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For Filmosophy’s Wes Anderson Week, here’s a piece I wrote previewing the maestro’s later years. Includes many of your late-period Anderson favorites, from The Dreyfus Affair all the way through Well-Respected Men.
Who else writes a mean Wes Anderson speculative future piece? Tess Lynch, that’s who.
The $15 Midtown Drug Phone, 2009-2009.
“You were always on my mind…you were always on my mind.”
Things I Learned About From Mike Gunther, #2: The Midtown Phillips Light Aircraft Graveyard.
South Minneapolis is unlike a lot of other urban areas in the sense that it’s not as dense as it seems like it should be — this part of the city wasn’t developed until the 1910s and ’20s, so instead of multistory apartment buildings, it’s miles and miles of really narrow lots laid out on a grid, each with tiny front and back yards with single-family houses, duplexes and triplexes (or, in the case of the S. 12th residential compound for which this tumblelog is named, a six-plex). More than one east coast native has pointed out to me that the southside has to them a somewhat suburban feel to it. Rightfully so, because it is suburban. Literally: South Minneapolis is right below the urban core, and was populated by the first generation of Minneapolitans that could just as easily take the streetcars to and from downtown as live there. The southside is still laid out, in a grid, along those streetcar lines — Cedar, Bloomington, Chicago, 28th. Though the streetcars were torn out sixty years ago, those avenues still form the skeleton of the area, with Nicollet as the spine.
My point is that when you’re walking or driving through Powderhorn or Phillips or Longfellow or any of the other neighborhoods south of Franklin, the grid layout and its endless lots can all run together. Superficially, there’s a kind of a bland, repetitive quality to these neighborhoods. Stucco duplex, stucco cottage, Lutheran church, brick triplex, stucco duplex…
Hidden away, however, behind streetcorner buildings and between all those stucco duplexes are all sorts of weird little details that make South Minneapolis so quietly interesting. A case in point is the light airplane graveyard in Phillips, a block or two north of my house on 13th.
Mike tipped me off on its existence, and if he hadn’t, I might never have noticed it — it’s behind a tall wooden fence with barbed wire lining the top. There is no information on the fence or the adjoining building about who owns the lot, or how to get in touch with them, or anything else. There’s just rows and rows of Piper Cubs and Cessna 120s, crushed and stacked atop one another in piles. They are stacked just high enough that a bent propeller or wing will peek over the fence. Did people die in these planes? Or just sell them for scrap? It’s hard to get a look. Apparently the business is called Wentworth Aircraft (“the world’s leading supplier of used aircraft parts for single-engine aircraft”), but you’d never know from the exterior.
The airplane graveyard is next door to a squat, one-story light industrial building that’s been repurposed as a mosque. In the summer, sometimes the East African teenage boys will take their shirts off and do chin-ups on the metal railing overlooking the Greenway. Two block away is the Circle of Discipline, a converted garage in which neighborhood kids train in martial arts; you sometimes hear them jogging in formation down 12th chanting “Who are we? C.O.D.! Who are we? C.O.D.!” South Minneapolis doesn’t wear its eccentricities on its sleeve. You have to find them yourself. Or have Mike Gunther find them for you.
It’s Wednesday, which in many cultures means you are going to be forced to look at a picture of me.
Last summer I went to go visit my friend Tom in Oakland, where this photo was taken. The bandana scarf and jaunty cap indicate that I am at the dizzying apex of my celebrated Fiorello La Guardia-Era Newsboy look.
Earlier in the day, Tom had taken me to his favorite flea market in Berkeley. Every Saturday, apparently, he biked down there to pick up new conspiracy theory DVDs from a very excitable vendor that knew him by name and had an endless selection of titles with bizarre Photoshopped covers on subjects ranging from UFOs to weather control to Freemasonry.
