multimedia blog
Snapshots: Midwestern Summer Life
Nigel Parry, Thursday, August 30th, 2007
Life in the Midwest rolls on during the summer, with most people grabbing the good weather while they can. This mission is sometimes frustrated by unpredictable weather that includes hailing summer storms and even monsoon-level rain at times. It is also frustrated by people who don't want to grab the good weather but then spend much of the long, cold winter complaining about the weather outside. In the UK, we complain about the weather all year long, no matter what it's doing. It simplifies things. Images taken with a Motorola Razr V3xx camera phone.
WEEK'S END IN LOWERTOWN, SAINT PAUL, MN
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| Above: 4th Street in Lowertown, Saint Paul, home of the Farmer's Market, the 4th Street Station venue, the old train depot with Christos Greek restaurant, and the only liquor store in town. A former commercial warehouse district with many of the structures built one hundred years ago, the neighborhood has been revitalized as an artists' community ...to some degree. Condos, which aren't necessarily a bad thing, have been springing up over the last 5 years. If the artists start getting kicked out to make way for new condos, that's the time when we'll make that final judgment. At this point, many of the condos aren't selling. |
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Above: Local artist Frank Brown walks by the Black Dog Cafe & Wine Bar at the corner of 4th and Broadway, in Lowertown.
Ask Frank how he's doing on any given day and you'll get a big smile and: "Another day, another blessing."
Recently, we've been telling him: "No, Frank. Another day, another kick in the nuts." |
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| Above: Another afternoon well spent at the Black Dog, sitting in the sun with a downtempo groove, during the nightly Happy Hour (4pm-7pm) which features DJ Del6 on Fridays. |
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Above: It's a lazy time of the week, late Friday afternoon, with people trailing home from work. Local residents sitting on the patio bring dogs, chat, and watch the flow. It's a good -- and importantly for the neighborhood -- affordable time.
Right: A few blocks away in Mears Park, The Roo Dog is taunted by a squirrel that shook his tail and chattered at the suddenly-frozen, comically-predatory Roo for 20 straight minutes. |
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| Above: Sitting at the Black Dog, you get to see the world pass by. Here, advertising for the Minnesota State Fair on the side of a bus. Whoever thought this one up: one story. Whoever approved the concept and copy obviously didn't show it to anyone in our neighborhood, where hoots of laughter greet the ad everytime it rolls past. Get your corn dog and cheese curds just to the right of the goat-fucking stand. |
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| Above: DJ's, like musicians, are cursed with having to carry around a lot of gear. Everyone likes to forget this part. Especially DJs and musicians, when we can. |
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| Above: On the plus side, the local area is teeming with loading bays, freight elevators, wide corridors and doorways, flatbed carts, and many, many -- hopefully donated -- shopping carts. |
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| Above: Final version of an invite I designed for a friend's coming party. Warehouses are good for those too. Some detail removed. The Saturn Baboon and Post-Apocalyptic Cockroaches (on the right of frame) I was particularly happy with. |
SMALLTOWN WISCONSIN OVER THE WEEKEND
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| Above: As we were taking the ride up to the Wisconsin cabin in a large commercial truck -- long story -- it seemed only right to bring the whole trailer park, bucket o' chicken and all. The Colonel became a cabin tea light lampshade later that night, just to bring the concept all the way home. |
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Above: "Papers That Were Left Here", 2007. Found photocopy originals of an Introduction to Islam left in a gas station photocopier in small town Wisconsin.
It seemed like an art installation exploring paranoia and context. |
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| Above: The Liquor Store At The End Of The Universe. This isn't the best snapshot as it doesn't really capture the enormity of the already-redundant sign in its environmental context. It comes at the end of a T-junction, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and looks very odd. |
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| Above: Stop at the cheese shop! 6-, 5-, and 4-year-old Sharp Wisconsin Cheddar. After trying all three and the red 3-year on the right of frame, the 4-year won. $10 a pound but worth every cent once or twice a year, just to remind you what good cheese tastes like in this country that strangely has the blandest cheddars in its supermarkets. |
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Above: Roo liked the tunes on the iPod so much he went and lay down with his head near the speaker.
Or maybe he just passed out in a cheese coma. |
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| Above: Morning has broken. Dawn over Lowertown, Saint Paul, 25 August 2007 at 6:38am. |
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| Above: Evening has come. Sunset over a Wisconsin lake, 25 August 2007 at 7:43pm. |
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| Above: Peaceful gradient as the sun goes down. Wisconsin lake, 8:03pm, 25 August 2007. |
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| Above: The Roo Dog on the cabin's lakeshore dock. This frame became one of the random panels delivered at the top of the homepage of this site. The random panels come from a pool of pairs of identical images of dogs, the difference being that one has a tagline from the Bible ("Perfect Love Drives Out Fear") and the other, a common proverb ("Every Dog Has His Day"). The point of the panels is to note how taglines and captions really do change how you see an image. There were subway ads LIKE/DISLIKE in New York last year, sometime after I began the panels, that used the same concept. Context is everything and effect of the taglines is to make you focus on different parts of the image, as you tell yourself the story it conjures up. The process is fascinating and insidious at the same time. In any case, it has been an interesting, ongoing doodle on the front of the site for some time now. |
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Above: Roo Dog still swims! 25 feet out for this stick.
Right: One of the waves of briefly overcast skies. It was still warm, though.
The weather has never managed to dent the main point of the cabin: Zen. |
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| Above: Wish You Were Here! |
More From This Section
• Elliot Hughes, a young protester tortured during the RNC by a dozen cops in a dark room in the Ramsey County Sheriff's jail, testifies at a special "Community Conversation about the RNC" at the St. Paul City Council (Thursday, September 25th, 2008)
• Art: Alex Lilly photos and protest posters from the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN (Sunday, September 21st, 2008)
• "Hockey Mamas for Obama": Anchorage Demonstration by Alaska Women Reject Palin (Saturday, September 20th, 2008)
• "Rage against the machine", R.N.C. Diary (part 3) (Friday, September 5th, 2008)
• "Police and technology", R.N.C. Diary (part 2) (Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008)
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