Middleman by Jason Laughlin

FOR THE SAVVY BRUTE IN FLYOVER COUNTRY

MIDDLEMAN

ISSUE 1

Volume 1

The

NO JUNK

MANIFESTO PG. 13 BORDERS IS DEAD LONG LIVE BOOKSHOPS

PG. 6

Winter 2011

low brow

HIGH ART PG. 8

Culture Sports Fashion Design Art Politics Business Policy

CONTENTS

MIDDLEMAN Editor Jason Laughlin

Contributing Editors Tony Feltner Leigh White

Art Direction Jason Laughlin

Publisher MONOICONO

CONTRIBUTORS Matt Dobson Designer, illustrator and fellow man of letters (www.louisvillepaper.com), Mr. Dobson resides in Louisville, Kentucky, and works to make the world a more beautiful and informed place with his wife and daughter.

Policy and Politics State of Confusion

An Affair To Remember

Cities and states play together.

Why Does Middle America Love the GOP

They just don’t play nice, and it’s

The Midwest and the GOP seem to

killing the Midwest.

have a match made in heaven, at least

Pg. 4

from the GOP’s perspective.

Pg. 5

Business The End of Print

Carol Besse

The Plot Thickens

Middleman talks with the owner of one

As the big box book retailers

of the best independent book sellers,

slowly go the way of the dodo, the

Carmichael’s in Louisville, Kentucky.

neighborhood bookshops live on.

Pg. 7

Pg. 6 Swan Song

Matt Frederick

The Sound of Silence

Furniture designer and partner in Frederick Chaffin (www.frederickchaffin.com), Mr. Frederick makes a continual effort to convince everyone to buy the things that last. He calls Louisville, Kentucky, home

The life and death of the record store depends on behaving like a record store.

Pg. 6

Jason Laughlin Designer, writer, publisher, editor and (hopefully) all-around nice guy living with his wife, son and dog in Louisville, Kentucky.

CONTACT We would love to hear from you. Whether it’s in response to something you’ve read here in Middleman or if you have a story you’d like us to cover, or if you’re interested in contributing or advertising with us, please just contact us through our editor Jason Laughlin at: monoicono@gmail.com 1818 Deer Park Avenue Louisville, Kentucky 40202

Volume 1, Issue 1 Winter 2011

Art Jeral Tidwell Making fine art out of things you wouldn’t call refined.

Pg. 8

Culture

Sports

DIY and the Big Lie

Pros and Cons

The No Junk Manifesto

Amateur Hour

When home improvement

The idea that pro sports are more

destroys.

entertaining than college is a

Pg. 13

big con.

Pg. 14

FROM THE EDITOR

Welcome to the first issue of Middleman. We genuinely hope that you find it to be thought provoking, funny and of great use for party conversation. We understand that this magazine isn’t for everyone. So let us, right now, try to give you a brief list of things that make someone a Middleman (and sometimes woman). The Middleman generally hails from somewhere in the Midwest yet doesn’t despise the coasts. He appreciates nature but prefers the city. He likes to be comfortable but dresses like a goddamned adult. He feels comfortable using goddamned as an adjective, yet enjoys the prose of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He understands that value suggests something valuable, not something cheap. He appreciates that wanting nice things doesn’t make you an elitist, it makes you a connoisseur. The Middleman appreciates the emotion of the symphony, but will ignore his wife, child and all yard work to witness the brutality of football (American, of course). The politics of the Middleman is based on being a human who actually cares about the people around him, the environment he lives in and the understanding that policy choices make a difference in people’s lives. Hence he is likely not a Republican1. He is all of this and more. Our goal here at Middleman is to connect you with the things we find to be inspiring, interesting

or just plain entertaining. We would like to point out that being from or living in the Midwest is a blessing. We want to stir conversation and maybe, if we do things right, controversy2. We hope that people have a love/hate relationship with us because that will mean we’ve done something right. We would be remiss if we didn’t thank all of those who have helped to make this first issue come to fruition. All the writers and photographers and illustrators are incredibly talented and show how much talent this region has to offer. Speaking of talent, we chose this cover image from the great Jeral Tidwell, a local boy made good, for a couple of reasons. First, it is clearly badass, and that’s enough of a reason. Second, this is hopefully the birth of something great and twisted, much like Tidwell’s twisted version of The Birth of Venus. With that, enjoy the first issue and welcome to the club.

Jason Laughlin Editor

IF YOU’RE GOING TO BE A MIDDLEMAN, LOOK THE PART

3. 5. 6.

Heavy Yet Not-Too-Heavy Glasses Along with a certain intellectual 1. capability vision is sometimes sacrificed. The proper glasses are essential to any Middleman.

The Right Leather Bag You’ve got things going on and need to 5. keep them in something other than a JanSport backpack left over from high school.

5 O’clock Shadow You’re a man on the move in a part of the 2. country where the weather wears on your grizzled features. We save money on razors and look like men. Real men.

Straight Leg Jeans These aren’t skinny jeans. They’re 6. straight cut jeans. Skinny jeans are for people with no imagination or Eastern Europeans. Lean towards darker jeans as they can tend to be more slimming and more appropriate for a night out. If these jeans have a place to hang a hammer you’ve done something horribly wrong.

