Barring some unpacking and some cleaning, I’m finally and completely moved into my new apartment.

I promised myself I wouldn’t oversentimentalize the process, and I think I’ve done a reasonably good job of that. I threw away, sold, or donated a lot of things I’d been holding onto long past their usefulness even as mementos, and I still think this move sets a new record for the least amount of garbage produced and cheap plastic purchased from Target to replace it.

But old habits die hard, and there’s nothing that turns the gears of sentimentality—or at least retrospect, wrapped in a skein of sentimentality and garnished with shavings of nostalgia marinated in Weltschmertz—better than looking at my newly empty old apartment after giving it the most thorough cleaning I’ve ever given anything (at least, thorough by my lazy bachelor standards; execrable by anyone else’s) and knowing that for three years it was my Home with a capital H. Nothing says transition—or ending—quite like a series of empty rooms.

As a kid, I loved the sitcom Growing Pains. The series finale, after several years of Learning Some Important Lessons and Having a Few Laughs Along the Way, hinged on one of many can’t-fail tropes for ending a series: the Seaver family was moving away, leaving the cozy three-walled house where Alan Thicke’s firm but fair patriarch practiced psychology in his home office and the family gathered on the lawn at the end of the theme song every week. When the Seavers relocated, they literally ceased to exist.

In my dim memory of the finale, Seaver daughter Carol, played by Tracy Gold, was the last one to leave the house. (I’m not sure why she got the last shot, and not Mike, or even better, Boner). She looked around the living room, ground zero for so many comic misunderstandings and Very Special Episode third-act denouments, and bid the place goodbye.

That’s kind of how I felt on Sunday night, which I realize makes me a grade-A sap. But that apartment was my homebase for three years, the longest I’ve stayed in one place since I went to college at 19. It was my first legitimately adult apartment—not a dorm room, not shared with a roommate, not a basement. It’s where I finished my thesis. It’s where I peaked as a filmmaker.

So if all this makes me a sap, then bring on the theme song.

Posted: July 2nd, 2009 under General, Minneapolis.
Comments: 2

Thriller was the first album I actually owned. Beginning at age three, I listened to and became familiar with my parents’ Beatles albums, but I couldn’t claim them as my own.

When I was seven and Thriller was released, I begged my mother for it, and she was all like, “Why don’t you just have Uncle Henry make a tape of it for you?”

“That’s not the point!” I whined. With all due respect to my uncle Henry—definitely one of my hipper, more musically aware uncles— I wanted the official album on tape, the complete package: that shimmery white suit reproduced in a tiny 3×4″ format, and the ugly beige cassette itself, with the song titles and everything stamped on the plastic. That was my holy grail.

So I wore my mother down and eventually got it, and played the hell out of it, and eventually lost it, and a couple years later moved onto the second album I ever owned, Songs From the Big Chair. But that album, the video for “Shout,” and the ensuing 25 years of pop music couldn’t have existed without Thriller, or the man who created it.

As soon as I heard the news yesterday, my brain performed that curious elision that allows adults to reckon with nuance, controversy, and cognitive dissonance: I immediately forgot the past 20 years of Michael Jackson’s narrative—the weirdness and the plastic surgery and the baby-dangling and the allegations of impropriety—and thought only about Thriller and Bad, about being a single-digit age in the 1980s—an era I consider more frequently even as it continues to recede.

The bells at Minneapolis’ City Hall are playing Michael Jackson songs. You can hear them all over downtown. I recorded them playing “I’ll Be There.”

Posted: June 26th, 2009 under Music.
Comments: 1

Posted: June 21st, 2009 under General, Images.
Comments: 1

Well here’s a rant from out of nowhere.

Several times during my time in the Twin Cities, I’ve heard, or seen online, the following statement: “There are no black people here / in Minneapolis / in the Twin Cities.” This happened most recently just the other day, and since it’s one of my pet peeves I decided it was time for me to work myself up into a semi-informed lather and sound off about it.

I know it might seem absurd that anyone would actually say there are no black people (or Hispanics, or Asians) in a metropolitan area like the Twin Cities. But I am not expending 800 words on a straw man argument. I assure you that I really have heard people say this—bright, progressive, conscientious people—about not just blacks but the other groups I mentioned.

I’m not sure what the people who utter this statement are trying to say. Well, that’s not entirely true—I think what they’re trying to say is that this part of the country is so provincial, so culturally and ethnically homogeneous, that persons of color and other minorities are all but invisible.

There is some truth to this—the Twin Cities are, like much of the United States, still predominantly white. Maybe the people who make this irksome declaration are bothered by what they perceive as a lack of diversity in the Twin Cities. But this dismissive claim does nothing to further diversity, and it is not only inaccurate, but insidiously harmful and patronizing.

Because guess what? There are black people in the Twin Cities. Quite a few, actually. And they’re not just confined to North Minneapolis or Cedar-Riverside, though yes, you will find quite a few African-Americans and Somali immigrants living there. After all, Minneapolis saw a 127% increase in foreign-born residents between 1990 and 2000, and is home to the one of the largest U.S. Somali populations, and St. Paul has the largest U.S. Hmong population—though I have heard, appended with a straight face to the “There are no black people here” formulation, the corollary, “and Somalis don’t count.”

