1. Evanston, IL. That's where I'm from. It's the place from which I set out and to which I may one day return. Where is Evanston? It's in Illinois, "The Corn State." When most people think of Illinois, they think, "That's the 21st state to enter the Union," but did you know we grow a great deal of corn? Soybeans, too. In my first grade class there was a picture of Abraham Lincoln on the wall. He looked so sad. As a youngling I swore I would get myself a hat like that. Years ago I saw such a hat on sale, but I didn't buy it. I had grown up.
2. The summer of 1999 was a summer of baseball and math problems. We ate corn on the cob and played with autistic children. Other stuff too, probably, but whatever. Of course not everyone ate their corn on the cob. Some people ate it on a plate with a fork, but we looked at those people askance, even the autistic kid. All in all, it was a really hot summer.
3. My favorite movie about corn? Definitely Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest. It's a bittersweet coming-of-age film about being on your own in the big city. It's a film about brotherhood and a film about America, but more than anything it's a movie about the wayward fortunes of the little vegetal bloodcult that could.
Here's a painting I made about my feelings toward the film:
The real Hal Pratt is most non plussed at his name being appropriated by the not real Hal Pratt. So, some modifications:
ReplyDelete1 - I'm... not from Evanston. Evanston is like, scary and has black people. Where I'm from is a happy land of piccolos and hot dogs and pizzas whose bottoms are as endless as the pyramid of turtles upon which the dome of heaven rests.
2 - I am atrocious at baseball, and was not much interested in the sport as a spectator until the summer of 2001. I at no time did math problems during the summer. I would be an extremely unlikely candidate to play with autistic children. I do not recall whether it was a hot summer or no. I know that... was it 1996?, perhaps '95 or '97, there was a singularly cold 4th of July, to the point that my family eschewed the usual parades and instead went to the Art Institute. This is the only time that I have been to a museum with my entire family without one of us being surly about the expedition. My little brother, as we walked from the north end of the Art Institute (the lions, and the main entrance, face west) to where we were parked, through a tunnel, my brother espied some graffiti, and exclaimed "Oh, look, more paintings!" I was embarassed, as I often am as a result of other people's behavior. In the car ride, I read the manual to SimCity, which had this strange, long weird essay about... something?, at the end, and an article in that month's issue of National Geographic about a team that had taken a reconstructed Vickers Vimy and replicated a flight from... well, I presume the early 20s or late 10s, flying from Britain to Australia without ever touching down on lands not part of the Empire.
3 - I'm going to start a moderately priced restaurant that will present bland, generic food such as corn on the cob and hot dogs and hamburgers as food that, properly prepared, should be enjoyed as much as any other countries food. It will be called Urban Harvest. We probably won't murder our customers, at least for the first few years.