An Excellent Cup of Coffee Even in the land of flyover country, maybe 3. especially in the land of flyover country, you need a pick me up. There’s no sense in not getting the best. The Perfect Sport Coat You’re an adult. Dress like one. Never be 4. under or over dressed in the right sport coat that never, ever, has the bottom button buttoned.

1 2

Not that there’s anything wrong with Republicans. Other than their general aversion to science. See footnote number one.

POLICY & POLITICS

Twin Cities State of Constant Winter

Actual Flyover Country

Liberalville

There is a word in the English lexicon called ‘city-state.’ It’s a compound word but the governments are anything but jopined

Chicagoland

The Rust Belt Buckle

By Jason Laughlin

STATE In the tale of the country mouse and the city mouse, each comes to appreciate what his individual settings has to offer. What Aesop left out of the fable is that city mouse was funding country mouse’s lifestyle. Throughout the Midwest there is a growing problem in the relationships of cities and their governments to state government. It is sometimes viewed as simply a rural versus urban issue, but in reality there are structural issues at the state level that are keeping cities from being able to grow at the pace they need. In turn this is hampering statewide growth. The Midwest is undeniably rural. From the rolling hills of Kentucky to the pancakeflat cornfields of Indiana and Illinois, vast swathes of rural landscape punctuate urban cores. Yet it’s the dots on the map, not the spaces between that generate economic growth. For every dollar the larger cities send to their state capitols they get about 50 or so cents back1. This probably doesn’t strike you as a great deal for the cities. As an example, Louisville generates 31% of Kentucky’s GDP. You read that number correctly. Almost a full third! For their trouble they get back maybe half of what they put in.

1 2

Cubs State

This is not a problem specific to Louisville and Kentucky. State budgets have been taking it on the chin as of late. Their shrinking budgets mean less going back to their cities, which are under equal amounts of financial stress. Meanwhile small communities are scratching and clawing to stay alive. This results in rural folk calling the city folk whiners when they bemoan the fact that they have to cut services, and city folk trying to tell these yokels that spending their own money will improve the city and help it grow, which will in turn help the rest of the state2. Some of this dynamic comes from the fact that mechanisms for changing macro policy in a city can’t be executed without legislative approval from the state. States dictate how cities merge with other communities, how they are allowed to tax people and which people they’re allowed to tax. Transportation policy, and in some places, educational policy all require state-level involvement. Essentially the biggest levers a city could operate to help itself are stuck in some other place. The problem with this is that many capitols in the Midwest are either unfamiliar with, or simply untrusting of the things that need to be done for cities to compete in what has

Cardinal State

become a global competition. Capitols like Frankfort, Springfield and Jefferson City have a hard time seeing the world the way Louisville, St. Louis, and Chicago would. Many states are actually quite culturally divided in terms of urban and rural. The differences between northern, central and southern Indiana are relatively large. The same can be said for the I-64 corridor of Kentucky and its relationship to the eastern and southern parts of the state. It’s not hard to see how this can cause a problem. Nobody seems to see that their interests are aligned. Yet they are states with borders. And these states are in competition for jobs and growth. Unfortunately in the Midwest many of the urban cores were settled along waterways that also serve as borders for states. This then pits these cross-river communities against each other. States then get into the business of selling the store in order to “steal” business away from the other states in an ever-growing downward spiral. This is not a winning strategy.

Horse Country

Hillbillyland

What’s a girl to do? States have to come to the realization that their cities are their most important asset. It’s all well and good that your city is your financial engine. Cities are incredibly efficient at generating wealth. But unlike with Peter Parker, responsibility didn’t come with great power. States need to cede decision making on certain policy initiatives. As a for instance, transportation funding is allocated to localities by the state with comical amounts of constraints on where and how it is spent. Cities need control over how they spend their transportation dollars in order to create the kind of environments conducive to growth. Additionally States seem to see transportation spending as valuable in terms of miles of road rather than number of people served. Flipping this inane view of the world starts to move the money where it belongs, which (shockingly) happens to be where the people are. Midwestern cities face a plethora of challenges ranging from the legacy costs of being industrial communities, to poor longterm thinking on infrastructure investment to simple geographic constraints. States can’t actually do tons to alleviate this issue, but they can certainly do a better job of getting out of the way.

Some studies suggest that most cities are net exporters. This is a prevalent problem throughout the country, let alone the Midwest. The only places that somewhat avoid this problem are states where a world-class city like a New York or Chicago tend to also dominate state politics, or places where the largest city is also the state capitol, a la Indiana. Though places like Indiana suffer from a more bitter battle between urban and suburban interests.

