28th December 11
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 with. (Although, in hindsight, the mid-’90s peroxide blonde “alternative” jerk-ass soccer player is a beautiful archetype that I feel oddly nostalgic for, as it is rapidly fading into history.) On the whole, I actually didn’t much care for soccer at all.
During this past World Cup, however, I inexplicably caught a low-grade case of football fever — something about the sounds of the vuvzelas and living in a predominately Mexican neighborhood did it. I got very excited about the whole thing. When it was all over, I actually thought, well, maybe I won’t go as far as selecting a Premiere League English football club to get behind (I don’t even know what metrics could be applied to making such a decision). But maybe, I thought, Major League Soccer could be something interesting to think about.
Until I looked at the team names. They all suck. They really suck.
They all sound like third-rate expansion WNBA teams. “San Jose Earthquakes”? “Colorado Rapids”? What the shit is “Colorado Rapids” supposed to mean? That doesn’t even sound like a sports team. It sounds like a town off the interstate where your car breaks down and you buy a Slim Jim in the gas station while the tow truck comes from three towns over and some redneck makes fun of your shirt and you buy one of those newspapers that’s all personals ads for truck-drivers and prison inmates. Not very inspiring.
There is, in my limited experience, a poetry to football club names. They’re not named for vaguely threatening singular nouns or natural disasters. They are named for neighborhoods, and places of employment, and defunct athletic clubs, and weird inside jokes from the 19th Century. They are at least a dozen teams in London, and not one of them has the word “London” in their name. It’s Crystal Palace F.C., Chelsea, Arsenal, Fulham, Tottenham Hotspur, Leyton Orient.
So to that end, I’ve taken the liberty of renaming each of the MLS teams to more closely conform with my own expectations for what a soccer team’s name should sound like. Please enjoy.
Chicago Fire » Bridgeview Town FC
The stadium’s not even in Chicago proper. Which is fine, but the fact that’s a dumb pun on top of that makes it inexcusable. Show some pride for little Bridgeview. An alternative would be naming for the long-gone White City, from the 1893 Columbian Exposition, but White City FC sounds a little racist.
Columbus Crew » Linden South End FC
The “Columbus Crew” sounds like a gang of jocks that come down from OSU and crash your little sister’s graduation party. Again, naming the club for the city neighborhood it’s located in makes a much stronger statement.
D.C. United » Columbia FC
Nice try, guys, but “United” should only apply to a team that is formed when two hated crosstown rivals finally put aside their differences and join forces. Until the D.C. club merges with the Arlington Avvalanchez or whatever, “Columbia FC” should do it.
Kansas City Wizards » Village West Rangers FC
There is no reason to drag wizards into this whole thing. Apparently they’re building these guys a new stadium in a mixed-use development near the Speedway called “Village West.” Sounds good to me. Plus, maybe “rangers” kind of sounds like something with cows. You know, like stockyards, or that kind of thing. I don’t know.
New England Revolution » Lexington & Concord FC
Why fart around with vague historical references? Just go for it, dudes.
New York Red Bulls » Brooklyn Celtic
“But Andy, the team’s not in Brooklyn.” No, you’re right: it’s in New Jersey. But come on, teams that play in New Jersey get to call themselves “New York” all the damned time. It’s absurd, but it’s life. “Brooklyn Celtic” was a respected American soccer team from back in the bad old days, when American soccer teams had better names. So Brooklyn can have a team that plays in New Jersey. That’s fine.
Philadelphia Union » Chester FC
Again: not in Philadelphia. It’s in Chester. We’ll just use that.
Toronto FC » Dufferin Gate FC
Actually, I guess “Toronto FC” is hard to argue with. Or maybe “Toronto City FC.” But it looks like the team plays at a stadium at Exhibition Place, which was once the site of a 19th Century structure called “Dufferin Gate.” I like the sound of that. Let’s go with it.
C.D. Chivas USA » C.D. Chivas USA
This one generally seems reasonable.
