Egad, a base life defiles a bad age

Evidence that I was the founder of the Grunge movement. At the time the photo was taken (and credit to the photographer, but I can’t remember his name) I was bartending in South Minneapolis. I had a coat that my Dad’s employers had given him, it was a great winter coat, insulated with a hood. He never wore it because it just wasn’t classy enough for him. It had a huge Siouxland Dressed Beef logo embroidered on the back and “Bill” stitched on the front. My Dad could have manure on his boots, but he wasn’t going to be seen in somethig like that. It was about the coolest thing a guy like me could wear. And the warmest.
One night it was about -20° and somehow I had ended up at the bar late. I positioned myself by the waitress station between the bar and the kitchen because it was the best place to watch the show and also chat up the waitresses. As the evening passed I got, as usual, pretty tuned up. When it came time, protected by my insulated stockyards coat, I trudged the mile or so home to the upper duplex I was sharing with BB and his future wife. I do not recommend this behavior to anyone! Minnesota winters are serious, they can kill you. But I made it home safely with all toes and fingers intact.
The next day I put the coat on and headed out the door for a new adventure. When I put my hand into the left pocket, I discovered it was coated with a syrupy substance. “What the hell?” It turns out that while I had been leaning on the bar the night before, I had also been leaning on the Dr. Pepper dispenser and was blithely filling my pocket with Dr. Pepper. At least the bar owner didn’t find out that I was stealing. It’s a good thing I sobered up!

Gophers lose.
sportsgoddess: I pefer my crow braised in wine sauce with leeks and wild mushrooms, heavy on the garlic.

Sex-aware era waxes

Went to Intolerable Cruelty last night. I loved it. A romantic COMEDY. Farce is probably a better word. Do not see this movie if you don’t have a tolerence for cornball humor. I’m a big Coen Brothers fan. After all I grew up in Moorhead, which is the sister city of Fargo. Marge…know her. St. Louis Park High School produced the Coens and Al Franken. Someone last night was listing other notables from there, but my memory is toast and I’m way to lazy to research it. I’m not much of a fan of George Clooney as a serious actor, but I think he’s a great comic actor. His portrayal of a shallow, vain, divorce lawyer is hilarious. If you like cornball satire and slapsick humor, this three stooges meets Pat and Mike is a must see. Plus Catherine Zita-Jones is fun to look at. I’m told the same thing’s true of George.
The whole family went to church this morning. They walked behind me on the way to the garage. I was working on this post. It brought this Rockwell painting to mind. One of my favorites of his.

Check out skrawler’s entry for 1/17.

Drawn Inward

Three days and I’ve only used the first person singular once.It was tough but ultimately worth it.

Warning: This is going to be a long, nostalgic post.

One of my college art professors, Timothy Lloyd, is retiring this year. Last night was the opening of one of two exhibitions honoring him. Bec and I drove down, her sporting the beautiful pin, made by Tim, that I gave her for our 25th Anniversary last year. Carleton College, my Alma Mater, is located in Northfield, Minnesota, the town of Cows, Colleges, and Contentment, or so they say. I can vouch for the cows and the colleges. There are two colleges, St. Olaf (boooooo) and Carleton (Yeaaaaah) being by far the more prestigious. You may recognize it as the place where Senator Paul Wellstone taught since way back when I was there. Northfield also is famous for a big shootout at the bank on Division Street where Jesse James and the Younger brothers got their asses handed to them by the local farmers. Lesson: don’t mess with an armed Minnesota farmer. Another significant feature of the town is the Malt-O-Meal plant. My entire college experience was flavored by the constant smell of Malt-O-Meal. To this day, when someone is cooking Malt-O-Meal, I get pangs of guilt and feel that I should be studying more.

Tim Lloyd is an amazing artist. A jewelry maker with pieces in the Smithsonian, who’s work has evolved into the making of Japanese influenced vessels crafted out of sheet copper and other metals. The show featured the work of four Japanese kettle makers and two Americans, Tim Lloyd and Wayne Potratz, inspired by their work. Stunningly elegant pieces, I wish I could show you more of but my camera battery went dead.

