Institute for the Study and Preservation of South 12th

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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Front foyer of Uncle Juggi’s house, Cambridge Avenue, Cincinnati, Ohio.

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It was in the reign of Barack Obama that the aforesaid personages lived and quarrelled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.

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“And I just hate the Trumps because they never bought my Trump Tower portraits. And I also hate them because the cabs on the upper level of their ugly Hyatt Hotel just back up traffic so badly around Grand Central now and it takes me so long to get home.” - Andy Warhol, 1984.

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Internal monologue after Imran challenged me to explain to him what the line “a garage band from Seattle” from Weird Al’s “Smells Like Nirvana” means, Winter 1992.

“You don’t even know that means.” Yikes. He’s right. But OK. OK. You've got this. Imran thinks it’s lame and stupid that I like the Weird Al song, but don’t know anything about the Nirvana song it’s based on. Well, that’s not true, and I can show him. 

Actually, it is true, but I can fake this. OK. Think.

I think it means they're from Seattle. Right? In fact, yes, I know that for a fact. I read it somewhere. It's called the 'Seattle sound.' I am sure of that. I read that in Newsweek.

But that's too easy. This is a trick question. 

No, no, no. The Seattle answer is definitely too obvious. It's a trap. It must mean something else. 'Seattle' is probably slang for something. There's a lot of layers of meaning here. Weird Al is a genius and he packs in so many layers of meaning in his lyrics he'd never use a line like a 'garage band from Seattle' if he just meant they were literally from Seattle. 

Why can’t mom and dad just get cable? I would understand all of this stuff if we had MTV.

It might be a sex thing. Or drugs. I think grunge people use drugs. What are some drugs things that 'Seattle' might mean? 

No! Wait! 'Garage band'! That's it! Imran means I don't know what a 'garage band' is. He's right, too. It couldn't that obvious. It's a band in a garage? Like they have to use a garage to rehearse? Because they’re...poor? Are rock bands poor? No, that doesn’t make any sense. It must be a sex thing. Would Weird Al make a sex joke? Maybe. UHF doesn’t have any sex jokes, I don’t think. Maybe Weird Al is getting edgier now? 

Imran is getting impatient! He’s looking at me. I need to say something. Don’t say ‘duh, it means they’re from Seattle.’ That’s what he wants you to say. Say something else. 

Just say something!

Me, to Imran: Duh, of course I know what that means. It's...you know...with...drugs?

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The first post on South 12th appeared eight years ago this afternoon. A very happy anniversary to this haunted, partially abandoned warehouse of creative nonfiction fragments and Instagram overstock.

Here I am in late 2008. The man pictured above doesn’t yet know who Pierce Gleeson, Louise Laing or Melissa Graeber are. The words “duckbeater,” “womanhouse” and “cosmopsis” have no meaning to him. He’s never met a dog named Gemma. He doesn’t know anyone in Madrid or Des Moines or Cantabrigia, Massachusettensis. He doesn’t know anyone who knew their library card number before their social security number. He doesn’t know anything about skull girls or invisible constructs. What an impoverished existence he leads. What rewards await him.

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Veterans.

The last verified combat veteran of the Civil War, Private James A. Hard, died about 25 years before I was born -- which is to say, just within my parents’ lifetime. 

Jones Morgan, the last American veteran of the Spanish-American War, died in 1993. I was 13. I don’t remember hearing about it, though I am sure it was noted in Newsweek, which I read religiously in 1993.

The last American veteran of World War I died in my lifetime, as well. Frank Buckles, an ambulance driver who enlisted at age 16 in 1917, died in 2011, when I was 31. I remember reading about this at the time. Anyone in my family who fought in World War I had been dead long before I was born.

Most likely, the last American veteran of World War II will die within my lifetime. If a kid had enlisted at age 17, right at the end of the war in 1945, that person would be 88 years old now. Assuming at least one very young veteran lives to the age of 110, there could be surviving World War II veterans well into the end of the 2030s. I will be in my late fifties. A world without World War II veterans is very difficult to imagine. That’s when I’ll know I’m really, truly getting old. When I was young, every old person you met was a World War II veteran. Everyone’s grandparents, for the most part.

I may or may not outlive the last American veteran of the Vietnam War. If you use similar math, and put a 17 year old Army private on a helicopter during the Fall of Saigon in 1975, and that person also lives to be 110, that would put you somewhere around 2068. That would be over a century after the war started. I’d be in my nineties. 

