South 12th

In tribute to improbable feats of birthday-related cooking this...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:25:00 -0600

In tribute to improbable feats of birthday-related cooking this week, I give you for your Friday amusement the plinkiest new wave gem of plinky new wave gems: Jona Lewie’s “You’ll Always Find Me in the Kitchen at Parties,” from 1980.

Then I met this debutante, I said “I like new wave rock.”
She was into French cuisine but I ain’t no cordon bleu.

Occasional clock shifts present other challenges.

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:40:00 -0600

I am very likely in an embattled and sleepy-eyed minority here, but I really love the end of daylights savings in the fall. You can spend the entire summer enjoying long, lazy, well-lit evenings that dip off imperceptibly into twilight sometime long after supper, where you bike around without lights in white pants rolled up to mid-calf until at least 9:30 pm, at which point you realize the day is very nearly over and you haven’t accomplished shit except drinking a lot of summer cocktails with lime garnish and exploring a dozen city blocks worth of south Minneapolis commercial architecture. Yes!

So it feels right that as bike-and-white-pants season comes to an end, you trade all of that in for darkness, enforced solitute and a re-committment to the sort of unwavering Nordic work ethic that gave America everything from The Boat of Longing to “The Toolmaster of Brainerd.” Time to hit the studio! Time to up your Netflix queue to four-at-a-time!

Here in Minneapolis, the sun will set at 4:55pm today, and then continue to set two-and-a-half minutes earlier with every passing day until Hippie Holiday Winter Solstice. By the end of November, the sun will have set completely at 4:30 in the afternoon. The entire state will be plunged into darkness by the time I leave work, in other words.

I still find that tremendously exciting for some reason. It makes you feel as if you are privy to the secrets of the North, as if you have a shared kinship with Canadians and Swedes and Russians and Alaskans and Finns that everyone in the rest of the hemisphere doesn’t get as they go on with their subtropical sweating and stinking well into November.

I will be sick of of all of it by late March, of course, but I’ll have gotten a tremendous amount of work done, and will be ready to jump back into warmth and light with a sweaty, white-pantsed fury.

I got a lot of really, really nice birthday wishes yesterday,...

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:07:00 -0600

I got a lot of really, really nice birthday wishes yesterday, but this message from Nate wins the Best Use of Pointless Cinematic Allusion Award:

Andy Sturdevant is tall, rich, good looking, stupid, dishonest, conceited, a bully, liar, drunk and thief, an egomaniac, and probably psychotic. In short, highly attractive to happy birthdays.

Aw, thanks, Nate! Good luck with your Fourierism!

Also, uh, since it’s my birthday and all, it seems like...

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:41:48 -0600

Also, uh, since it’s my birthday and all, it seems like it’d be OK to point out this hilarious and utterly terrifying photo — my friends Allen and Pamela went costumed as your correspondent for Halloween last weekend, right down to the red socks, vintage campaign lapel buttons and furry Russian hats. If people didn’t know who I was, they just said they were “Amish rabbis,” which works, too.

There is also a photo of them making out, but I have sworn to never look at it. The metaphysical implications are too terrible.

Robin Scott, of the Scottish band M, whose song “Pop...

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:37:00 -0600

Robin Scott, of the Scottish band M, whose song “Pop Muzik” was #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on November 3, 1979:

“I was looking to make a fusion of various styles which somehow would summarize the last 25 years of pop music. It was a deliberate point I was trying to make. Whereas rock and roll had created a generation gap, disco was bringing people together on an enormous scale. That’s why I really wanted to make a simple, bland statement, which was, ‘All we’re talking about basically [is] pop music.’”

That’s a very late-1970s sentiment, the touchingly naive and idealistic concept that people might be coming together on some global scale to fulfill, in some way, the promises of the 1960s (by dancing, I guess). I suppose that particular party came to a pretty abrpupt end almost exactly one year later with the election of Ronald Reagan on November 4, 1980. Morning in America! No more of this gay cosmopolitan utopian bullshit!

This optimistic, internationalist pop anthem that positions itself with one foot in the past and one foot in the future is thirty years old today.

And actually, so am I! I am also a relic of a forgotten time!

Neil Simon, rendered obsolete by powerful historical forces!

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:24:00 -0600

“Mr. Simon was a forefather of situation comedy writers, and his scripts for stage and screen were embraced by actors like Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. But sitcoms have given way to reality shows like “American Idol,” one-liners to the sardonic humor of “The Office,” and the heavily plotted comedy of Mr. Simon’s film “California Suite” to the animated wit of “Up” and the fratty banter of “The Hangover,” two of the summer’s biggest hits.”

From Sunday’s article in The New York Times about Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs closing on Broadway so quickly.

