land of ten thousand (frozen) lakes.

land of ten thousand (frozen) lakes., originally uploaded by _ambrown.

The Winter Break Coma/Hibernation Period Ends.

Papa Brown and Rilo, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

Hey, Portland. It's been real. This photo is from Thanksgiving Break but it could very well summarize my couple of weeks here at home over the break. My general lackluster, sleep-late-every-afternoon pattern comes to an abrupt end as I valiently attempt to graduate from college and move into "the real world," whatever that is. Sounds very 2010 to me.

But yeah, monday afternoon, Empire Builder-ing to Saint Paul. See you on a bitterly cold, sunny, cheery Saint Paul Wednesday Morning.

2009 in pictures

I did this last year, and I liked the results. I tried to put up photos here that I hadn't published before, but some photos (Carnaval) are just too legendary not to be included in a "Best Of" list. There's a sad dearth of photos post September; I still haven't scanned in all of the film that I've accumulated over the past semester in my photography class, and to be fair at least a few of those shots would otherwise be included. But! Hopefully I don't get too bogged down in 2010 with everything (HONORS/WORK STUDY/SENIOR CAPSTONE/STUDENT GOVERNMENT/AHHHH) and I actually take some photos for fun.

I recently went to Vancouver with Papa Brown, and I want to write about that, and I hope to also blog about how excellent it is that we're done with Decade Zero, but I feel like I missed the boat for opportune timing on those blog entries. Stick with me dear readers; there will always be times at five in the morning when insomnia strikes, and I'll want to throw together a blog entry and tell you how I feel. Worst comes to worst, things'll definitely pick up post graduation.

Until I actually do get the chance to write something heartfelt, meaningful, , reflecting, thoughtful or whatever, I like how my blog has slowly morphed into a cyberscrapbook, a collection of miscellaneous pictures or phrases or thoughts that capture something relevant to my life while I'm procrastinating on doing real work. Expect more ironic wittyisms, flickr photos, and gchat conversations to fill in the gaps. If you're really into that sorta thing, I got addicted to twitter this fall, and on the sidebar you can follow me and my friends.

So long, Oregon., originally uploaded by _ambrown.

Obama is inaugurated as President of the United States of America, Times Square, New York, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

The Summer's Life is Good, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

Third Largest City in the world, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

Carnaval 2009, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

The Last Supper, or at least the last game of snooker, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

Hey buddy., originally uploaded by _ambrown.

Numbers 6, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

Fire on Table Mountain., originally uploaded by _ambrown.

Home sweet home in Langa., originally uploaded by _ambrown.

Raf, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

Football, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

Evenings on the West lake., originally uploaded by _ambrown.

IHPers in Vietnam, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

The hanoi living room project., originally uploaded by _ambrown.

Ihp portraits., originally uploaded by _ambrown.

International Honors Program, Cities in the 21st Century 2009, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

Leeeeean, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

Happy Fourth, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

goal, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

Waldo Lake 2009, originally uploaded by Aaron Michael Brown.

Rilo, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

Montana, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

bridge no 9., s.e. mpls., originally uploaded by _ambrown.

Peter, Chelsea, Joe and Ian, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

hayley loves the cold weather, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

oh hey macbikes, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

The Drive, VANCBC, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

2009 audibly, according to Lastfm: (a reliable source)
1 Bon Iver 1,389
2 Blind Pilot 1,010
3 Frightened Rabbit 516
4 The Rural Alberta Advantage 438
5 The Weakerthans 427
6 The National 418
7 Death Cab for Cutie 402
8 Barenaked Ladies 354
9 Horse Feathers 313
10 Red House Painters 276

not cold enough

not cold enough, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

Pathways

Pathways, originally uploaded by _ambrown.

The snow doesn't discriminate about the built environment the way that we do. Our cities are built with such hard-and-fast rules; sidewalks are for people, streets are for cars, lawns are for the people who own them and the dogs who pee wherever they want. The actual topography of the "built environment" that lies beneath the rest of the built environment is meticulously regulated with curbs, paint, gutters, bus stops, and all sorts of little differentiated quirks designed to completely segregate cars and pedestrians, to inhabit different spaces in some modernist appeal for "order" to our streets to ensure cars can get from point A to B as fast as possible with no hindrance from other road users. In the name of "efficiency," we've denotated every square inch for its optimal use, with the clear intended goal of forcing us to see our landscape as a mosiac of private versus public space, natural versus manmade, safe versus unsafe, cars versus people.

