South 12th

Professional development.

As a person active in the world of visual art, you are often called upon to greet other art world acquaintances from New York City or Europe. This is usually really lovely, but there is often one minor difficulty: many times, they will want to kiss you on the cheeks.

Now, look: I like kissing people on the cheeks. I like kissing people, period. I am a supporter of kissing in all of its many forms, and let it never be said otherwise. But the fact is, greeting people by kissing them on each cheek involves specific maneuvering techniques that one refines over the course of years. Art people from New York and Europe have much more practice in this because they kiss each other on the cheek several times a day. As for myself, I am only in a situation a few times a year that calls for me to greet someone by kissing them on the cheeks. The will is there; the technique is lacking.

For example, I was at the Minneapolis Institute of Art the other day with an artist friend, a very smart, sophisticated native Minnesotan that studied in New York, and a curator he knew walked by. They greeted with the traditional hug and kissing on the cheek. And he admitted to me afterwards that he still feels totally awkward doing this. Not awkward about the kissing, but awkward about the stilted quality of his technique. And I realized, wow, I am not the only one.

It was then we hit upon the idea of offering a workshop for Midwestern art people on how to best kiss people from New York or Europe on the cheek when you meet them. It would cover need-to-know areas such as the best angle of approach, the precise amount of time the kiss should last, which cheek to do first, etc. Over the course of a few hours, with a lunch in the middle, attendees would learn valuable techniques to this art form, first with mannequins, then with live subjects. By the time the workshop is over, attendees would be able to confidently greet art acquaintances by kissing them on the cheek as well as any native of the Upper West Side or Dresden. 

All that’s left to do is determine a fair price. Maybe $50? Not including lunch?

Dubious dating practices.

One of the fun things about dating a professor* is succumbing to the temptation to look them up on the often unfair and generally awful website ratemyprofessor.com, so you can find out what all the spoiled, ungrateful kid-swine in their charge have to say about them. It’s not fair, and you wouldn’t want to take it particularly seriously, but it’s still sort of fun.

It’s mostly fun because you can mentally change the word “professor” to “girlfriend/boyfriend” (depending on the circumstances), and the word “students” to the opposite number. Then you get hilarious insider information like this:

He just is not clear about what he wants.

She is a very tough girlfriend and can be unfair.

He is a horrible boyfriend and I haven’t learned a thing.

You will get marked down if you don’t agree with her view point.

He doesn’t seem to really want to help his girlfriend.

Gives dirty looks all the time and makes you feel inferior for asking questions.

He’s kind of on a powertrip…

She is a very unhelpful girlfriend who doesn’t take time to actually listen to her boyfriend.

He is very stuck in his ways.

Those ungrateful kid-swine!

Extra Bonus Points: Employ the classic Chinese fortune cookie trick at the end.

* Just so you don’t think I am springing significant personal information on you, reader, I would like to make it very clear that I am not currently dating a professor and have not dated a professor for many, many years. 

My co-worker Kathleen was kind enough to bring back purple-scented wax mustaches for everyone following an outstate trip. I wore mine for a moment, then I tried to eat it, because it smelled like purple. It was chewable, but it was not edible. Kathleen was shocked, and asked me where I grew up. I told her “somewhere where things that smell like purple are always edible.” If you are interested in seeing what a three-way cross between Will Oldham, Daniel Plainview and Ralph Wiggum looks like, you are gazing upon it now.

Gmail > Settings > Labels > Buzz > Hide

Colin Kloecker provides some useful information.

Oh, but we’ll all look back on this post and have a great chuckle after I am named Google Buzz Top User Champion of 2015, and I am quoted as saying, “I really cannot imagine my life without Google Buzz. I can’t believe I’d ever want to hide such a useful and powerful tool. What was I thinking?” Then I would make that head-slap pantomime gesture, and everyone at the press conference would chuckle and think, What a charming guy! No wonder he’s the Google Buzz Top User of 2015.

“I love you, Google Buzz!” I will say.

But for now, it’s still 2010. And the Buzz is remaining hidden.

“He is, uh, quite a character.”

One of my favorite types of social interactions — and perhaps one of the trickiest to navigate — is when you meet someone for the first time, discover that you have a mutual acquaintance whom you personally dislike very much, and then try to figure out, without tipping your hand, if the person you’ve just met also dislikes this mutual acquaintance as much as you do. It’s a difficult little dance. I am sure the Germans have a word for it. We don’t in English, unfortunately.

Recently I was introduced to a pleasant, hippie-ish guy at a party, and it turned out he’d played in a band with a certain unsmiling jerk I’d once known. The jerk in question would very easily make my all-time top 5 list of most unpleasant people I’ve ever known. I hadn’t heard anything about him in a few years, so I was eager to find out if his general unpleasantness had finally caught up with him.

