South 12th

I’m thinking tote bags. 

"I love the end of an American television program — he’d loved ‘Cheers’ and Krugman hated it."

Again, my sincerest congratulations to Riaz Moola for using robots to distill three years of blogging into one perfect, perfectly representative sentence.

“As a related note, I now have a 1.4mb dump of every word you’ve written on this blog.”

I checked in with Herbach and I know all of the New Frontier-themed optimism, forward propulsion and questionable cross-genre meddling. You’ve known a lot more than ten years; it’s great that local ceramic artists compete in some cinemas.

So: my parents’ basement. But I’m pretty sure it’s really tacky to give my life and work. Kissy-kissy, possibly tipsy mash notes from various state labor federation conferences on the trip, and it begins with some generous helpings of Carlos Castaneda. Back to the adult’s table, sometime around 1992. It was key in my life. In the Minneapolis Journal, 1925: “But Guy Maddin’s imagination vanquishes even this simple documentary act of flyover country yokel that thought he had moved here from somewhere else only to realize the full effect of a Micron pen in 2001 ($2.69).” 

Or if they’re a real drag on the life-size viking ship, they make films as “the Bowery Boys” until well after nine o’clock, and these sons-o’ bitches are subject to civil and criminal penalties under the administration of Governor John Lind. There’s a connection to a short-lived Minnesotan arts fad in Paris, the door open for its experimentation with the order: a hand-drawn daily record of grass stains, bicycle grease, coffee, wine and beer spills, discolorations from Mississippi River water, sand grit from the ranges of Northeast bar rock; shuffles, swamp rock, twang, the Band. 

Hey, good news: it’s Christina Billotte Week this year.

Coincidentally, the first time after high school, he was head writer for a few reasons I am no longer interested in. Maybe they need your help. They’re going to be the greatest in the world, and everything we understand about the Associated Press. When Minneapolis and St. Paul-based artists play their high, lonesome squeezebox renditions of “Indifférence” or “Valse-intermezzo,” you think of various wild fowl sound effects. Here they perform for a piece of work by amateur photographer Irwin Norling from the Mill City Cafe / California Building parking lot. (Louise’s tweet above, as if in them. I adore it.)

I came across The Potboiler in 1959. One of the first of all, it originated in Vermont. Vermont! The home of my favorite cities in America and a Manson-styled killer cult hippie? What if the circumstances seem extraordinary? If the answer is “yes,” related material: Can You Draw a Fairly Accurate Sketch of Vice President Henry A. Wallace? Here Wallace shows off his life smoking unfiltered Marlboros when he walks in the past, and if that weren’t enough: here is what you get when you remove the battery before MPR came to him in the Box. We loaded all her possessions up in Louisville and gave $25.

We’ll save you a cup of tea, a light, and your non-Minneapolis readers don’t care how many woolly-headed, flat-on-their-faces failures Google has been fascinating. 

I am so proud of our nation’s plastic resources; looking again, it’s actually for that pathetic shell of a JFK cutout in my kitchen wall. He had a chuckle watching the snow fall silently to the melody to “There’s No Other Way.” In this movie I don’t have a not-insigificant number of friends and neighbors. We called it! I missed the boat rides down; the names of all time are a sweet, fizzy red wine, and finally learn how to tie a bowtie with a few France-based ex-pats reading.

The ultimate in South Minneapolis is to roll around in my Tumblr feed earlier this week already. Why’s he always callin’? So I cut each individual portrait out of a lazy correspondent this month — now seems touchingly quaint. In homage to this place I loved: wonderful! Tumblr makes the magic happen. I believe I’ll have gotten you tickets to see a great, old typeface like Windsor being slowly consigned to an address listed on Google Books, and then asking me to make a terrible network sitcom about two nurses, set in Tolkein’s Middle Earth, with some awesome personal request. I decide it would probably be wearing an anti-NBC t-shirt. Watching the wrap-ups of the digital conversion happening onscreen. It is on its own way through to read about it that way — told as only the angry young thrill-a-minute pop renegades of the New York Times running a brief feud with the 1870s, 1940s and 1980s can!

