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Night Photography by teucer
February 29th, 2008 9:26 PMThese pictures come from the same nighttime walk as my Anybody Want a Peanut? praxis. On the night these were taken - this past Monday evening - I was staying with a friend who lives in Minneapolis, not very far from Nicollet Mall. I took pictures with strong visual similarities for that completion, but I also took some that were meant only to convey my impression of what Nicollet Mall is like at night - the strange blend of "nighttime in a big city" and "this is an upscale shopping district, and dammit you're going to notice how upscale we are here in Minneapolis even though half of it is places like Panera and McDonald's and Target and Barnes & Noble that you have wherever the hell you're from."
Sculpture
This is a sculpture in front of a church.
Trees
I think of this sort of light on trees as Christmas lights, particularly the colorful ones. Which makes it really jarring to see them on every tree along the street in late February.
The Dakota
The blurriness comes from the fact that I took these pictures without a tripod, and I believe I used a fill flash on this one (which is why they're more vivid and thus legible at the front). But honestly I think the way it makes the letters seem to rush toward you actually puts me in mind of the high-energy bop the place was pumping out onto the street.
Skyways
One of the annoying things about Minnesota is the winter. Luckily, folks know how to deal with it - mostly by walking in enclosed skyways above the streets. They're quite predictable and easy to navigate in most places, which makes the more mazelike parts that much easier to get lost in.
Fountain
It's weird how self-consciously *fancy* Nicollet Mall is. The bus shelters are weird pagoda-like things, the buildings have weird names like "Gaviidae Common", and even relatively ordinary stores surround architectural features like this. Hell, even the Target has a fancy lobby - damn, I really should've gotten a picture of that.
Skyscraper
Minneapolis has a tall downtown. Not quite like New York or something, but it's pretty tall. (The UFO is actually a reflection of the lights in the skyway I took this from, not a We Are Not Alone completion - though one of those is in the pipeline too.)
More skyways
Those two are running parallel to Nicollet, if I remember correctly. Since pretty much every street has skyways over every block, you can get anywhere you want in central downtown Minneapolis without setting foot outdoors - but you'd better know your way around.
Bromeliads
Twice during that stroll I went into the skyway system. This potful of bromeliads in Gaviidae Common - a building Firefox's spellchecker hates the name of, by the way - seemed almost jarring in the cold Minnesota winter. But I liked how they brought a little sense of summertime warmth to the otherwise unreasonable frigidity that lurked just outside the doors.
Light Rail
This is the light rail station on Nicollet Mall. The swoopy architecture is yet another reminder of how self-consciously hip downtown Minneapolis can be at times; I'd say this is mostly a good thing.
9 vote(s)
Jellybean of Thark
5
Not Here No More
5
The Duchess
5
Optical Dave
5
Burn Unit
5
GYØ Ben
5
JTony Loves Brains
5
miss understanding
5
Sushin
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You know, there's plenty of us from Minneapolis who have no delusions about how classy (or otherwise) we are. We who fit that description do tire of people, especially other Minnesotans, who think we think we're all that, as we don't, we are comfortable loving our city as is.
For example, those of us who use the bus know that Nicollet Mall does contain fine dining and a not-unreasonable amount of hoity toityness, but it's also a major arterial connector of buslines and is therefore a kind of sacred location.
Yeah, I'm not saying most Minneapolitans actually fit Keillor's image - but the image the folks that built Nicollet Mall try to convey certainly seems to.
And yes, it's a nice place. It's trying too hard to be one, in my opinion, but that doesn't mean it's failing.
Immediately after voting for this, JTony wrote:
I just voted for another of these Praxii, but I wanted to point something out and also put my vote behind a suggestion. The directions for this task state very clearly, "Explore your neighborhood," which would disqualify the completion I just voted for, and would disqualify others (including the current leader), because the tasks are being performed in a neighborhood the tasker is only visiting.
I think the original intention of the task was for the taskers to find things of interest that the tasker might never notice in the daylight in their own neighborhoods. I think it was originally intended to be about finding the extraordinary at night in what the tasker normally only saw as ordinary in the daylight.
That said, I think the praxis has really only been helped by the fact that folks have chosen to do the task in the extraordinary surroundings in which they find themselves, and I would like to make the following proposal: Please replace the words "your neighborhood" with the words "a neighborhood" and continue the praxis as it has been running. If you choose the neighborhood to be your own, that's awesome. If you choose a different neighborhood, that's awesome, too.
Anyone else have any thoughts?
As the person whose completion you're referring to, I'll actually justify mine a bit. (I figured nobody would complain and that including this unnecessarily would detract from the praxis.)
I'm actually in the middle of a move. My current address is in North Carolina, but this fact will change Real Soon Now. My completion occurred while on a trip to hunt for apartments to live in. So there's a sense in which that praxis captures me in a state of transition, where there's no "my neighborhood" anywhere more permanent than wherever I'm staying at the moment. Which, at the time of the praxis, is about a half-dozen blocks from Nicollet Mall.
That said, in general I'm in favor of the idea of interpreting this as including any neighborhood you've spent enough time in to be familiar with how it looks by day, and taking pictures that show how different it is at night. Night throws all sorts of things into high relief while masking others; I'd say you don't know an area until you've seen both the daytime and nighttime versions of it.
I'm in total agreement, Doctor, and chose to mention the neighborhood issue in the overall discussion so I wouldn't fill up your comment area here (since my real point is that I'd like to see the task directions changed to incorporate all of the praxii that use any night-time neighborhood perambulations as valid fodder). That's also why I voted here first and commented there afterward (to show my support for your completion). Just sayin....
Funny you mention that. Your Peanut completion kinda reminds me of Guy Noir.