Images
Field of View
I realize I’ve been an unapologetic cheerleader for Minneapolis lately, but it shows no signs of abating. Maybe it’s because winter sucks so much here that it makes me appreciate everything more when summer finally arrives.
And it’s especially easy to appreciate Minneapolis in the summer from top floor of the Walker, where I’d never been until I went there for this the other night, and spent most of the time just staring out the window. It isn’t even the best view of the city, but it’s still pretty great.
Posted: June 26th, 2008 under Minneapolis, Images.
Comments: none
This is what the future should look like
Permit me to rhapsodize for a moment.
I was doing my usual weekly ride around the lakes today and headed back home on the Midtown Greenway, getting off at Park Ave and heading downtown, when I got a pinch flat in my back tire. Fortunately, I was only a couple blocks from the Greenway, so I just turned around and walked my bike to the Freewheel that’s part of the brand-new, ridiculously awesome bike center there. Inside is a sleek, spacious bike shop/cafe/depot with lockers and showers for commuters, and bike parking and service and of course plenty of expensive gear to gawk at.
They fixed my flat and put a new, better-sized tire on my wheel in like ten minutes while I had a coffee and watched all manner of riders come and go—and not just the rich white lycra-clad gear fetishists, but mothers and their small children, and old men, and kids from the surrounding neighborhoods, pouring into the place to get their bikes serviced or just look around.
So many things are wrong and unfair right now, it’s reassuring when something works the way it’s supposed to, if not better. Sitting in that place, buffeted by friendly service, high ceilings, clean lines, right angles, and air-conditioned convenience, I felt like I was seeing into the future—in a good way, for once.
I nudged my bike back out onto the Greenway (itself a marvel) and rode home swelling with sustainable-transportation-infrastructure goodwill. Between that and Dosh, I’m really proud of my adopted hometown right now.
Posted: June 18th, 2008 under Minneapolis, Images.
Comments: 3
A Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man
There’s a new mini-meme out there: a growing collection of drawings, done by various bloggers, of themselves as teenagers. It’s a great idea, and I decided that, as someone who is 1) a blogger; 2) a former teenager; and 3) an occasional doodler, I would give it a shot.
The result is, I think, a representative portrait of who I was around age eighteen, and can be found after the jump.
Posted: May 29th, 2008 under Images.
Comments: 7
Paradigm Shift
In college, whenever I was feeling antsy and uninspired, I would rearrange the furniture in my dorm room. This usually bought me a couple days’ worth of an artificially renewed feeling of purpose and invigoration before the tedium set back in and I finally got around to writing that paper about the Dry Salvages.
Today, probably because of the shitty weather, I was feeling antsy and uninspired, so I dragged my comfy couch out of the comfort nook where it’s been for the past year and installed it by the window in my bedroom. So far, so good. Just look at all that natural light my couch is enjoying.
All that cold, rainy, natural light.
Still, though. This is going to change everything. I can already feel it. Now I can lounge in the natural light on my couch while I enjoy the dour exploits of unhappily married couples on Tell Me You Love Me read classic literature and catch up on my New Yorkers and otherwise edify myself.
Truly, a new era.
Posted: April 25th, 2008 under Images, General.
Comments: none
11N
Posted: March 25th, 2008 under Images.
Comments: 2
The day after tomorrow
Voicemail from Emily:
“I think you have class but I have the most amazing thing you have to see. Over at Washington Avenue and, like, 11th Avenue South, by Grumpy’s and the Loft—you have to get down here. And bring your camera; it would be perfect for your blog. A building burned down yesterday, and they put out the fire, but the water they used is, like, all frozen into crazy icicles. And it looks so strange. It reminds me of that terrible movie from a few years ago where New York is all frozen, and it’s got someone young-looking like Tobey Maguire—no, Jake Gyllenhaal. But it looks like that. So you should get down here as soon as you can. Call me. Bye.”
Posted: February 22nd, 2008 under Minneapolis, Images.
Comments: 4
Caption contest
Philip and Emily and I got the ball rolling the other day, on the bus:
“At least there’s a U.”
“You get what you pay for, I guess.”
“Poor Doug.”
Posted: February 7th, 2008 under Minneapolis, Images.