I realize it’s just a tossed-off line, not meant to be a serious diagnosis of the state of American comedy, but I still find it to be a strange statement nonetheless. I suppose I can see where ”sardonic humor” has replaced “one-liners” (though I’m not sure Jack Donaghy and Liz Lemon would agree), but I’m not sure how “animated wit” might have replaced “heavily plotted comedy”; I mean, wasn’t Up about as traditional a piece of heartstring-tugging comic narrative cinema as one could imagine? It even starred Ed Asner, who’s actually acted in a Neil Simon production! The road from The Goodbye Girl to Up is not a long one.

Comedy, like any form of popular art, is a continuum — there’s never clean breaks from the past. For example, can it be said that Woody Allen’s neurotic brand of sophisticated urban comedy made Bob Hope’s schtickier brand of self-deprecating comedy obsolete? I guess so, but that statement is negated by the fact that Woody Allen stole a ton from Bob Hope, a fact Allen happily admits. That doesn’t take anything away from Hope or Allen.

I think it’s too pat to say “audiences don’t like that scripted stuff anymore — they prefer fratty banter.” The reality is always more complex, and it’s a lot more interesting to poke and see where those fault lines have formed, and just how these changes in taste have manifested themselves.

Questions for discussion:

Who are the transitional figures between Felix & Oscar and Harold & Kumar?
If Walter Matthau were still alive, would he ever be cast as Will Ferrell’s father? Zach Galifinakis’s? Why does it make sense that he might have appeared in a cameo on 30 Rock, and not on The Office?
What does Chevy Chase’s presence in the new comedy show Community suggest?
Should Neil Simon begin writing videos for Funny or Die? Should Robert Redford start appearing in them?
What will future generations make of Cougartown’s slow, inevitable transformation into a Larry Gelbart sitcom?

"Sheesh, simmer down, crybaby—the rest of us middle American die-hards have been dealing with our own..."

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:50:00 -0600

“Sheesh, simmer down, crybaby—the rest of us middle American die-hards have been dealing with our own squads of AAA losers for decades, so join the club. But of course it’s not just Mets fans who get a bruised ego and have self-righteous hissy fits after a disappointing season—Cubs fans are downright scary when the subject of entitlement comes up. And don’t they still burn Kenesaw Mountain Landis effigies on Chicago’s Southside every October? Nobody holds a grudge like a real baseball fan.”

- My old pal Katie, a diehard Reds fan, writing over at Mercy Missiles on the subject of postseason baseball misery in flyover country.

If you’re not following Mercy Missiles, you’re missing out on the best of pro baseball, Louisville politics, old television shows, mixed drinks and other very important subjects also dear to our hearts over here at S. 12th.

Sexy Всесоюзный Ленинский Коммунистический Союз Молодёж.

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:01:17 -0600

Sexy Всесоюзный Ленинский Коммунистический Союз Молодёж.

I’m not a dad or a homeowner, Obama. What can I do to...

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:10:36 -0500

I’m not a dad or a homeowner, Obama. What can I do to help?

I am hoping the answer is “form a bluegrass band and travel across the country in a red-white-and-blue solar-powered conversion van solving mysteries.”

Reader, you are gazing upon an image of the world’s...

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:30:00 -0500

Reader, you are gazing upon an image of the world’s greatest living Sconnie. It’s Geoff Herbach, and he is forty years old today.

The glasses he is wearing in this photo were purchased as a kind of a joke, because we had both helped write an urban planning radio musical about a twee-pop band last year, and Geoff played the lead twee-pop songwriter. So he needed a suitable pair of tongue-in-cheek 1980s sad-person glasses. But he actually looked fairly good in them, and started wearing them on a regular basis, even after the performance’s run had ended. “I see why computer guys like these,” he exclaimed one evening, walking around his living room whipping his head around. “You can really see everything! I’ve got perfect 360 degree vision!”

That is my own personal idea of Herbach: a man with perfect 360 degree vision who can see things around him. I, uh, guess that works on a couple of different levels, but Herbach would write it better.

Other Scorpios.

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:18:00 -0500

Other Scorpios.:

That handsome devil and Louisiana gadabout Mills marks his 29th birthday today — stop by one of his online homes and pass on your best wishes.

When I first made the decision to use Tumblr as a blogging platform a year ago, I had some misgivings. Everything seemed so short and so ephemeral! Mills’s tumblelog was the only one that I knew of in those early days that seemed to think it was OK to write longer, more complicated posts. Moreoever, people seemed to enjoy reading them! “Huh,” I thought. “I guess this means I can write longer pieces if I want to. I guess I can even” — dare I even utter this aloud — “take it kind of seriously if the occasion warrants.”

