September 2009
32 posts
1 tag
5 tags
1 tag
3 tags
4 tags
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...
3 tags
1 tag
"On Disappearing," Jan Estep. →
A lovely essay, prompted by artist/writer Estep’s visit to Davis Gulch in Utah, from the new arts and criticism website Quodlibetica. It’s just been launched by some talented former colleagues of mine from The Rake, Christina Schmid and Collier White.
3 tags
2 tags
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:
...
1 tag
"Me and Mrs. Palin." →
Squashed reads the Levi Johnston Vanity Fair article and concludes that he “seems quite likable…That said, I wouldn’t take everything he writes at face value. It’s actually a fairly uncomfortable read…”
Agreed! I thought the whole story was fascinating real-life right-wing inverse of Five Easy Pieces, with Levi in the Nicholson role; a trouble, individualistic loner, bound...
3 tags
For the benefit of my eager young grandchildren. →
A short piece I wrote on the 1992 film In the Soup for Filmosophy:
“Grandpa Andy,” they will say, “what was American independent cinema of the 1980s and early 1990s like, in the period following Cassavettes and Jim Jarmusch, but before Kevin Smith, Pulp Fiction and Harvey Weinstein?” That is an excellent question, my young darlings, I will tell them. And I will be able...
3 tags
Selections from the S. 12th personal library: "The...
A few years ago I was sitting at the bar at Nye’s Polonaise with a friend, making the bartender mix me obscure, fruity cocktails from the ’60s that I’d never heard of (the bartenders at Nye’s are almost all ancient Northeast natives that have a sense memory of every cocktail ever created, even the really farty ones, like a “Blood and Sand”). It was still pretty...
3 tags
3 tags
How like a god.
Inspired by Elizabeth Wilcox’s recent-ish essay on Withnail & I, I have assembled here a comprehensive list of the greatest movies of the 1980s that end with a character reciting excerpts from Act II, Scene 2 of Hamlet. In each of these films, the “what a piece of work is a man” excerpts are the last lines of spoken dialogue before the credits roll.
Withnail & I (1986):...
1 tag
El Grito de Dolores.
The neighborhood seemed unusually lively this evening when I biked home; there was clearly some sort of block party going on near Bloomington Avenue. So I headed over that way, and was met with the surprising and quite inspiring sight of an entire parking lot of people, led by a DJ in a tent lit only by disco balls, singing the Mexican national anthem in unison.
(Or, actually, what I guessed was...
3 tags
Health code violations. →
I’ve decided to begin the long and arduous task of tagging the last year or so of S. 12th posts, making it easier for you, the reader, to access the sexy bits right away.
On this note, I have to say I’m a little surprised and perversely pleased at how resilient the “health code violations” tag has turned out to be. It was a joke tag initially, just a one-off, but after...
4 tags
I had this song stuck in my head over the weekend,...
3 tags
In Which We Attend the Great Sewing-Union at...
It was OK. The vendors weren’t as good this year. This one girl had some neat handkerchiefs for sale where she’d cross-stitched Joy Division lyrics onto them, so I bought some of those to give out as Christmas presents. That one collective from Madison that makes those historic neon naval jacks must have skipped the GSU this year, because I didn’t see them anywhere.
Ptolemy...
3 tags
VERY EASY QUIZ: Blog heading or chapter title from...
In Which We Prepare to Fight the Spaniard
In Which We Try To Guess What A Thom Yorke Twilight Tune Might Sound Like
In Which We Relate to Tyra Banks for the Very First Time
In Which We Both Fight and Run Away
In Which We Follow the Heir
In Which We Admit To The Modest Charms Of ‘Shark Tank’
In Which We Attend the Great Sewing-Union at Ptolemy
In Which We Enjoy Three Courses and...
3 tags
“Don’t worry. ‘05 was a heady year before we realized we needed discipline. At least it’s not about the sins perpetrated in, for and by Brooklyn.”
That’s Nate on Whitney Terrell’s 2005 novel King of Kings County. He’d sent me an idle text message one evening wondering if I’d read it, and I texted back enthusiastically that I had, and had...
1 tag
Conversations I am fairly sure I overheard...
Stately old man sitting behind me in the movie theater: “Do you know who is playing the lead cop? Norm McDonald. They’re using actual archival footage.”
This must be the remake of Medium Cool with Artie Lang as Mayor Richard Daley.
3 tags
If I owned a bar.
It would be all glass blocks and wood paneling.
It would only serve beers named after eminent 19th Century German-Americans or colloquial nicknames for mid-sized American cities and geographic regions.
It would be shut down after five days for what the city health inspector would later call, in television and newspaper interviews, “the most serious and egregious violations of the health...
3 tags
4 tags
Brilliance and disaster. →
I did not know doodly-squat about football until I met Geoff Herbach, and really did not care doodly-squat about football; televised football games (usually the Bengals) were a thing at Thanksgiving family gatherings that rudely interrupted conversations about Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Tom Verlaine. But Geoff Herbach has a way of writing about these things in such a beautiful way, I have come...
1 tag
Help him be a good boy. →
There is no greater friend to the animals of South Minneapolis than Molly Priesmeyer. She was the one that rallied the neighborhood to action during the Movies the Cat tragedy, and she has now turned her attention to a new cause, that of one Scoobi Priesmeyer. Scoobi seems to be a local pit bull from a broken home. He says himself, on his new blog:
I am hoping to get my nuts removed and get...
4 tags
2 tags
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...
1 tag
The old tumblelog looks the same as I step down...