I aimed to open my eyes to new sights and scenes at the fair this year, instead of circling around the exact seven same spots like I usually do. Had I walked by the Education building in any of the past years I would’ve already photographed the heck out of it. But it was new to my eyes this year. It’s just soooo yesterday, and thus I soooo love it.

I also had never gone into the Fine Arts building and, walking around the various Minnesotan masterpieces, I found this sun-slashed mint blue curtain in a quiet little corner, squatted all over the floor and snapped some almost-art of my own.

Paul and Babe rendered in paper mosaic.

A string of resurrected soda pop brands for sale inside Heritage Square. A bottle of Peach Nesbitt’s was already chilling in my fridge back at home. Either for me to drink or enter into the Treasury. I hadn’t yet decided, and still haven’t, I guess.

Another new adventure for me this year was the State Fair museum, filled with memorabilia from years past.

Further on in the exhibit, Norm and Opal Hall shimmied across my path. I wish people still did fancy, fringed stuff like this. And not ironically. We’re all so self conscious and cool now. It’s honestly a shame.

Old Elephants. (Speaking of which, did you know elephants “sing” songs to themselves with over 20 verses to them, and when other elephants die those that they leave behind perform a funeral-type ritual for their dearly departed? I learned that when I bought my sister the novel White Bone many years ago which I’ve been wanting to read myself someday. And in other elephant literature-related business, this book is on my horizon as well.)

Don’t really like snow cones, didn’t order a snow cone, but the shimmer of the shop’s signage was a treat in and of itself.

I would’ve honestly been happy with fifth or sixth place. Those ribbons would’ve looked livelier on a wall than red or royal blue anyways.

I like how this photo creates the illusion that the Sky Ride traveled above nothing but miles of countryside corn-fields, but it was just a good old fashioned framing trick.

Can’t wait to return next year.

Also I’m wondering if it’d be fun to go to another state’s Fair sometime too. Anyone been to any amazing ones? I’ve heard the one in Texas is as epic as the state would suggest.

This coming Saturday, the pop-up-style men’s market makes its way to Minneapolis thanks to the mavens behind J.W. Hulme Co., Pierrepont Hicks, Red Wing Shoes, and Fox River Socks.

The Northern Grade Ad-Hoc Men’s Market will be invading an old, antique Barn Door/Church Pew store in NorthEast Minneapolis from noon until 7. I’ll be making an unscheduled appearance at some point in the afternoon, and I think I heard there’d be hot, straight-razor shaves offered on-site too. So needless to say, it’s THE place to be seen this weekend.

I best go on now, and grow out my scruff as quickly as possible. I refuse to clash with all the domestic plaids and leathers.

Kirsten Kennis may be 5 feet 8 inches of WASP-y gorgeousness but don’t even think about downloading or re-tumblr-ing her beautiful face for your own enjoyment, artistic or otherwise.

If she’ll take Ezra and his boys to court, I don’t doubt she’d do it to all of us as well.

They differ somewhat from my original inspiration, but they were just the style and color I figured would work with my day-to-day wardrobe. Now that I’ve finally got them, I’ve had to figure out to make them look cool with my pants when I’m not wearing slim 60s denim and sitting on a mini-motorcycle as Mr. Paul Newman was.

First I started with my pants crammed inside, but it takes time and it takes work to get them in there alright, and the resulting look is undefined and essentially dowdy.

Pulling the pants out streamlined the silhouette, but I can only think of electricians and dishwasher delivery men wearing them this way.

Neither in nor out was working, so I finally tried my pants the way I normally wear them, cuffed up twice. So far that gets me and my boots nearest that Newman photograph so I’ll roll along that way and see how often I end up wearing these biker-y boots I spent all year yearning for.

(Slimmer pants will probably help too. I’ve loved these canvas, khaki ones quite a bit, but half a year without fried chicken and chocolate milk and they’re just too big now.)

I’ll be carrying over my white jeans from summer, and loosening up my new pale blue self-shrunk Levi’s 501s, and spicing up a ton of outfits with these selvage jeans by New York-based label 4 Stroke in a deadstock fabric color the company calls “Warmtape”.

Their Warsaw-fit Warmtapes are proving a perfect option for this transitional time of year when sartorially Summer’s become a bummer but its still too hot to truly dress for Fall.

Thinner than traditional denim while still robust and rugged in feel, the Warsaw’s harvest-time tone brings a bold hint of Autumn into an outfit without weighing me down in weighty and woolly fabrics while August and September take their sweet time in cooling the hot city down.

The cut is trim but non-fashion-victim-ed and the jeans, through their unusual hue, seem to lend new life to old pieces I’d been tired of taking out of the closet.

Old shades of gray or faded chambray are given a good twist by pairing them up with a punch of orangey-red rust. I figure, once you’ve got your closet covered in the basics (which I guess I basically do now), it comes time to spice it all up.

