My walk to the polls, a photo journal

 

In all my photography here on clerkmanifesto, I am ever at pains to show you the most remarkable, striking possible representations of the world I encounter. And that's fine. But it doesn't necessarily get to the day to day of what my world exactly looks like.

So for today's photo essay, one documenting my walk to go vote in a minor election in Saint Minneapolis, I resolved to take relatively random pictures along my way, and to leave those pictures largely untouched in the post processing. Does this provide for the most compelling of my photography? Perhaps not. But in walking along, grabbing pictures of anything that caught my eye, I am doing something a little different, maybe laying a foundational understanding for the more compelling and scenic photography you are accustomed to encountering here at clerkmanifesto.

So, come with me on my walk to go vote in the 2023 election, where the murky shreds of democracy are barely visible and even in the most Democratic of cities, people still make terrible choices.

My neighborhood is riddled with alleys, and as I start out my walk I wind through them. It's a bit rough along the garages and back fences. But sometimes there will be a bit of charm to some small gate back there, and so when I saw this white picket inspired archway, I took my first pic:

Here's another back gateway along the same alley:

Halloween is over, but not all the decorations are down. I found this out in the abandoned fringe of someone's yard.

At least, I assume it's a Halloween decoration!

Out on the stately main streets I caught a couple of wild animals gamboling along the front lawns. I guess during the weekdays the neighborhoods get so quiet the wildlife emerges from the nearby river wilds.

Here I've made it onto the local college campus with a large seating area going unused because of the apocalypse and everything. Just kidding about the apocalypse. It's not like there are elephants wandering through! I think everyone is just in class.

This is near the stately main entrance to the campus.

This is looking back across the street at that main entrance of the last photo. We'll be turning camera right here. But this is a good illustration of everything in this journey: It's all kind of pretty, but so pointlessly spread out in its stupid American way that it's weirdly half abandoned and so can't regularly support commercial ventures in walkable ways.

But I digress.

Finally we are getting close to the polling place, as suggested by the parking set aside. We have left the main campus, but this college has spread far from its original center and out into significant campuses in the neighborhood. 

I came across these two guys! I wonder if they'll be voting too!

Here's the entrance to my voting place!

This is as much of the interior of my polling place as I have to show you today. I was feeling a bit circumspect about taking pictures of the polling place, though, come to think of it, I don't really know why. It's not like they're secret.

I voted:

 No. No. NO NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! 

But it all happened anyway.

Outside, not far away, is this terrific bronze sculpture by a local artist who's heyday was back in the nineties. I forget their name, but I think they still have a store on Franklin Avenue. They are seriously underappreciated, but whimsy always is. 

Oh lord, don't I know it!

Here are some less good sculptures, not that they are bad- these of corrugated steel and sheet metal cutouts.

This is even better with the steel, and it has a book theme! 

And animals like to play on it!

And then finally we come to this handy passthrough of yet another university building. It is one of the things I appreciate about this University's design. This will nicely send me on my way to the river where we can resume tomorrow!

Little foxes

 

After an Autumn full of deer, I have not found my Winter to be nearly as rich in wildlife sightings. And so it was with especial joy that, in walking down a long, snowy alley in my neighborhood, I spotted two scrappy little wild creatures.

"Foxes!" I glee'd softly to myself in delight. Then I began hurriedly preparing my camera. 

These small animals were still pretty far away, clearly cautious, and on the move. But I hoped to get some kind of picture if I could. I aimed the camera as fast as I was able, and I cranked the zoom...

Oh. 

Cats.

Not foxes, cats.

Well, I have no complaint.

The two of them dashed into the backyards before I could get anywhere near them. But I hooked around to the front of those houses and found one of the cats already settling in for a snooze on a front stoop.

More adventures of the flower spy

A villain roams these neighborhoods, a villain like no one has ever seen before. And who will stop him?

The Police?

Oh no. They are too busy beating up the people protesting about the police beating up people.

Vigilantes?

No. The vigilantes are storming the Statehouse to demand their god given right to contract and spread deadly viruses. 

Sorry. It makes more sense if you're one of them.

