South 12th // Tagged as “Sconnies”

Oct 30 11:30 am

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.

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Sep 14 9:26 am

In Which We Attend the Great Sewing-Union at Ptolemy

It was OK. The vendors weren’t as good this year. This one girl had some neat handkerchiefs for sale where she’d cross-stitched Joy Division lyrics onto them, so I bought some of those to give out as Christmas presents. That one collective from Madison that makes those historic neon naval jacks must have skipped the GSU this year, because I didn’t see them anywhere.

Ptolemy itself is still about as dumpy as I remember it. We found a corner bar with Radio Birdman on the jukebox, but Dave had too much whiskey and got in a fight with a townie, so we got kicked out. We went to that fakey-dive bar down in Ptolemy Heights, near the Ptolemy College of Art. It stunk; those PCA kids are incredibly obnoxious. PCA is the worst.

I hope the GSU is held somewhere else next year.

(I’ll do it myself.)

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Sep 10 9:46 am

Brilliance and disaster. »

I did not know doodly-squat about football until I met Geoff Herbach, and really did not care doodly-squat about football; televised football games (usually the Bengals) were a thing at Thanksgiving family gatherings that rudely interrupted conversations about Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Tom Verlaine. But Geoff Herbach has a way of writing about these things in such a beautiful way, I have come around in the years that I have been his friend and collaborator. This essay about Brett Favre he’s just written for MPR sums it all up wonderfully.

In 1977, when I was 7, Mom got one of those terrible, tight perms everyone was getting. She didn’t look like herself, so she scared me and I cried and cried. Sometime in the middle of the night, me still crying, she came into my bedroom, exhausted, ready to let me have it. In the moonlight, I realized her perm made her look like Packers kicker Chester Marcol, and then I loved her more than ever.

Here, by the way, is a photo of Chester Marcol.

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Jul 22 2:25 pm

Here is a neat (by which I mean “fairly boring”) trick for those readers that now live in Minneapolis-St. Paul, but who once lived and loved in the great city of Madison, a city that you still occasionally pine for. That’s at least ten of you, right? Five?

Well, regardless, take a look at this. The first photo above is the famous approach to the Wisconsin state capitol, on Washington Avenue near Ingersoll, right in the middle of the isthmus.

Now, look at the second photo up there, a stretch of road on Smith Avenue, on the West Side of St. Paul, before it veers west and crosses the river. You can see the Minnesota state capitol from that approach (hard to see in the photo, but it’s there).

Wow! Look at the way the respective capitols gleam in the middle distance! It looks exactly the same! Kind of! It’s actually better at night, when the details are a little hazier. This stretch of Smith gives more the impression of being in Madison, if not an actual replication of the experience. I remember driving back from a meal at Caspar’s Cherokee Sirloin Room a few years ago, and being very struck by the resemblance.

So, displaced Madisonians, if you’re ever feeling lonely for home, just make the ten-minute drive to the west side. You can park on Smith, turn up To the Best of Our Knowledge on your car radio, and weep softly into your Plaza Burger or bag of Nature’s Bakery granola as you stare off into your past.

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Jan 12 10:52 am

What Did You Buy Today? is a hand-drawn daily record of Kate Bingaman-Burt’s daily purchases. Above is a pull-tab she bought in Kenosha, Wisconsin on December 28.

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