Still, I hope I chose the right place. It’s sad and a little map on a card. Send it to my attention now. I love the end of an American television program — he’d loved Cheers and Krugman hated it. I will inevitably leave out some thrift stores, now that Brad Zellar has returned from SXSW. She lives with his pile of blankets, and they left all these bright pink notes on everything that basically said, ”Sorry we couldn’t get out all over the world of indie-rock namedropping and solipsistic navel-gazing.”

(One in a series of fake South 12th posts in honor of its third anniversary, written by its most faithful readers. This one is by Riaz Moola. A note about this entry: it was, incredibly, created by Mr. Moola using a Markov Chain programming code that scanned every entry on South 12th, and randomized and re-assembled all of it into clusters of sentence fragments (“hopefully some dork hasn’t beaten me to this”). This passage is excerpted from a much, much, much longer email that actually made use of every word that has ever appeared on South 12th. It was edited very minimally for punctuation and grammar.)

The sneeze guard at a members-only gnostic buffet.

So I recently picked up a copy of Atlantis Rising. It was in a Barnes & Noble knock-off in Waupaca, WI (pop 5,676 as of 2000), complete with political biography bestsellers and green signage. The best feature was the magazine rack. It was about half the store. And what do you do when you find a magazine trove like that? Yes, dear reader, you buy a bunch of obscure magazines. What else can you do? 

As I was starting to tell you, I picked up a copy of Atlantis Rising, which you should check out if you either believe in or find paranormal activity entertaining. The headlines on the cover of the issue I picked up, Sept/Oct 2011, read like the sneeze guard at a members-only gnostic buffet: “Altantis and the Stars.” “Nuclear Meltdown and Time Dilation.” “Nicholas Roerich & His Tibetan Plan.” Heavy stuff. 

Very quickly, the articles bored. I mean, an article about ancient giants entitled “What Do We Really Know About Ancient Giants?” that doesn’t do much beyond string together poorly retold biblical and mythic giant lore. I guess the answer is we don’t know much, and I felt like I knew slightly more before I read it. 

But then I found, in the middle of the magazine, a crossword puzzle. This discovery got me excited, because although I never listened to AM Coast to Coast, I’m sure Art Bell would relax with this puzzle before he passed on to the Great Beyond. 

The theme was “Afghanistan and Azerbaijan.” OK, I’m excited to solve some word riddles about the paranormal in those places. Taliban werewolves? Yes, please. Aral Sea mermaids? Could be hot. I don’t know. Let’s do this. So I sat down to work on this most intriguing puzzle. 

Turns out it’s not so intriguing. Yes, there were a few “on top” clues (62 Across - An Islamist militia group), and even some easy ones (88 Down - __ and behold!). But there were very, very few paranormal ones. Actually, there were none. The clues were weird (“34 Down - An addiction recovery program-abbr.”), but not paranormal. The closest one was “86 Across - The craniometric point.” I looked it up, and here’s what Wikipedia had to say: 

“In human anatomy, the asterion is a visible, so-called craniometric, point on the exposed skull, just behind the ear, where three cranial sutures meet”

What sorts of paranormal activity is associated with the craniometric point? They don’t say. It’s probably spelled out very clearly in the answer to the Cryptogram that shares a page with the crossword, but let’s be honest. After reading three or four articles that get less interesting the more you read, and that crossword fiasco, I’m not gonna break out my decoder ring. 

So if you ever run into Atlantis Rising, or any of its ilk, don’t buy it. Even if it would be supporting a local bookstore in a small town in Wisconsin. Just read the cover, and then spend the rest of the afternoon imaging what crazy paranormal secrets are unlocked on its newsprint pages, the kinds of secrets that would paradigm shift the universe if we only all read it and believed it and bathed with Egyptian biometric soap (ad, inside back cover).

(One in a series of fake South 12th posts in honor of its third anniversary, written by its most faithful readers. This one is by Peter Hajinian.)

The forgotten Minnesota Twins of 1975.

Tom Lundstedt played his third and final season of major league baseball with the Twins as a back-up catcher. According to his website, he is now known as “the funniest investment and tax guy in America!” He lives in Emphraim, Wisconsin and runs real estate and tax seminars.

Mike Pazik pitched for the Twins 1975-1977, with an ERA of 5.79. His pitching career ended when a van he was driving in with fellow pitcher Don Carrithers collided with another car going the wrong way on an exit ramp in Bloomington. He eventually became the pitching coach for the White Sox and was fired from the position in 1998.  He now lives in the D.C. area and is known for being the father-in-law of Ukrainian soccer star Andriy Shevchenko. His grandson’s godfather is Silvio Berlusconi.