The evening began at Boliou Hall with a lecture on the Tea Ceremony in the Art History lecture room where I spent so many mornings happily sleeping through lectures. We got there late and didn’t get seats. I spent the time wandering around the building where I spent most of my college career. The students still look the same. I stopped one young girl and asked her if she was Pat Anthony’s daughter, she looked so much like Pat way back then. She wasn’t. I visited the expanded printmaking studio and saw Old Ironsides the litho press that I fought for so many hours printing editions of my student work.

The other exhibit honoring Tim was an alumni artist show (gosh I guess my invitation got lost in the mail). One of the exhibitors was David Hero a potter and classmate of mine, who now lives on the Olympic Peninsula. In 1970 David and I dropped out of school, he bought a Volkswagen bus at the factory in Hamburg and we drove it around Europe for three months. I was sure David would be there and was relishing the thought of the spectacle he would make when he saw me. I knew I had a bear hug coming. The lecture went on forever, a half hour past when it was supposed to end. My anticipation of seeing David was about to boil over. I paced. The lecture ended and the crowd filed out on their way across campus to the opening at another gallery. No David. I saw Tim and ask him if he was there. He was supposed to be. We went to the opening, the usual thing. Professor types wearing Dean buttons, students there just for the food (they served sushi), artsy types and of course all kinds of people that I thought I recognized but couldn’t quite place. I positioned myself for a good view of the entry and watched for David. He never showed.

Of course, the disrespecting of St. Olaf is all in jest. It’s a great Lutheran Liberal Arts College in the Minnesota tradition of great Lutheran Liberal Arts Colleges. They have a Choir that will knock your socks off, competitive sports teams (regularly whipping the Carls and hence the animosity), excellent Academics and really great sweaters.

No, Mel, a sleepy baby peels a lemon.

“blogging makes your brain work.  that’s why it is better than crashing on the recliner.” sportsgoddess.

“I think it’s a wonderful window into people’s thoughts” History_Pig

On January third History_Pig wrote a philosophical entry about how blogging has begun to fill the fellowship and community role of church for him. If you follow his blog, you will see he’s built quite a congregation for himself.
The internet and email seemed to hold this promise for personal communication. The ability to connect so quickly and so universally across the globe would bring forth a revolution in the art of correspondence. What it did was bring about AIM speak, bizzare abbreviation, flames, spam, and forwarding jokes around the planet without a word of comment or greeting. Talk about your vast wasteland. The information super-highway is cluttered with roadside garbage.
And then there’s here. Come to Xanga for laughs, art, advice, new perspectives, tears and ordinance (History_Pig’s New Year’s Eve Blast). The internet makes it so easy for anyone to publish to a huge audience, it’s a dream come true for the closet writer set. So you start publishing your blog and you get responses. “This is cool.” And now you have a readership. And you feel some responsibility to supply fresh material and to not bore them silly. You become accountable. It’s no longer enough to sit in the rocker and say, “that’s something that might make an essay or story.” You need to perform.
Then you realize that no one comes to see you unless you go out and visit them and leave your tracks. So you participate. And you learn different perspectives. And now you have a community. And your brain is working. And you are writing.

Gophers 74 Illinois 59
ISU (Princess L’s future school, I think) beat Texas Tech
leaving the Gophs the last undefeated team in the nation.

Dog, as a devil deified, lived as a god.

Name no one man.

A great digest of the best in editorial cartooning. Well organized, thoughtfull and entertaining. There’s a very intresting article that shows how many cartoonists came up with the same idea for the Mars lander….finding Osama on Mars. These guys know a good Idea when they steal it!

Ah, Satan sees Natasha.

This is a doodle I did during a particularly agonizing corportate meeting last week. I like the whippy, immediate line quality, all energy and spontaneity. Seems like I do my best work when I’m doodling. This was kind of a downfall for me when I was drawing pictures for a living. I could do the nice loose stuff when I was scewing around but when someone hung a check and a deadline in front of me the icy fingers of chokedom would start clamping on my windpipe. Or as The Mountain would say, “It’s hard to draw (shoot-pass-kick-catch-dribble-hit) with your hands around your throat.” HARHARAR! He’s got a million of them! A lot of my professional work is much stiffer than I would like it to be. One of the worst drawings I ever did shows up every year in a newspaper ad. It’s an awful drawing of a guy spraying lawn chemicals. Just terrible. It’s run every spring now for about twenty years. I cringe everytime I see it.
That fearlessness of attack is why I admire Calvin and Hobbs so much. Bill Watterson can draw like a mutha. The stuff seems to be born on the paper. He is a master of the economic of line, creating the perfect gesture and expression with the fewest possible strokes. It takes years of practice. I don’t remember what cartoonist said it, but when asked how long it took him to do a drawing he replied, “30 seconds and 20 years.”