Without his example, I might have given up on Tumblr and I’d be thanklessly toiling away on Wordpress! Maybe I’d even be dead. Who can say with any certainty? To paraphrase Lionel Hutz: “hero” is not a word I use very often, but Mills is the greatest hero in American history.

Invariably used without permission.

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:29:35 -0500

A few years ago Nate came up for a visit, and we were at the Half Price Books in St. Louis Park. Nate was stocking up on Henry Roth paperbacks or whatever, and I was perusing a very handsome three-hundred page hardcover volume on Tijuana bibles. We’d been in the store for about an hour, and it was about time to leave.

“What’s that?” asked Nate.

“Oh, it’s a book on Tijuana bibles,” I told him. “Really interesting. Very titillating, very scholarly — that’s a rare combination.”

“Well, bring it up front and let’s go.”

I shook my head. “Naw, I’m not going to buy it,” I said, admiring a crude rendering of Cary Grant’s wang before reshelving it.

“Why not? It looks great.”

“It is, there’s some really good essays and really charming drawings of Cary Grant’s wang, but I don’t have any money.”

“How much is it?”

“Five dollars.”

“Five dollars? Are you kidding? You have five dollars! Come on! Buy it!”

“Naw, my personal library doesn’t need an informative, well-researched illustration-heavy book featuring drawings of Cary Grant’s wang,” I said dismissively. ”Let’s go.”

“Fine, but you are going to regret not buying that,” he warned.

I waved my hand and frowned and made that pfffft sound. We left the store and drove back down Excelsior Boulevard and the Miracle Mile, back into Minneapolis.

That was four years ago. There is not a week that goes by where I don’t think about that god-damned book.

Maybe you already saw that “riot grrl” kiddie...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:28:00 -0500

Maybe you already saw that “riot grrl” kiddie costume making the rounds on your favorite blogs? Well, nice try, pint-size. I perfected the riot grrl costume myself one briefly beardless Halloween night in 2006. (Hint: I’m the one the left.)

And lest you think this awesome costume is simply mocking, heartless burlesque, note the careful and (dare I say) loving attention to detail: those neon 1” buttons on my sweater are for Half Seas Over, a magnificent Louisville-based band that relocated to Portland sometime in the early-2000s and transmorgified into Swan Island, members of whom eventually went on to teach at the Rock and Roll Camp for Girls. Game, set, match.

Art Institute of Miami - beechershandmadecheese.com - Find it...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:55:00 -0500

Art Institute of Miami - beechershandmadecheese.com - Find it here.

Oops, the AIM is letting the big secret slip…

I remember, in my own art school days, that terrible, inevitable moment after the weekly group critiques, when my professor would stand up and yell: “All right, you Picassos, playtime is over! You think that milk is going to separate itself into curds and whey?” Then he’d throw copies of Janson at our heads as we scurried down into the vat room in terror, where we would mill curd for hours, our vintage thrift-store outfits caked with rennet. This Google ad is a rare slip: the art schools of America are almost all secret cheese mills (except SCAD, where undergrads are forced to churn artisinal butter, and RISD, which is a yogurt sweatshop). Have you ever wondered where all that cube cheese at gallery openings comes from? Take your blinders off.

ACTUALLY, I DON’T HAVE ANY FRIENDS: The Wonderful and Baffling World of Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies.

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:03:00 -0500

ACTUALLY, I DON’T HAVE ANY FRIENDS: The Wonderful and Baffling World of Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies.:

For Halloween Week at Filmosophy, a wildly unreasonable short essay on one of my favorite movies of all time.

There are a lot of trashy made-for-cable horror flicks out there, but there is only one where a socially awkward Persian genie kills Tiny Lister in a mystical prison dance-off and then possesses his body in order to bust his secret Russian boyfriend out of Los Angeles County Jail. That flick, ladies and gentlemen, is Wishmaster 2.

Top three memories associated with Freddy Fender’s 1975...

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:42:00 -0500

Top three memories associated with Freddy Fender’s 1975 country hit “Before the Next Teardop Falls”:

Trying to learn the words and melody so I could work it into a medley with “Interstellar Overdrive,” “Act Naturally,” “Tobacco Road,” “Land of 1,000 Dances,” “Seven and Seven Is,” “Let’s Build a Car” and “Honor Thy Father and Mother” with my old band for a year-end reunion show in 2006. The idea was to attempt to honor the dead musicans of that year (which including Freddy Fender) with a Dead Musicians of 2006 Hit Medley, only to realize (1) we had no time to prepare such a complex medley and (2) we were absolutely terrible at learning new songs, anyway.
Yelping triumphantly when it appeared on a mix CD my friend Charlie made for me last year, where all the songs were themed around crying. The whole time I listened to the CD, I was thinking “Oh, man, I hope that Freddy Fender song is on it,” and then it was! For this reason and many others, it is perhaps still the greatest mix CD anyone has ever made me.
Hearing it in a very vivid dream from when I was 14, wherein a dignified old man in a suit that I understood to be the prime minister of Japan was singing it to me as he slowly committed suicide and I stood by helplessly. Yeesh! Troubled teenage psyches!

