First Avenue Hallucinates Target Field.

Acid-etched view toward Block E and the Target Center.  As seen from the skyway crossing First Avenue from the megaparking ramp.

When is a Vespa a Triumph?

The pink Vespa grabbed my eye.  It was an unusual combination of female + machine.  Not like the familiar and offensive association of female + machine you find in the vacuum cleaner, or the odd loss of significance you find in "girl's bicycle."  It was an assertion of grace and energy that was not overpowering, but it was still in its way a triumph.

 The couple is interesting for reasons beyond their youth and attractiveness. She gestures with vitality.  He listens with depth.  They are easy with each other, and barely notice the explosion of bath powders at the base of the decapitated parking meter nearby.

Frosted glass walls in the skyways have the effect of making objects on the other side somewhat ethereal, like spirits shimmering into substance before our eyes.

The Dahl Violin Shop is just below the white and black patterned building just left of center...(if you haven't clicked to enlarge the pix yet, this is a good time to do it).  The flaked paint of the sign on the old music shop evokes a horse and rider set out against the behemoths of shiny modern bulk.

My first encounter with the Orchestra Hall matinee set. An usher reads Nicholas Nickleby, by Dickens, while the bartender puts a dry lime twist on the lady's Corona. At least, that is what I would like to think.

C'mon, you have to love this lighted bar in the middle of the day serving up a beer to the white-haired escapee from the concert. Inside the Hall, something like Shostakovich is lumbering around, muffled and galoshed for the Minnesota late winter climate.

Another patron of the arts escapes the matinee performance for a quick stroll around the lobby.

There are long long stretches in the skyway where the only sound the the traffic beneath you and your own footfalls. If you take away the traffic, you think of Theseus, nervously fingering the string Ariadne gave him, waiting for the sound of the beasts breath to drown out his own raspy panting.

Wow. This is what draws me out into the serenity of the skyway edges, beyond the boistering lunch crowds. This is antiseptic at first glance, but beyond its purity lies a simplicity, a breathing space. Like the first moment out of a dream, when the awful fullness of life is just a sketch.

This is my nod to the cliche of the person inured to the traffic past his glass wall. He seems suspended in time, and keeper of something interesting, if not wonderful.

Just a minimalist composition of glass, light, frames. Some part of me is stuck in the 70's when the art world tried to turn inside out on empty white slabs, and see what made itself tick.

This woman's hat said "German" and this tiny nook in the skyways sells German hot dogs, which are half the size of bratwurst but taste just like them. She was the friendliest person I met all day. When she asked me what I was doing, I took a chance and said "Taking pictures of pretty girls, what else can an old man do?" And got this response from her. Humor trumps political correctness. I bought the hot dog. I wasn't really taking pictures of pretty girls.  I didn't even know if I wanted to.  My friend Gus, god rest his soul, said the best pictures had pretty girls in them.  My politically correct self wants to prove him wrong, but he is laughing.  He was always able to laugh. I dedicate this picture to him.  Gerald Gustafson...my friend.

You see the empty table is in focus.

I am so charmed by the way the city insists on framing or emphasizing the lone figure. Here the parking lot provides a cartoon ladder for the woman in red jacket and red bag. As though she climbed out of some impossible plane into the three dimensions of isolation stretched out before her.

surprised by the substance of geometry

I was ready to snap this octagonal window as an evocation of the sufic sense of wholeness, including the multiple reflections, when a man came around the corner into my frame of view, and seemed startled that there might be something to his right, coming in, alive.

Some skyways have muzak, some have closed circuit canned programming, including freeze-dried djs. This skyway has a live dude. When I tip him, I am wearing a tie, and he does not see me.

Man moves against the scale of the city, in the style of the city. On machines. Putting speed before safety, haste before fulfillment, movement before perception. Its not as bad as it seems.