South 12th // Tagged as “self-image”

Dec 11 4:58 pm

What are these chuckleheads talking about? Ryan? Charlie sent this and he says it looks like me.

Dec 2 4:01 pm

Happy Wednesday, reader. On the eve of our potential Thursday snowfall, here is a photo that captures the precise moment before I learned to ice skate last winter. Under the tutelage of Mount Holly’s own Tammy Dahlke, I seconds later cast the chair aside and completed three perfect, broken-ankle free laps around the pond. Tammy said I was a natural.

On a related note, I was asked last week by Vita.mn magazine to recommend a Christmas gift for their readers . This is what I told them:

A customized hockey jersey from Hockey Giant in Bloomington. They’ll put your name and number (mine is 00) on the back, and any crazy thing you want in big, beautiful block lettering on the front (“ART SCHOOL,” “SOCIALISM,” etc.).

This is still my favorite customized skating jersey, from last winter. The big, beautiful block lettering on the front says AREA HIGH SCHOOL, and the back does indeed say STURDEVANT / 00. Maybe this is the year I actually do have one made that says SOCIALISM, so I can being the long and thankless task of reclaiming ice hockey from the Sarah Palins and Tim Pawlentys of the world. I’ll probably have a punch thrown at me by some jerk with a mullet, but hell, I’m 30 years old now. It’s about time I finally took a punch to the face over something important.

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Nov 3 9:41 am

Also, uh, since it’s my birthday and all, it seems like it’d be OK to point out this hilarious and utterly terrifying photo — my friends Allen and Pamela went costumed as your correspondent for Halloween last weekend, right down to the red socks, vintage campaign lapel buttons and furry Russian hats. If people didn’t know who I was, they just said they were “Amish rabbis,” which works, too.

There is also a photo of them making out, but I have sworn to never look at it. The metaphysical implications are too terrible.

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Nov 3 8:37 am

Robin Scott, of the Scottish band M, whose song “Pop Muzik” was #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on November 3, 1979:

“I was looking to make a fusion of various styles which somehow would summarize the last 25 years of pop music. It was a deliberate point I was trying to make. Whereas rock and roll had created a generation gap, disco was bringing people together on an enormous scale. That’s why I really wanted to make a simple, bland statement, which was, ‘All we’re talking about basically [is] pop music.’”

That’s a very late-1970s sentiment, the touchingly naive and idealistic concept that people might be coming together on some global scale to fulfill, in some way, the promises of the 1960s (by dancing, I guess). I suppose that particular party came to a pretty abrpupt end almost exactly one year later with the election of Ronald Reagan on November 4, 1980. Morning in America! No more of this gay cosmopolitan utopian bullshit!

This optimistic, internationalist pop anthem that positions itself with one foot in the past and one foot in the future is thirty years old today.

And actually, so am I! I am also a relic of a forgotten time!

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Oct 27 9:02 am

Steph has a really nice camera, so you know you will always look OK when she takes a picture of you. This one is from Saturday night. I look like I am considering a number of sad, crazy ideas about the way life should be lived. Maybe I am!

Actually, that’s the perfect tone, because I am hoping photographs like this can be used to trick advertising executives into using my epic sad-crazy American poetry for the new Levi Strauss blue jeans fall ad campaign. “Sturdevant’s got the impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship western youthful look that’s really hot right now,” they’ll say. “Throw ten thousand dollars at him and let’s see what happens.” We must cash in, my darlings!

(On a related note, how do those Walt Whitman Levi’s commercials make you feel? I will admit they fill me with a strange and not altogether disgusted feeling, which probably has something to do with the shock of hearing wax cylinder recordings emanating from a source other than the old beloved-by-us-dorks UCSB archives. Actually, it’s sort of a generally positive feeling. While I have probably seen enough ad campaigns knocking off Ryan McGinley’s wild-shirtless-bros imagery to hold me over until I am a very old man, I do like hearing Walt Whitman recordings in public, and wish I did more often. Plus, Levi Strauss was manufacturing clothing while Whitman was still alive, which seems worth pointing out somehow. I guess I approve. Of course, it won’t make me run out and buy jeans, because I never wear jeans.)

