolina. Carolina Avenue is in the Highlands but not really.
- South Dakota. Dakota Street is in Wilder Park, remember?
- Tennessee Avenue is in Taylor Berry.
- Texas Avenue is in Schnitzelburg/Germantown
- Utah Street is in Taylor Berry
- Vermont Avenue is in Shawnee in the West End.
- Virginia Avenue is in Chickasaw in the West End and is the same street as Hale, Oak, Winter and Grinstead so really runs most of the city.
- Washington Street is in Butchertown.
- No West Virginia Street but Virginia Avenue is in the West End. Pretty close.
For those of you following along in MSP, note that such a locally specific list would be fairly uninteresting. The obsessive-compulsive-disordered grid system most the metro area employs favors alphabetization, so streets named for states would tend to be clustered in the same area. There’s a few Alaska and Alabama Avenues scattered through parts of St. Paul, but it doesn’t seem quite the same somehow. And, of course, more than half the streets and avenues in Minneapolis aren’t named at all; they’re numbered. 12th Avenue South, for example, in an older, unrulier eastern city might be called Hanover or Whitmarsh or Mawney or Wadsworth Avenue.
And so right now you’d be reading this at something like southwhitmarsh.tumblr.com, which is better in some ways and worse in others.
In ongoing discussions of the enduring importance of Steve Prefontaine, Falling and Laughing introduced me recently to an exciting new term with which I’d somehow been unfamiliar: “Manson lamps.” In honor of Manson lamps and 10,000 dune buggies roaring down into Laurel Canyon, here is Neil Young’s “Revolution Blues.”
Also, while we’re on the subject, don’t forget to check out S. 12th’s ongoing award-winning coverage of the 1970s.
There is something about President Obama’s sense of drama and timing that is very canny, and that makes me wonder if his true political education was in watching English midcentury boarding school dramas. In the two years or so that we have known Obama as a public figure, how many times has this exact scenario played itself out?
A problem arises, and the problem needs to be solved. The naysayers are naysaying, the people are grumbling. Obama is thinking. He’s deliberating. People are getting restless. The problem is hanging in the air. “He’s finished,” the naysayers say, “unless he can somehow explain how he’s gotten us all into this mess.” Obama’s got to do something. He’s got to give a speech! This is it. This is the make-or-break monologue. If he blows this, it’s all over. And so everyone is shouting and muttering among themselves, and then Obama stands up, looks around in that way he does with that air of magesterial authority, and then he clears his throat and he gives The Speech. He gives The Speech, and it’s beautiful and there is a moment after The Speech has been given where an uneasy silence hangs in the air. And then someone slowly does that slow lonely clapping thing, and there is a moment where the only sound in the room (maybe a long communal dinner table) is the slow lonely clapping, and then the rest of the room joins in and there are cheers and the music swells and Obama has done it again! The camera pans to the jubiliant faces in the assembled mutltiudes. It pans again to the faces of his enemies, rubbing their eyes slowly in utter defeat. Another stirring monologue that has silenced his opponents and redeemed his work!
He’ll do it tonight at West Point about Afghanistan. The Jeremiah Wright was perhaps the first and the best, but he did it as recently as September with health care (“A make or break speech for Obama,” said the Financial Times). The problem seems solved, until the next one comes along. And then it’s another make-or-break monologue.
Stephanie, over at your favorite New Jersey-based tumblelog I Can See New York City from My House, has re-posted an anecdotal comment I left on an earlier post of hers about the great Steve Prefontaine. I now re-re-post it here so that it is formally entered into the record:
I was once on the train wearing a Prefontaine t-shirt, a tasteful portrait in red, and some guy asked me if it was my son. I beamed and said “It sure is, sir, and I am so proud of him.” He said “God bless, that’s beautiful.”
How old did that guy think I was, I wonder? I suppose when you pass retirement age anyone under 40 looks the same.
The obvious opportunity I missed is telling the man that I was proud of my son for the specific reason that he once held the American record in the 10,000 meter and appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated at age 19. My beautiful son!
Also, it was Katie that made me the t-shirt in question. This is what the portrait looks like, except in red. Who wouldn’t want that fiery, free-spirited hunk of 1970s vintage young manhood springing forth from their loins?
In reference to today’s earlier post on the wonders of No Limit album art of the 1990s, I’ve cooled a little on the idea of the coffee table book. The ever-reliable Ben sent along an interesting interview with the (white, it turns out) creative team behind the album covers. This part in particular jumped out and slapped me in the face:
“My brother was more into business, I was more into graphics. Before that, I went to the Chicago Art Institute, I have one degree there and another one in Parsons School of Design in graphic communication.”
The SAIC! Fellow alumni: Jeff Koons, Sarah Vowell, Grant Wood, Claes Oldenberg, Robert Indiana. Or Parsons: fellow alumni including Edward Hopper, Barbara Kruger, Ryan McGinley and Joel Schumaker. The man that co-created Silkk the Shocker’s album covers holds degrees from two of the finest art schools in America.
While I still like the art a lot and think they’re totally without peer, I have to admit I’m a little disappointed. It’s like finding out that Howard Finster went to RISD, or that Jandek studied at Berklee. Is that unreasonable? Am I mistaken in wanting to attach a greater value to this sort of art if it had been created by outsiders? Am I inadvertently running an insidiously soft-racist variation on the old Noble Savage routine? Am I projecting my own anxiety about holding a degree from a lesser-quality institution (BFA, Studio Art, Louisville Public Basketball Camp University) instead of a legitimate art school? Why does this work hold less interest for me after knowing it was created by skilled professionals?
Or was the work so influential and so widely imitated over the course of the last ten years that, looking at it in retrospect, I’m missing its true value? I’m no designer: maybe it is impossibly difficult to achieve sparking-diamond effects in Photoshop, in such a way that only a skilled, highly trained craftsperson could have done it.
I think that last point is meant to seem less sarcastic than it sounds.
S. 12th always asks the hard questions!
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