I realize I’ve been an unapologetic cheerleader for Minneapolis lately, but it shows no signs of abating. Maybe it’s because winter sucks so much here that it makes me appreciate everything more when summer finally arrives.

And it’s especially easy to appreciate Minneapolis in the summer from top floor of the Walker, where I’d never been until I went there for this the other night, and spent most of the time just staring out the window. It isn’t even the best view of the city, but it’s still pretty great.

Posted: June 26th, 2008 under Minneapolis, Images.
Comments: none

Permit me to rhapsodize for a moment.

I was doing my usual weekly ride around the lakes today and headed back home on the Midtown Greenway, getting off at Park Ave and heading downtown, when I got a pinch flat in my back tire. Fortunately, I was only a couple blocks from the Greenway, so I just turned around and walked my bike to the Freewheel that’s part of the brand-new, ridiculously awesome bike center there. Inside is a sleek, spacious bike shop/cafe/depot with lockers and showers for commuters, and bike parking and service and of course plenty of expensive gear to gawk at.

They fixed my flat and put a new, better-sized tire on my wheel in like ten minutes while I had a coffee and watched all manner of riders come and go—and not just the rich white lycra-clad gear fetishists, but mothers and their small children, and old men, and kids from the surrounding neighborhoods, pouring into the place to get their bikes serviced or just look around.

So many things are wrong and unfair right now, it’s reassuring when something works the way it’s supposed to, if not better. Sitting in that place, buffeted by friendly service, high ceilings, clean lines, right angles, and air-conditioned convenience, I felt like I was seeing into the future—in a good way, for once.

I nudged my bike back out onto the Greenway (itself a marvel) and rode home swelling with sustainable-transportation-infrastructure goodwill. Between that and Dosh, I’m really proud of my adopted hometown right now.

Posted: June 18th, 2008 under Minneapolis, Images.
Comments: 3

I’m not going to try and justify or apologize for the fact that I recently viewed the new Genesis documentary/concert film, When In Rome. I did it, and I am not sorry. (Nor am I sorry for riding my bike to the nearest Wal-Mart, which is in the suburbs, to purchase the DVD because Wal-Mart is the only U.S. retailer selling the DVD, and I kind of wanted to be able to say that I rode my bike to a Wal-Mart in the suburbs to buy the new Genesis DVD.)

I have a Masters of Fine Arts degree.

Whether you’re a fan of Genesis and/or Phil Collins or not, I think this short film is a nice little portrait of what happens when a handful of wildly successful musicians in their mid-fifties decide to undertake that dubious endeavor that is the reunion tour, and the developments, both positive and otherwise, that result from a fifteen-year hiatus and subsequent reconvening in lavish rehearsal halls tucked away in Lausanne and Helsinki with seven months to rehearse and a quadrillion-dollar production budget.

Through it all, the person who acquits himself surprisingly admirably is actually Phil Collins. There’s none of the supposed egotism or overweening ambition that has led to various PR issues over the span of his thirty years as a solo artist (and I stress the word “artist”); no mention of Tarzan, or any of the other occasionally middling pap he’s churned out during his solo career, or his insistence on collaborating with Eric Clapton, or Tarzan, or his three divorces, or Tarzan. Rather, he emerges as a talented but flawed musician in his autumn years—which was never how I’ve perceived him until a very specific moment in the documentary.

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Posted: June 13th, 2008 under Video, Music.
Comments: 3

First of all, we didn’t get in. Andrew and I were not two of the 18,000 who made it through the doors. We weren’t sure how insanely early we would’ve had to arrive to get in. The important thing is that we tried.

We showed up at seven, far too late, and wandered several blocks looking for the end of the line that wended through the streets of downtown St Paul—otherwise a ghost town after 5 p.m.—a docile but cheerful crowd that, much as I wanted to make some weary pronouncement to Andrew about our cohort, confounded all attempts at demographic or cultural classification beyond our shared reason for being there.

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Posted: June 3rd, 2008 under General.
Comments: 3

There’s a new mini-meme out there: a growing collection of drawings, done by various bloggers, of themselves as teenagers. It’s a great idea, and I decided that, as someone who is 1) a blogger; 2) a former teenager; and 3) an occasional doodler, I would give it a shot.

The result is, I think, a representative portrait of who I was around age eighteen, and can be found after the jump.

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Posted: May 29th, 2008 under Images.
Comments: 7

Guess what I’m planning to do again this summer.

That’s right; I’m going to teach my cat to read.

We’re going to start an online book club. If you want in at the ground floor, let me know.

And by “ground floor” I mean, of course, November Y.O.G.