Colorado Rapids » Commerce City FC
Another one where the name of the suburb the club’s actually located in has a better name than the major city it supposedly represents. Though I’ve heard Commerce City is pretty crappy.
FC Dallas » Tree City FC
This club is based not in Dallas proper, but in Frisco, Texas. Listen to this gem from Wikipedia about the city of Frisco: “Since 2003, Frisco has received the designation ‘Tree City USA’ by the National Arbor Day Foundation.” That’s outstanding!
Houston Dynamo » Dynamo Houston FC
Apparently “Dynamo” is also the name that all the KGB- and Stasi-backed football clubs in the old Soviet bloc had, but why not, let’s just keep it anyway. Maybe switch the two words around.
Los Angeles Galaxy » Carson South Bay FC
Teams in huge cities shouldn’t be named for the whole city. It’s too expansive. Just a small part of it. Since the club doesn’t play in LA proper but in nearby Carson, I think this geographic designation is more specific and more appropriate.
Real Salt Lake » Salt Lake County FC
Using the Spanish term “real” — which means “royal” — is just ridiculously pretentious. This is the equivalent of a naming the shittiest cookie-cutter suburban apartment development “Le Royale Oakes Apartments at Wyndmere” so that it sounds vaguely European. Again, “City” is already in the god-damned name, so we could just do “Salt Lake City FC.” That said, I like the “county” designation, and we need at least one team with “county” in the name. You’re it, Salt Lake.
Seattle Sounders FC » Seattle Occidental FC
Again, let’s go with a neighborhood. Seattle is a city of neighborhoods. This should be easy. Actually, now that I look at it, the team plays in kind of a downtown-nowhere arena, and “Central Business District FC” isn’t so inspiring. However, it’s located at 800 Occidental Avenue. Great name! “West,” get it? Totally mythical.
San Jose Earthquakes » ???
I give up. You think of something.
(November 5, 2010)
NOTES: In fact, a mere month after I wrote this, the Kansas City Wizards, A.K.A. Village West Rangers, renamed their franchise “Sporting K.C.” Also, I am still not sure how an American fan chooses an English football team to support. As far as I can tell, the English Premiere Football League has three New York Yankees-equivalent clubs: Manchester, Chelsea and Arsenal. Yuck, right? Or, actually, in all fairness, Manchester United seems like a team that manages to marry the provincial, chip-on-shoulder qualities of the Boston Red Sox to the unrelentingly obnoxious zillionaire winningness of the Yankees. Which is about the worst thing I can think of.
27th December 11
“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 the ethics of the task at hand, which in rock-and-roll, is the affirmation of American innocence in the face of pervasive guilt and complicity.”
- Dave Hickey, Air Guitar
“In the beginning of rock ’n’ roll, the artist was either a star/singer or a featured instrumentalist like Duane Eddy. Soon, these characters were replaced by ’groups’ who more resonantly mirrored the boss class. The group was a construct that sounded large, democratic and inclusive, but was by nature actually fixed and exclusive. More importantly, as with a board of directors in the industrial superstructure, the group had no culpability; its multifaceted and liquid person could slither from scandal and irresponsibility in an eternal buck-passing session. It took a collective name, which would serve as a brand or corporate flag and which could sometimes be used to designate a succession of personages.”
- Ian Svenonious, The Psychic Soviet
(February 5, 2009)
23rd December 11
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 those fucking bars down in St. Paul. So I can just fucking drink for free at any of ‘um. They all know who I am. They’ll fucking buy me drinks anytime.
Q: Do you pick up random chicks after your shows?
A: I just fucking pick up random chicks after my shows all the time, man.
Q: What’s the deal with this fucking child support shit?
A: Hey, I was just about to ask you that.
(August 3, 2009)
NOTES: A special deep cuts request from Rachel, happily fulfilled.
23rd December 11
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 discuss it.
Q. Why was it necessary to open the front driver’s seat door?
A. The St. Paul poet Paul D. Dickinson needed to pop the hood to remove the battery before MPR came to tow the 1999 Mercury Tracer away to Mercury Tracer Heaven, or a scrapyard in Blaine.
