South 12th

“When smoking clove cigarettes is outlawed, then only outlaws will smoke clove cigarettes”: The awful, true story of the S. 12th Teen Party Annex, parts 1, 2 and 3. To this day, not a single actual teenager has registered for the S.T.T.P.A. Possibly related, as well as this. 

“Remember the bad old days, before the Internet, when you didn’t know anything about an artist except what you read in zines, liner notes and magazine reviews?”: Christina Billotte Week, a more-or-less successful attempt at blogging in-depth about one subject for an entire week. Start on page 4 and work forward.

“Portland is a city that seems intent on making sure oddball things are happening to you every moment you are there.”: Let’s put on a white suit and go to Portland for Open Engagement. Apparently, the conference organizers found my blog and were irritated that I had written that the event sounded like it would be one of the “least structured events I have ever attended.” I forget that people read things unprompted on the Internet sometimes. Read for yourself here.

Meanwhile, around Minneapolis: the difference between “South Minneapolis” and “Midtown” (with follow-up), the year in offensive Minnesota-specific flags, la historia terrible de Don David, the accidental coffee date with Ted Kennedy’s press secretary, the wasp’s nest catchetism, a close brush with my 1970s doppelganger on Nicollet Avenue, a little early evening workface, wasting time with Fritz Pollard at the library, it was all a dream, the S. 12th exclusive that made two handsome painters the most lusted-after men in the city this summer, and the Great-Grandparent Neighborhood Litmus Test. Also, this was completely made-up. This was my favorite thing I wrote about Minneapolis all year. And of course, one more recurring annual feature/public service.

Bad short fiction: Space Cop and Where is Stedman Plaza?

Miscellaneous favorites: related to election day, the Modern Lovers, geography, J.D. Salinger, work, street addresses, soccer and airports. 

To you, reader, thank you for making S. 12th such a strangely important part of my day-to-day life. It’s only fun to write this stuff because I know you read it.

The new work, Broken Manual, is itself very zine-like in its most basic format: it’s a paperback, tape-bound at the spine with the title that appears to be crudely lettered-on with a Sharpie. The text throughout — supplied by Morrison, and covering the “Steps to Disappearing” utilized by “hermits and hippies, monks and survivalists” — is printed in uniform, 12-point Times New Roman font, and it looks very much like something printed off a laser jet at Kinko’s. The text portions appear on stock green and pink, 8 ½” x 11” paper. With the exception of the high-quality reproductions of Soth’s photos of shacks, mountain vistas, and survivalist ephemera throughout (and the imprint of Steidl, a well regarded German photography and fashion publisher), Broken Manual looks much like the sort of thing you might see for sale at a gun show.

Earlier this year I went to Alec Soth’s studio in St. Paul to look at his new collaboration with Lester B. Morrison, Broken Manual, and wrote about it for the newest issue of Rain Taxi. You can read it here.

A recent news item brought to my attention by local soccer-affiliated Tumblr personality Holly Go Nightly:

Like it or not the Kansas City Wizards is no longer the name of the Major League Soccer team that resides in Kansas City, Kansas. The organization announced yesterday that it has a new logo and a new name, Sporting Kansas City.

Huh? Huh? Did I call this, or what? That’s even better than the name I suggested, which was “Village West Rangers.” This bodes well for the entire enterprise, as far as I am concerned. Except:

The name change using “Sporting” has been more than a little controversial as many American soccer fans feel the logo and name are Europosing or as Brian Straus wrote at Fanhouse, “the name Sporting Kansas City seems to embody the worst kind of self-hating cultural identity theft.”

Heh heh. Because it’s the inalienable birthright of every American billionaire to give their teams crappy names based on singular nouns, isn’t it? Good old American names, like “Fire,” “Storm,” “MudDawgs” or “DawgStorm.” I was talking to some friends the other day and we predicted when Los Angeles inevitably kidnaps the Vikings in a few years, Minneapolis will be without a team for awhile until some local captain of industry strong-arms the legislature into building him a zillion-dollar taxpayer-funded stadium in the exurbs and lures an expansion team and then instead of having the “Vikings” they’ll be called the “Minnesota Chill” or “Minnesota BlizzardDawgz” or something equally horrible. And they’ll have a 2-12 record for fifteen years and lose every game to the L.A. Vikings and I won’t care, because I just learned to make cyanotype photographs last night and I bought a Holga camera and I will spend football season in my basement making blue 19th Century photographs of my neighborhood and I don’t anticipate any football team in Minnesota will ever have as hilarious a season as this one ever again so why even bother to pay attention anyway. 