Comments: 7
The magic hour
Driving north the other day the weather was quintessential winter, especially in the quality of the light—photographers probably have a name for it; I don’t know. But it was a sunless, total kind of light that seemed to swell and peak just before dusk, that midwinter, midafternoon fade that I’ve decided is more depressing than actual nighttime darkness—Emily and I were discussing this recently, that perhaps the most intense disthymia or skewed circadian rhythms of real or imagined S.A.D. are exacerbated not by the solid, complete darkness of nighttime itself but instead this very pre-dusk, incipient darkness; a milky, solid, cold light that heralds nightfall (with whose darkness it’s easier for us to reckon because that’s year-round, that’s normal, but this is something else, something rarer and therefore less welcome [and what must it be like in Greenland or Scandanavia, where the sun’s angle of incidence is such that this terrible limbo state lasts days, weeks, months at a time?])—the perfect accompaniment to a vast sadness initiating in the accreted losses and gains of the past but also bound up in the present, and maybe/probably even the future in terms of its unpredictability: the stealthy way it grabbed me from behind when I was listening to certain songs or looking at a particular stretch of highway between here and Iowa. It’s a deeply authentic but also vague, indefinable kind of sadness we all have to know sometime and so with which we may as well get acquainted—but without, god forbid, becoming too familiar.
Posted: January 2nd, 2008 under Images, General.
Comments: 2
It may be fucked up, but it sure builds character.
Maybe it’s just the time of year, but I’m feeling nostalgic. Then again, I’m always feeling nostalgic. From the vaults:
Nolan - “Convincing” (live at Gabe’s, August 2005) (mp3)
Posted: December 19th, 2007 under Iowa City, Images, Music.
Comments: none
Insomnia
Sunrise: 7:16 a.m.
Temp: 39° F
Wind: SE @ 7mph
Humidity: 89%
Soundtrack: Odd Nosdam, “Up In Flames”
Milk: $3.39/gallon
Posted: November 19th, 2007 under Minneapolis, Images, Music.
Comments: 2
Sleeping on Lake Michigan
Say what you will about Facebook, but without it I never would have learned that my former summer employer, Crystalaire Camp, is closing.
I never much cared for camp as a young boy. Throughout elementary school I declined most slumber party invitations due to chronic homesickness and a paralyzing fear of wetting the bed. During the week-long fourth grade campout I cried every day until Mr Weinmann permitted me one phone call home. My Cub Boy Scout troop was dominated by bullies who made weekend campouts unbearable.
So I didn’t have what could be considered an enjoyable camping experience until music camp (yes, music camp) in eighth grade. By then, bedwetting and homesickness were permanently behind me. And by the time I was in college, I was desperate not to return home for the summer, eager to go somewhere new and unfamiliar, and drawn to the prospect of getting paid less than a thousand dollars to live and work in the birch woods of northwestern Michigan, right on the lake. I applied for a job as a counselor at Crystalaire.
And that’s what I did, over the summers of 1997 and 1998. My parents and many of my friends thought I was crazy, since the pay wasn’t great and I’d never been much of an outdoorsy type. “What about the bedwetting?” they said.
But the camp’s philosophy was progressive, the kids were hilarious, and the scenery was gorgeous. I inevitably ended up leading most of the artsy-fartsy activities and was drafted to write and direct the camp play at the end of each session—though I was also a lifeguard and hopped in the canoe every chance I got, and led the kids on long bike rides and epic hikes up the enormous dunes.
My bailiwick was a cabin of twelve-year-old boys, who I won over by doing South Park impressions and reading Richard Brautigan aloud at bedtime. I learned all the lyrics to the campfire songs and sang them earnestly. I accumulated a fan club of adolescents who are now Ivy League grads. I discovered that maybe I wanted to be a teacher. I made hemp necklaces and played a hand drum and learned how to batik; it was the closest I’ve ever come to being a hippie, but for once that didn’t seem like it was necessarily a bad thing.
Me, the aforementioned hemp necklace, some of my campers, and Trout Fishing in America
The camp was near a town called Frankfort, north of Interlochen and southeast of Traverse City. Down the road from Frankfort was the Cherry Hut, and a bar called the Cabbage Shed where we’d get drunk after lights-out. We skinny-dipped in Lake Michigan and slept on the beach and got killer tans. We spent our weekends between sessions at cottages belonging to friends of friends.
Life was tough, but we managed.
The camp recruited a lot of its counselors from other countries, and I got to know people from the UK and Sweden and Germany and Australia. The resulting culture clash was awkward, then fascinating, and they tended to laugh at how prudish we were, even after the skinny-dipping.
Why am I wearing a necklace and a goatee? Shut up, that’s why.
I guess the story is that Crystalaire couldn’t afford the land it sat on. I’m not surprised—it’s premium land. But I’m still sad. I now regret never going back there at some point in the intervening decade; just this weekend, there was a “final campfire” that I wish I could have attended.
As hackneyed as it sounds, that camp was a symbol of innocence for me and probably most of the other people who attended it or worked there. It was one of my last bulwarks against post-collegiate cynicism and knee-jerk distrust of basically everything. I was allowed to be sincere there, to teach kids how to write poetry and sing songs without anybody smirking. That ought to count for something.
So, RIP Crystalaire Camp, 1922-2007. I’m sorry I lost touch.
Sufjan Stevens - “Holland” (mp3)
Posted: October 15th, 2007 under Images, General.
Comments: 8