Why does

GOP.? Keeping what you earn sounds like a great idea, but what happens if the reality is that you have only a small part to play in your own future. By Jason Laughlin

Every so often, liberal-minded folks in the Midwest wonder what makes “hard-working, blue-collar Americans” lean towards the GOP when seemingly all the GOP does is stick it to the little guy. Some chalk it up to the notion of social conservatism trumping economic issues, but that seems not to be the case as the recent Tea Party movement is one of a fiscal concern (at least on its face). It seems that the blue-collar ethos might be the culprit for this curious allegiance. The idea that people need to earn their way in life runs deep throughout the Midwest. An apparently sensible conclusion from this would be that highly successful people have earned what they have. In turn it follows that those in need of assistance simply haven’t worked hard enough to be successful. We all want to believe that with the right effort we can be the guy at the top. The final piece that helps the blue-collar worker have a sense of identification with the Tea Party/ GOP is the idea that, because they’ve earned their keep, it sure as hell shouldn’t be taken from them and given to those who simply don’t work as hard. All of this dovetails quite nicely with the notion of the American dream and American exceptionalism that has been ingrained in all of us since childhood. Unfortunately, while these ideas follow a lovely, simple logic, the actual world we live in doesn’t work this way. A world where financial success or social standing is directly related to work or talent is a wonderfully comfortable place to live. Comfortable because it ignores things like luckor circumstance or unscrupulous people.1

The blue-collar world doesn’t account for someone who is wealthy simply by virtue of his great-great-grandfather.2 It doesn’t account for kids who grow up not just in broken families, but in circumstances where they don’t have enough food to be nourished. You can’t pull yourself up by the boot straps when you don’t have boots. These things are ignored in the blue-collar world. That’s partly because there was an era in America when you could get a job working in the factory that paid a wage that afforded you a home, kids, two cars and vacations – with only a high school education. This isn’t the result of people in the Midwest being dupes. It’s simply that in that idealized post-war world, with an economy that is growing and the rising tide is actually lifting all the boats, it’s easy to see yourself as a hard-working, integral part of not only your own success, but the nation’s as well. As that world erodes, and circumstance slowly squeezes in, people tend to develop tunnel vision rather than have their eyes opened to the fact that they aren’t actually as responsible as they thought they were for what they have. With tunnel vision your focus becomes narrow and all the things you can’t see become blurrier. When those things were already blurry to begin with, it’s easy to see why people would latch onto someone who (disingenuous or not) dangles what they think they want to see (a tea bag?) in front of them.

The Rundown Policy and politics in the Midwest, it’s time we all stand up an pay attention.

CONGESTION PRICING Chicago Recently ensconced Mayor Rahm Emanuel is bringing congestion pricing to The Windy City. Unlike London’s traditional idea of congestion pricing, there will be a surcharge placed on parking garages and lots in downtown Chicago during weekdays. Funds raised from the surcharge will be invested in improving transit projects.

LANDMARK PLANNING St. Louis And yet the Grand Old Party seems to have no shortage of these examples. 2 The entire Bush brood fits this mold. 1

The grounds surrounding the mighty St. Louis Arch are enormous and mostly unused due to the fact that it isn’t integrated into

the city and has vast swathes of unused open space, even by walkers or tourists. Nine firms are in the running for a redesign.

BRIDGING GAPS Cincinnati & Louisville While Louisville endlessly debates it’s twobridge plan, the I-64 bridge, which was shut down due to structural damage, should have repairs completed in six to eight months. Meanwhile, Cincinnati has revealed the final three designs for its $2-3 billion Brent Spence Bridge Project. President Obama’s visit elevated the project into prominence, though complete funding has not been secured.

BUSINESS

The

PLOT

THICKENS

The story of the printed word has a long and convoluted plot. Recently some major characters have been killed off. The question is what’s replacing them. Like the world of books, the music industry has been in upheaval. And while small bookshops survive as big boxes fail, small record stores are getting sucked into the digital black hole. By Jason Laughlin

the

Sound of Silence

The slow death of record store ear-x-tacy, a Louisville, Kentucky, institution, brings into focus the coming age of digital entertainment. For 26 years ear-x-tacy was the place to buy records, or tapes at one point, and then CDs for an entire city. It was a gathering spot for teens. They were the purveyor of cool. They stocked the latest hits as well as bands buried so deep underground that underground wasn’t good enough to describe them. Then came the internet and the iPod, and music was changed forever. The impotence and incompetence of the music industry has been oft chronicled and doesn’t need to be rehashed here. What needs to be understood, however, is that the independent record store needs to stare itself in the mirror and realize that in order to survive, it needs to rapidly change its business model, reconnect to what their actual strengths are and understand that it now serves a more niche market than ever.

Record shops, and folks afflicted with nostalgia, want us to believe that digital music is an inferior and degraded form of listening to music. Billions of downloaded songs later, the message is clear: compressed digital audio files are pretty damn listenable. Record store owners need to recognize that music lovers and audiophiles are not necessarily

one and the same. Luckily for those selling music in brick and mortar stores on pressed vinyl discs, the people that are both music lovers and audiophiles are an ideal niche market. Their addiction always needs to be fed, hence you have repeat buyers. They tend to be people of means who respect the concept of getting what you pay for. These are people who are willing to shell out $30 for records in an age where music is virtually free. But even with such an audience you need to provide a compelling experience. Curation is the key word when developing a record buying experience. The independent record store earned a reputation as a place where the unwashed listener, looking for the latest Maroon 5 record, was ridiculed by an actually unwashed know-it-all in a failing band. Record stores began shooting themselves in the foot when it became apparent that Maroon 5 would be selling it’s records online yet continued to carry a huge catalog of music that they would then belittle you for buying. Now those who were initiated into the club are the only ones returning. With that knowledge, a scaled back inventory of what those in the know are looking for is paramount. Music has become incredibly niche oriented. The same is true for the music buyer. It turns out that people who actually buy music are a niche in themselves.