Their new line just newly on-line, sportswear label Scotch & Soda nixes any trace of their Netherlands heritage for a Super-American collection for Fall 2010.

Rugged, one-buttoned blazers rendered in crinkled wool and lined in casual cotton would cover quite well those dressed up/dressed down days we live half our lives in.

While plaid flannel perched atop the shoulders of button-up lambswool sweaters further the toughly tony aesthetic.

These ribbed-bottomed hiker chinos are where the collection starts to get especially adventurous. Arguably Alpine and almost awesome, I am, if nothing else, intrigued by their high-trail heartiness.

The shade, shape, and sheen of this classic bomber jacket, as well as its price, make it one of this Fall’s classiest takes on the classic coat. I now suddenly regret dropping dough for the brown bomber jacket I bought last Winter and had been liking quite a lot (up until the split second I spotted this Scotch & Soda version.)

And lastly, an über-Abercrombie style flannel, but Montana manly instead of so Michigan mall-like.

Scotch & Soda’s prices range from around $70 to $300 US, so it’s definitely not true couture, although hitting it with the snippy A&F quip isn’t quite fair either.

A number of these and other Amsterdam goes American pieces from S&S look like witty and reasonably priced pieces for all this Fall.

But now that’s one of the main reasons I fancy it so much. Every year there’s some new strange indulgence deep-fried experimentally or served on a stick to prove that a new year really has rolled around, but aside from that, the fair looks and feels exactly the same as it did when I was a kid.

And, aside from all the overalls and three-piece suits, it looks and feels not too terribly different than it does in all these decades-old photos.

Lessons learned last year:

1) Full funnel cakes are a better value and better tasting than funnel cake-bites.

2) Just bite the bullet and buy the big jar of honey with the handsome, green label, even if you have to lug it around for a few hours. It’ll brighten up your cupboard and your cereal for months.

Out of all the shop sites to scroll past, I wouldn’t have thought Restoration Hardware, a fancy faux-aged furniture retailer, would’ve offered up a viable contender for fall’s make or break accessory, the strapless leather case. But, it has.

Made of artisan, vegetable-dyed leather to evoke “the rich and rustic satchels used by 19th century bankers”, the $129 case is designed to carry a 15″ laptop but would look all the smarter stuffed with hand written letters and Japanese fashion mags instead.

See what you can find in places you “shouldn’t bother” looking?

Roaming around the wannabe waves in the drenched denim didn’t feel too icky or sticky, surprisingly. It actually felt sorta swell.

After a breezy, forty minute boat ride my 501s were at least 50 percent dry.

A few sunny, strolls down hot, graveled roads on top of that and the jeans began condensing and conforming to my shape, just as the Levi’s clerk had promised.

A day later, my jeans have maintained their rough, rigid, General Store-staple type of structure, while gaining the perfect little wrinkles and angles which give them that authentic, lived-in, almost alive look.

So far they shrunk up pretty nicely. At least an inch in the waist and the length. Since they aren’t an inky indigo denim and I’m not going for a really worn or whiskered look, I’m gonna just launder them now, fly them through the dryer, and be done with them.

I don’t want to go overboard with the whole ordeal.

(Although, technically, I suppose I already did.)

I do have a pair of (my first) selvage jeans arriving in the mail today (more on those later) and I did wear a pair of dark rigid denim twenty-plus times this past year before giving them their first wash because voices on the internet told me to. But that’s about as bothered as I’ve cared to get over the whole do-it-yourself denim perfecting game.

But a perfect storm came upon me this week that’s tempting me to play. An article by Simon Roe from Inventory’s premiere issue, along with these $50 buck 501s from the Levi’s store and the quirky clerk who sold them to me seem to be telling me it’s finally time to take the denim perfecting plunge.

My photos don’t quite show it, but the denim I chose isn’t a traditional inky indigo. They’re a lighter, almost train engineer blue, halfway down the track to actually being gray. In person, they’re just odd enough to seem like precious deadstock.

Looming together the advice of Mr. Roe and the dude at the Levi’s store, the key to killer shrink-to-fit 501s appears to be buying them an inch to two inches too large in the waist, wearing them while wet until they dry entirely, and then….

Well, we’ll see where that gets me. I’ll be near a western Wisconsin lake this weekend, so I’ll take a denim dip in my lighter-than-they-seem Levi’s and let them dry right on me.

After that, some advisors claim the jeans will have shrunk to my body already and to wear them as-is a few more weeks before machine washing them. Others suggest I’ll need to launder and dry them after the drench/air dry adventure to ensure a proper fit.

I’ll just take it step by step and see how things seem. Fresh from the store, they fit baggy and bunchy like a toddler’s favorite jeans, but the Levi’s clerk assured me that would be the perfect start to my self-shrinking process.

If nothing else, hopefully we’ll all be info-tained.

TO BE CONTINUED…

I’m trying to comfort myself here, but honestly I feel a little bit blue.