“I Am More of a Wayne County and the Electric Chairs Sort of Guy Myself”: A comprehensive look back at 2011 at South 12th (Part 1).
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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 done a success, in many respects: what I had assumed was a dying typeface used exclusively by Woody Allen actually turns up all over the place once you start noticing it. In fact, it’s so widely used that I actually had to stop posting submissions from readers because there were just so many. An absolutely massive catalog of Windsor use here in Minnesota and beyond can be found here. The work must continue!
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BUFFALO WILD WINGS vs. THE BRYCC HOUSE, May
“I don’t know how this correspondence could conclude without one or both parties ceding something fundamental about their day-to-day practices of living…”
An email conversation between me and an anonymous marketing executive at Buffalo Wild Wings, prompted by my disappointment that a youth culture landmark in my hometown was transformed into the casual dining establishment in question.
Easily the best material posted on South 12th all year, made more (or less?) interesting by the fact that of course it’s all completely made-up. Well, partially made-up; the BRYCC House really did become a BWW. And while the emails from the BWW executive are all fake, the questions he or she poses to me are certainly real. They are certainly questions I have worried about for the past ten years, and continue to worry about.
Here’s the photo that prompted the exchange, BWW’s first email, my reply, BWW’s scathing second response, and then some mind-bendingly excellent commentary by Evan at Duck Beater, one of my favorite writers on Tumblr.
I ask the forgiveness of anyone I fooled with this, and hope they’d realize my intent wasn’t malicious. I’d further hope they’d agree that this fake correspondence became a great opportunity to discuss some really fundamental questions about how art and commerce interact with one another. Initially, I was going to drive this fictional exchange into more absurdist territory, but I stopped short because the conversation took a turn into the truly uncomfortable, and I didn’t want to nullify that by ending it with some typically crappy slapstick. Frankly, reading it again, I’m not at all sure that the BWW exec didn’t win this argument convincingly.
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ELSEWHERE COLLABORATIVE, September
“You give her a huge, big-headed graphite racket with some width, she’s gonna be able to stand up at the net and bop the ball all day long.”
In September, I completed a monthlong residency at the Elsewhere Collaborative, a repurposed thrift store / artists’ community in Greensboro, North Carolina. It led to, among a thousand other things, a trip to Surf City offseason, wild phone calls to Manhattan, some mysterious interactions with the local Freemason community, and finally, a lovely piece of art that will live in North Carolina for the next two generations. The whole account in reverse chronological order, here.
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TRUST FUND KIDS, October-November
“Those eternal bogeymen and bogey-women of pure, noble self-expression!”
An off-the-cuff insult aimed at Occupy Wall Street participants from none other than Rush Limbaugh prompts me to wonder where the term “trust fund kid” come from. Some light investigation turns up an early reference to the term in a novel by a New York writer/photographer in the mid-1980s, and prompts some reflections about how the term has been bandied around since then (including by me, and by younger versions of me). Readers respond, and the term is traced back further yet to “trust fund baby.” A number of key South 12th obsessions touched on: class, old rock music, creaky autobiography, writing emails to people I’ve never met, fake research, the art world, rich people, vaguely defined left-wing politics, and Wikipedia.
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Part two tomorrow, or maybe later today.