As tumbleweeds roll through an empty cavern that was once a Borders, a moment comes when you do a mental autopsy on the death of the retailing giant. The cursory report will say death resulted from the bluntforce trauma of the internet (read: Amazon). But further study will show a slower more drawn out death by a thousand paper cuts. As you tally up all the straws that broke the camel’s back, it makes you question the future of retail in the world of books. How will it live on, what can be successful and who are the people doing that now? Bookshops around the Midwest are showing that in the world of brick-and-mortar book retailing, bigger isn’t always better.

POST MORTEM Borders demise was the result of a fundamental failure of not seeing what was staring them right in the face. Namely, people want books in a variety of ways and, more important, those ways are so radically different that they involve differing strategies. Their insistence on being not just a large store physically, but carrying every book under the sun, turned out to be a strategy that saddled them with big rent, big overhead and a big headache. Unlimited supply is the forté of the internet. And when you’re competing with the likes of Amazon, you end up having to compete on price which a brick and mortar store cannot do terribly well. Borders and Barnes & Noble figured out that people really like large stores with cozy nooks and chairs to sit in and flip through a good book. The attraction worked wonders on getting people in the stores and involved with their brand of book selling. Unfortunately, Borders fell behind the curve in terms of the in-store experience. Barnes and Nobles secured exclusive rights to the Starbucks brand in their cafés, Borders was left with Seattle’s Best. Borders made a boatload of money in the world of CD and DVD sales, and in turn dedicated huge amounts of space in their stores to those media. As the sales tanked – competing with Netflix and iTunes – the dedicated floor space didn’t get any smaller. Making matters worse, the selection became smaller inside that huge physical space. Perhaps the most grievous mistake Borders made was not recognizing in any way the importance of the e-book, which now outsell their physical brethren. Just how behind the curve they were becomes evident in a

brief time line of events. Amazon launched the Kindle in November 2007, Barnes and Noble launched the Nook in November 2009 and made it available through other big box retailers like Walmart and Best Buy, and the iPad launched in April 2010. Meanwhile just last year Borders released its e-reader dubbed Kobo. That was news to us too. All of this was happening and they still managed to over expand, including going overseas even as they hemorrhaged money like a hemophiliac.

Thankfully all hope is not lost for the bookshop. Retailers around the Midwest have discovered that people will readily buy books at an actual store. The key is making the store a place that feels as easy as sitting on your couch and ordering a book. This happens in a couple of ways. Namely they are curation and service. Borders desire to carry every book made for an overwhelming experience. This coupled with employees who really weren’t equipped to deliver good service led to disaster. Smaller book shops by virtue of their size are forced to be choosy about the books they keep on the shelves. They cater to the people in their neighborhood and have a great grasp of what people will find interesting. The employees in these places know what will be the best beach read as well as what book of poetry will make you look attractive to literature majors. Like anything in the world of retail, the other piece of the puzzle is location, location, location. Borders suffered from over expansion. Additionally they overpaid for spaces that were too large and weren’t generating enough foot traffic. Smaller bookshops have located in areas of the city where there is already a relatively sustainable walkable environment. This is important in the life of a brick and mortar retailer. The ability to draw traffic into your store is immensely easier when the traffic doesn’t zip by at 55 miles per hour. Intelligent window displays and the outward-facing brand have the time to make their mark on people walking the neighborhood. The good book shops create that tantalizing impulse to walk in and see what they have to offer. The story of how the world of printed books will be sold or if they’ll become a relic is still being told. But for now, the bookstore is dead. Long live the bookshop!

Q&A CAROLBESSE

Over 30 years ago, Carol Besse and her husband opened Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky. We sat down to talk with her about how they’ve managed to battle back against the big-box retailers and the Amazonian problem of the internet.

You guys have small retail spaces. How do you curate what’s in the store?

So, along came the big-box stores and they were supposed to kill you. Then came retailers like Target and Walmart getting into the book-selling game, and that was supposed to kill you, and of course the internet was supposed to kill you. Yet here you are over 30 years later. What happened? I think the reason we have survived is because of our size, and the fact that we are integrated into a neighborhood of people – who before there was ever a “shop local” movement – understood what it meant to have a bookstore down the street. Being in a walkable community has to be helpful. Absolutely. The store on Longest [Avenue and Bardstown Road] has been very good to us. What is now Heine Bros. Coffee was a million different things. But that corner with Heinie Bros. and Ramsi’s is lively and generates a lot of traffic.

That would be my husband. He makes 90% of the buying decisions and has been doing it for 30 years. He has a sensibility of his own and an understanding of what our customers are looking for. There’s also serendipity that just tells us “this is something cool” and we try it. Over and over people come into our store and say that they find things that they don’t see anywhere else. Which is amazing considering how many books are on the shelves of a place like Barnes and Noble. It is an amazing thing. The other thing is, that even though we’re really small, we are also really likely to have that book you’re looking for. Community is obviously important to you and how you operate. How do you foster that relationship? We go out into the community a lot! We go to different events where authors are appearing. I was just at an event for The Olmstead Conservancy because there’s a great new book out by Justin Martin on Frederick Law Olmstead. It helps us not only build relationships but can also make us seem a little bigger than we actually are.