Posted: May 22nd, 2008 under General.
Comments: 4

In high school this time of year would be marked by graduation parties and drama club awards ceremonies. In college, finals and hasty last-minute dormroom moveouts. This year it’s thesis defenses, a new but not entirely dissimilar ritual. A lot of departures, whatever the reason or destination. The weather complies and becomes unpredictable or ominous. Thunderstorms every few days. Still chilly at night. Sunny and dry in the afternoon. Earthquake weather without the earthquakes.

Us third-years cluster in the halls and just outside the doors to buildings. We come out of our thesis-writing hovels, bleary-eyed and ready to be friends again like we were in the beginning. Everyone wishes everyone well; nearly every debt has been squared or forgiven. I see a little more of the people who’ve spent the past three years propping me up. During defenses, sitting in the room listening to them read from their manuscripts, glancing around at the people in the seats next to me, I find my pride in my cohort growing outsized, a little amazed at the sheer magnitude of creative firepower all concentrated in one room.

When I’m not watching my peers make their presentations, I’ve been spending my days preparing mine, trying to winnow down and optimize the material I have so that when I go before my friends and mentors on Friday it will appear I’ve been working and thinking hard. It hasn’t been easy. And when I do get outside, I get sunburned and pleasantly exhausted, pedaling till it seems absurd. Yesterday I rode my bike around Lake Calhoun while listening to Led Zeppelin and playing along on the handlebars. I came home and cleaned my apartment while listening to Yes. I took a too-long nap, the kind that makes you think it’s eight a.m. when you wake up instead of eight at night. I woke up and wondered what I’m going to do with all these books.

A tapering rather than a resolution.

Well-wishes for the well-wishers.

Posted: May 15th, 2008 under General.
Comments: 4

“Instead, I’m ready to consider the argumentative essay, the lyrical essay, the prose poem, literary journalism, and criticism. I’m ready to write in the second- and third-person voice, in the present and future tenses.”

Posted: May 8th, 2008 under General.
Comments: 2

Ever since I finished my thesis, whenever I talk to people about it, I’ve been joking half-jokingly that I’ll never write again. “Surely you’ll keep writing,” people will say. Or they’ll ask questions like, “Do you really think you’ll never write again?” or, “Why do you think you’ll never write again?” or, “Jake, why are you flinging your laptop into the turbid waters of the mighty Mississippi River? Is it because you intend to stop writing forever?”

I’m not serious, of course; I know I’ll keep writing. I can’t help myself, and I’m not really much good anything else (besides crossword puzzles, of course). But I will say that I’m ready to be done with the first-person voice for a while, and with the memoir. I’ve written a thick slice of unabashedly personal history in order to obtain a graduate degree, which is already kind of strange when I stop to think about it—which I’ve been doing a lot lately.

So I’m ready to be done casting back into the past, to finish scrutinizing and documenting an era that was hard enough the first time around. It’s been difficult, draining, depressing work to spend three years (re-)inhabiting what was arguably the worst year of my life. So I’m ready to be done with that. I’m ready to be done with reflection, and retrospect, now that they’ve served their purpose; I’m ready to be done with nostalgia, something that, I’ve recently discovered, isn’t actually that up to which it’s cracked.

Instead, I’m ready to consider the argumentative essay, the lyrical essay, the prose poem, literary journalism, and criticism. I’m ready to write in the second- and third-person voice, in the present and future tenses. Now that I’ve spent three years and a couple hundred pages dispatching a weird chunk of my own history, I’m ready to look outward, to draw my gaze up from my navel. The past may not be done with me, but I’m done with the past. (For now.)

Posted: May 5th, 2008 under Literature.
Comments: 4

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Posted: May 1st, 2008 under Minneapolis, Images.
Comments: none

(Last Monday I had the rare opportunity to see Stars of the Lid perform live. Because I apparently can’t let a beautiful musical moment stand on its own without documenting it exhaustively, I came home and wrote this review.)

During the first true spring rain of the season, an eclectic array of people—hipsters, the art crowd, older classical-music aficionados, season-ticket holders, and everyone in between—crammed themselves into the tiny seats at the Southern Theater, not quite sure what to expect from the Wordless Music Series‘ Minneapolis stopover. While the artists currently showcased in the series do happen to traffic in instrumental music, the “wordless” component of the name probably refers more to the eschewal of genre tags as outlined in the series’ mission statement: “The various boundaries and genre distinctions segregating music today … are in an artificial construction in need of dismantling.”

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Posted: April 28th, 2008 under Minneapolis, Concerts, Music.
Comments: 1

In college, whenever I was feeling antsy and uninspired, I would rearrange the furniture in my dorm room. This usually bought me a couple days’ worth of an artificially renewed feeling of purpose and invigoration before the tedium set back in and I finally got around to writing that paper about the Dry Salvages.