Tom’s particular interest was in Freemasonry that summer, so he’d loaded up on titles related to that, no matter how crazy they seemed. Some of them did indeed seem crazy. For example, he was breathlessly telling me about one he’d bought that drew some parallels between Freemasonry, the establishment of the University of Texas and George W. Bush. You know, Longhorns. I couldn’t follow it, but it had to do with the “longhorn salute” and its relation to the One-World Satanic salute. Or maybe it had something to do with the University of Texas’s creepy fight song, “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You.”
Whatever it was, there is an agreeably sinister, omniscient Masonic quality to the lyrics:
The eyes of Texas are upon you,
All the live long day.
The eyes of Texas are upon you,
You cannot get away.
Do not think you can escape them,
At night, or early in the morn’.
The eyes of Texas are upon you,
Till Gabriel blows his horn!
Anyway, after the flea market we biked up to Amoeba Records, and the first record we found was a cheap used copy of Elvis Presley’s Flaming Star soundtrack, where he sings — oh my God! — “The Eyes of Texas”! Yikes! The Freemasons planned it that way!
So in tribute to all-seeing eyes of the Texan Freemasons and their Satanic One-World Masters, Tom is throwing up the Longhorn salute, and I am forming the “Eye of Texas” with my right hand. We are under the thrall of Texas Freemasonry. It is important to have friends that share your interests.
Later on, we saw DJ Shadow at a stoplight on Telegraph Avenue, and he was blaring the organ solo from the extended version of “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida” for some reason.
What a great trip! What a great guy, that Tom Hall!
The great St. Paul-based singer and guitarist Mike Gunther, above. The photo is courtesy Chuck’s Flickr.
I’m posting a photo of Mike above because this is the first entry in a new semi-regular feature here at S. 12th, Things I Learned From Mike Gunther. I don’t see Mike often enough, but whenever I do, he always has some completely outlandish bit of cultural ephemera to share with me. Mike, in addition to being a celebrated musician, also drives cabs and restores antique furniture. He is a man of broad interests and talents. So what he shares with me, reader, I will pass onto you.
(This feature does not have the personal approval of Mike Gunther, and should not be taken as an endorsement from him. I don’t think he’d mind, though.)
Things I Learned From Mike Gunther, #1: Dion McGregor
Mike once picked me up in a 1970s black taxicab to go help shoot a movie with two friends. Instead of playing music or NPR while he drove, like a regular boring person would, he was playing the recordings of Dion McGregor.
Dion McGregor. Wow. I could try to describe McGregor’s work for you in my own words, but that’s what Wikipedia was created for:
McGregor talked in his sleep. Not in quiet, barely-comprehensible mumbles: while he slept, McGregor would essentially narrate his dreams at conversational volume. As a narrator of his (often terrifying) dreams, Dion adopted various personas but frequently established a fey, argumentative, insolent approach to the subject at hand –- be it a hot air balloon trip to the moon with a group of multi-ethnic children, a frantic journey around New York, or a tattooing job on a woman’s tongue.
Basically, dreams described in real-time, with New York City traffic in the background. They’re sort of stressful to listen to. McGregor is almost always panicking about something, being chased or confronted with surreal, insurmountable problems, and narrating all of it in a really odd, really 1960s-sounding voice: a little bit like a cross between Truman Capote and Phil Silvers. Apparently his roommate would record his dream narrations, and some of the best ones were released by Decca as spoken-word albums. There’s some on a MySpace page for your perusal. Some of them are pretty, uh, blue.
Mike Gunther’s music is here. It’s really some of my favorite. I am truly lucky to live in a town where one of my favorite singers is able to sometimes pick me up in a vintage cab and drive me around South Minneapolis regaling me strange tales of the sleeptalkers of the 1960s.
Did you know? If the Burj Dubai tower had been built in South Minneapolis, it would be more than 2,652 feet taller than Matt’s Bar.
ANSWER: Number 5, no contest. That kid was awesome. Where do you even get those t-shirts anymore?