February 2012
5 posts
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A beacon for all Twin Citians.
One of my favorite pieces of anything I read last year was Dan Sinker’s extended, real-time novella of fake @MayorEmanuel tweets. It was great for many reasons, but principally because it started as a not-that-funny one-off joke (Rahm Emanuel likes to say “fuck”), and then, once it had captured its audience’s attention, slowly built into this sprawling, surreal love letter...
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Programming note, and movie magic.
I’m a little worried, gang, that writing a weekly column (it’s here) will cut deeply into S. 12th writing time, and that this blog that we have all enjoyed together for so many years will devolve into an anemic gallery of links to “look what I am doing!”-type things.
I won’t let that happen, though! I promise! I will still post boring stories from my youth and...
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Two new pieces posted today.
Both pretty Minneapolis-y.
At Quodlibetica, a short essay on photographer Paula McCartney’s new book, On Thin Ice, In a Blizzard, and the way we talk about weather in the Upper Midwest. The images in the book are McCartney’s beautiful photograms of ice, created in the dark room:
It seems at first like this exercise may be McCartney’s way of exerting control over powerful natural...
January 2012
13 posts
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"Toot! Toot!" Foley artistry with Dark Dark Dark...
This will probably sound ridiculous, but to a certain extent, I’ve tried to follow the example of two role models in my creative life: Studs Terkel and George Plimpton. Following Terkel’s example, I’ve tried to never pass up an opportunity to talk to someone about their story, and record it where I can. From Plimpton’s example, I’ve done my best to never pass up an...
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WatchC’mon, baby, let’s get dressed up and go down to the Stock Footage District. Seems like there’s always something gong on down there.
(Stock footage of the Stock Footage District was shot by Willard Van Dyke and comes courtesy of archive.org. The Stock Footage District is all vacant condos now.)
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An exclusive interview with a YouTube commenter.
I decided to interview the YouTube user that left the top-rated memento mori comment on the Lana Del Rey video that I pointed out on Friday.
The commenter is a Dutch teenager. I wrote her an introductory email, asking if she’d mind being interviewed, and she happily agreed. “But don’t expect too much from it,” she warned. ”I don’t know that much. The only thing...
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December 2011
20 posts
"I Am More of a Wayne County and the Electric...
In the world of contemporary art: The city you live in is full of abandoned factories and old, crumbling robber baron mansions. First we kiss mannequins, then live models, then New York curators. It’s not too late for leftists to co-opt flags with pine trees on them. The emotional realities of the art-for-tattoo-work economy of the early ’00s. Using applied mathematics to help with...
"I Am More of a Wayne County and the Electric...
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THE WINDSOR DEFENSE FUND, March
“Maybe Old Man Williams got sick of being mistaken for a 1970s macrobiotic food restaurant.”
Hard to believe it’s been less than a year, but March saw the launch of the Windsor Defense Fund, a venture that has consumed quite a bit more time and energy than is probably necessary. Though, actually, I’d call the work we’ve...
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Neighborhoods, places of employment, weird inside...
I will happily admit to being sort of a soccer poseur. After being relegated out of my pops’s youth soccer league at age 10, I didn’t pay much attention to the beautiful game for a solid twenty years. It didn’t help matters that during what ought to have been my formative soccer years, I was attending a suburban crudhole filled with jerk-ass soccer players I had nothing in common...
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Point-counterpoint: rock-and-roll bands.
“Rock-and-roll bands reconstitute the ideal of the American family in its original, nineteenth-century form, as a quasi-democratic, mercantile unit (the family farm, the family firm, the vaudeville act) — as a collective endeavour in which the static rigor of single-provider patriarchy is mitigated by issues of competence and merit, by the exigencies of collaboration, and, finally by...
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The loud guy on his phone sitting behind me on the...
Q: Are you into welding?
A: I’m fucking into welding, man. I can fucking weld anything, no shit. Number one in my fucking welding class.
Q: So who can you weld better than?
A: I can weld better than all of those motherfuckers at St. Paul Technical College.
Q: I’ve heard you often drink for free. How are you able to do this?
A: I’m in a fucking rock band, man. We play all...
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Catechetism.
Q. Where was the wasps nest located? A. In the latch cavity of the front driver’s side door of the 1999 Mercury Tracer.
Q. How many wasps were living in the wasps nest? A. Twenty wasps.
Q. Why had no one opened the front driver’s side door of the 1999 Mercury Tracer in the amount of time it took twenty wasps to build a full-sized nest in the latch cavity? A. I’d rather not...
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Two late-breaking Ted Kennedy-related memories.