Today, probably because of the shitty weather, I was feeling antsy and uninspired, so I dragged my comfy couch out of the comfort nook where it’s been for the past year and installed it by the window in my bedroom. So far, so good. Just look at all that natural light my couch is enjoying.

All that cold, rainy, natural light.

Still, though. This is going to change everything. I can already feel it. Now I can lounge in the natural light on my couch while I enjoy the dour exploits of unhappily married couples on Tell Me You Love Me read classic literature and catch up on my New Yorkers and otherwise edify myself.

Truly, a new era.

Posted: April 25th, 2008 under Images, General.
Comments: none

A partial list of the words in my thesis unrecognized by MS Word’s spellcheck dictionary:

Ágætis Byrjun
Alvie (Singer)
(Anna) Akhmatova
amp/amped
(New) Amsterdams
angsty
anthemic/anthemically
apeshit
Arby’s
Arc du Triomphe
(Stella) Artois
(Paul) Auster

backload
backroad
backstory
Badmotorfinger
Balocchi
Bananarama
bandmate
barnlike
Berklee
(Dressy) Bessy
BetaMax
birdwatching
bizzaro
(The) Buggles
(Mikhail) Bulgakov

campustown
cellphone
commodify
Cornershop
Cyndi Lauper

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Posted: April 20th, 2008 under General.
Comments: 15

In hopes that I can somehow magically impel my thesis to finish itself by leaving it untouched in the next room while I lie on the couch in front of the television, I am watching Breaking & Entering, a strange and beautiful film I’ve been meaning to Netflix* for a long time, ever since I bought its score simply because it’s by Underworld (actually, a collaboration between them and Gabriel Yared). This is always a strange and kind of lovely way to discover a movie, so that while watching it I am hearing music with which I’ve become intensely familiar—jogged to, slept to, included in mixes—cast in a new context.

Like I said, it’s a beautiful film, both for its music and its cinematography, but also for the pretty people who populate it, and who are pretty to look at. It’s a difficult film to describe or pin down—one moment an urban crime drama, the next a portrait of a troubled family, the next a postmodern morality play—a shapeshifter that grabs me in the manner of any art that resists simple characterization, like You Shall Know Our Velocity or For Hero: For Fool: I can’t quite say what it is I like about it because I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to hit “pause” and check to see if my thesis has typed “THE END” at the end of itself like I politely and magically willed it to.

Underworld & Gabriel Yared - “Happy Toast” (mp3)

* (”Netflix” here being a colloquialism meaning “to let a DVD languish in an envelope atop of one’s television for six weeks so that one’s Netflix subscription does rather the opposite of paying for itself.”)

Posted: April 18th, 2008 under Film, Music.
Comments: 3

I know I’ve addressed this before, but today’s date reminded me that there are a few people whose birthdays I can remember even though I haven’t seen them in years, dates sunk into my brain far deeper than the birthdays of more recent, closer friends—my brain was younger and therefore more plastic when I learned them, I suppose. At some point in 1987, not long after becoming friends with him, I committed to memory the fact that April 11 is Michael Mutti’s birthday.

Starting in fifth grade and continuing more or less all the way until high school, Michael and I informed each other’s troubled, surreal preadolescent sensibilities. We were similarly introverted and socially awkward and had a love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with the institutional and social vagaries of Grinnell Middle School. We drew bizarre cartoons and science-fiction tableaux in our notebooks that might get today’s eleven-year-olds sent to a child psychologist. We made up cruel nicknames for the popular kids in our class, and crueler nicknames for our teachers. We staged epic schoolyard battles where the playground equipment became spacecraft and the grass and gravel became—of course—either hot lava, flesh-dissolving acid, or deep space.

I now realize that in these idiosyncrasies, we were profoundly normal boys.

And like most young American people our age, we negotiated the pop-culture landscape far more adroitly than we did the social rituals of our peer group. Frequently assisted by Chuck Munyon (9/6/77), we became highly discriminating connoisseurs of Duck Tales, Ghostbusters (the film), The Real Ghostbusters (the animated series), Weird Al, Airwolf, the 1988 Olympic Games, Police Academy, Future Problem Solving, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Laser Tag, Dragonlance, Legos, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Odyssey of the Mind, Foxtrot, the NES, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Headbanger’s Ball, Michael Jackson’s Bad, Weird Al’s Even Worse, and—last but certainly the hell not least—Def Leppard.

Michael actually ended up going to undergrad at Lawrence, just like me; by then, however, we had fallen out of touch, which is weird, and which I’ve always regretted. I haven’t seen him in a long time and probably won’t hear from him until he finds out about this post and emails me to request I remove it because he doesn’t want prospective employers to Google his name and see this.

Until then, happy birthday, Michael.

Posted: April 11th, 2008 under Grinnell.
Comments: none