Seen and not taken

Things I saw, but did not photograph, on the skyway today: (all incidents verified by MyOwnEyes reality verification)

1. A live red rooster in the North Star Building.  The design studio on the skyway level hosts animal awareness lunch hour demonstrations occaisionally.  If you look through this blog you will see evidence of the live chicken event from a few months back.  I simply watched the chicken strut around on the terrazo floor for a few minutes, and was enthralled by how beautifully designed this guy was. Imagine if you woke up every day looking this well put together.  You can see his cousin at raising-chickens.org, thanks!
2. A human powered taxi on 3rd Ave. South.  It was an American version of the venerable rickshaw.  I have taken these in San Diego but it was the first time I have seen one in Minneapolis. The taxi was stopped at a red light and the driver suddenly jumped from his seat and walked back to secure the folding roof of the passenger seat.  A policeman was parked on Seventh and looked as surprised as I was by the incongruous mix of foot and vehicle in a traffic lane.  Our instincts tell us that drivers can't jump from their vehicles to zip things up in the middle of traffic, but our brains tell us "Hey, its a bike, get over it."
3. A small trailer taking bikes from rental bike rack to another.  Why did they need to carry the bikes on a trailer?  Couldn't they have ridden the bikes? Or waited until the Brownian Motion of the bike rentals redistributed them all evenly?
4. Some ladies lunching under the Au Bon Pain umbrellas in the Capella Tower northeast lobby.  There is no longer an Au Bon Pain restaurant on the ground floor -- its moved up to the skyway level, thank you, but the umbrellas add a kind of continental class to the empty lobby. (Hope they weren't waiting for service.)
5. Park Benches in the Baker Building promenade between the North Star Building and One Financial Plaza.  They face a high row of windows which open out onto a utility courtyard with lots of old brick and Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning sheet metal on display.  I sat for a few minutes and watched the silhouetted skyway foot soldiers amble, stroll, hike, strut, march, shuffle, sashay, stalk, pace and skitter past me.  No one swooned,sprinted or staggered.  It was a good day.
6. A guy in spiked dreadlocks,  battered combat boots, and a Hells Angels jeans vest over a black leather jacket talking softly and animatedly to a pal in a silky-looking shirt and razor-creased pants, whose haircut cost $60 if it cost a dime.  They were the duo of the day for sheer visual contrast.  It would have made a great photo.

An image fast.

They say you need a fast lens to get images in low light.  I am performing an "image fast" that requires no lens.  Starting May 1st in the morning, I have left my cameras on the desk and confronted the world with my bare eyes, barely open.  It is an eye-opener to see without lenses for a while, to see without frames and without film, even though I wear glasses.  Many intriguing and lovely images have slipped my reflexive twitching shutter finger these last couple of days.

Without anything to take pictures with, I look inward.  There are many miles of skyways inside, an accumulation of many months of peripatetic meditation.  I close my eyes now, and step off into the memory grid.

TCF atrium

Flag in the skylight, sculpture against the brick wall.

The end

If you want to go to the furthest outpost of the skyways south, you walk through the Convention Center, go back up to the skyway level from the northwest corner, and follow the last little leg of skyway out as far as you can parallel to 13th St across Nicollet. The system deposits you at the Hyatt Regency. This piano greets you from the balcony. The painting of a piano above it is pretty edgy stuff for the skyways. Keep going along the balcony back north, and you exit on the access ramp, which you can follow down to Nicollet for a nice walk downtown, or to Loring Park.

Four roofs

Four signature roofs of the Downtown skyline seen from the Orchestra Hall skyway.  Can you name them, left to right?

Skyway people

Close encounter of the skyway kind. Click to see the facial expressions.

Now that would make a nice wedding present

Classic Jaguar on the Nicollet Mall. On the day of the Royal Wedding...a coincidence?

A face only a toff could love

This vintage Jaguar sedan (I am guessing early 40s, although I have heard they didn't update the design during the war) was on display on the Nicollet Mall today.

Jaguars on the Prowl on Nicollet Ave today

Vintage Jaguars lined up on Nicollet Mall today near Orchestra Hall. Hey who parked that Ford near the beasts?

Spontaneous Joy

A warm Minnesota greeting to all the world from the skyway level of the Hennepin County Government Center.

Skyway people and the politics of bleakness

The closed, boring environment of this skyway serves as a utilitarian backdrop to the people moving from point a to point b.  If you are looking for something, there are few clues to help you find your way.  There is nothing to entertain or delight you here.  It is a prefabricated environment stripped of leisure or pleasure or distraction.

When you get to where you are going it is just another nowhere on the way to somewhere.

There is your car, surrounded by absence.  It doesn't threaten you, and within a few minutes the whole passage from cell to freeway will be forgotten. We have come to take these elisions of sense for granted.  The experiences of featureless, entranced movement through anonymous space creates gaps in our psychic fabric.  Our internal landscapes are erased, bit by bit.  Anything can fill these holes.  Fears, promises, the assertions of urgent people who want to borrow your attention and faith for a while to build pyramids of mass emptiness...anything can fill these holes.  Tomorrow, it will be the Royal Wedding.  Today it is the birth certificate.  Yesterday it was the weather going rogue and terrorizing whole states.  These wild disparities seems connected by the visual continuity of television, which is the information equivalent of the skyway, connecting emptynesses, providing passage of attention from abandoned place to abandoned place.  Or as the computer operating system marketing rhetoric puts it: "Where do you want to go today."

The people are full of life, and the potential for joy and fascination.  They are dense fabrics of memory and hope, feelings and dreams, needs and abilities.  Why do we throw our landscapes up with the haste of scenery designers?  Why did the program of Modernism in the urban world strip out the texture and push the utility forward with such a vengeance upon the human spirit?  Was it a kind of gnosticism, a despair of fulfillment in this world that can only be a waystation on the way to the next world? 

The people are full.  The cities, alas, seem empty. 

Government Center Fountain

Discussion at the end of the day on the Public Service Level. 

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.

The skyway viewpoint

I have been reading the landmark collection of Berenice Abbot's New York City photos, executed under the auspices of the WPA in the late 1930s.  This photo reminds me of one of her street shots near Union Square, a choreography of isolated pedestrians emphasizing the urban grid and the randomness of human activity.

The randomness is only an illusion, of course.  Everyone has a purpose, and that sense of purpose is reflected in the city faces.

Standing in this skyway between the Crystal Court and Macy's, you see the bustle of the city syncopated to silent music.

Skyway people.