Andrew Schroeder

Something really amazing happened to me today. I was headed to the Northern Lights Tea Shop (link) when I was stopped by three people attending a conference about using technology to organize information, notes, etc… I couldn’t resist when they inquired if they could ask me a couple of questions about the ways that I organize information and make lists in my life. Really, how could I? This is something I obsess about; something that kicks into high gear all the archivist tendencies I try to suppress throughout the day. I am obsessive-compulsive when it comes to organizing data and it often takes all my strength not to completely reorganize the database I manage at work. (more…)

When I came across this image in the news this morning, I couldn’t resist. It appears that everyone’s favorite source for marriage and morality advice, Newt Gingrich, has officially announced his bid for the presidency of the fine crap-hold known as America. Now, don’t get me wrong here, I’m a liberal (AKA in the USA: a gay-communist-anti christ-abortion/death squad leader) but now I’m having second thoughts. LOOK AT THOSE CHINS! Yes, plural: C-H-I-N-S. Seriously! Look at all the gloriously lustrous, bulbous bags of fat under that man’s mandible. Just think of the sweat that accumulates there on a warm Washington DC day. I’m ready to see some gravy dribbling down this man’s grossly over-indulged chins as he takes us back in the 19th century. God bless the USA!

TCHIKITAHMAN: “Just got done with a fitting for a job…now I’m off to the la gun club for some gun powder relaxation!” 4/29/11 via HTC Peep

I couldn’t have said it better. And I, for one, was absolutely crushed that he wasn’t at the concert at First Ave in Minneapolis…

It has been an insanely good evening and I’m going to do my damnedest to keep this short and sweet. After a few perfectly mixed cocktails at the Aster Cafe, I found myself wandering around Northeast Minneapolis. Instead of waiting for the bus, I continued to drift up Hennepin Avenue, circling aimlessly around, until I ended up back at the bus stop, staring into the eyes of an nun who was also enjoying the first real spring evening.

Anyway. The future. Yes! That’s what’s been on my mind. Specifically, what is the future of our cities going to look like if we keep pushing for New Urbanist developments? The condos that now line both banks of the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis are a good example. While I applaud the renewed interest in the heart of the city, I’m skeptical of the end results. Getting to the point. Why is it that in order to make people come back to the diversity of the city, we have to completely replace it with generic condo buildings with eco-ironic use of sheet metal adornments?

I’d really like to start a movement. It isn’t New Urbanism, it is simply called Urbanism. It is not the homogenization and sterilization of our urban spaces, but instead is the fruits of their diversity. What makes urban spaces so desirable is not the safety of the familiar, but instead the unknowable complexities that arise when the rich and the poor and the whole mix of our species live next to each other.

(One may ask why the above photo is posted. It is a scan of a c-print from an archive of Japanese train photos I acquired. Someone had the interest, bordering on obsession, to return again and again to Tokyo and photograph, what must have been at the time, the futuristic-looking landscape. There is just something inherent in the city of Tokyo that invokes feelings of what is yet to come… This is just one of about 100 photos that show this constant revision of what “the future” looks like… What a fantastic way to spend one’s yearly vacations.)

The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.

Michel Foucault
Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopias.

“Behind the incessant parade of bright images, a gaping blackness.”

Through out the course of my day, I look at hundreds (if not more) photographic images that fall into the genre we call “photography”. RSS feeds of photo blogs have become the easiest and, at the same time, most in unobtrusive method for consuming my daily dose. It isn’t so much the dosage that bothers me. I’m hung up on the concept of what exactly I’m eating up when I’m searching, shifting, and glancing at the endless buffet of fine-art photography that is presented to me…

There is a point where I have to just take my eyes out of focus and concentrate on the idea that the blurred image which emerges might be a better indicator of contemporary photography than anything curated, anything put together into a project…

1990s Chevrolet Caprice Wagon

I know that this post could very easily be construed as being childish or immature. Trust me, I am both of those things. However, I think there is a deeper undercurrent to what I did at the Mall of America overflow parking lot yesterday afternoon.

Lets preface this a bit. You know, build up a framework before I delve in. I believe that everyone has certain design fetishes. Aesthetic aspects of physical products that appeal to us on a level we can’t quite explain. In turn, we’re drawn to those products and buy them. Really we buy the hell out of them to be more precise. Case in point, the new iPad or Macbook Air.

Now, in order to keep the universe from collapsing into oblivion, there has to be a counter balance to objects that are so compelling we cannot resist. There have to be objects out there that are so repulsive that the very sight of them triggers an innate hatred in the reptilian part of our brains.

For me, one of those objects is the mid-1990s Chevrolet Caprice station wagon. Perhaps it is the nature of the vehicle’s name… don’t we want vehicles that stand for reliability and not impulsive changes? However, I cannot pinpoint my hatred. I see them less and less these days, but… they’re out there. Like a fleet of marauding slug-shaped cars, they haunt me when I drive.

As luck and fate would have it, when I pulled into the Mall of America overflow parking lot, directly ahead of me was a real doozy of a Caprice wagon. Dark brown. DUNG brown even. I had to act to let this other driver know the torture which is seeing them on the road.

And so I did. I left a note. Childish you say? Yes, of course. But something had to be done.

Although the time for this image has passed, I still feel that it is appropriate. This was earlier this week. Yes, this much snow falls in the middle of April. One of the things that I’ve learned here in Minnesota is that we’re always just one tiny step away from slipping back into the misery of winter. You could be out in the middle of July, 90 degree F heat, sweating your ass off when suddenly it hits you… before you know it everything will be returned to the winter. It is a strange feeling. I’m not certain it serves any purpose. The optimist in me hopes it is reminder of how fleeting even the most basic things can be… I won’t bother with lingering pessimist.