I just left in the note crashing into her forehead. “Regional” Regional what? There’s a word in front of it, but I can’t read it. Mostly when I take notes I can’t make any sense of them when I go back to read them. I used to be able to remember everything and didn’t need to take notes. Now I can’t remember anything and I don’t know how to take notes.

Stop, murder us not tonsured rumpots!

Last night, Princess Q walked past the entrance to my “office” and quipped, “Dad, can you say addicted?” This coming from the queen of AIM. It’s closing in on 3 am and here I am pumping out more narcissitic drivel. Judging by the details of my site tracker, my readers are no strangers to insomnia. But I have a confession to make. I’m on drugs. Ever since I started this blog, I’ve been under the influence. Prednisone. I’ve had Crohn’s disease now for over thirty years, but I won’t go into the shitty details. It’s a mild case, and when it flares up (stress will do it) I can usually knock it down with that wonder corticosteroid. Prednisone, like any other Faustian deal with the pharmacuetical devil, is a two edged sword. (honey get the blender, it’s time to mix some metaphores) It can erase my symptoms in a few hours and take my arthritic pain away with it. I feel fifteen years younger. I have way more energy than normal, I’ve eshewed my customary daily nap for more productive things. Well, blogging anyway. But on the other hand, you retain water, have a ravenous appetite, get agitated and jumpy, talk too loud and fast, and have problems sleeping. Not to mention the long term effects like bone loss and in males I think your dick falls off.
So the burst of energy that’s propelled my to keep this little celebration of myself going for three weeks now is fueled by drugs. I’m enjoying this exercise so much though, I’m really afraid that when I’m done tapering off the elixer, I’ll go back to my old lazy self, snoring away on the barcalounger instead of participating in this wildly entertaining ego circus. No! I shall persevere. I’ll overcome my natural lethargy. After all, I must think of my readers. Anyone? Hello?

Get Your Ya-Yas Out!

Earlier I wrote that I was going to explain the Ya-Yas. Of course they were named after the book by Rachel Wells but these Ya-Ya’s predate the book by at least a couple of decades. The first time I ever saw my wife she walked into a party at the Belvidere Museum¹, she was with the Ya-Ya’s. My calendar has a permanent repeating entry, “bec out” on Thursday nights. They call themselves Cookie, Higs and Swan and these girls know how to have fun. One is an escapee from a convent, one is a Wisconsin farm girl and the third is a small town Minnesota girl who grew up poor with an absent father and seven siblings. I don’t think guys do this. My pals and I don’t. For us if it didn’t involve killing something, competing in games, watching other people competing in games or fixing something, what’s the point. The thought of having a permanent night of the week reserved for hanging out is just too…well you know. We have a standing joke at our house. When my wife is telling me about her latest plans with her women friends, I put on a sad face and say, “I wish I had friends.”
Not that the Ya-Yas just hang out. They go to plays and movies and restaurants, they are regular bon vivants. Sometimes when the work week has been tough they do just hang, often in a room in Hig’s house known as the Ya-Ya room. Alcohol consumption is often involved. Otherr times they paint a room or have a garage sale or plan a party. I suspect they spend some tme bitching about their husbands, although my wife denies it.
Beck is a great friend, I can tell when I drop into her work world that people really like her. I think sometimes I get jealous of that. Sometimes it seems like she gives more of a damn about her friends than her family. I know that’s not true, just old Mr. Insecure popping his ugly head up again, but what good’s being married if you can’t occasionally bitch about it? One of the bonuses of the Ya-Ya sisterhood for me is that I’ve become pals with the other husbands. We play poker and fish and camp together and when we all get together we laugh so hard it hurts!

1. The Belvedere Museum: The house on the Robert Street Hill in St. Paul that I was living in. It was literally a museum to kitch, a college dorm room on steroids. but that’s another story.