There are a lot of people who’ve heard of Carmichael’s who may not have ever been in our stores. Since Borders demise have you seen any uptick in business? Actually, yes we have. Why haven’t you all gone the way of generating revenue through something like a cafe? I don’t believe that bigger is always better. And I don’t buy into the idea that you have to constantly be growing to be successful. We really know our business. We don’t know the restaurant business. We like being booksellers.

How important to publishers are independent bookshops? Even though independent book sellers constitute a fairly small percentage of their actual sales, we’re like the taste makers. We’re able to make a book that we like successful. You can make a difference between ten thousand and one hundred thousand in sales? Yes. The independent book seller has a larger influence than their fiscal contribution might suggest.

01 Carol Besse

03 Inside the Frankfort Avenue store

02 Carmichael’s on Longest Avenue

04 Carmichael’s on Frankfort Avenue

ART

jeral tidwell is more

than you By Jason Laughlin

ART

Jeral Jeral Tidwell isn’t an artist. Don’t be fooled by the genuinely virtuosic draftsmanship. Nevermind the surreal mind that comes out in his work, or his recent interest in iconography drawing from religion and the annals of art history. Ignore the beautiful low-brow subject matter like skulls and swords and booze and chicks mixed with the technique of a master. Tidwell will tell you he’s simply a renderer.

basis – describes his paintings thusly: “I like to put a bunch of pieces together, and then add a bunch of details and realism so that all these things that don’t go together look like they could actually work. The engines I paint could run.” I call this the Rube Goldberg description of his work. A more blunt and possibly more accurate way Jeral describes his approach to painting does exist:

It was always Garfield or the Smurfs or some shit, and I’d draw that and put their name on it in bubble letters. And bam!” From there, his attention turned to making money. Through a series of somewhat shady requests and overt dropping of hints, Tidwell manipulated his grandmother into purchasing his first decent airbrush kit. From this, a small high school t-shirt business was born.

“It has to have balls.” “My friends used to call me a human encyclopedia,” says the just-this-side of 40 shaved head, tattooed man from Louisville, Kentucky by way of Louisiana. “You could ask me to draw pretty much anything and I could. If I didn’t know what it was, someone could describe it to me and I’d knock it out in ten minutes or so. They’d be like ‘What the fuck.’ I was pretty much a machine.” Jeral – it should be noted I’ve known him for almost 11 years, so we’re on a first name

“I taped shirts to the water heater in a room that was so small may ass was against the door. I’m probably the only person who can airbrush on a round surface.”

Indeed. If anything, Jeral Tidwell has balls. Practically before his voice cracked Jeral was a hustler. He first used his art to gain the attention of girls in his hometown of Monroe, Louisiana. “I would figure out what cartoon they liked.

But these instances are chump change compared to his later antics in order to get gigs in the art world. The most ridiculous being an airbrush throwdown he had as a 17year-old kid with a guy who was airbrushing shirts at a kiosk in the middle of the mall. In a scene straight out of a bad 80’s music video, Tidwell challenged the guy to what amounted to an airbrush duel in front of a crowd of onlookers.1 His foe eventually came to be his boss and, with Jeral’s keen sensibility, opened up a chain of airbrush shirt shops throughout the south. Jeral’s tenacity and plow-ahead work ethic come up time and again in the story of his success. Hailing from Monroe, Louisiana, Jeral is just one among a long line of hustling, entrepreneurial and also generally insane Tidwells. In a two-hour conversation he mentioned what seemed like 15 different uncles all with various “shops.” It is Louisiana after all. However, his work ethic has a particularly Midwestern bent. This southern yet Midwestern wuzzling results in a man who works hard so he can do whatever the hell he wants. More specifically: “My goal hasn’t really changed my whole

1 2

life. I want to be happy, not worry about where my next meal is coming from and do whatever the fuck I want to do.” Jeral pursues this goal with an almost manic pace. He is prolific. This can be evidenced in the number of clients he’s done illustration work for, including small start ups in Germany to Kawasaki and General Motors. What’s incredible isn’t just his sheer volume of work, but that all of the work is at an inhumanly high level. “I’m kind of like a machine,” he says. “You know the moment when you’re looking at a blank page? It’s scary shit. It’s what causes writer’s block or creative block. I knew I needed to get over that in a hurry. So I have a trigger. If I’m sitting there and nothing’s coming I just start drawing a skull. The skull is my trigger. And then hopefully something happens as I’m drawing, some happy accident that leads me in a new direction.” Judging from the polished nature of his paintings you wouldn’t assume Tidwell holds these accidents as the most important part of his work. Yet he finds the sketch to be frankly the purest form of his art. In describing how he decides what stays a sketch, what becomes a screen print or a sticker or a shirt2 he says, “Look at it like a relationship. You do a sketch and it’s like those first months where you’re just having sex all the time. It’s just sex, sex, sex, sex, sex. Then you go to inking and maybe adding some color to maybe make a poster. That requires a little more time, and you sacrifice the raw part of the sketch a little bit. The painting is like marriage. A bunch of time and sacrifice needs to be made.” So how does he decide what ideas deserve matrimony? “I just know when I’ve said everything I need to say with a certain piece. Some things I can say all I need to say with

Face it. In the 1980s in Monroe, Louisiana an airbrush kiosk with live airbrushing was some exciting shit. While Tidwell is successful in selling paintings in the multi-thousands of dollars, he is a merchandising animal. He sells gobs of shirts, stickers and posters. He sells what are essentially coloring books of his illustration. Oh and a signature line of paint brushes through Mack Brush. All of this on is his site humantree.com.

