The skyway perspective lesson

When you learn to draw,  you learn to locate the vanishing point, where all parallel lines converge on the horizon in your scene.  There are many vanishing points in the skyway system.  Some of the skyways have vanishing points as ineluctable as black holes in the birth time of the universe itself, others have gentler doorways and doglegs that draw the eye off the main line of depth, convergence, disappearance.  These are three vanishing points from my trek the other day.

Elle at the salon

I ducked into a salon to get my hair setting wax with sesame, an Aveda product I can no longer live without. I lived a long time without product in my hair.  Now I am one of the productified masses. At the register,  Elle posed for a portrait, and gave me a coupon good for $10 off my next visit.

Real people. Souls with faces.

Using the Leica has added a new dimension to my photographing the skyways.  The digital cameras were too unresponsive to try to get certain moments on film, so I settled for scenes.  With the Leica I can respond more intuitively to the changing tableaux of faces, gestures and postures.  The people I see and photograph become more real, more individual.  It is a fitting time for that, with accusations flying among the insiders that the skyways are full of zombies...faceless and proletarian, soulless replicants.  Look at these faces and you see souls.

The last, really last snowfall of the season

A bit of white clung to the grey and black city as late as April 15 this year...tax day.  We were on our way to a record year, but I don't think we made all time history.  On a global scale the tragedy in Japan overshadowed our prolonged winter misery.  On a personal scale the impending death of my big sister Zoe has put the inconveniences of our climate into a humbling perspective.

The odd utilitarian romance of the Mill City

This sign down by the river was repainted in the last 20 years.  Before that, it had a charming desquamate appearance -- huge flakes of paint slowly deconstructing the identity of an enormous box.  By repainting it, the civic-minded sentimentalists rescued our drowning history.  But what did they save?  While the elegance and sensuality of the West Hotel or the Metropolitan Building fell beneath the brutal ambition of the Urban Renewalists in the 60s, this featureless warehouse and mill survived.  It is an enormous grinder, a huge pocket.  It ground up and stored a billion of bushels of wheat.  It has the charm of a blender or can opener, of a packing crate. Or casket, in which the competence and dull ambition of another century lies mummified.

We are obliged to like it, because we were robbed of what was more spiritual, more human in scale, and more sustainable in its reflection of our inner lives.  We are dwarfed, and affectionate, and stagger around clawing at random bits of an unknowable past, here, by the river.  Good for us.  Let's give ourselves a prize.

The city from the inside out

When inside is outside and outside is in.  Looking into the US Bank atrium from inside Chipotle. At the end of the lunch break, there are few figures to break up the chrome and glass vistas. The gloss and emptiness of the space is emphasized.  It is a difficult landscape, and the spirit does not settle into the geometry easily.

A knife-wielding businessman runs into a pal in the Crystal Court.  It breaks up the office routine, and forces a consideration of what security looks for.  At this very spot, an armed guard stops me because I am holding a camera. I don't know too many people who could run around downtown with a 12" knife unsheathed and not attract official attention.  I am sure it is a collector's item of some kind.  I am sure he knows what he is doing...because he looks the way he does, right? Turns assumptions inside out.