State Fair part II: Got Lileks?
Okay, so here’s a post for the Lileks fans out there. If you haven’t heard of him, James Lileks is a local Star Tribune humor/commentary columnist, frequently both at the same time. Almost everyone around here has heard of and/or read his regular column in the Strib, the Backfence. “Oh, the fence guy!” is a common response I get from people when I try to explain who he is. Well, a lot of local folks don’t realize that he has this crazy website, chock full of long lost 50s and 60s cultural oddities and other bits of pop-culture bizzarrity. I stumbled across the Gallery of Regrettable Food back in 98 or 99 and spent an afternoon laughing my ass off at the scans of recipes for truly horrible food and his comments about them. He also has this thing called The Bleat, a journal/weblog thing updated M-F, which is very popular on the interweb.
One of the reasons why I lobbied Peggy to go to the Fair on the Friday right before we would be driving through most of boring ol’ Wisconsin to go to Lee and Kim’s wedding is because I knew that Lileks would be co-hosting the Hugh Hewitt show live from the State Fair, and I thought “Ha ha, this will be my chance to meet him in real life and see just how funny he REALLY is!” (Answer: very, but he’s not just funny in real life, he’s very expressive, see below).
Lileks got upgraded from co-host to host when Hugh’s father died last week. The show was going to be on from 5-8. It was about 2:00 or so; Peggy and I were on our way to the animal barns when we went past the Star Tribune booth. And lo, there was a sign that said “Now Appearing: James Lileks, Variety Columnist.” So we ran over, and waited for him to get done talking with the people in front of us.
“Hi.” I waved.
“Hi, do I know you?” he asked.
“No, I don’t think so. How are things going?”
He held up one of the pictures he had been signing for anyone who asked, and exclaimed while gesticulating at the picture, “I wish I didn’t have this grey growth, this clay leprosy on my head, but other than that I’m fine! It’s the Fair, it’s great,” he finished by gesticulating at the world in general.
We talked a bit more, and I got my picture taken with him. I told him I’d send him an e-mail when I posted it on my weblog, and he told me his “secret no-spam” e-mail address. That led to a brief discussion about spam; he was disgusted that he had even gotten some Nigerian spam to this e-mail address which was posted nowhere on the internet. I gave him an explanation for how he could have gotten the spam anyway, and he said “Those bastards. That’s the only part of Sharia I agree with: chop off their hands. The crooks, the scammers, just…” He made an emphatic slicing motion across his wrist. Then we talked about fark.com for a bit after I mentioned that I participated in the photoshopping of his face on Fark. I mentioned that I’d be there to catch the radio show later in the day.
Okay, fast forward through the day to the radio show. We got there just as they were starting the Spam (real Spam) bit. Lileks and Generalissimo sent longsuffering Jay Larson in search of spam; he had 7 minutes and 32 seconds (or something like that) to find spam and bring it back and eat it. (The spam truck (across the street) was offering free spam samples all day long.) Jay countered by bringing back 3 spam samples, one for everyone. I got some pictures as they were taking their first bites:
Generalissimo tries spam
Generalissimo contemplates spam
Longsuffering Jay Larson tries spam (for the first time ever!)
Alas, the reflection of the trees in the booth glass completely obscured Lileks in the pictures I took. But I was there, I saw the look on his face. In case you were wondering, the enthusiasm Lileks had while eating his spam was not faked. If that picture would have turned out, I would have lobbied Merriam Webster to put it under the word “endorsement” in the dictionary.
Funniest part of the spam bit: G. mentioned that he’d never had hot spam before; he’d only had it cold, and Lileks replied
“Well of course! That’s why you don’t like it! You don’t take eggs and eat them right out of the chicken’s butt, do you?”
“Can you… say that on the air?”
“I just did.”
(I was mostly amused at the briefest of pauses inbetween “chicken’s” and “butt”, while his FCC filter kicked in.)
Okay, for those of you who listened to the show, remember “Sign Guy?” That… wasn’t me. Someone made two big posters that said “Party @ Lileks!” and another which said “Long Live Lileks” or something like that. I had some blank paper, and I was going to make a sign that said “Lindstrom Loves Lileks” but I saw Sign Guy’s LLL sign and changed my mind. I instead made a sign that said “Got Lileks?” and attached it to my map on a stick and held it up every now and again. (Peggy suggested that I make another one say “Got Spam?”, so I did; the guys in the booth gave it a thumbs up in the middle of the sci-fi bit.) Also during the sci-fi segment I made a “Got Sci-fi?” sign, and finally a “Where’s the Gnat?” one. (”In Boston,” Lileks said when he came out of the booth for a break.)
Next year I’m bringing a whiteboard.
If you missed the show, here are the top ten sci-fi movies according to Lileks:
- 10: 2001, A Space Odessey. “I put this one on the list because you can’t have a list without it.”
- 9: Fantastic Voyage
- 8: Them!
- 7: Alien
- 6: The Matrix
- 5: Close Encounters of the Third Kind
- 4: Star Wars (Episode 4)
- 3: Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
- 2: Aliens
- 1: Star Trek 2, the Wrath of Kahn
In the middle of the sci-fi segment, one of the transition songs they played was Arms for the Love of America. I don’t think they noticed me in the booth, but outside I was singing along (like every other hipster conservative in America), punctuating the verses with an upraised fist.
After the show, Lileks came out and thanked us for being there, and then apologized for having to rush home to tend to a dog who hadn’t been walked in hours.
So what’d I think? Being a longtime Bleat fan, and having met the guy earlier in the day, and then having heard him on-air, I can definitely say that when it comes to Lileks, what you see is what you get. Want to know what he thinks about something? Ask him. The man has an ability to express himself with words that has to be seen in real time to be understood. I used to wonder how the heck he could pound out volumes of quality Bleatage seemingly at the end of the day — wouldn’t it take him hours to figure out some of those analogies, to work out the phrasing of the jokes? Answer: he just starts typing and doesn’t look back.
(State Fair part III will be pictures with commentary.)