P.S. - That last bit of unresolved business from the soccer club post: the San Jose EarthquakeDawgs, who actually play in Santa Clara, will be known as “Mission Santa Clara SC,” in deference to the old mission located there. And because one team should have “SC” in it, since “soccer” is what people call it. I hope this meets with your approval. 

P.P.S. - I forgot to mention that the word “BlizzardDawgzz” has four “z”s in it.

A friend sent a link this morning to that hilarious New York Times article about Steve Martin’s appearance at the 92nd Street Y, and how it “resulted in the Y’s sending out a next-day apology, along with a promise of a refund” to the unlucky attendees, who were forced to sit through a harrowing evening of conversation about art.

On one hand, I’m sympathetic to Martin and a little put out at the audience’s and the Y’s reaction. Of course I didn’t see the interview personally, so I can’t know for sure, but really, how off-topic could it have gotten? How unentertaining could it have been? Were people really upset that they were talking about painting instead of, uh, Cheaper By the Dozen 2? Steve Martin is a well-known art collector; hell, he wrote a play about Pablo Picasso. Plus, it’s not like buying a ticket to see Steve Martin talk to the person who writes the interview column in the New York Times Magazine every week is going to be like seeing him come on Leno the weekend of a major film release. One would think, in that context, that the parts of his career not related to his screen comedies would account for a large percentage of the conversation.

On the other hand, Martin’s career has always totally baffled me. I read Deborah Solomon’s (admittedly very funny) assertion that she “had no idea that the Y programmers wanted me to talk to Steve instead on what it’s like to host the Oscars or appear in It’s Complicated with Alec Baldwin.” I then grumbled to myself, “Well, Steve, if you weren’t making movies like It’s Complicated and The Pink Panther 2 every other year, maybe people wouldn’t have reason to be so confused about your intentions as an artist.” Sure, you can have a career as an author and a banjo player and performer, but if you’re still turning up with some regularity in those types of high-visiblity Hollywood productions that Solomon mocks, you have to expect that you’re going to have to justify that to the public once in a while. This sounds like one of those occasions.

I’ve never quite understood why Martin hasn’t gone the Bill Murray route. At a certain point, Bill Murray realized he didn’t need to make big-budget crotch-shot comedies. Martin is clearly a equally smart or smarter guy. His entire approach to performance has always been incredibly inventive.

Moreover, Born Standing Up, his memoir about his early days as a comedian, is hands-down one of the best books about the nuts and bolts of making a career as an artist that I’ve ever read. In fact, I read it the very same weekend that I had the misfortune of seeing Synecdoche, New York, one of the most unpleasant experiences of my filmgoing life. I’m glad I experienced them both the same weekend, though, because together they made for an incredible point-counterpoint on what it means to be an artist.

In my experience, being an artist consists mainly of two things:

• Grinding out work, day after day after day after day, and…
• Stealing other people’s ideas.

That’s it. That’s 90% of your life as an artist. And that’s what Martin writes about in his book. Where his ideas came from, what shaped them, and how he refined them until he arrived as a national presence. Then the book ends. Synecdoche, on the other hand, was so misguided and so totally off-base in its portrayal of the artist’s life, it made me wonder what Charlie Kaufman thinks he’s been doing all these years. Maybe I wildly misread all of the wallowing and general bullshit as a trenchant critique of the way artists think about their careers, but I am pretty comfortable saying I don’t think that’s the case. I am pretty sure it was wallowing and general bullshit; a lazy, way-too-long snapshot of the overblown angst of being an artist without any of the real work that has to go into it. Compare that to Born Standing Up, which is practically a technical manual on how a career in the arts is put together. I certainly found the latter much more honest, and closer to my own experiences.

So I’m left wondering what to make of a guy like Martin, that’s obviously very intelligent, self-aware, and knowledgeable of his work. I feel like he’s experienced an incredibly public insult here, but there’s a part of me that wonders, well, come on, how do you explain any movie you’ve been in since The Spanish Prisoner?