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Oct 13 3:47 pm

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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

59 Plays. Download?

I’m not an obnoxious person (wait, I don’t think), but some days I do suspect it would be enjoyable to carry around a portable boombox with me, playing doo-wop songs like “Cry Baby” and “There Goes My Baby” as I walk down the street, like Harvey Keitel in Fingers. Of course, the difference is I suppose I wouldn’t try to beat people up when they complained to the waiter in seafood restaurants (“…the most musically inventive song of 1958! What are you eating? Shrimp? Are you gonna tell me this song doesn’t go with your shrimp?”). Plus, that’s what iPods are for, anyway, and we all know how that turned out.

Oct 9 10:01 am

"He's here to fill your kopfs mit lies!"

A few weeks ago I went to Oak Street Cinema to see The Baader-Meinhof Complex. Since I work right in the neighborhood, I headed over to buy tickets early, even though the screening wasn’t for another hour or so. The front doors were still closed when I arrived at the theater. I stood outside a moment, trying to figure out if I should come back, when a person in the lobby saw me and walked over to open the door.

“Are you Bill?” she asked, poking her head out.

I must be honest. Whenever I am confronted with questions like this, where the answer is a very unambiguous “no, I am definitely not Bill,” I am always tempted to bite my lip, look around, and then say “why yes, I am Bill.” Just to see where things might go.

Of course I didn’t do this. “No,” I said. She told me to come back in an hour to buy a ticket.

Sitting in the theater an hour later before the movie began, the same person from the lobby walked to the front of the theater. “Thank you for coming out tonight,” she said. “Before we start the film, we’ve invited the head of the German Studies department at the U to say a few words about the Baader-Meinhoff gang. Please welcome Dr. Bill So-and-so.”

Ah ha! Bill! She thought I was the head of the German Studies department at the U! People are always mistaking me for a professor. I can’t imagine why.

I was a little sad I hadn’t gone along with her initially. The opportunity for mischief would have been great. As I listened to the professor talk, I wondered how much I could credibly bullshit about Baader-Meinhoff unprompted before a crowd. A little bit. Not a lot. What would have happened? Would I have been smoked out before the screening when the real Bill showed up? Who would they have believed? Would it have gotten far enough that there might have been a scene in the theater? Where he’d be introduced, and we both stood up?

“This man is an imposter!” the real Bill would have yelled, pointing out me.

“What an outrage!” I’d have yelled back. “That man is the imposter! He’s with the Stasi! He’s here to fill your kopfs mit lies!” Who would the crowd believe? Would they take a vote? Would they call die Polizei?

I am sure it is a scenario that would have ended badly for me. For many reasons other than that, I am glad that didn’t happen anyway, because Bill’s remarks about the Red Army Faction were very informative, and the film itself was enjoyable. I would have hated to miss it, and besides, it would have been rude to deprive filmgoers of a thorough background on the historic events they were about to see portrayed.

Just because you look like a professor of German studies does not give you the right to act like one — a lesson I have learned the hard way many, many times.

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Oct 7 4:18 pm

Here’s a fun piece of S. 12th trivia — take a look at the infographic above. According to Google Analytics, those are my top four keywords. It makes sense that the name of the blog would be the top, and that my name would be third, right?

(Regarding #2: I have no idea why the gangster burger remains such a favorite with the web-browsing public. I wrote about it briefly a long time ago, back when S. 12th was a lot linkier in orientation and probably before you even started following — you can read all about the damnable saga of the GB here, here and here. For the record, let me say that I never even saw a god-damned gangster burger in person, let alone ate one.)

However, let’s look at number four. Andy DuCett! The Minneapolis-based artist and a great personal friend! A shocking amount of people come to this very tumblelog looking for Andy DuCett. Here is a list of keywords bringing people here that are less popular than Andy DuCett:

“1957 red wine”
“classy animated gif”
“girls playing accordion”
“hey wanna make out”

If I’m extrapolating this correctly, that means more people come to S. 12th looking for information about Andy DuCett than come hoping to find animated GIFs of people making out with vintage wine-slurping accordion girls (I believe Molly Lambert would be your best source for such a creation, if it indeed exists).

A world that chooses Andy DuCett over classy animated GIFs. Any way you look at it, readers, that is a triumph for culture.

So, to placate you DuCett-crazed masses, let me direct you to this: the man himself is showing at Art Of This here in south Minneapolis next weekend:

Andy DuCett deeply delves into the histories of the building Art of This inhabits, Nicollet Avenue and the surrounding neighborhood to construct his latest sculptural installation, A.O.T. as been here forever, except when it wasn’t. Building upon much of his past installation work employing all things thrift store kitsch, as well as his architectural and illustrative drawings, DuCett investigates the various ways we subjectively interpret and connect with the world around us all.