ART Some people find me from the world of gig posters. Some are really into the hot rod association. In Switzerland, they really love my trees for some reason.” He is partial to the people here in flyover country, though he would likely admit that some of his partiality lies in the fact that he enjoys bucking the system of having to be on the coasts to do what he does. “I really feel like the good stuff that’s happening is coming from the middle of the country. The best work does. I think it’s because we’re on the outside looking in, and the folks on the coast are in the bubble. They do one thing, sell one piece, do one interview and they’re like where’s my fucking money? Why aren’t I famous?”

pencil and ink. But some things I need to almost overexplain, those become paintings.”

Tidwell himself is a study in dichotomies. His appearance is that of a motorcycle riding badass, a bit smaller version of a Hell’s Angel. Yet he’s the classic gruff exterior with heart of gold on the inside. He’s generous to a fault but is brutally honest with clients. His art, both low brow and refined, depicts sometimes overused symbols in ways that are entirely original.3 Maybe most interesting is the frenzied way he pursues his rather Zen-like goal of happiness. “I haven’t done all of this just to make money. I knew I was good at it, and I always

wanted to do what I want. I’ve been lucky. I haven’t had a boss, or at least anybody that could really tell me what I was going to do. From the beginning I wanted to make art, make my living making art and travel the world. So I’d say I’m doing pretty well.” Indeed. While he isn’t a millionaire, Tidwell has a studio in Louisville, Kentucky, that would make him the envy of any artist trying to get along in New York. He has also traveled the world. While in Austria, almost on a whim, he won an international body painting competition wherein you airbrush whatever seems appropriate on scantily clad young Austrian women. It’s a hard life. So how does one conquer the low-brow art world, as it were, from the heartland? Who’s buying all of this stuff? “No one in Louisville. Well some, but I mostly sell on the coasts and internationally. Luckily I have my hand in a lot of niches.

Perspective is a particularly salient subject with Tidwell currently. As a lad he was adept at always choosing the most physically treacherous hobbies. You know the variety: dirtbikes and skateboards and mountian bikes. All of them ridden in a fashion that required you to be made of rubber or not care about broken limbs. Yet somehow while motorcycles and bikes were involved in his two most recent injuries they happened while he was using them in the most mundane ways. His knee was turned into a garbled mess about five years ago while standing (literally standing) in a skate park. A skateboarder lost control and careened into him.

This resulted in two broken wrists. It was perhaps the worst injury someone of Jeral’s vocation can endure both physically and mentally. He has recovered from the injuries, at least to a point where he can continue to paint. And while horrifying, the accident has somehow lit a fire under what already seemed to be a raging inferno.

“It has had an effect. I always thought I was a lucky guy. But now I really feel like the luckiest fucker around,” he says. “Now when I do something I’m always thinking that it has to be the best thing I’ve done. And it got me in gear to actually do the book.” Right, the book. If you’re wondering what success looks like, I can tell you. It’s 180 full color pages compiled and stitched together into a hard-backed monograph of your work. The introduction would be written by Frank Kozik, demigod of the gig poster world. Your working title would be De Nada – Spanish for you’re welcome. Everything about it will exude your view on the world. “All I do is try and document the culture that I grew up in and live in today,” Jeral says, almost dismissively. You may ask yourself, ‘isn’t that what makes someone an artist?’ Isn’t that what the first cave painters were doing? Jeral Tidwell, friends, is an artist. Don’t let his fuck you, rock ‘n’ roll attitude fool you.

Most recently and harrowingly, while riding his motorcycle, a drunk driver hit him head on.

He has a real issue with the idea of originality. “I’ve never done an original thing in my life,” he claims, “I steal other people’s things and make them my own. That part is important. If I steal your car and just let it sit and rot that’s one thing, but if I take it and put rims on it and lower it, it becomes a different thing.” While I’m not sure this is the most thought-out analogy he’s arrived at, you get where he’s going.

CULTURE

NO JUNK

MANIFESTO STOP IMPROVING In pursuing the vision of the No Junk Manifesto, the end goal is always a junk-free life. Sadly, in our country, particularly the wide-open spaces of the heartland, there is a church of false economy, which most people worship without question as a bastion of value and virtue, but which is, in fact, sodden with junk, rotten to the bone. I am referring, of course, to the cult of DIY home improvement. This vast industry is underpinned by the belief that, by remodeling and adding on, and by doing so ourselves, we are creating stored value, saving money, and honoring our country. I’m not convinced that any of these are true: does your new sunroom make your house more valuable in proportion to the time and money you could have spent learning to invest in other arenas? Are you sure you couldn’t have paid someone very little money to set tile just as poorly as you do? Couldn’t you have made your

CULTURE BRIEFS Some are old, some are new, but if you want to be the interesting one at a dinner party all of these are worth your time