Q: What did the St. Paul poet Paul D. Dickinson plan to do with the battery?
A. He planned to install it in an acquaintance’s Geo Metro in Northeast Minneapolis.
Q. Is the St. Paul poet Paul D. Dickinson allergic to wasps?
A. Deathly.
Q. What did the St. Paul poet Paul D. Dickinson yell when the twenty wasps swarmed on him?
A. “If one of those fuckers stings me, you’ll have to drive me to HCMC.”
Q. Was there a can of Raid nearby?
A. There was not.
Q. Was there anything else nearby one could use to kill twenty wasps?
A. There was a rusted spray can of oven cleaner in a nearby alley.
Q. How effective is oven cleaner for the killing of wasps?
A. Very, as it turns out.
Q. What is the spray range of an average rusty can of alley oven cleaner?
A. Almost four feet, actually.
Q. How many wasps were killed with the oven cleaner?
A. All twenty.
Q. Was there any damage or discoloration to the body of the 1999 Mercury Tracer caused by the oven cleaner?
A. Surprisingly, no.
Q. What injuries did the St. Paul poet Paul D. Dickinson sustain in the process?
A. Minor electrical shocks were sustained in removing the battery. He was neither stung by wasp nor burned by oven cleaner.
Q. Where is the 1999 Mercury Tracer now?
A. Mercury Tracer Heaven, or a scrapyard in Blaine.
Q. Where is the rusty can of oven cleaner now?
A. Back in the alley it came from.
(June 29, 2010)
22nd December 11
A few weeks ago, I was parking my bicycle outside the Central Library on Nicollet Avenue, when a man walked by and stopped for a moment to look at me oddly. This happens sometimes, so I didn’t think much of it. He passed me by, but then he stopped again, turned around, and approached me. “C____ T_____?” he asked.
(I am omitting the full name he used for privacy-related reasons that will become clear shortly.)
“Pardon me?” I said.
“Oh,” he replied. “I thought you were C_____ T ______.”
I shook my head. “No, I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “I am Andy Sturdevant.” He apologized, looking a little embarrassed, and walked off.
“C_____ T_____” is a memorable name, so I made a note of it. Perhaps C_____ T_____ was my doppelganger.
When I arrived home that evening, I Googled the name with “Minnesota” to see what came up. After a little digging around, I came upon a very old-school personal website for a person of the same name that lives in South Minneapolis. Along with some historic photos and essays on his work in real estate and historic preservation, he included a photo gallery of some photographs of himself. One of these photos is above: C______ T________ with a Rudge Ulster motorcycle, en route from Cincinnati to the Twin Cities.
I believe it is fair to say that he and I share a certain resemblance.
The odd thing, though, is that C_____ T_____ was born in the mid-’50s. The photo above is from 1979.
C_____ T_____ also posted some photos of himself as he appears today, which is quite a bit different. In fact, I don’t look much like the current-day version of C_____ T_____ at all — he is now clean shaven and doesn’t wear glasses. I do, however, look a bit like the 1979 vintage.
So perhaps this fellow on Nicollet Mall thought he had momentarily traveled thirty years in the past and stumbled across C_____ T_____. This would account for his confusion. I would be baffled if I was walking down the street and came across a person that I hadn’t seen for thirty years but who did not look any different than he looked thirty years ago, when I knew him.
Of course I emailed C_____ T_____ immediately and told him the whole story, also attaching a photo of myself. I was hoping he would invite me to lunch or something and we could talk about what it’s like to look like we do, but I never heard from him. Maybe he never got the email, or maybe it was an old address. Or maybe he just thought it was all too weird. To preserve his privacy, I’m not using his full name, but I really do sort of wish he’d written back.
I have never been mistaken for a time traveler before, and if C_____ T_____ was thinking it was all too weird, he’s not wrong. It is kind of weird, but I also think it’s kind of great.