There is no chance I’ll outlive the last American veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Using 2011 and 2014 as the end dates (though that’s up for debate), there will be veterans of those wars alive for decades after I’ve died, most likely into the first decade of the 22nd century. The Iraq War will seem as distant to the young people of that generation as World War I seems to us now.

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One possible scenario.

You wake up one morning, in the next few weeks, and find you’ve travelled one hundred and fifty years into the future. It’s a miracle. No one can explain it. You find some scientists on the futuristic version of the Internet, and after studying you for a few weeks, they accept your story, and welcome you into their futuristic society.  

Your knowledge of the past fascinates and delights the people of the future. The world they live in is very different than the world you left behind, but not so radically different that you don’t adjust to it quickly. 

Through your connections in the scientist and historian communities, you land a job being an advisor on period dramas set in your heyday: the 2000s and 2010s. The period dramas are sort of like movies, except maybe more like holograms, or virtual reality, or something else similar to what you recognize as movies, but more futuristic.

The futuristic moviemakers do a good job with the futuristic movies. The costumes are little off. They have normal people wearing Pearl Jam t-shirts in 2016, which you find really funny. But most of the references are pretty close to right. The mistakes are minor: characters carry iPhone 2s five years after they probably would have. Half the cars in exterior scenes are late-model Teslas, which you tell them might have been technically possible, but is completely wrong. You tell them that, in 2016, you’d only seen one Tesla on the road in your entire life. You remember everyone driving 2003 Subaru hatchbacks. 

What bugs you most is the dialogue, though. It sounds too futuristic, too perfectly robotic. You say to one director: “So, I feel like you didn’t do a super-great job getting the dialogue right.”

“How?” she says. “We’ve studied written and spoken text in your era, and have tried to accurately and faithfully replicate the speech we heard on ‘YouTube videos’ and ‘podcasts.’”

“So, that may be the case,” you say. “But I feel like people spoke super-differently in those venues than they might have in daily life. You didn’t have the characters saying ‘so,’ ‘super’ and ‘feel like’ in every other sentence. I feel like we said that stuff all the time.”

The moviemakers convene to discuss your recommendations, and reach a consensus. They pledge to write more historically accurate dialogue. From then on, every spoken word of dialogue in a future-movie set in the 2010s is super-accurate.

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Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace + Wet Hot American Summer + Serious Young Man peak TV auteur syndrome = Stranger Things.

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Anti-product placement in Sarah Jacobson’s Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore, from 1998.

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"’You really get the impression that the government is being run by a clique at public school,’ said the novelist and political commentator Robert Harris... ‘There’s a sense of a gilded circle who have played student-union politics with the country, in the service of their own ambition.’” -- New York Times.

Maybe the UK could use some more democratic, American-style educational institutions for its political leaders to attend in lieu of Oxford or Cambridge. 

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At the end of the work day on Monday, June 20, 2016, this crossed my Tumblr dashboard.

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You will have to prove you’re the real Lauren Bacall.

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McMurdo, Antarctica on Google Photo Sphere. 

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I am really loving this new Radiohead record. It’s very edgy!

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Rock Star!, Wizard Games of Scotland, 1989. A personal favorite in the Sturdevant household, 1992-95.

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A pretty bitchin’ mix CD of non-canonical driving songs I made for my friend Katie, whose employer is sending her on a truck convoy across the U.S.A. Somehow doesn’t include C.W. McCall’s “Convoy,” although it does have Kirsty MacColl’s “Terry.”

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This drawing for a Heavy Table April Fools Day article from 2011 (and the accompanying closeup sketch of the yak milk) are my sole contributions to the larger body of Prince-related apocrypha. A very minor contribution, but surprisingly indestructible -- it pops up every few years, and since Prince’s death yesterday, has turned up again on a few media outlets who arguably should know better. (During one such resurgence a few years ago, I actually got an email from MTV VJ Martha Quinn asking if it was authentic, and favorably comparing the drawings to the artwork in A-Ha’s “Take On Me” video.)

When the piece first ran, I remember a comment posted somewhere that said something to the effect of “Prince would never have such a shitty refrigerator, it only has one door and doesn’t even have an icemaker.” And that commenter was correct: the drawing is based on the shitty refrigerator in my old apartment, which in fact did not have an icemaker. But I imagined this was only one of Prince’s fridges, like the smaller one in the basement of Paisley Park.

On a related note: so much wonderful writing about the man and his work to be found, but my very favorite, and the one that resonated most for me, is from my friend Keith Harris on the complicated but enduring relationship between Prince and the city of Minneapolis.