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...