“Oh, yes, [name redacted],” I said, smiling a little too broadly. “He’s, uh, quite a character, huh?” The guy I’d just met looked at me. “Yes, he is,” he said. Very neutral tone of voice; he wasn’t taking the bait. 

I frowned for a moment, then offered this mysterious, open-ended statement: ”I, uh, always wondered how that particular story ended.”

“Well,” said the guy, “he’s out in Portland now, playin’ music. I have to say, I’ve never met a more talented guy. He’s just incredible. He can just…I mean, he’s top 5, for sure.”

No, no! Wrong top 5! Geez, band guys! They’re all the same!

I smiled politely. “Yep, he’s definitely a great guitar player,” I said. (This is true.)  “Glad he’s doing well.” (This was maybe less true.) 

He nodded. I smiled again, and then I dropped the subject.

I was a little disappointed. I was looking forward to recounting tales of [name redacted]’s various unsmiling crimes against humanity with a former bandmate. Instead, I heard a more familiar story about a jerk that moved to Portland and played guitar well. I felt like a creep, so I went and ate a bunch of feelings, in the form of hors d’oeuvres. There’s no English word for that, either.

Second-tier, USA.

All this talk of Philly art kids reminds me of a somewhat tipsy, rampaging conversation I had with my friend Matt last year about something we called The Second-Tier City Art Kid Playoffs. It sort of seemed like an interesting idea at the time, I guess, but I’m a little hazy on what it entailed precisely. Something about all of the second-tier cities in America sending their best multimedia, performance and installation artists to compete in some sort of vaguely defined team-based contest of aesthetic prowess. The idea, I believe, was sort of a cross between Prospect New Orleans, The Saddest Music in the World, that fort-building contest booooooom.com sponsored for Where the Wild Things Are, and an Odyssey of the Mind meet-up. Terminally twee, I know, but what hasn’t been this past decade?

What was most interesting, though, was trying to figure out what constitutes a “second-tier city.” Minneapolis, most definitely. Portland, Seattle, Cleveland, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Detroit, San Diego: all second-tier. First-tier cities are obviously Brooklyn as well as Manhattan (though it was agreed Queens was separately second-tier and would be permitted to field a squad), Chicago, LA, DC, San Francisco, Miami, Boston. I believe there was some spirited debate as to whether Philly and Atlanta constituted first-tier or second-tier cities. First-tier, I think we decided, but only barely.

The third-tier cities were places like Madison and Columbus and Nashville.

At the end we all agreed Minneapolis was the greatest second-tier city in America and our young multidisciplinary strivers would sweep the field in this theoretical contest*. This seems like a weird thing to agree on, but I guess it was pretty late and we’d all had a lot of beer.

* I believe we actually came up with a theoretical Minneapolis art kid roster — yes, that’s how far into we got. Email me privately for the list as I remember it.

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.

This album cover turned up on If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger yesterday, and I got a little excited. I love the Pixies Three, performers of such great songs as “442 Glenwood Avenue,” “Summertime USA” and many others. I probably like the Pixies Three even better than the regular Pixies, which is a really stupid thing to say, I know, but it’s true.

In fact, it’s true in this way specifically: let’s imagine it is Saturday night, and you have the choice of going to two different parties.

• One is in Jamaica Plain. It will be at the crappy studio apartment of some guy that looks (and acts!) like Andrew Bujalski, with beer-scented shag carpet and pictures of Carl Yastrzemski tacked to the wall and a turntable on top of a milk crate. One or two people will be dancing listlessly to Doolittle and the collected works of Galaxie 500, but most people are sitting around drinking Sam Adams Light out of plastic cups. There is a cute girl in a baggy sweater and oversized glasses from Brandeis that you get a chance to talk to briefly, until you’re interrupted when her boyfriend arrives, a 6’3” Ben Affleck-lookalike with parquet flooring patterns tattooed to his upper body. So you spend the remainder of the night on a futon next to a very sweaty guy who talks non-stop about the enduring genius of Frank Black’s The Cult of Ray while you silently pray for death.
• The other party is at 442 Glenwood Avenue (which actually is an address in Minneapolis, up near the impound lot). There are going to be girls there in bouffant haircuts wearing lace sailor suits snapping their fingers, and well-dressed men dancing behind them so quickly that they have become indistinct blurs. Someone has taken the time to decorate the place with streamers and balloons, and music blaring off the hi-fi is all about boys and birthday parties. All your favorite Minneapolitans and St. Paulites are there! And over in the corner, you make out a familiar shaggy-haired figure standing there grinning: oh my god, it’s Jonathan Richman! You run over and ask him how come he’s not at that party back in his hometown of Boston? “Oh, that pah-ty was boh-ring,” he says. “This one’s bettah. I’m going to duet with the girls on ‘Pahty Lights,’ so stick around.” Then one of the Pixies Three comes over and asks you in her adorable Philly accent if you’ll hold her invisible cocktail glass for her.

I mean, come on, do you even need to think about this?