And yet, the snow doesn't ever care. It's still early in the season, so I'm still giddy when I see it's going to snow eight inches or whatever, but even when the winter has long worn out its welcome on those awful Minnesota-in-April mornings, a big dumping of snow gives one quite the opportunity to watch the ways that we reinforce these divisions of our landscape even when you can't see the literal lines in the sand. It's 11:30 at night right now, and the municipalities are eagerly firing up their snow plows, getting ready to clear the arterials and restore the sense of order to the streets by pushing all of nature's residue out of the way so we can carry on about our lives, almost uninterrupted. But before they do, before the snow plows and the adventurous drivers attempt to recarve out their space in our Twin Cities, in the midst of the big snowfall the snow fall is uniform, evenly distributed across space. There's no curbs, no busy streets, no tangible way to tell the neighbors property line from mine. It's just....shared, untouched, open space. As a livable streets advocate, its so fascinating to watch studded tires and footprints and snowblowers reprioritize and categorize streets into streets and sidewalks into sidewalks, because in my mind the process shows just how intrinsically we understand and reconstruct our urban form to be split into separated use, even in the spaces between houses. When there's enough snow on the ground, you can walk right down the middle of the street; why not? Who's going to stop you? And you can look back and see exactly the trail you've left, and above the crunchy sounds of your boots gripping the ice you can look out and see nature attempt to remind us that all these divisions we've created for ourselves are a product of our own imagination, our own internal mandate, and that maybe, somehow, things could be different; those busy streets could maybe be used for recreation not just during the epic snowball fight but year round, that minor street might work better if it was only for bicycles, our front yards could form a linear park of shared space connecting the smoke shop to the laundromat to the corner pub.

Until then, the paths left in the snow instead just leave vestigial reminders of the way we're moving through our spaces, the ways we understand the spaces around us. And just like our dissipating breath that escapes quickly into the crisp cloudless night sky, the snow forces us to see that we're here, that we've left a mark, that our presence was noticed, that this isn't for naught, that we're alive, that tangibly the world remembers everything we do.

semester is winding down...

We recognize the present
Is half as pleasant
As our nostalgia for
The past'll be presented
Recast and reinvented
Until it's how we meant it

rilo brown.

rilo brown., originally uploaded by _ambrown.

Tomorrow is the first day of the last month of the last year of the first decade of the twenty first century.

If you think that's weird, think about where we were December 1st, 1999, and how far away that seems. What on earth will we be up to December 1st 2019? I'll be 31 years old then! We could be driving subarus around subdivisions by then, cursing under our breath while trying to fit the baby seat into the back of the car, frustratingly late for whatever jobs/grown up responsibilities/important life moments have replaced the current barrage of student government meetings and honors project papers. It's kind of baffling, really, to think that 2000-2010 has been an era of pure adolescence and relatively consequence-free growing up, and that somehow the turning of the decade represents a seismic shift in all of that.


ISN'T RILO CUTE OH MY GOD

In Transit

Somehow, on an entire 737 full of eager travelers, it appears that only two passengers managed to miss the plane, and the stars somehow aligned so that their empty seats sit to my right and left here in 21B. The cabin is sealed, we take off from the earth, and I slide over to the window seat, disappointed that the low cloud cover prevents me from observing the fractal-road patterns of suburban Minneapolis. My last site of the frozen tundra landscape was of an arterial interstate cloverleaf, shaped with an oddly calming geometry that ensures commuters and thanksgiving travelers headed towards Apple Valley will make their transfer from 694 to 35W with efficiency and expedience.

Does it make me an asshole if I put my back against the airplane window, now feeding the plane with harsh, 35000 elevation North Dakota sunlight, and stretch my awkward, no-longer-adolescent-but-not-quite adult legs out across 21B and C? At what point won’t I get away with this youthful sort of self indulgence anymore? I admittedly feel a bit of guilt knowing how packed in the rest of the passengers are, after watching a larger woman who is also at least 200 years old attempt to fit her purse into the overhead bin and then struggle with the confines of the middle seat.

With any luck, when I surprise my mom and my sister by showing up in Portland this afternoon (no, I didn’t actually end up going to Lincoln, Nebraska), these could be the most expensive smile I’ve ever procured.

