Dec 3 4:33 pm
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14 Plays.

Uno Lady is Christa Ebert, from off the streets of Cleveland, all by herself with a laptop. She is South Twelfth’s official pick for Band of the Year!

Dec 3 4:14 pm

Greek prog-rock all-stars Aphrodite’s Child walk around and mouth the words to “Spring, Summer, Winter and Fall,” 1970 (via mmeida). I love the weird Nina Simone phrasing in the vocal.

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Dec 2 2:10 pm

The annals of youth.

This from an “oral history” of a house I lived in through college called the Birchwood Palace that I started putting together a few years ago. It will probably never be finished, so here is an excerpt describing my early apartment life.

X and Y, who were living in the Palace at the time, broke up in a spectacular fashion during the winter of 2001/02. I was still living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment with a kitchenette on Highland Avenue, and the rent was cheap — $250 a month. It had been filthy for most of the time I’d lived there, but after I’d gotten a girlfriend, I had made an effort to beautify the place by putting down new carpeting, bringing in some plants and painting a Roy Lichtenstein mural on the bedroom wall. Still, it was very small and after being there for about a year and a half, I was ready to move out.

So it made a certain amount of sense that Y and I should switch places.  The idea was she could get out of the Palace, where X was living, and stay on her own cheaply while looking for a new place to live. In turn, I could finally get out of the tiny apartment, live in a huge, beautiful house with my best friend X, and save about $70 a month in rent.  It doesn’t sound like much, but it was an enormous amount when one considers that $70 constituted a little more than 10% of my monthly income at the time.

The landlord at my old apartment was a lazy jerk who’d inherited the property from his father, a local music promoter who was famous for bringing the Rolling Stones to town in 1964, and who then died in a horrific car wreck a few weeks after I moved in (I somewhat ghoulishly pinned his obituary to my kitchen wall). He had told me he’d wanted to raise the rent if I moved out. So Y and I made the sort of completely ludicrous oral agreement that only two 22-year old art students could dream up: she would keep my name on the lease, and if the landlord ever came around (which he never did), she would just pretend to me my boyfriend, and I would be “out for the day.” In the interim, she would keep paying the rent in my name with money orders.

This precarious arrangement was only supposed to last a few months while she found a new place, but she ended up staying for at least two or three years. When she finally did move out, well after I’d lost touch with her, she had apparently never changed the name on the utilities (oops! I should have thought of that!), a situation that resulted in me being hit with a few hundred dollars in back charges, and subsequently having my power shut off in the middle of dinner one night in the apartment I was living several years later. It was months before I even made the connection.

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Dec 2 11:12 am
Blurry food. On Flickr, via joescales.

Blurry food.

On Flickr, via joescales.

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Dec 2 11:03 am
Photo by Asen Ognyanov, featured in the Humble Arts Foundation Group Show #27, New York.

Photo by Asen Ognyanov, featured in the Humble Arts Foundation Group Show #27, New York.

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Dec 2 10:55 am

David Byrne interviews Jeff Koons in 1975. Filmed at 52 Bond Street by Jamie Dalglish.

At what point does an artist’s persona solidify into the one that we recognize today? In the case of both Byrne and Koons, this video seems to indicate that the answer in this case is “sometime before 1975.” 

What’s most impressive here is that both of these figures are already fairly recognizable as we know them today: Koons’ cornball proto-yuppie swagger is already in place (he’s only 20 years old in this clip), as is Byrne’s tic-y deadpan (he’s a mere 23). What a find! (Via C-Monster by way of Good) (Copyright Jamie Dalgish; please see comments below.)

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Dec 1 3:14 pm

Press "0" for an agent. »

A comphrehensive guide to getting a human on the other end of just about any customer service call imaginable. Thanks, Jenny Anything.

