My favorite things about the Minnesota State Fair.
State Fair Despair
It can happen to anybody. It’s late in the day. You’re tired of walking. All you want to do is sit down. And you do. And once you do, you can’t bring yourself to stand back up again. You’re permanently planted to the curb on Dan Patch Ave across from the Hawaiian Ice booth. You’ll remain there for the rest of the fair, maybe you’ll be there through next year’s fair as well! But you can’t bear the thought. You’ve eaten enough funnel cake on the Midway. You’ve seen enough of the witty t-shirts that the teenagers wear. You’ve seen the K9 Police dog demonstration at the Pet Barn. And all you want to do is go home! But home is so far away. You’ll have to walk to the park and ride, ride on the park and ride, find the car in the gigantic shopping center parking lot, THEN drive home. This all goes through you’re mind as you sit on the curb on Dan Patch Ave, and you just don’t know what to do.
The Sublime Porcine
You want to see it again. You can do it. You saw it last year. That giant round mound of flesh. But there’s always something that holds you back, just a little bit. Is it the way his ears cover his eyes like fuzzy pink blinders? Or is it knowing that those same ears will be a welcome gift to the family dog someday? Perhaps it’s the fact that in all the years you’ve gone to the fair you’ve never once seen him/her standing?a Always laying there in the sawdust as if the simple laws of physics and motion prevented the auto-locomotion of an animal of such impressive size. Staring there at that animal you remember back to the freshman art history class you had in college. You remember Heironymus Bosch, “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” You remember Salvidor Dali, “The Persistence of Memory.” Like the hog, it’s all highly vivid in detail, but it just doesn’t seem to make sense. And deep, deep down, it terrifies you.
Commerce and Trade, From Memory
It’s in the Merchandise Mart. You can’t think of it’s name. It’s something like “Kitchen Widget” or something like that. Whatever it’s called you know for certain you don’t need one. But it’s not the device that disturbs you. It’s the man hawking it. He rubs the device on a head of cabbage and thread like shavings fall like snow upon the cutting board. You stop and listen to his hypnotic spiel. He recites again the dishwasher-safeness of his gizmo and you regard him as a caricature, a life size cut-out of an actual human being. But this pains you. This man, his life. As he expertly slices his 3rd tomato you think “There must be more to this man.” Suddenly you want to know him. What is his life like? Does he have a family? Where does he sleep at night? But his rant begins to dissolve as you listen to it. The rhythmic delivery and lack of inflection begins to erode the meaning of the words and you are left with only the soft, gooey, and artificial sounds of the man’s voice. It’s then that you remember you want mini-donuts.
I haven’t been able to decide what my fourth item in my State Fair Four should be.
The GRLA has been nice enough to allow me to do the cover for his new EP “Samariah Carrie.” Album release party at Big V’s July 10th. (Keep your eyes peeled for another awesome animated GIF poster!)
Just a cute little graphic I whipped up to promote this event online. Hopefully an animated GIF will follow soon.
UPDATE: As promised (kinda) here is the awesome animated GIF of the poster. I wonder if this is how Terry Gilliam got started.
February 16, 2010 – 12:51 pm
Click image for hi-res version. Trust me, you want to see this in hi-res.
I love Liberace. Ever since reading Dave Hickey’s essay, “A Rhinestone as Big as The Ritz” in “Air Guitar.” A fascinating man.
This j-card was from a tape I bought at a thrift store. It includes Liberace’s wonderful rendition of chopsticks as well as some great between Liberace and his audience. Well the tape deck in the Buick finally went kaput so there will be no more Liberace sadly. The next car I buy probably won’t even have a tape deck. So, I figured I’d immortalize this small piece of Liberace on the web.
February 1, 2010 – 7:12 pm
More pictures, and video, available at my Flickr page
Every year for the past 32 years, the weekend before the Super Bowl is Concertina Bowl (CB). A couple hundred people pack the Blainbrook Bowl Even Center for 12 hours of non-stop concertina music, KOC bratwurst, and lots and lots of dancing. I went for the first time last year on a bit of a lark, but found the even so damn interesting I went back again this year.
I grew up near the city of Blaine, where CB is held. 20 years ago it was the edge of the suburbs, full of sod fields and pumpkin farms. All that land has now been turned into housing developments and KFCs, and the edge of the suburbs is now more like East Bethel, or Ham Lake (what we used to consider the ‘country’). But the Blainbrook Bowl has always been there. Even with the expansion and widening of Highway 65, which now lumbers just beyond the parking lot behind a wall of concrete, Blainbrook has endured. It’s not fancy. It never was. It was just where you went to hang out at night. After the place closed for the night the mass exodus headed just a mile north on 65 to Perkins. High schoolers and bar closers alike would sit for hours drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and eating Country Club Melts.
I’m sure this nostalgia plays a large part of why I’m so enamored with CB. But the strangeness of it all is what really attracts me. It’s fo alien, so foreign to me. I attend Concertina Bowl without irony or condescension. I am just truly fascinated with it. I’m not a fan of concertina music, although I secretly enjoy the fact that I can’t tell one song from another. I can usually discern the waltzes from the polkas but after that I’m lost. I guess I just really enjoy seeing people who have enough passion to carve out an event for what they love, even if I don’t understand it. I guess it all boils down to what the great Reine Motschke said about his love for the concertina:
“If I have to explain it to you,
you ain’t never gonna get it!”
January 12, 2010 – 2:44 pm
Here’s a piece of paper my friend Daniel used to take orders during the Muddy Pig’s second annual Belgian Beer Fest. Notice how he began using different colored pens and wrote in different directions to discern which orders belonged together. Emergence. Fascinating.
Click image for hi res.
January 11, 2010 – 7:06 pm
January 1, 2010 – 3:31 pm
Big Table Studio is now on the board, or at least on the wall. I just slapped up our ‘signage’ last night. Every studio in the Jax Building has the opportunity to have their name on the wall in the entryway, kind of like a directory. So Craig asked me if I had any extra time if I wouldn’t mind coming up with something. So I found a roll of masking tape and went to work.
Big Table is comprised of 5 other designers, illustrators, a screen printer, and myself. We’ve had the space in the Jax Building in lowertown St Paul for about two months now, but have finally finished the painting and have moved in. I’m hoping to spend some quality time here working on a number of projects I’ve got on my mind for 2010. And there’s a liquor store right across the street, bonus.
December 19, 2009 – 6:00 pm
I thought this was pretty funny for some reason.