Don’t make junk

Tenet 2 Don’t buy junk

Tenet 3 Don’t keep junk

neighborhood just a little better by hosting a potluck? In my darker moments (anytime I’m involved in hanging drywall) I’m fairly convinced that the entire DIY industry was conceived and birthed by robber-barons who want all the proles in flyover country to believe that the just reward for our 40-plus hours a week is a weekend spent running between “our” home improvement stores and our homes. While mudding drywall, I realize that the moneyed elite underwrite homeimprovement shows to instill the desire for a deck that, if we just spent a few weekends working on it, would calm the creeping sense that we aren’t really doing any better than we were a few years ago. When sanding drywall, the whorls of dust trace out for me the tracks of the entire global banking conspiracy, which has told us that our homes are the ultimate stores of value for our finances, as well as the ultimate expressions of our individual personhoods. In non-drywall-involved moments I

NON-fiction book that might change the way you think The Paradox of Choice By Barry Schwartz If you’ve ever stood in a grocery store and been paralyzed by the number of mustards on the shelf, this book is for you. Schwartz explores the idea that freedom of choice when taken to the extreme isn’t really freedom at all.

DOCUMENTARY YOU PROBABLY HAVEN’T SEEN Waste Land

FRIED RAVIOLI

Filmed over three years, this documentary follows Vik Muniz, one of the truly great contemporary artists as he returns to his native Brazil to work on a project that shows art can truly change people’s lives.

You read that correctly. Sometimes called toasted ravioli, this is a specialty in St. Louis, Missouri, that should really be tried by any red-blooded American. Lombardo’s west of Union Station serves up a delicious version.

Junk pervades every part of our lives. Whether it’s at work where we junk up our day with worthless meetings, or at home where we junk up our lives with useless items, all of us could stand to adopt the No Junk Manifesto. You can read more on the junkless life at www.frederickchaffin.com By Matt Frederick

“

The entire DIY industry was conceived and birthed by robber-barons who want all the proles in flyover country to believe that the just reward for our 40-plus hours a week is a weekend spent running between “our” home improvement stores and our homes.

recognize that, yes, it is nice to have a place to live that is more or less how one wants it. Further, I realize that we can’t all pay other, more skilled people to make our homes more like we want them to be. However... however, Lowe’s has recently changed its corporate slogan from the neighborly “Let’s build something together” to the imperious, “Never stop improving.” This is unconscionable. That we must sometimes line our nests to survive the winter is a primal animal condition. That we desire beauty and some sense of identity from our caves is a primal human condition. That we should never stop spending our lives in service to our homes is a junk concept, pure and simple. Here, according to The No Junk Manifesto, is why: • Every project yields waste materials that you don’t have any use for, but will keep due to their expense. Even tiny pieces of 2 x 4. (Tenet 3) • You will consider buying a truck. (Tenet 2)

A NEW SPORTS BOOK FOR THE GOLDEN ERA OF SPORTS BOOKS The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood By Jane Leavy An honest account of the shockingly handsome and talented number 7. Recounting his crippling injuries and equally crippling alcoholism, Leavy paints a true portrait of a legend while somehow not tarnishing the myth.

“

The

Tenet 1

• Every project requires new tools that you won’t ever use again. (Tenet 2) • You will keep these until you are dead. (Tenet 3) • Slight increases in skill and knowledge perpetuate the illusion that the next project is worth it. • You will never go to the home improvement store just once. Always twice. Always. • You won’t do a great job. (Tenet 1) • Your house is pretty amazing as it is, I can almost guarantee you: It keeps you mostly dry, warm and/or cool. There is a place to cook your food, a place to hide your food from wild animals. It contains your TV. It is the end point of tens of thousands of years of other DIYers and a couple thousand years of specialists figuring out how to make their homes better, and while it might not have everything you think you want in a home, it’s pretty great just how it is.

BEST SONG RIGHT NOW BY A 62YEAR-OLD MAN The World (Is Going Up In Flames) By Charles Bradley Bradley sounds like he’s had 62 years of hard living and lets it all out in this ridiculously good song.

YOUR INDIE FIX Colours By Grouplove Looking for indie street cred? Look no further. Drop their name and look like the aloof snob everyone else at the party wants to be.

SPORTS

HOUR

When it comes time to bleed your colors, whether it’s Buckeye Red or Wildcat Blue, wouldn’t you like to root for players that bleed a color other than green? By Jason Laughlin

The great sage Quentin Tarantino once wrote that there are two kinds of people: Elvis people and Beatles people. The same is true for the world of sport. There are prosports people and college-sports people. As it happens the Midwest is a college sports mecca. Why? you may ask. Because people in the Midwest want their sports to be entertaining and college sports, quite simply, are more entertaining than their professional counterpart. There are sound reasons for this entertainment value. When looking at the highest level of sport, the differences between all the moving parts are miniscule. In individual sports like golf or tennis, a difference can be made obvious by winning (i.e., Roger Federer/Tiger Woods), but once you get down to players ranked ten through twenty, you can just pull them out of a hat. They’re the same player. The same is true in team sport. In the NFL, on first glance, everyone seems to play exactly the same way. The difference between winning and losing a game is in very small things you can hardly see. This is what happens when the athletes are so evenly balanced in terms of physical ability. Even chess works this way. The best players all know the game so well they know who the winner will be five moves into a match. But this is not so in college. The athletic ability from program to program varies. The smaller the program is, the wider the athletic swing. Also, the people on the field are 20year-old kids. As we all know, 20-year-old kids are not very bright. The combination of kids being kids and more variability in athletic prowess makes for a game of a more random nature, a game where momentum and emotion play a much larger role in the results. A more entertaining game. This is just science, people.

