Andrew Schroeder

The Geotaggers’ World Atlas #14: Amsterdam on Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

Kunststoffen afwasmachine / Small washing-machine on Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

Finally. After five long months of frigid, often painfully cold temperatures and people, the first hints of spring are starting to tease Minneapolis. Like a cheap hooker that only shows you she’s a tranny after you’ve paid your $50, the cityscape is beginning to reveal all of its dirty little secrets. These include the usual list of suspects that testify to survival strategies in what I can only call “The City Goes To Bed at a Reasonable Hour”.  Bottles of cheap Skol or Aristocrat vodka, lost photographs, a few stilettos that couldn’t pass through our record snowfall — these are all the flotsam and jetsam of the life of a contemporary Minneapolitan.

From Herman Miller…. The “Envelop” Desk

Flickr Photo Download: Exhibit at the First Symposium on Low Pollution Power Systems Development …, 10/1973.

Via US National Archives via Flickr

White Flower, 1960. Oil on canvas, 71 7/8 x 72 inches (182.6 x 182.9 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Anonymous gift 63.1653. © 2007 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

As the slide into full-blown winter solidifies, the concepts of failure and reduction have taken over my thoughts. When one thinks of improvement, of being a “better person”, the tendency is to look at what we lack and emphasize what we can acquire. I feel like I have been caught in this quagmire of acquisition for way too long (perhaps roughly 27 years).

Reduction.
Simplification.
These are my new goals.
By all intensive logic, I want less.
I want to fail.

What does it mean to fail? According to Agnes Martin, failure is a state which exists only when one has exhausted all means and possible courses of action. Failure is a terminal condition–an end of possibilities.

Can one consider it a victory to stop doing something? To cease to acquire? To cease to care? Is that really failure? Or is the act of losing all choice, movement, and flexibility that elusive  apex of liberation I have been searing for?

Just a bit more Agnes and then I am going to call it a night, crawl into bed, and be blissfully unconscious.

“To progress in life you must give up the things you do not like. Give up doing the things that you do not like to do. You must find the things that you do like. The things that are acceptable to your mind.”

I really cannot think of anything I would like more.

MSP - Modern Gem

Everyone has photographic fetishes. And, I have a thing for airports. Maybe it is the intersection of private desire to travel with very public, non-descript, and functional architecture. Or maybe I just like photographing in places where I know my film may be confiscated.

MSP - A Sign of Life

On a recent trip to New York I had the distinct pleasure of flying out of the old, Lindbergh terminal at Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport. It is exceptionally unfortunate what time has done to this ultra-modern, mid-century diamond in the rough. It has been added to seemingly endlessly to the point that one cannot see the front facade through all the parking garages and overpasses. Inside the airport, depressing gates and shopping mall corridors make it seem like a bad 1980s theme park. (Remember the movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles – like that)