June 2009
68 posts
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Sham 69, “If the Kids Are United.”
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Suitable names for St. Paul Catholic school jocks...
Wiry, polite guys that lettered in four sports and grew up in huge third-generation families in the Holy Spirit or St. Mark’s parish. As compiled by Geoff Herbach and I for an as-yet-untitled summer radio project.
Jackie Doughan
Conor Kealy
Don Kinsella
Hugh Treacy
Randall Mulroney
Shane Dooley
Cam Dooley
Mikey Meagher
Pat Hanlon
Gerry Dwyer
Jackie Dwyer
Mac Whelan
Danny...
Urban Dictionary, helping you out with your... →
I imagine Guy Debord and Asger Jorn running around Paris, knocking over convenience stores with squirt guns full of piss, and it actually almost works.
Let’s also not forget that yesterday, among...
Notable uses of the F-bomb in my email...
Do a search in your inbox for use of the word “fuck” sometime. The results are fascinating. Of course, it’s most often used casually, but sometimes it pinpoints exactly great moments of excitability, frustration or anger — mostly anger against schools, contemporary artmaking practices and certain mutual acquaintances, in my case. But it can also indicates the start of...
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Your Saturday night murder ballad,...
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Harry Nilsson, “Spaceman.”
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Regional hot dog variations. →
This is one of those great lists you often find on Wikipedia that seems very cobbled together with little consideration for formal sources, other than someone saying “Hey, I grew up in [geographic area] and this is how grandpa made a hot dog…”, then taking it upon themselves to create a new entry.
My hometown Louisville falls under the cultural influence of neighboring...
Nate just doesn't enjoy the contemporary cable...
Nate: It just doesn't make any sense. I mean, they actually made a "car backfiring sounds like a gunshot" joke. Have you ever heard a car backfire?
Me: No, actually.
Nate: Not since they invented fuel-injection! Twenty-five years ago!
"Steve is a tiger of non-reliability. He’d ride 50... →
I was so excited to wake up this morning and find that Erica is telling the story of Eastside Steve, the greatest biking story in St. Paul history:
Steve also said that a lot of girls from Uptown had stopped by looking for bikes, and that I “wasn’t like those Uptown girls.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I took it as a compliment.
Ironically, the bike I bought from...
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More than eighty different versions of "St. James... →
One of those songs that’s so old and so fundamentally weird in tone that you can’t believe an individual person could ever have written it. A man stops into the morgue to visit his dead girlfriend, sees her laid out, and uses the situation as an opportunity to assess his own last wishes, and then boast about what a catch he is. A very complex set of emotions, one might say.
I had...
Corner Bakery Watch. →
Corner Bakery Watch is my favorite new blog. It only has one post, from October 6, 2006:
Corner Bakery SUCKS It’s awful!
Go ahead, click through. You really need to see the CBW in action yourself firsthand.
If Corner Bakery ever stopped sucking, I am sure we’d be informed immediately. The lack of updates is probably due to the Bakery’s continuing suckiness; there is simply...
"Maybe if you add the five of us up, we’re as old...
I recieved an email today announcing a collaborative dance performance by HIJACK and Mad King Thomas called “Maybe,” at Red Eye Theater in beautiful Loring Park this week, June 18-21. We are told the following (emphasis mine):
Maybe the collaboration of collaborations will make the show of all shows. Maybe if you add the five of us up, we’re as old as Minneapolis. Maybe this show...
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“If you didn’t know, now the ducks come with a... →
Here’s an interview I did with Wolfgang Puck for Heavy Table last week. I found his stories of coming to the U.S. in the 1970s and finding people ordering Chablis and well-done steaks very entertaining.
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Reader, we are sharing a very special moment right...
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The ironic T-shirts of the 1990s: a look back.
Sometime you should try devoting your blog or Tumblr solely to a single broad subject for some prolonged period of time, reader. Despite the inevitable unfollowings, grumbling readership and dwindling returns, it does instill in you a sense of purposefulness and focus that is strangely rewarding. Such an undertaking rewards extended periods of critical thinking, and encourages the creation...
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Ironic T-shirts of the 1990s: Mumblelard.
I have enjoyed the notebook scrawling stage of thinking about t-shirts. It does seem to lead somewhere interesting. Unfortunately, it has come to my attention that I might not really know if I ever wore an ironic t-shirt. I am not confident that I even know what that means.
My parents didn’t give me any measurable amount of money after I left home at seventeen. I shopped at thrift stores...
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Ironic T-shirts of the 1990s: Katie Beach.
I’m not sure when the “Ironic Tee Shirt” trend passed into my consciousness, but it was probably sometime in my early college years. I went to Catholic school, which meant uniforms, and the opportunity for quirky self-actualization through smart-ass clothing was limited. To say I missed the boat on the trends of my generation is understatement—throughout the ’90s I was distracted by...
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Ironic T-shirts of the 1990s: Paul D. Dickinson.
Mustard, Green, Plaid and Aqua: Where Did All the Cool Stuff Go?
T-shirts are a good starting point for this — in a way, T-shirts used to be the mark of total authenticity. You went to the Black Sabbath concert, you bought the shirt, and you wore it with pride to high school the next day. Remember “my mom went to Florida and all I got was this T-shirt”? Yes, even mom had to go Florida...
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Ironic T-shirts of the 1990s: Jonathan M. Katz.
The best thing you can say about the irony fad of the early 1990’s is that it gave the sterile, mediocre jackasses now populating the faltering ranks of American middle managers and unemployable drunks a chance to be vaguely funny in eighth grade. This was also the problem.
Giving the middle school power class dominion over irony is like giving the Czar all your vodka: you’ve taken...
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The ironic T-shirts of the 1990s: a new S. 12th...
After posting yesterday’s personal impressions of the rise and fall of the thrift-store T-shirt during the Clinton era, my inbox was inundated with literally thousands of emails from readers who had lived through that period, and from those (like me) who came in at the tail end. So many of them had such interesting thoughts and reflections on the subject, I thought I would devote a large...
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Nixon's the one.
In the fall of 1992, my seventh grade year, an almost mystical transformation began to occur among the suburban high school students on my bus. Overnight, perpetually pissed off, acne-ridden jocks who had previously worn nothing but oversized Karl Malone basketball jerseys and Reebok Pumps were suddenly dressed in secondhand ’70s corduroy, polyester, leather boots and gaudy, secondhand...
For your Monday morning, here’s Slim Whitman...
Time travel barbeque, just like his old man.
My brother Nate reports that he has just returned from our uncle’s annual D-Day barbeque, held at the ancestral Sturdevant homestead in Cincinnati.
It was a fine time, I am told, but there was one detail that was a little odd. As the night wore on and the bonhomie increased, our uncle’s friends — most of whom have been coming to visit him in that same house since the 1970s...
