South 12th

I turned up my sketchbook from 2005-06 while rooting around in the basement the other day. There’s some real gems in it, including sketches I’d made at Mystic Lake Casino that were to accompany a Brad Zellar piece that ran in The Rake (I was in fact kicked out by Mystic Lake security — apparently there is an actual “no drawing on the casino floor” policy). There’s also a recipe for Spanish potato tortillas, notes from my very first meeting with Herbach and Sam (sigh!), a drawing of the spontaneous mourning scene outside the Metrodome the day Kirby Puckett died, and, best of all, a list of “finished projects” from the year before on the final pages (several early curatorial efforts at The Soap Factory, learning to play dominoes, and the name of a woman I’d dated, after which I helpfully notated “This project almost finished me”).

Also included is this quite lovely sketch of a pre-W Hotel Foshay Tower, made squatting on Marquette Avenue in the dead of winter. Frustratingly, this is actually the last regular sketchbook I’ve kept since then. Keeping a sketchbook is one of those habits I’ve never been any good at starting, but manage to be fairly faithful about keeping to once I get going. Clearly it’s time to restart one now.

The ‘05-‘06 sketchbook here was 8.5” x 11” hardbound with 60# paper, which I recall made it really cumbersome to carry around, but made for a large, substantial drawing surface. I use a bicycle now much more than I did then, so I don’t know that I’d want to keep a similar model today; any extra weight is a handicap. Do you keep a sketchbook? What kind do you find works best? 

Above is a drawing I did in, oh, 2007 or so that Herbach just posted, originally made for the program for one of the Electric Arc Radio Shows. EARS was a debauched live radio production I occasionally performed in, masterminded by a small, brilliant group of Minneapolis writers and musicians. Herbach found this drawing, along with scads of other related drawings and promotional items I’d helped create, while cleaning out the downstairs apartment at S. 12th.

Herbach is moving from downstairs to live part-time in Mankato, where he secured an excellent, tenure-track creative writing position at the university there, and where he will live some of the week. There are a great many Minneapolitans regularly referenced on S. 12th, but there is only one that earned his or her own tag. I am very happy he has secured the position, but I am terribly sorry to see him gone from the apartment downstairs. 

Incidentally, one of the best features in the Minneapolis urban landscape is the beautiful, baroque neon liquor store signs that creep up on most of the arterial streets. The liquor stores close at 10pm and they’re never open Sundays, but they are gorgeous all the same. The “Clerky’s Liquors” sign is based on the one at Minnehaha Liquors, a few blocks away from where I live. It’s just one of the many amazing neon marquees in and around South Minneapolis. Franklin Nicollet, Skol, Zipps, Lowry Hill and Hum’s are also favorites.

Man, that drawing’s a lot nicer than I remember it being. I really ought to draw in pen and ink more often.

Herbach, writing on Fambled:

Andy, Steph and I watched the Vikings simply beat themselves.  It was an eerie, horrible time.  This photo essay, dumbly, documents our pain as it happened.

This was the scene downstairs at S. 12th over the weekend. I was out of frame for much of the game, watching from the chair on the right. :37 in is my personal favorite. Herbach slunk off to the kitchen and Steph whispered “I don’t think he’s coming back.”

Contrast to the jubiliant scene on the other end of the Mississippi at Ills Manor.

Selections from the S. 12th personal library: signed copies of books.