I am Seattle bound, before my final destination in Portland. Longtime, astute readers with impeccable memory might think this beleaguered attempted at travel writing and waxing nostalgic about places and hurtling across the country all sounds a little familiar; travelling home for thanksgiving invokes a very sharp, particular set of emotions that are often coupled with surprising clarity. I think thanksgiving inspires me because it is here, under the auspices of blaring, inane Headline News and airport-priced Caribou Coffee that an entire country attempts to rearrange itself, to head the primal, instinctual desire to spend six hundred dollars for a reaffirmation of the definition of home, of family, of belongingness.  Logistics, practicality, finances be damned; its thanksgiving, dammit, and those with the means are honestly willing to bear almost any cost for those moments of authenticity, of candlelit turkey-and-cranberry-relish dinner, of help eating the leftovers, of arguing with friends whether Jeremy Masoli is going to take the Ducks to the Rose Bowl. Tin cans full of people are vaulting across the country, soaring over deserts and shopping malls and mountains and parking lots. Minneapolis/St Paul’s airport bristles with activity; the gates are lit up with fluorescents, with dreary televisions neatly lined up to herald the name of a deindustrialized Midwestern metropolitan region at which each flight intends to arrive. I’d like quite a bit to be an astronaut aboard that space shuttle right now, the one NASA keeps tweeting about, looking down on a tumultuous continent full of people that decided today they’d make the journey to someplace, somewhere, someone they call home. You could look down on the Twin Cities, glowing with red interstates lines heading east and west and north and south to Chicago and Fargo and Duluth and Iowa, and even more red lines as planes from around the country hop and skip their way into the airport and out, hub and spokes, a whole country interconnected by the Dwight D Eisenhower Interstate System and cheesy United Airlines Commercials and a solemn yearning to dedicate a day of the year for commitment to family, place, and belonging.

Much like the beginning of the end of senior year of high school, it really does hit me in the most unexpected and unfavorable times just what it means and how serious it is that my time at Macalester is drawing to a close. Last week it was the belated-diwali dinner, where I had been sent on photography assignment, a handful of Southeast Asian students and their friends reaffirming some commitment to multiculturalism or perhaps a connection of a home of their own. The lights of Macalester’s science building’s atrium are dimmed, and behind the silhouettes of girls clothed in dresses the colors of glamorous foreign spices and the lingering caterers who aren’t sure when to leave begins the slideshow. I should admit that even with Macalester’s small size and my perchance for both meeting people and facebook stalking, I’m only acquaintances at best with many of the students in attendance, and I contemplate leaving the dinner while students fumble with the AV chords that never, ever, ever seem to work correctly. Yet the slideshow starts, and the crowd oohs and ahhs with the pictures that commemorate the seniors who are leaving and have helped through the MASECA events in the past. It was as though I have been unable to truly grasp what any of graduating and “real-worlding” and moving on from so many stages of my life actually mean to me, but that the sight of vaguely familiar students sharing a warm moment of acknowledgement at the ritual, coming of age, the beauty of friendship, that make me wonder if I should be having these moments of my own.

“The radio would be turned on, full of love songs and rock music; we believed the rock music but I don’t think we believed in the love songs, either then, or now. Ours was a life lived in paradise and thus it rendered any discussion of transcendental ideas pointless. Politics, we supposed, existed elsewhere in a televised non-paradise; death was something similar to recycling.

Life was charmed but without politics of religion. It was the life of children of the children of the pioneers- Life after God – a life of earthly salvation on the edge of heaven. Perhaps this is the finest thing to which we may aspire, the life of peace, the blurring between dream life and real life – and yet I find myself speaking these words with a sense of doubt.

I think there was a trade-off somewhere along the line. I think the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched. And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God.

But then I must remind myself we are living creatures – we have religious impulses – we must­ – and yet into what cracks do these impulses flow in a world without religion?”

   -Life After God, Douglas Coupland

So far, by far, the best night of the semester has got to be the Zombie Pub Crawl. I guess the Geography Progressive might make a close second.

I’ve over a year removed from some of the darker, rougher times in my life. It’s an odd thing to be nostalgic for – the gritty, cold insomniatic depression best immortalized in my memory as a collection of images of trudging through snow with inundated sneakers, coughing and wheezing in a cold bed, and the sight of a frozen Mississippi River from the window of an airport-bound 84 bus that I would swear away as a parched tundra to be forgotten. The homework was hard, the breakup was harder, the doubt of self was hardest. Maybe nostalgia isn’t the right word for it, but I’m left wondering about the authenticity of emotion, at least after having finished this Coupland book on the flight. This semester has been pretty tough for me as well, in terms of the amount of imported Stumptown Coffee beans needed to keep me awake/functional and in terms of the hours of student government meetings and textbook readings required of this semester. But now, after a whirlwind tour and yet another set of rearrangements, I… well, I’m chugging along quite nicely. But it is odd to miss the severity of those emotions, even if they weren’t positive ones.