The night after Ted Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama for president, I had a very high-stakes date with a woman that was wildly out of my league. I checked in with Herbach beforehand (high-stakes dates aren’t any fun unless you’ve made arrangements to tell someone afterwards how badly they went), and showed him I was wearing a “KENNEDY ‘80” pinback on my lapel to be sure...
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Airport shoeshine: point-counterpoint.
Andy:
Last month I was walking through the terminal at MSP on my way to catch a flight. It was fairly late in the evening on a Sunday, so the concourse was very uncrowded. On the way to the gate, I passed a shoeshine stand. There was a man working there who looked as if he hadn’t a customer for hours.
“Hey!” he said as I walked by. “Get your shoes shined.”
I was in...
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A dose of a freaky ghost baby.
Back in Louisville, there was a radio station run out a local high school across the river in New Albany. During school hours and into the early evening, the kids would operate it, taking call-in requests and playing different types of teenage-oriented music. It was almost always a lot more interesting to listen to then any of the other local stations, because teenagers, for all their hormonal...
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The chronological broadcast of every motion...
Here’s an excerpt from a piece of speculative journalism written by Lester Bangs and published in Creem magazine in 1973. It’s entitled “Boob Tube Liberation Front Storms CBS, ABC, PBS & Quaking Independents from Coast to Coast,” and it’s an account of the freeform television programming offered after a supposed 1976 takeover of the airwaves by leftist radicals:
...
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Items currently in use as bookmarks.
A Metro Transit transfer from March (Edwin Mullhouse, Steven Millhauser)
A hot pink Post It note, folded in half, with directions to an address on Johnson Street in Northeast Minneapolis (The Pets, Bragi Olafsson)
A pricetag from the Savers thrift store on Lake Street, for a 99-cent “bed and bath accessory” (Atmospheric Disturbances, Rivka Galchen)
A business card (doubling as a “key to the...
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Jeff Hanson.
Waking up on this cold, dreary Sunday morning to learn of the death of Jeff Hanson is almost impossibly sad. I cannot say, unfortunately, that I knew the man personally, but his music has been a presence for as long as I have lived in Minnesota.
I first heard him in 2005, right after I had arrived in Minneapolis. I was very tenuously dating a snotty, fairly chic MCAD sophomore I’d met at an...
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Sunday, straightedge Sunday.
“The only problem was Preslar, Nelson and Baker had become big fans of U2. And MacKaye hadn’t. U2’s sound was even beginning to creep into their music…”
- Michael Azerrad on Minor Threat, from Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991, page 153.
1982: At a VFW show in Boston, Ian MacKaye recieves a head injury after...
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Programming note.
For the most part, December’s never been a great month for writing or posting for me. Too much holiday distraction, on both my part and on yours. To that end, I am taking the rest of December off from new posts. Which really, I barely need to mention, because at this point I’m only doing like, what, three posts a week? On a particularly active week? Oh well.
Regardless, two things...
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Over lunch yesterday, I rented a car in order to drive an Irish artist I know — formerly living in New York and now temporarily residing in Minneapolis — around town to scout for a location for a public art piece he was working on. Specifically, he was looking for abandoned billboard support structures, and a mutual friend had told him that of all the people in town, I’d be best...
November 2011
15 posts
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Speaking of a.) art projects of months past, and...
…here is a favorite anecdote from the past year.
At the end of August, Sergio Vucci and I held our final Common Room event of the year, which involved taking a group of around 30-60 people on bicycle to see four sites around the city that everyone often speaks fondly of, but that even many longtime residents have never actually experienced themselves. I’ll post the full list later....
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L'affaire fiducie de fonds kids: some conclusions.
Based on the limited figures I have at my disposal, I’d guess that this here blog has only around sixty regular, dedicated, engaged readers. Which perhaps isn’t many compared to some other blogs, but you all are the right sixty readers. Whenever I pose a question here, I am always amazed at the range of thoughtful answers I recieve.
In reference to l’affaire fiducie de fonds...
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The painful emotional economies of artmaking in...
Since I haven’t used this space for much else recently, I figure it’s time for you to hear another boring story from my youth. I spent the weekend in Louisville, my hometown, and on Saturday, my brother Danny lent me a bicycle. I took Saturday afternoon to bicycle around the coffee shops and bookstores of the Highlands, where I lived in my early 20s. This boring story from my youth in...
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Andysturdevant.com is now your one-stop shop for...
The problem with the Internet has been, for a long time, there was no one good place to take care of all your Andy Sturdevant-related needs. Apparently he was doing all this crap all over the place, art stuff, but also writing stuff, but also ??????. Some of it was on Tumblr, I guess. But also on Facebook? And, like, maybe at the Salon Saloon website? Wasn’t there stuff somewhere else,...
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