• Adverbs, Daniel Hadler. “I wrote this book, [signed] Daniel Hadler, 7.XII.2007.” I really, really hated this book. The cutesy notation and the “XII” instead of “7” or “July” make it even worse; it’s like the author is making fun of me for owning it. If you feel I have the wrong idea about Mr. Hadler and you would like to own this book for your personal library, please email me and I’ll send it to you. No judgment; I understand that tastes vary. Just PayPal me a few dollars to send it FedEx.
• Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory, Mickey Hess.Mickey was the first writer I ever saw read short fiction in a bar, sometime in 2001. That’s maybe something you and I perhaps take for granted now, but it made quite an impact on me (as my continuted partnership with Herbach proves). This book is probably the most accurate account of what it is like to live and work and make art in Louisville (second most accurate: Bonny Billy’s Funtown Comedown). Mickey lives in Philadelphia now, so any of our Philly art kid readership should make a point to see him perform sometime. Either way, you should track down this book, because it’s just been republished and it’s very funny.
• The Third Freedom: Ending Hunger in Our Time, George McGovern. This was a birthday present from the St. Paul poet Paul D. Dickinson, who is also a book dealer.
• The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas, Davy Rothbart. “For Andy! Keep on pimpin’! Peace — Davy.” Why did Davy think I would ever stop pimpin’? Or, actually, why did he think I was pimpin’ in the first place? Davy Rothbart is the creator of Found magazine. There’s a blurb from Arthur Miller on the front.
• Elvis Presley, Bobbie Ann Mason. Just a signature on the title page. This is one of my very favorite books on Elvis, along with Greil Marcus’ Dead Elvis and Guralnick’s Careless Love. Mason describes her father seeing Elvis for the first time on the Sullivan show, and instead of the typical “what the hell is this trash” reaction you might expect, he slaps his knee and shouts “Boy, he’s good!”
• The Wrecking Crew, Thomas Frank. I went to go see Frank to a reading at a Unitarian church in Uptown the night Obama won the nomination. The note inside compliments me on the FDR lapel button I was wearing. People asked him a bunch of crazy questions, which he handled with aplomb. I am really glad to hear The Baffler is apparently returning.
• Drink This: Wine Made Simple, Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl. Grumdahl is a food writer here in Minneapolis, formerly of one of our storied alt-weeklies. Her farewell essay for that paper, on the subject of moving to Minneapolis from the east coast and winding up as a food writer, is perhaps the best transplant narrative I have ever read in newsprint (“Minnesota became, in my mind, an exotic land of rock and truth-telling. It really did.”). There’s a very nice note inside that mentions Facebook.
• Barney’s Crew, Sean Carswell. “Barney’s Crew,” the short story from which the title of this volume derives, is one of my favorite object lessons in building a really great joke throughout the course of a narrative and then blowing it up at the end; it unfolds perfectly. I met Carswell when he was on tour with Mickey Hess, and he wrote a nice note in the front. There’s a blurb from Howard Zinn on the back that says Carswell “will make you laugh and make you think.” I remember singing the Dr. Frink theme song to Carswell when I read this, which he only found partially funny.
• Cheap Novelties (The Pleasures of Urban Decay), Ben Katchor. This one is made out to “Andrew Sturdevant,” with a little drawing of Julius Knipl himself inside! You all know how I feel about Katchor. One of my most treasured possessions.
• The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg, Geoff Herbach. I don’t actually own an autographed copy of this, but Herbach lives ten feet away. I am certain it could be arranged.
  

A sloppy, sentimental life, 190 bytes at a time.

This is a problem many of you readers probably don’t have, because many of you (most of you?) have iPhones and Androids and other nice non-drug phones that you didn’t buy from a combination Western-wear store/semi-legit wireless franchise on Lake Street.

I, however, did buy my drug phone from a combination Western-wear store/semi-legit wireless franchise on Lake Street, and that is something I am OK with. I like my drug phone. But I do run into certain problems sometimes, the sorts of problems that I anticipate have been resolved by owning a nicer, more internet-oriented type of phone device.

The problem is text messages.

What do you do with yours after you’ve read them?

Do you delete them? Living the sloppy, sentimental life I have chosen, I get awfully misty-eyed about certain text messages I have received over the years. I have dozens of them, sitting on my SIM card, transferred from drug phone to drug phone, that I just cannot bear to delete. Some date back to 2007. I’m running out of room.

What do I do with all of them?

Do I just man up, so to speak, delete all of them, and accept that I will have to live my life without these small tokens of friendship and love? Do I forward them to my email address and keep them in a folder labeled “texts,” where they will rest forever in the warm, all-remembering bosom of Mother Gmail? Should I write them on 3x5 cards in a calligraphic script, purchase a vintage Rolodex or coupon box on eBay and store them chronologically in my home office?

And what is at stake here, exactly? Could I live without holding on to Abingdon, Virginia native Peter Morgan’s breathless text from November 4, 2008, announcing that Obama had Virginia “on lockdown”? Nate’s outraged all-caps missive from Louisville that his favorite downmarket neighborhood grocery store had renovated their meat coolers (“DO THEY THINK I COME HERE TO FIND THINGS CLEAN AND BRIGHTLY LIT”)? Herbach’s various songs of devotion over the years, sent to allay minor crises in life and work? Kissy-kissy, possibly tipsy mash notes from various romantic interests? Is living without these even a life at all?

I don’t have answers to these questions, reader. As our pal Stephanie recently pointed out, “”Imsa justa faarrrm boy.” Hyuck, hyuck! Like I said, I don’t have answers, but maybe you do. Comments section, post-haste!

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.

Herbach and I reading our sex-drugs-and-minor-league-baseball epic Sideways Slide: The Shane Dooley Story at the Turf Club for the Riot Act Reading Series last weekend. Photo by Paul D. Dickinson, I think.

I was at a party a few weekends ago, and some drunk girls from St. Cloud were telling me I looked like Brian Posehn. I sent a whiny text message to Herbach:

“Herbach, these people think I look like that unattractive comic.”

Herbach texted back:

“Zach Galifinakis?”

Ha! I wish. I think Zach Galifinakis looks just fine. Where was Will Oldham’s beard in that one Kanye video they did together? That’s an OK look to go for, I guess; the brotherhood of ginger beardos. Galifinakis and Oldham both had a hand in legitimizing that aesthetic, so I owe them for that, probably.

Happy Friday, readers.