Steph has a really nice camera, so you know you will always...

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:02:00 -0500

Steph has a really nice camera, so you know you will always look OK when she takes a picture of you. This one is from Saturday night. I look like I am considering a number of sad, crazy ideas about the way life should be lived. Maybe I am!

Actually, that’s the perfect tone, because I am hoping photographs like this can be used to trick advertising executives into using my epic sad-crazy American poetry for the new Levi Strauss blue jeans fall ad campaign. “Sturdevant’s got the impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship western youthful look that’s really hot right now,” they’ll say. “Throw ten thousand dollars at him and let’s see what happens.” We must cash in, my darlings!

(On a related note, how do those Walt Whitman Levi’s commercials make you feel? I will admit they fill me with a strange and not altogether disgusted feeling, which probably has something to do with the shock of hearing wax cylinder recordings emanating from a source other than the old beloved-by-us-dorks UCSB archives. Actually, it’s sort of a generally positive feeling. While I have probably seen enough ad campaigns knocking off Ryan McGinley’s wild-shirtless-bros imagery to hold me over until I am a very old man, I do like hearing Walt Whitman recordings in public, and wish I did more often. Plus, Levi Strauss was manufacturing clothing while Whitman was still alive, which seems worth pointing out somehow. I guess I approve. Of course, it won’t make me run out and buy jeans, because I never wear jeans.)

Testing.

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:09:00 -0500

Blah blah blah, look at me, I’m S. 12th, everyone! I screw up the flow of your dashboard with a bunch of long, boring posts full of run-on sentences that go on for nineteen paragraphs…

…and you’re stuck with all of it.

Until now! It looks like you can skip it with the “read more” feature? Wow, great! I guess!

Should I use this new feature? Or do you want the whole mess, unexpurgated, as has been the custom around here? I will just follow Mills’ and Tess Lynch’s examples, since they like the long posts, too. You set the scene, Baker and Lynch.

"To the east WELCOME, to the west WELCOME..."

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:23:00 -0500

Here is an excerpt from a reader’s (presumably negative) two-star customer review of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America in ~~Arabic~~ Farsi (thanks, Age of Dhool!). If anyone speaks ~~Arabic~~ Farsi, I would love to know what specifically is being singled out for criticism.

صید قزل آلا در آمریکا نوشته ریچارد براتیگان یک رمان پست مدرن است. براتیگان در این اثر که شاهکار او محسوب می شود نگارش داستان را تکه تکه پیش برده است که هر تکه را می توان به عنوان بخشی جدا در نظرگرفت و به این دلیل ظاهر این رمان شبیه مجموعه داستان کوتاه است و داستان ها را می توان مس.. صید قزل آلا در آمریکا نوشته ریچارد براتیگان یک رمان پست مدرن است. براتیگان در این اثر که شاهکار او محسوب می شود نگارش داستان را تکه تکه پیش برده است که هر تکه را می توان به عنوان بخشی جدا در نظرگرفت و به این دلیل ظاهر این رمان شبیه مجموعه داستان کوتاه است و داستان ها را می توان مستقل از همدیگر و بدون در نظر گرفتن ترتیب آنها خواند. نشانه هایی از قبیل داشتن یک فرزند خردسال و مسافرت با شریک زندگی که در بخش های مختلف کتاب آمده سبب می شود به راحتی نتیجه گرفت که راوی در بخش های مختلف داستان یک نفر است. ضمنا نقل تکرار شده داستان درباره فردی با نام کوتوله صید قزل آلا در آمریکا که به گفته راوی یک الکلی آس و پاس است را می توان به عنوان رد پای راوی یکسان در همه داستان ها در نظر گرفت. با هم در نظر گرفتن کل رمان از راوی داستان که صید قزل آلا را در مکان ها و زمان های مختلف نقل می کند و حوادث مختلفی برایش پیش می آید داستان را بهتر در ذهن خواننده جا می اندازد.

"In particular, the numbers have been critiqued…for their depiction of collectivism (as opposed..."

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:21:49 -0500

“In particular, the numbers have been critiqued…for their depiction of collectivism (as opposed to traditionally American rugged individualism) in the spirit of Roosevelt’s New Deal.”

- An excerpt from the Wikipedia article on Busby Berkeley (needing a citation, of course). Socialism is everywhere!

I spent a few lazy hours yesterday afternoon being indoctrinated into collectivism by watching 42nd Street and Footlight Parade, the latter of which contained this water number that made me spit coffee all over myself.