I’ll be there, and I hope you will, too. Someday, in the far-off future, S. 12th may just be a repository for information about Andy DuCett, like those websites you stumble across when you accidentally type in a URL incorrectly, like kiknos.com, and it’s a blank page with spammy links that says “what you need it, when you need it.” Andy DuCett, when you need it.

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Oct 2 1:55 pm

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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

71 Plays. Download?

Since it’s been a dreary, rainy week (here in Minneapolis, anyway), and there’s been so little to get excited about regarding President Obama lately (even Molly and Mel seem much less chipper on the subject these days), I thought this would be a good time to share with you a favorite personal entry in the Dreams I Had About Barack Obama sweepstakes. Remember there was once a semi-popular blog on this subject? Last updated in May, 2008. Those were the days, huh?

Anyway, it went like this: during the campaign, Barack and I had met, and struck up a wonderful friendship. On his off-days campaigning, he’d fly into Minneapolis and we’d get together in my dream apartment (which was much nicer than my non-dream apartment). We had beautiful matching velvet waistcoats and matching trousers that we stored at my place, and we’d put them on, play Moody Blues records on my turntable for a few hours and sit around talking about poetry. We’d do this once a week; it was how we both unwound from the pressures of our lives. Velvet’s a comfortable fabric, you know? A lot of cute stories about our meet-ups were appearing in the press (Barack’s Velvet Pantsuit Parties: The Trees Are Drawing Him Near! Inside, We Find Out Why!).

One day, before our appointed meeting, an aide (let’s say it was Rahm Emanuel) pulled me aside. “Andy,” he hissed. “These get-togethers with Barack have to stop.”

I was perplexed. “But why?” I asked.

Rahm stared at me with a look of barely contained rage. “The velvet jackets. The fucking Moody Blues. It’s all too effete. It’s not the kind of image he needs in the press right now.”

“But…but…,” I stammered.

“It ends now.”

I was on the verge of tears. “But Barack and I love the Moody Blues,” I wailed.

And so we did. In the dream. Above is ”Minstrel’s Song,” from 1960-something. Happy Friday, reader.

Sep 21 11:50 am

After a weekend meeting with a key member of the S. 12th Senior Advisory Committee, we’ve decided to name the Blood and Sand the official cocktail of S. 12th (both the tumblelog and the house). A Blood and Sand:

1 ounce blended scotch

1 ounce fresh-squeezed orange juice

¾ ounce cherry brandy

¾ ounce sweet vermouth

Shake with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass; garnish with a cherry.

Ew, Scotch in a cocktail, right? But it’s outstanding. Says the Cocktail Chronicles:

In the glass, the blend of cherry brandy and vermouth form a perfect base for the stubborn flavor of scotch, the scotch’s aggressive smokiness keeps the sweet flavors in line, while the orange juice soothes all the various rough edges, making everything work together in the glass.

That’s all true. It’s a really complex mixture of flavors that one wouldn’t expect to work together. It’s also closer to the sort of cocktail one associates with very nicely decorated east coast hotels and snappy banter written by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, which is to say: not every cruddy bar just has cherry brandy around lying around, only the good ones. Plus there’s the added hassle (cough, cough) of making a bartender mix a Blood and Sand for you, even though, like, come on, a bartender’s job is to mix drinks together. I’ve never understood why some bartenders get so irritated about being forced to mix drinks more complicated than a whiskey and soda. Is this just a mark of a bad bartender? Or a busy bartender and I’m just a jerk for asking? (Bartenders: please leave comments below.)

The article above has some solid historical insights into the cocktail’s origins. I first came across it in a 1957 edition of The Standard Bartender’s Guide that Sergio and Emily sold me at their yard sale. The article linked to above it traces it back to the 1930s; it was named for the popular Valentino bullfighter film of the same name. The film itself was based on the 1909 novel Sangre y arena by Spanish novelist and filmmaker Vicente Blasco Ibáñez.

Incidentally, there is not a single title in the bibliography of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez that would not also make an oustanding name for a cocktail. A Maja Desnuda (Woman Triumphant) or Papa del Mar (Sea Pope)? Make my Sea Pope on the rocks, barkeep.

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