Andrew Schroeder

I was headed into work this morning when I noticed yet another giant white truck selling food items in downtown Minneapolis. In the past, I’ve made the decision to judge every city I travel to/live in by the quality of its street food. For example, New York introduced me to the beauty of spicy squid on a stick. In Mexico City I had the distinct pleasure of having a five-course meal of nothing but delicious nibbles found on the street. Montreal and Sofia, Bulgaria both rocked the bagel-like items. Istanbul made me squeal with an amazing grilled mackerel sandwich on the Galata bridge. Street food truly is an indicator of the health of a city, its people’s participation in the public sphere, and a commitment to the exchange of energy and life which can only happen in public.

Back to Minneapolis. If I am to apply my criteria for evaluating street food, Minneapolis gets little more than a D-. The effort is there, but the joy, the spontaneity…. the people…. are no where to be found. Instead, I am greeted by the rather gruesome display of a giant, flaccid turkey drumstick roasting in the morning haze inside a pristine white snatcher van.  Yippee.

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…

I am an employee of EDMC. I am now required to disclose that any and all opinions are not the opinions of EDMC.

“The structure of a system reflects the structure of the organization that built it.”

- R. Fairley

via: Minimal

…it is coming. In case you forgot.