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.
Maybe every other American movie shouldn’t be based on a comic book. Other countries will think Americans live in an infantile fantasy land where reality is whatever we say it is and every problem can be solved with violence.
My life so far has been centered around a type of “chain migration.” I started off in a small town (Kearney, NE pop. 24,000), moved to a slightly larger area (Lincoln, NE pop 225,000), and ended up in the Twin Cities Metro (pop 3,200,000). Apparently, somewhere along the way I lost the innovation and skill necessary to appreciate the poetic elements of life in a rural area. As anyone that has lived away from a major population center can attest, being able to stimulate your mind in an environment lacking stimulus is an immense gift.
Perhaps the most poignant of all of the entertainment endeavors I happened to engage in while living in a small place was my search for a gay community. In Kearney there was nothing except for the late-night cruising grounds in Harmon Park. In Lincoln, I was upgraded to 1 gay bar: the less-than-lovely (as in hepatitis) Q Bar.
While traveling through rural Waterloo, Iowa over the Fourth of July weekend, I decided that there was no better way to celebrate our nation’s (and my own) independence than to go to a small-town gay bar.
Kings and Queens was the aptly appointed name of the joint. It smelled of mold from the last time the Cedar River flooded downtown. There were no decorations, just a bar, a few stools, and (on the evening of a drag show) a full buffet of Hy-Vee cookies. To be inside of the small town gay bar is to transport oneself out of all contexts and into a vacuum-like abnormality of a bar. Think something like a John Waters film (The “Pelt Room” from “Pecker” comes immediately to mind).
There’s something beautiful in all of this. And, if one is patient, signs of that underlying beauty will eventually surface. In this case, I was fortunate enough to see a young woman, in a wheel-chair, dancing/wheeling her heart out in a rhine-stone studded wheel chair.
A great site that is holding my attention hostage this morning. Check it out for a variety of fresh perspectives on one of the most important issues in the contemporary city. Few sites I have come across investigate what makes public spaces successful, desirable, and heavily used in the same way that Project for Public Spaces does. Joy.
And bit more of failed public space from my own travel experiences.
Life is good and I’m enjoying myself. What can I say? I’m completely spellbound by the new wall shelves that my friend Christopher Pole is going to build for me and I’m also salivating at the thought of getting out of MPLS for a while.
On a recent trip to Barnes & Noble, Curtis and I came across the Mystery Science Theater 3000 box sets. Wow. Talk about taking me back to my youth. For a second, I had bad acne and felt like I was back in my family’s basement watching the Sci-Fi Channel. Anyway. As we were watching The Touch of Satan, it occurred to me that there has to be greater critical depth to this program.
In a past post, I remarked that I thought the FOX animated television show Family Guy might be an apex of late Postmodernism. After watching MST3K again, I believe that it represents yet another facet of Postmodernism coming to fruition. Where Family Guy represents the splintering, mish-mashing, and appropriation of aspects of contemporary culture to create a new whole, one could argue that MST3K indicates another core part of postmodernism in visual culture: questions of authorship.
I couldn’t help but notice that the commentary introduced by Mike, Tom Servo, and Crow acts both as a humorous (exceptionally, even) device, and also, as a means of redrawing the narrative of the film as it unfolds. It is fascinating to watch the linear format of a bad film be verbally cut up, digested, and wittily put back together into something better.
I’ve been reading through Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety. It is truly a great book that accurately describes the pressures of being an individual alive in our current historical period. It’s true: we are infinitely wealthier than those who lived before us… but the accumulation of wealth and comfort in no way has translated into greater happiness.
Check out this video segment from Botton’s broadcast on his book.
After a long weekend of phlegm, I’m back in action. I was riding in my buddy Mike’s car on an errand at work and the topic of cool new ads and the Walker’s hosting of the British Advertising Awards came up.
What does it mean when the most interesting parts of a society’s visual culture are advertisements? I’m asking this in lieu of both the Brit’s advertising foray’s and also the Adicolor series from Adidas. For the most part, there seems to be a distinct lack of products (aside from the following VW commercial) -but- these ads seem to go beyond the touchy-feely, emotional adverts of the 90s.
Lets take for example the Cabury advert of a Gorilla playing the drum sequence in the Phil Collins’ song “In the Air Tonight”. The advertisment has nothing to do with the crappy chocolate from Cadbury… but… I can’t stop watching the ad. Taken a step further… apparently the studio that owns the rights to the song has prevented it from being included in versions of the ad posted to You Tube. So, the gorilla ad runs… without Phil Collins.
The result is something akin to a piece of video art you could find in any white cube gallery. (Embedding has been disabled… you’ll have to… click)
A different side of the coin: What happens when a social fabric (in this case a city) decides to openly reject advertisements? The city of Sao Paulo, Brazil decided last year to ban outdoor advertisements. Photographer Tony de Marco has been documenting the city’s empty billboard structures…
From Tony de Marco's FLICKR
My next question: If visual advertisements are banned – how have the advertisers retaliated? Is all advertising product placement? Word of mouth? Do people “randomly” break into the Coke jingle in order to sell soda?
