Warmest regards, Andy - ProfilesArchive

About Me

"...dirty and compulsively neat, aloof and desperately gregarious, enthusiastic and sullen, generous and stingy, a snappy dresser and scarecrow, a gentleman and a boor, given to extremes of happiness and despair, singularly well able to apply himself and capable of frittering away a lifetime in trivial pursuits, decorous and unseemly, kind and cruel, tolerant yet open to the most outrageous varieties of bigotry, a great friend and an implacable enemy, a lover and abominator of women, sweet-spoken and foul-mouthed, a rake and puritan, swelling with hubris and haunted by inferiority, outcast and social climber, felon and philanthropist, barbarian and patron of the arts, enamored of novelty and solidly conservative, philosopher and fool, large of soul and unbearably petty, distant and brimming with friendly impulses, an inveterate liar and astonishingly strict with petty cash, adventurous and timid, imaginative and stolid, malignly destructive and a planter of trees on Arbor Day."
Chick, Sherman and Marisha.

My Interests

The Foshay Tower. Pierogi. Snow. Old-time radio dramas. Gray suits. Fresh flowers. The Columbia Sports III bicycle, 1972 model -- long may she ride in Scrap Metal Heaven. The Wheel Goods Flyer, 1939 model -- manufacturered right up the street on Lyndale Avenue for me to ride around on. Ushankas. Poncey wallpaper. Loring Park. Cathedral Hill in St. Paul. Steaks. Liberal Norman Lear sitcoms of the 1970s. Biking in suits. Handclaps. Cabinet Magazine. Harper's. New Yorker cartoons. Slidehows. The NATO phonetic alphabet. Disliking bands I liked at age 23. Liking bands I will dislike at age 43. Creepy fascination with the robotic qualities of Mitt Romney. Falling asleep at bars. Text messages. Old-fashioneds.. The photo archives at the Minnesota Historical Society. Thinking about Christopher Hitchens. Craigslist missed connections. YouTube videos that are just an uninterrupted shot of a 45 playing on a turntable in its entirety. The Layman's Cemetery on Lake Street. Heavy starch. The Folk Art Museum in New York City. Pittsburgh, Cleveland and the filthier parts of Cincinnati and Brooklyn. Marcel Dzama, Icecreamlandia, Henry Darger, Katie Beach, Ted Nathanson, Michel Gondry, Raymond Pettibon. Henry Hobson Richardson. The Soap Factory. Art of this Gallery. ARP! Magazine. The 21A. Team Double Team. Stucco. Mizithra cheese. Teenage Law Student and Prom Shame. Knob Creek bourbon. Saturday night fish fries. Orthodox churches. Nicollet Avenue in the spring. Biographies of Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon. Bubble tea. The architecture on Marquette Avenue in Minneapolis and Market Street in Louisville. Directing pleas of desperation towards Larkin. Latin arrangements of La Perfidia. Hand-drawn maps on bar napkins. Complaining out loud to myself that KQRS does not play enough early Deep Purple. Taking the LRT to MSP. Regionally-specific acronyms. Tying linen napkins around my neck in nice restaurants and holding up my knife and fork vertically so that they are perfectly parallel to one another, and then saying "Let's eat!".

I'd like to meet:

People with loud and forceful opinions about my potentially impending graduate education.

Music:

Mingering Mike.

Movies:

The Third Man. The Saddest Music in the World. Diary of a Lost Girl. Slap Shot. O Lucky Man! If... Britannia Hospital. Nashville. Any and all Elvis movies, particularly It Happened At the World's Fair, which is the one where Elvis goes to Seattle, adopts a Chinese kid, and then becomes an astronaut at the end.

Television:

Bottom, Yes Prime Minister, Good Times. Frontline. Meet the Press if I'm awake.

Books:

Dave Hickey, Sean Carswell, Joe Meno, Ben Katchor, Nick Tosches, Ole Rolvaag, Studs Terkel, Colson Whitehead, John Dos Passos, Italo Calvino, Mark Twain, Larry Millett, George Plimpton, George Saunders, Tony Millionaire, David Rakoff, Zadie Smith, Joan Didion, Nicholson Baker, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Frank, Lillian Ross, Johnny Ryan.

Heroes:

NeighborhoodsHilltop, J-town, Whipps Millgate, Barbourmeade, Lyndon, the Highlands, Phoenix Hill, Crescent Hill, Regent Square, Old Louisville, Bryn Mawr, Midtown Phillips, Powderhorn Park (back where I belong).

My Blog

"Obama JFK" image watch, part 4.

Here are more good finds from an "Obama JFK" Google image search. There seem to be more and more every time I search -- now you get 48,000 results, up from 29,000 a few months ago. Between the Shirtle...
Posted by Warmest regards, Andy on Wed, 21 May 2008 08:40:00 PST

The Sturdevant musical legacy.

These are pictures of the Cincinnati-based punk band SS-20 in 1985. The singer in front is Juggi Sturdevant, and the guitarist on the left in the bottom picture is Pete Sturdevant. They're my uncles.I...
Posted by Warmest regards, Andy on Fri, 09 May 2008 06:18:00 PST

"Obama JFK" image watch, part 3.

Yet another gem from an "Obama JFK" Google image search (apparently, this is an office wall at Obama Iowa HQ): Note the Obama button on JFK's label. What attention to detail! "Obama JFK" image s...
Posted by Warmest regards, Andy on Thu, 08 May 2008 01:29:00 PST

Op, alle Jordens bundne Trælle!

For additional May Day fun and edification, here are more of those Ole Mattiason Aarseth photos from 1915 with the socialism pennants. Go socialism! Aarseth was a photographer that worked in the Siou...
Posted by Warmest regards, Andy on Thu, 01 May 2008 12:46:00 PST

Létat comprime et la loi triche!

Happy May Day, pinko! Celebrate the day in your office by playing one of the dozens of versions of that great Socialist hymn, "L'Internationale," found here in this online musical library. M...
Posted by Warmest regards, Andy on Thu, 01 May 2008 08:51:00 PST

Good-looking older ladies...

...keep telling me that I look exactly like their first husbands, who they've been divorced from since the 1970s. It happened again last night, and it was the third time in the last two years. Why do ...
Posted by Warmest regards, Andy on Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:10:00 PST

"Obama JFK" image watch, part 2.

Another gem from an "Obama JFK" Google image search: But wait! Who invited those flabby triangulating jerks the Clintons to muscle beach?...
Posted by Warmest regards, Andy on Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:38:00 PST

Point-counterpoint: rock bands.

"Rock-and-roll bands reconstitute the ideal of the American family in its original, nineteenth-century form, as a quasi-democratic, mercantile unit (the family farm, the family firm, the vaudeville ac...
Posted by Warmest regards, Andy on Tue, 08 Apr 2008 05:27:00 PST

An audience with Charlton Heston, ruined.

Charlton Heston has just died. I had the opportunity to meet the late actor, once.It was in 1997, and he had just written a book entitled Charlton Heston Presents the Bible. He was on some sort of boo...
Posted by Warmest regards, Andy on Mon, 07 Apr 2008 08:54:00 PST

16,000 of my fellow Minneapolitans.

On April 15, the Minneapolis Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery at the corner of Lake Street and Cedar Avenue will open again, and I’ll finally have a destination once again ...
Posted by Warmest regards, Andy on Thu, 03 Apr 2008 10:11:00 PST