To come back to this whole waxing nostalgic for travel thing: I think it’s only here, in Montana, whether on eastbound I90 with a friend like I did this summer or six miles above it heading westbound, participating in the ritual act of being physically between two places and two worlds, it is here that it is possible to truly understand how we are travelling throughout the rest of our lives anyway. It’s only on this precipice between Minnesota and Oregon, a bumpy six hour trek above time zones  and Marlboro man cowboys, that it becomes so abundantly clear how much of the rest of my life right now is defined by intellectual, and emotional movement. It’s here, waiting for the Rocky Mountains to spring up from the unassuming Tattooine foothills, that retrospection encourages an honest assessment of how little is constant  and how applying for a job in New York isn’t just A New Thing in life but potentially The Next Thing in life. It’s over my plastic glass of ginger ale, with airplane ice cubes that routinely don’t pass health inspections for water quality, that my ruminations on navigating through space on a bicycle on an Alley Cat race aren’t all that different from my ruminations on navigating through my own desires, plans, and concerns for life. It’s all about constantly dodging obstacles, whether its roadkill in the Fairview Avenue bike lane or young children darting in front of you on the airport’s peoplemover or the eminent threat of leaving Macalester or escaping loneliness.

All of this for a little bit of my mom’s Watergate salad. 

Okay, enough of this. I have three full seats on this aisle to take advantage of, and I’m still pretty tired from those almost-all-nighters for the Ecology Lab and Econ paper earlier this week. Updates of my time in thanksgiving to follow, maybe.

I'm running out of stumptown coffee.

Papers that someone should write, as compiled by Sir Alexander Harry Leeding and Aaron Brown via gchat

me: "Occupying the cracks in the Urban Streets: Ben Gibbard and the Urbanization of Young White Emo Americans"

4:38 PM "Wondering What's Buried Underneath: The Narrative of Urban Infrastructure"

  oh god i could go on forever

 Alex: "The Skyline Looked Like Crooked Teeth: How the Resistance of LEED-certified building has Ruined the 21st Century Urban Ecosystem

4:39 PM  21st Century Towers: The Search For Affordable Condo Living in Inner Cities

 me: "Taking Nicollet to the 494: The Hold Steady and the Right to the City"

4:40 PM "Meet me at the Construction Site: Placemaking in Winnipeg with The Weakerthans"  ____

8:44 PM Alex: I Missed the Exit to Your Parents House Hours Ago: How The Interstate Freeway System Contributed to a Half Decade of Suburban Depression

 me: winnar

8:47 PM Alex: thank you. held onto that for a couple of hours. thought it up on the metro ride home

 

  me: In the back of the grey subcompact: the sexualization of the automobile in 1980s america

 Alex: oh nice

8:55 PM Searching for Some Legal Documents: An Analysis of the Evolution of Storage Space in the Modern Automobile

8:56 PM me: The air of railroads is making the same sounds: urban memory and nostalgia in a postmodern age

 Alex: Spinsters All Around Us Making Notes: The Evolution of Modern Telecommunications

8:57 PM me: There'd be no distance that could hold us back: Ruminations on spatial geography and urban narrative

9:00 PM Alex: ill come up with something.

9:01 PM me: i'm looking over my itunes and i feel i'm out

9:02 PM there's at least a dozen good ones for we will become silhouettes

  and brand new colony is almost too explicitly easy

 Alex: this place is a prison as well

  the postal service is far to heteronormative

 

10:58 AM me: its this old asbestos building

 Alex: killing all yall softly

10:59 AM me: ECONOMIC EXTERNALITY

 Alex: oh noes

11:00 AM FARRA

7 minutes

11:07 AM Alex: fun fact, i am in the same metropolitan area as john farra. i could theoretically run into him at any time

11:08 AM me: ITS ALWAYS POSSIBLE

  your goal this year has to be to buy him a drink

 Alex: maybe a shot

  that way i wouldnt have to make small talk with him

11 minutes

11:20 AM Alex: ONLY ONE IN THE OFFICE

  KING OF MY DOMAIN

  I OWN THIS COMPANY

11:21 AM me: CEO LEEDING

  TRADING PUBLICLY

 Alex: STOCK MARKATS

11:22 AM i should just lock up

5 minutes

11:27 AM me: i just noticed my entire office is empty too

 Alex: LETS MERGE

 me: they are all freaking out about something and i don't know what and suddenly everybody dissapeared

  advertise macalester while placing foreign exchange students

 Alex: CORPARATE ACQUISISHUNS