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Dec 1 3:04 pm
Back to the camel chops, pictured here earlier. I forgot to do much Thanksgiving cooking until the day-of, and the only grocery open in my neighborhood was the “City Market,” a surprisingly cavernous East African-owned business that also has a coffee shop and money-wiring service attached. They also have a deli, where they were selling camel chops (ribs, the woman told me) for six dollars a pound. Sure, I thought. Despite posting a recipe for camel earlier in these pages (which turns out to be of, uh, slightly dubious provenance), I really had no idea how to prepare camel chops. The fellow that sold them to me told me that camel is a little like lamb, so I just followed a mid-Eastern lamp chop recipe. These were marinated in olive oil, chopped onions, some garlic and a few other spices I had laying around, then broiled. They weren’t bad — not great, but that may have had more to do with my preparation. It was a little like lamb, and quite a bit like buffalo. It was also quite tough and very sinewy. The chops were probably a little undercooked, as well, since camel doesn’t seem like one of those meats that is better rare. In the future, tenderizing it better, or perhaps soaking it in lemon juice beforehand might be advisable. Still, my friend Tim, whom I had Thanksgiving with, makes the following post-weekend report: Andy, I ate the rest of it last night. I just nuked the last rib for a couple minutes, and cut the meat off the bone. It was almost better than on Thursday. It’s really tastes sort of like a T-bone. I’m thinking a few hours in a crock-pot as a stew might be great… That does sound great. Camel stew strikes me as an outstanding winter dish.

Back to the camel chops, pictured here earlier.

I forgot to do much Thanksgiving cooking until the day-of, and the only grocery open in my neighborhood was the “City Market,” a surprisingly cavernous East African-owned business that also has a coffee shop and money-wiring service attached. They also have a deli, where they were selling camel chops (ribs, the woman told me) for six dollars a pound. Sure, I thought.

Despite posting a recipe for camel earlier in these pages (which turns out to be of, uh, slightly dubious provenance), I really had no idea how to prepare camel chops. The fellow that sold them to me told me that camel is a little like lamb, so I just followed a mid-Eastern lamp chop recipe. These were marinated in olive oil, chopped onions, some garlic and a few other spices I had laying around, then broiled.

They weren’t bad — not great, but that may have had more to do with my preparation. It was a little like lamb, and quite a bit like buffalo. It was also quite tough and very sinewy. The chops were probably a little undercooked, as well, since camel doesn’t seem like one of those meats that is better rare. In the future, tenderizing it better, or perhaps soaking it in lemon juice beforehand might be advisable.

Still, my friend Tim, whom I had Thanksgiving with, makes the following post-weekend report:

Andy, I ate the rest of it last night. I just nuked the last rib for a couple minutes, and cut the meat off the bone. It was almost better than on Thursday. It’s really tastes sort of like a T-bone. I’m thinking a few hours in a crock-pot as a stew might be great…

That does sound great. Camel stew strikes me as an outstanding winter dish.

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Dec 1 10:39 am
For the closing of Endless Skyway, Sergio Vucci and I invited about 30 or 40 people to The Soap Factory for a hobo breakfast I had prepared, consisting of beans, coffee, boiled eggs, oatmeal and cornbread. Everything was laid out on a table, and people spent the morning eating, playing the guitar, singing Woody Guthrie songs, playing Boggle and helping assemble some of the work for the upcoming season. Thanks to Jen March (again!) for the photo.

For the closing of Endless Skyway, Sergio Vucci and I invited about 30 or 40 people to The Soap Factory for a hobo breakfast I had prepared, consisting of beans, coffee, boiled eggs, oatmeal and cornbread. Everything was laid out on a table, and people spent the morning eating, playing the guitar, singing Woody Guthrie songs, playing Boggle and helping assemble some of the work for the upcoming season.

Thanks to Jen March (again!) for the photo.

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Dec 1 10:00 am

"A Day Without Art" in Minnesota, two decades later. »

On December 1, 1989, about six hundred galleries, museums and arts organizations across America, concentrated primarily in New York but including some here in the Twin Cities, observed the first “A Day Without Art.”

A brief piece I wrote for Secrets of the City marking the 19th anniversary of the first Day Without Art.

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