The State Theater's Pride Week imperative

Saying it with style.

Is Michael Jordon's *scalp* greying?

Michael Jordan wants me to wear undershirts. He doesn't understand the climate issues here, but I appreciate his concern. Meanwhile, I am fascinated by the variety of chimney accessories immediately above his head.

Yoiks, the Foxes!

Ambling through the Target Center I happened upon the aftermath of a network news event staged by the Timberwolves. Here are some Fox celebrity common taters talking to each other as though the cameras and lights didn't exist. It's a gift.

Dealing light across the pavement

A subtle but lovely pattern of reflections fan out from the curved prow of Fifth Street Towers (Seen from the US Bank skyway, looking North up 2nd Ave. So.). You can see them most clearly in the first picture, and the third one gives the building context.

New 3D tech for online skyway exploration

Microsoft's Photosynth technology allows you to submit several or hundreds of photos of a scene to a math engine that assembles them in spatial order. It creates an interface that allows you to navigate through multiple pictures of the same object or landscape taken from different distances and angles, in effect recreating the three dimensional experience.

Now, it is still a little rough. Try the synth above if you have a Wintel machine with Silverlight installed and Windows xp 2 or greater.
If you don't have the right configuration, you can read about it at this site.

Curating brick surfaces

This the trace of a historical change. The curator in me wants a small sign that would say "The xxx building, 1885-1940" along the demarcation line between proud exterior and furtive ghost. But true curating takes work. Research: finding the provenance of a scarred brick wall is not something you can just google, you know. By the time augmented reality is pervasive enough to let you hold your iPhone up to this wall and see my blog post about it, I will have nailed it, though.

The first Blond joke?

Dagwood's sandwich shop has Blondie movie posters. Who was the actress who played Blondie?







Penny Singleton

A skyway mystery

Why are there shopping carts in the skyway at the Churchill? I would love to borrow a shopping cart for an hour. I could mount my camera on a clamp and walk along the skyways doing a time lapse travelogue. What are the chances the management will agree? What kind of looks would I get, in suit and tie, pushing an empty shopping cart through the skyways?

Beautiful outdoor living

I feel like pulling a Barbara Flanagan here and lobbying for a "skyway beautiful" movement that takes these vistas into account. (Or at least get the sofa in the dumptser.)

The shoreline of emptyness

Coming out of the long long long feeder skyway from the Crossings, this is the first glimpse you see of commercial activity, a transitional zone between the skyway-only and the skyway-plus. The skyway-only is fine for the purposeful walker. It is something of a chore for the explorer

Bringing the sidewalk into the skyway

I don't know if it is intentional, but this stretch of promenade inside the Hotel Minneapolis has graphics that put you in mind of the construction fences on the sidewalk -- a convention adapted in the sixties when large scale graphics became affordable means to discourage random graffitti and promote some pet notions of the developers to the passers-by.

Pose. Repose.

There are not a lot of places to sit, to duck out of the velocity of the skyways and just chill. This skylight-washed alcove in the Fifth Avenue Tower building is one of the more pleasant. If I was dragging from a long meeting to my hotel to catch a cab to the airport, and I had a half hour to kill, I would rather sit here. In this alcove, I could read 19th century poetry or an essay by Montaigne, and appreciate the subtleties. In the fast food shops, I would have to read email.

Noted in absence

Andy is usually at this stand. He usually nods and waves. Or at least nods. Today he is gone, and a sign under the second chair says "closed." For me this whole mural and small court has become suffused with the personality of Andy, who gave me encouragement and suggestions in the first days of this blog project. I am pleased by the child-like innocence and historical innacuracy of the mural. I also note that certain parts of the skyway are acquiring distinct traits for me. Where is Andy?

Your first stadium dog

This sign exhorts people to walk. Briskly.  My guess is they think about the hot dog.

This picture is an apology for itself.

This picture would like to apologize to you for itself. It has nothing of interest in it. A young man is waiting for his sushi. A young woman approaches in the One Financial Plaza gallery, and behind her someone eats their lunch, a man in a jacket approaches unaware of the lack of interest that awaits him a few feet further on. I tell the photo to front itself, be still, be brave. With any luck, the expectation of the blog reader, which is like a marauding gang of bored youth, will pass by without noticing the absence of interest here. By apologizing, the photo draws attention to itself. As the Chinese say, "gaping hole draws wind".
Later I try to explain to the photo that there is very little in the skyways that is really interesting by internet standards...no murders or Britney Spears, no flaming car wrecks or felonious politicians. But the attention of the photo has already moved on. My words fall on deaf pixels.

What the camera doesn't know.

The camera doesn't know what you are looking at. It assumes things. In this case it assumed that the nearest thing it could focus on was the subject of the photo. It turned out to be the push panel on the glass door, so all the other transparent layers and receding planes of interest, from the solitary diner in the gallery to the comrades in the far distance, are blurred and rendered second-rate -- in the judgment of the camera.
I am fascinated by the ambiguity of the spaces here, in One Financial Plaza. As I look at this picture, the crisp linear edges of the glass walls zip through the other parts of the image like Barnett Newman zips.
For Newman, the "zips" were symbolic of the act of creation itself, the armature of the Hebrew glyph "Alef" which signified the emergence of something from nothing...the dividing of the darkness by the light.
For me the edges are randomizing geometries, angels' straight-edges that intrude on the illusion of the "other" -- slicing them into parts but not even touching them, like critical remarks made behind someone's back.

The art of the skyline in the skyway

Turtle Bread Co. in the One Financial Plaza skyway is hosting an excellent set of photos from Local Boy Photography studio. The large panoramas capture the color and character of the Minneapolis skyline in different moods. My favorite piece is a 58" long panorama of the skyline under a storm-laden sky. Scalloped low clouds barely clear the antennae on the roofs of the tallest buildings.  Nearby, in a black and white photo of sublime tones, charcoal washes of rain brood behind the crisp, mirror-planed image of a downtown that is part hyperreal, part dream.
Of course, that isn' t in the picture above. You have to go see them to know which one I mean.