20.3.10
7.3.10
mspdx.
Quiet night, originally uploaded by _ambrown.
Burnside Bryant
Couch Colfax
Davis Dupont
Everett Emerson
Flanders Fremont
Glisan Girard
Hoyt Humboldt
Irving Irving
Johnson James
Kearney Knox
Lovejoy Logan
Marshall Morgan
Northrup Newton
Overton Oliver
Pettygrove Penn
Quimby Queen
Raleigh Russell
Savier Sheridan
Thurman Thompson
Upton Upton
Vaughn Vincent
Wilson Washburn
Xerxes
Yorke
Zenith
26.2.10
10.2.10
11.1.10
The Winter Break Coma/Hibernation Period Ends.
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.
3.1.10
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.
Obama is inaugurated as President of the United States of America, Times Square, New York, 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
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.
Obama is inaugurated as President of the United States of America, Times Square, New York, 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
11.12.09
10.12.09
Pathways
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.
8.12.09
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
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