(October 27, 2010)
21st December 11
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 I had the full primal force of the Kennedies at my back. Herbach was already ecstatic about Teddy’s endorsement, so he proceeded to give me one of the greatest pep talks I have ever received from anyone. “I know he’d also endorse you, should this delicious woman want something in writing — and if that is something she desires,” he sputtered, building to a Kennedyesque crescendo of sheer liberal exuberance, “we will drive to Hyannis Port tonight!”
I still think of that rallying cry — we will drive to Hyannis Port tonight! — in similar moments of personal exuberance. I suppose it is my own private version of “the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die.”
/////////
A weeknight at Nye’s Polonaise, during the Republican Convention. As with most bars around the cities at that time, Republican delegates had completely taken over the place — assholes in cowboy boots, wall-to-wall. I decided it was time to do my civic duty by letting the fuckers know they’d picked the wrong night to ruin my favorite Polish piano lounge. I downed a shot of bourbon at the bar and marched over to the piano player, who was taking requests from patrons wishing to sing old standards as he played. “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” I snarled. He nodded uneasily as I picked up the mic. “This number goes out to alla you Western delegates,” I spat out as the piano player started, and I tore into the first verse in my best Johnny Cash vibrato. Except I changed the words from “ghost riders in the sky” to “Ted Kennedy in the sky” — painting a hellish vision of thundering liberal retribution, raining down on the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul. “A bolt of fear went through them as he thundered through the sky / For they saw Teddy comin’ hard, and they heard his mournful cry.”
But none of the delegates noticed. Or if they did, they didn’t care. They just kept drinking.
(September 9, 2009)
NOTES: This was originally posted a few days following Senator Kennedy’s death on August 25. A reader asked me later how the “high-stakes date” went. In true Teddy form, it went like this: I won primaries in several key states, but was blasted for giving a “repetitive and incoherent” answer to the question of why I was interested in the nomination, and was then decisively routed in key primaries leading up the convention. Actually, in retrospect, I think there’s probably something a little creepy about wearing a Ted Kennedy button on a date, especially when you’re picking that date up in a car and driving them around. Still, she didn’t seem to mind, and for a few months — before my poll numbers started their precipitous decline — it looked like I had the nomination sewn up.
20th December 11
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 my summer aeronautical casual attire, which consists of a pair of pinstriped slacks rolled up into highwaters, and a pair of beat-up brown leather pennyloafers with no socks. I wondered why he thought I might need a shoeshine. I am all for shiny shoes, and if I’d been wearing oxfords, I certainly might have considered it. But I wasn’t wearing socks. Doesn’t that negate any benefits that a shoeshine might offer?
“Sorry! Thanks!” I replied.
“Come on! Your shoes look terrible!” he said. I found this little bit of editorializing very unnecessary.
“What?” I asked incredulously. “I paid five dollars for these shoes. They don’t need shined.” This is true. I bought these pennyloafers for five dollars at the St. Vincent de Paul in Phillips, and I wear them so I don’t have to worry about them getting messy. They’re the cheapest pair of shoes I’ve ever owned. The shoeshine itself would actually have been more expensive than the shoes. It would have been a total waste of time and money. I would have looked crazy walking around in highwaters and no socks and a pair of gleaming, polished brown shoes. Surely this guy gets that?
The man just waved his hand in disgust.
Shoeshine Man:
I was at the end of my shift at MSP on a Sunday night recently, getting ready to pack it in. It had been a slow night, with only one or two customers. No one needs their shoes shined. People look like crap when they fly these days. There was a time when people dressed up to fly — suits, dresses, smart leather shoes. Now it’s all sweatpants and highwaters. No one even wears leather shoes.
As I’m packing, this hippie walks by, with an unkempt beard and wearing a cruddy pair of slacks, no socks and some brown loafers. He looks terrible, so I think a shoeshine might help the guy out. He could take a little pride in his appearance when he deplanes to see his family or whomever. I just can’t stand to see a pair of nice loafers so mistreated.
“Hey!” I said to him as he walked past. “Get your shoes shined!”
He declined and kept walking by.
“Come on! Your shoes look terrible!” I said, hoping to at least shame him into looking presentable.