Mike Poepping played in 14 games during his only year of play. He had a batting average of .135 and had one RBI in 37 at bats. After another year playing AAA ball, he left baseball and became a carpenter. In 2000 he was named to the Brainerd Dispatch All-Century Baseball Team. In 2002, he was sent to jail for repeatedly peeping at his naked stepdaughter.

(One in a series of fake South 12th posts in honor of its third anniversary, written by its most faithful readers. This one is by Molly Bloom.)

Glee webisodes recap.

when asked if the fox.com glee webisodes should be considered glee canon, showrunner mitchell warwick answered in the affirmative even though wyatt (who was killed off in the heartrending rabies/gloria estefan episode of season 2) confusingly is shown wielding a billy club in the gang fight montage of webisode 03. whatever your feelings are on the controversy, here’s the recap all you gleeks have been waiting for.

webisode 01: 
last season’s love pentagon between jayden, hayden, aiden, brayden and kaiden grows to hexagonal proportions when foreign exchange student bong sook (portrayed by a cgi model and voiced by daveigh chase) enrolls at walter reuther high school. in this first webisode of the webiseason, hayden stumbles upon an embarrassing youtube video of bong sook in a seoul karaoke arcade singing an off-key rendition of “copacabana”. hayden contemplates writing a lewd comment using brayden’s login information but coach stops him at the last minute and makes him climb up and down a rope for half an hour. the sponsor of this webisode is body glide anti-chafe balm.

webisode 02: 
the new biology teacher (played by melissa berkoff, former drummer of the post-punk band autoclave) passes around frogs for dissection. asher pretends to be a devout hangin kittologist (he cleverly improvs the name when he sees a “hang in there, kitty” inspirational poster). he further professes that touching dead things is contrary to his religious views. danica reminds him, perhaps insensitively, that his belt was once a cow and his boots were once a family of alligators. with his cover blown, asher hesitates to carve out a gallbladder but soon realises he has the steady hands of a calligrapher. the entire class then serenades asher with clarence “frogman” henry’s “ain’t got no home”. an iris wipe centers on the frog itself (played by the hand of the guy who operates elmo) croaking the famous rockabilly chorus.

webisode 03:
a philly art kid (played by regis philbin) is caught wearing an l. ron hubbard disguise and stenciling windsor letterforms onto the tennis courts of reuther high school. this kicks of a gritty montage of gang warfare set to “the rumble” from west side story but a record scratch signifies that this isn’t your parents’ gang fight montage. soon the familiar vocals of katy perry well up inside your laptop speakers as perry and cast rap about shin-stomping, eye-gouging, and the best spot to stab your enemy with a butterfly knife—all justifiable measures when high school pride is concerned. also: one of katy perry’s pepperoni-sized areolas starts accidentally peeking out of her corset in time with the song’s house music tempo. regrettably, it is heavily pixelated even though the fcc has no jurisdiction in cyberspace.

webisode 04:
in the tent city that sits in the shadow of prague’s charles bridge, jordyn discovers vaclav havel’s well-oiled body. she sings “dirge inferno” by cradle of filth while some bums masturbate in the corner. her mascara streaks in the shape of a question mark which hints that what she uncovered may not be have been havel’s body after all. the sponsor of this webisode is bertolli lucca extra virgin olive oil.

(One in a series of fake South 12th posts in honor of its third anniversary, written by its most faithful readers. This one is by Raynor Ganan.)

Year three.

As I mentioned last week, October 12, 2008 is when this mess went live. To commemorate the event, several faithful readers have created their own fake South 12th posts. They’ll all be posted here today.

Enjoy them, and thank you very much for reading, emailing, calling, commenting, reblogging, liking, subscribing, linking to, writing postcards, sending packages, funding various Kickstarter projects I have shaken you down for, and occasionally stopping by my house (or putting me up in your apartment while I’m in your city, as the case may be) all these years. Three years isn’t a really long time, I know, but it’s difficult to imagine what life might be like without South 12th, and without the many, many relationships that have grown out of it.

Now, enjoy all the fakes. They’re all better than anything I’ve written here for weeks.