Randomness, luck and big plays in college sports generally result from one thing: mistakes. When everything goes by the playbook, it is often boring. Mistakes make things interesting and college sports are full of them. Hell, some of them you can recall from a quick phrase. “The Phantom Pass” and “The Band is on the field” come to mind. The minimal amount of mistakes at the pro level of sport result in parity. This is often a ballyhooed part of pro sports. It is translated as competitiveness of the league. And there is some truth to that. Parity certainly spreads the interest level in the game more evenly. When folks in Oklahoma City see that they have as good (or better recently) chance of competing with teams from New York, it’s more “exciting.” But was there anything more exciting than Butler facing down Duke in the Final Four? If Hoosiers were about two equally talented teams facing off it would have been a pretty boring movie. The David versus Goliath story makes college sports fun. But to do that you need to have Goliaths. The organizational flow of money in college sports does a bang-up job of creating those evil-empire type of programs that dominate the scene. And seeing those teams fall, particularly to your own school is simply awesome1.

There are pro sports teams littered throughout flyover country, but let’s face facts: these franchises have had limited success, or are so hated by the sporting deities as to be the butt of jokes2. The

combined championships of all the professional teams from Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, Missouri, Minnesota, Michigan and Illinois since 2000 is eight. That’s eight championships spread among 23 pro teams (NFL, MLB, NHL) in just over a decade. Almost half of those are Stanley Cups, which I guess is as it should be. The powerhouse sporting programs in the Midwest are colleges. The Ohio State University in football, the University of Kentucky in basketball, the fighting Wolverines of Michigan. These institutions of higher learning are where the real rabid fan bases lie. It’s these rabid fan bases that generate true rivalries. Some would argue that pro sports has rivalries, the biggest (or at least the most pimped by ESPN) being the Yankees and Red Sox. And I suppose there is a rivalry with the fans. But the players clearly don’t feel that much hatred considering they will likely play for both sides of the rivalry depending on who ponies up the most cash. This doesn’t happen in college. Once you don the colors of your university, you are identified with that university for life. You don’t get to switch. Being tied to something in that way seems to automatically make the players identify with their fans’ irrational hatred of other human beings for having gone to another school. And what could be better than that? This idea of identification is important. Fans of pro sports like to try and imbue their team with the same cultural and social values as the city. Even the style of play gets branded as part of the culture of a fan. This is how you get the notion of a “grind it out,” blue-collar team like the Pittsburgh Steelers, versus those namby-pamby west

coast offenses like San Francisco ‘49ers used to run. Evidently you have to eat tofu and arugula to consider throwing a football as an effective strategy. Unfortunately for fans of pro teams, this is a pipe dream. The players on a professional sports team have barely any frame of reference to identify with their fans. They may be fans of the sport like the people in the seats, but they are not the same. From a purely technical perspective, their understanding of those tiny differences between winning and losing make them view the sport in entirely different ways. From a cultural perspective they make a shitload more money than 90% of the people watching them play. Ben Roethlisberger is not a blue collar individual. He makes $11.6 million every year, and generally behaves like a depraved child3. He is not from Pittsburgh. He has never worked in a factory. He is, however, very good at football. Hence, he is not like his fans. But when a kid goes to the same college as you did, at some level you do identify with him. You’ve walked those halls. You’ve had those professors (assuming you took Communications 101 or yoga). You’ve eaten in the same crappy cafeteria and slept in the same dorms. That kind of shared experience (even if not at the same time) is what unites alumni in the first place. And if you unite you might as well unite against something. And if you unite against something it might as well be those guys over at State U. Because well, they’re assholes and it’s way more entertaining to watch fans of assholes be disappointed than some schmo in Detroit wearing a Lion’s jersey.

Especially if the Goliath is Notre Dame, in which case you root for whomever they are playing. You would root for a team with John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy to beat up on those douche bags. Here’s looking at you, every team in Cleveland. 3 This is evident through him wrecking a motorcycle, being a noted alcoholic in the off season, oh, and being an unofficial rapist. Congrats on keeping those blue-collar values, Pittsburgh! 1 2

E H T

Good Design

CREATIVITY KNOWLEDGE 2108b Bardstown Rd. 445.3664 trilliquin.com

www.frederickchaffin.com

What attracts your customers?

HUNGRY FOR ACHIEVEMENT?

MARKET Research, But Not Boring

Boys & Girls Clubs of Kentuckiana feeds the mind, body and soul. Through the thousands of hot meals we serve every year to feed the body, education to feed the mind, and the volunteers and staff that simply listen and feed kid’s souls, we know what it takes to achieve. Whether you’re young or just a big kid at heart, join the club and see what Boys & Girls Clubs of Kentuckiana is all about.

www.bgckyana.org

find us on

OF Kentuckiana