He looked at me and mumbled something about the shoes being five dollars and not needing shined. As if that makes a difference! Scuffed up loafers are scuffed-up loafers!
Like I said, people used to look presentable when they flew, and now this hippie is going to deplane in whatever city he’s going to and his shoes are going to look like shit. And no one is even going to care.
(July 29, 2009)
19th December 11
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 unpleasantness, are generally really inventive. They’d play Rage Against the Machine and then “What is Love” and then Weird Al and then something from Use Your Illusion II, all in a row, because that’s how teenagers are.
When the kids went home at night, though, the station became fully automated. Computers would cycle through the station’s enormous library, playing music uninterrupted except for station identifications. With no kind of curatorial hand, the selections were even more wildly unpredictable than the teenage DJs, because the music library comprehensively spanned the last five decades of pop music — they had everything from ’50s novelty hits to the sort of financially aspirational hip-hop that teenagers in the early ’00s loved. All sorts of weird juxtapositions would turn up.
There is still one juxtaposition in particular I think of to this day, two songs that you typically never hear back-to-back. But I did, and it completely transformed the way I think about both of them.
It was “Ode to Billy Joe,” by Bobbie Gentry, followed by “Ghostbusters,” by Ray Parker, Jr. The remarkable thing about playing these two back-to-back is that, in doing so, the high school computers made “Ghostbusters” a sequel to “Ode to Billy Joe.”
If you’re not familiar with “Ode,” it’s a beautiful, creepy bit of ’60s Southern Gothic country, a story about an illicit love affair and the resultant suicide. A girl comes home to dinner one night, and her parents break the news to her: “Today Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.” And, it turns out, before he’d died, Billy Joe had earlier been seen throwing “something” off the bridge with a girl that “looked a lot like you.” What was that “something”? Well, the general consensus is that it was a baby.
So the song ends with the strings fading out, you reflect on it uneasily for a minute, but when I heard it in this context, one second later: more ghostly sounds, then some synthesized drums kick in and a familiar sax riff. It’s “Ghostbusters,” almost making a mockery of the song that came before it.
It’s more complex than that, however. Despite Ray Parker, Jr.’s good cheer, consider some of those bizarrely specific lyrics:
If you’ve had a dose of a
freaky ghost baby
Ya better call
GHOSTBUSTERS
An invisible man
sleeping in your bed
Who ya gonna call?
GHOSTBUSTERS
In this context: Billy Joe and his/your illegitimate child, that so-called “freaky ghost baby,” have returned in spectral form. That “invisible man sleeping in your bed” was once a visible man. A visible man that you loved, and who is the dead father of your dead child.
The air of dread in “Ode” infuses the pop trifle of “Ghostbusters” with an undercurrent of real terror, and the supernatural phenomenon described in ”Ghostbusters” soldifies the aura of menace in “Ode.” The insistence that ”I ain’t afraid of no ghosts” rings hollow. So, too, does the boast that “busting makes me feel good.” Busting makes you feel good temporarily, but it’s really just another way of not having to confront the messy, horrific past, which is what “Ode to Billy Joe” is all about. I’d have never realized it, until the high school computers spelled it out for me.
(October 16, 2009)
NOTES: Another perennial South 12th favorite that people still bring up once in awhile. The great Jim Norton, now of the Heavy Table, once told me this is the sort of piece that he would have been published in his late, great Flak magazine, which was another one of those occasional moments that made me wish I’d been born in 1974 instead of 1979.
16th December 11
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:
Largest viewer response, however, was gleaned by yet another L.A. station, which declared its aim, almost immediately after being seized by guerrillas, to the be the chronological broadcast of every motion picture in history. The began at 2:43 A.M. on May 11 with The Great Train Robbery, and continued without pause for commercials or announcements. Runners have been observed driving up to the back doors regularly in delivery trucks presumably carrying cans of film. At press time they had reached the year 1927, and viewer response was reportedly unprecedented, as vast numbers of California citizens rearranged their schedules and even quit their jobs to build their lives around the station’s output.