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Posted: June 16th, 2009 under Minneapolis.
Comments: none

“That challenge haunts all animators. We grow up thinking that our bike is cold when it’s left out in the rain, or that a leaf on a high branch is afraid of heights. ” - Andrew Stanton

“I chose, with not too much deliberation, a nice new desk at which I will accomplish many accomplishments for at least the next three years.” - Me

I’m not an animator, but I still get sentimental about inanimate objects. At the end of this month, in order to be closer to my job(s) and friends, I’m going to move to a new apartment. My last few moves were marked by ill-preparedness and last-minute all-nighters spent haphazardly throwing things into boxes. I’m trying to be a little more organized about it—I consider this my first “adult” move—but I still can’t help but feel overwhelmed by all the shit I have to do before July. Not to mention the emotional strain of vacating a place I’ve inhabited for three years—the longest I’ve lived anywhere since my parents’ house in high school.

So I’m trying to get started early. Today my project was to disassemble the aforementioned behemoth of a desk. It’s served me well in two apartments and through the entirety of my MFA program. I wrote a lot at that desk. But because it’s from IKEA, and because I probably didn’t care for it as well as I should have, it’s basically falling apart, its bolts missing and its famous IKEA particleboard disintegrating. I don’t think it can survive another move and I don’t relish the idea of carrying it up three flights of stairs.

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Posted: June 7th, 2009 under Iowa City, Minneapolis.
Comments: 3

I already alluded to this Onion article about adult kickball. But then, lying in bed last night, I began thinking about my 2004-2005 tenure with the World Adult Kickball Association’s Chicago Deep Dish league.

Those were heady days: three consecutive seasons of truly horrid playing on my part and raucous postgame summits at the bars whose owners probably could not fucking believe they sponsored an adult kickball league.

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Posted: June 4th, 2009 under Chicago.
Comments: 1

Oh hi. I was just sitting around, you know, listening to some great music.

Maybe it’s the weather—thunderstormy, on the cusp of June. Maybe it’s because it’s a Sunday night, or because some fuckwad killed an abortion doctor this morning in the lobby of his own church. Maybe it’s because I just watched a sad movie, or because this is the time of year when we are all going through transitions, even if we don’t know it. But this song hits me right square where it hurts.

Halloween, Alaska - “The Ends”

I try not to use the M word anymore when discussing music, but this is good old-fashioned melancholy pop. Halloween, Alaska is a Minneapolis band but they recorded their new album with Tchad Blake at Real World Studios. So I think it’s safe to say they’ve Arrived, if they hadn’t already, and they deserve every bit of it. These guys are geniuses with the vocal melodies and especially bridges—and a knife-twist of a lyric like “Don’t talk to your ex / There, I said it.” And while most bands would milk every last drop out of melodies as brilliant as the ones in “The Ends” (I know I would), they fade it out before you can really get a good grip on it.

I’m focusing on “The Ends” because it sounds a little bit like the 80s, and that’s always going to get my attention. And the Current’s been playing it a lot lately. But I could have picked just about any song from Champagne Downtown and it would match this one for sheer beauty and hooks. And then the bridge sounds like Steely Dan. So there you go.

I feel like lately my music listening habits have been stagnating a little, or that I’ve hit a dry spell interrupted only by halfhearted listens to P4K’s Best New Musics. I’ve been waiting to discover my First True Summer Album. It’s a new month, and it feels pretty much like summer, and I just belatedly acquired Champagne Downtown, and I love it, so it might as well be the one.

Posted: May 31st, 2009 under Minneapolis, Music.
Comments: 4

Our last shows of the tour were excellent: First there was the impromptu open-mic in Adams Morgan, DC, where a crowd member, upon finding out we were from Minnesota, shouted “Al Franken!” and “60!” between every song.

After that we drove to Philadelphia, where we were warmly welcomed by the women who run Girls Rock Camp there and several of their friends, including members of the delightfully insane ensemble Oh! Pears. The next day we even walked around the historical parts of the city.

That evening we joined Oh! Pears onstage at Johnny Brenda’s, along with An American Chinese and The Mean.

The drive from Philadelphia to Minneapolis was twenty hours long and punctuated only by a midnight meal at Denny’s and the unfortunate news of Jay Bennett’s death.

Now that I’m back, I’ve done that neat trick I performed after my tour with Nolan, which is to immediately and efficiently ablate from memory all the tedious or frustrating parts of touring with a band, leaving only memories of the fun, and the desire to do it all again as soon as possible.

More here.

Posted: May 27th, 2009 under Chicago, Music.
Comments: 1

We’re in Washington DC, trying to plan the next 48 hours until our next show, in Philadelphia. Right now our tentative plan is to try and hit an open mic and blow the minds of these District of Columbians.

(Marshall got a haircut. He has two mohawks now.)

Last night we played the Sidebar Tavern in Baltimore and had a wonderful time. It was a small, divey basement bar, so it seemed crowded even if there were only maybe thirty people there. The other bands, the psychedelic seven-piece King Cloud and the playfully proggy Cat, were the perfect match. We’ve been blessed with some really nice bills that just kind of fall together, where the bands all complement each other really well.

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Posted: May 21st, 2009 under General, Images, Music.
Comments: 2

After one consecutive back-to-back show and an epic 48 hours on the road, we decided we needed a break and drove up to Ogonquit, Maine, where we spent the weekend with Marshall’s friend Amy and her husband Idan. They were consummate hosts and we immediately bent to the task of walking along the shore, sleeping in, and eating all the time.

Our Joshua Tree pose

Tonight, Brooklyn.

Posted: May 19th, 2009 under General.
Comments: none