…Even if the rebels are not turned out of the studio by authorities (and the station’s owner is so pleased by viewer response that they might not be), the series can be expected, according to calculations on police computers, to conclude at some point in the year 1981, if at all.
The chronological broadcast of every film ever made! This astounding idea must have seemed even more astounding in 1973, when the only way to see a movie was to go to a theater, watch late-night television, or maybe find a friend that could project 16mm. There was not the sea of cable television channels and streaming online resources, both legal and illegal, to choose from.
Despite this wealth of contemporary resources, however, this particular project has never been attempted, as far as I know. It’s probably impossible (almost half of the silent films ever made are lost forever), but it’s exciting enough an idea, anyway, to devote a few minutes to a little thought experiment.
First of all, those police computers are way off. Such an undertaking would take much longer than the five years Bangs allots. How much longer? We’ll get to that in a moment. Let’s first imagine we are ourselves the California guerillas in question.
We begin with The Great Train Robbery from 1903. This is not, of course, the first ever film ever made, but it’s a very important one, and if it’s good enough for Lester, it’s good enough for me.
We then have to set certain criteria:
- We will exclude TV series, made-for-TV movies and direct-to-video releases (sorry to fans of Brian’s Song and Berlin Alexanderplatz).
- We will also exclude short films for the same reason — surely an important part of the rich tapestry of film history, but not necessary for the sort of overview we guerillas are interested in.
- We’ll open it to films of all countries, in all languages, in all genres — animation, documentary, whatever else. For thesake of simplicity, however, we’ll include feature length films only.
So, using IMDb to search for films made between 1903 and 1976, the number of matches returned is 155,576. We will chronologically be broadcasting 155,576 films in a row, 24 hours a day.
How long will it take? We can presume the average length of feature film is around an hour and a half, though stuff like Greed (four hours) and Burning of the Red Lotus Monastery (27 hours) will be much longer. Using that criteria, we’re probably looking at a little over 233,364 hours of broadcasting. That’s a little over 9,723 days, or around 24 years. And that’s just all the films made up until 1976, when the takeover begins.
Think about the richness of the experience! Imagine turning on your TV in the year 1998, the year I graduated from high school. I could have skipped my graduation ceremony (which was a snooze, anyhow), and in those four wasted hours, I could have watched the Indian college weeper Tears Have Become Flowers, followed by Leon Jervis and Lyn Logan in the Canadian “adult comedy” The Columbus of Sex. Imagine how much more memorable an experience that could have been for me!
The problem here is that by about the year 2000, our little guerilla group would have finished broadcasting every film made up to the takeover in 1976. Of course, one presumes we would keep adding to the chronology past the year of the takeover. Since 1977 and 2009, an additional 187,964 feature films have been released worldwide. Think about that for a moment: in the past twenty-five or so years, there have been more films made than in the entire period between 1903 and 1976. That seems hard to believe, but there it is.
So this year, in 2009, if my calculations are correct, the broadcast would have reached roughly the year 1987. So you ask yourself: would you rather be doing what you are doing right now, and or watching Jack Palance in Bagdad Cafe and wondering if you’ll be lucky enough to see RoboCop next?
(September 22, 2009)
NOTES: This may actually be one of my favorite posts of all time. I revised it quite a bit from the 2009 original — went pretty George Lucas on it, actually. But the math is more accurate this time, and I added photos. Thanks to Pat and Ilana for helping with some of the word problem aspects. If you find some of the math to be in error, let me know and I’ll correct it again.
15th December 11
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 city”) from Mike Haeg, Mayor of Mt. Holly, Minnesota, with a handwritten message from Mayor Haeg on the reverse (Nigger: An Autobiography, Dick Gregory)
The red plastic top for a jar of organic raisins (You Call It Madness: The Sensuous Song of the Crooner, Lenny Kaye)
A receipt for Micron pens and Bristol pads from Art Materials, Inc. in Uptown Minneapolis, with handwritten instructions to save it for tax purposes (Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, Morris Dickstein)
(September 27, 2009.)