How about the National Guard? I heard they called up the National Guard.

No. They just march around comically in their vintage WWI "Doughboy" Uniforms looking like they wouldn't hurt a fly.

Who will stop this villain then?

Alas there is no one. 

He roams at will.

Law and order has broken down.

Look! There he is now! Walking down the sidewalk with his camera like, like, like you can just do that!

"Hey, what are you doing down there?"

"Oh, sorry. I was just photographing your flowers."

"My flowers?"

"Yeah. This is a super close up lens."

"Oh. I just, uh, wondered what you were doing down there."

Ha ha ha! Wonder all you like. You cannot stop him. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood dimmed tide is loosed! Who will stop him?

The Governor?



The Governor will stop him?



Oh my sweet Summer child. The ceremony of innocence is drowned.



The Governor's yard is next!

Pandemic jukebox 2

One Summer evening in the St. Anthony Park neighborhood of St. Paul, in the 1990's, my wife and I went out to sit on the front steps of the four-plex Queen Anne house we lived in. Someone was playing music really loud. We could hear it reverberating through the ground in that way that overemphasizes the bass and drums and makes it hard to pick out the singing and melody. But at some point we were able to pick out that it was R.E.M.

"Who would play this so loud?" We asked each other.

Then "How could anyone play it so loud like this?"

And then the other strange, wonderful shoe dropped.

We lived a mile or two from a stadium where a popular minor league baseball club played at the time- Midway Stadium. The place also sometimes hosted concerts. We saw Bob Dylan there once with Ani Difranco. And once, one Summer evening in the St. Anthony Park neighborhood of St. Paul, in the 1990's, my wife and I went out to sit on the front steps and we heard R.E.M. playing there live in a way that mysteriously carried through the humid air all the way to us.

This was that time!

And all of that is to introduce what I firmly believe is the greatest music video ever made. Of course I adore the song, but to bring it to film and actually deepen it is an astonishing act of art.

If you've never seen it the subtitles may throw you at first, as I think they maybe did me. They are not accidentally there. Stick with it.

I hope you like it:


Everybody Hurts

Benefit of the Doubt

Readers and Neighbors:


Last night it snowed for a long time. But oddly, towards morning, the temperatures warmed a little. The snow turned to rain. And so by the time I went for a mid morning walk in my neighborhood much of the city was wallowing in two or three inches of pure, icy slush. It was extremely unpleasant to walk in. In fact, one couldn't exactly walk in it, it was more like stepping, or picking ones way through.

So that's what I did. And instead of ruminating on high things, you know, like birds or, er, the top parts of trees, as is my nature on leisurely walks, I ruminated unavoidably on the condition of the sidewalks. Many of them were in very bad shape for walking, but a few had been shoveled clear and were quite passable. 

I judged. I identified the guilty. And I handed out dispensations and condemnations.

The area where I walked today has apartment buildings, a few modest houses, and many really huge and fancy houses in shiny condition. Only the main streets had been plowed and I was forced to the sidewalks. But the streets revealed the first sinners: Public Works, also known as the city. They also got the first, tentative dispensation. Though guilty, I could forgive them for awhile because the snow falls everywhere at once and it takes time to get to everything. I was willing to give them a morning pass at least.

I was not, however, willing to give any sort of pass to the Apartment sidewalks. As a renter, after all, isn't that something I'm paying for? Isn't the ratio of renters to sidewalk incredible high? I doubt there could be more than five or ten feet of sidewalk per renting apartment where I live. I'm disinclined to give businesses, the most likely in our capitalist culture to lack any humanity, any allowances. Their cost in doing this right is small and they will take allowances here strictly as exploitable weaknesses rather than understanding gifts. However, and this is important, the apartment buildings, including mine, had been almost entirely shoveled and were the best places to walk of my whole journey.

Which brings us to the other end of the spectrum, the more humble houses. There were not a lot of these along my way, and they ran about fifty-fifty, some shoveled, some not. I did not want to forgive those which let me down, but I understand it's hard to work, and deal with the holidays, and get up early enough to shovel. Plus it was an odd snow, hard to make sense of, and we'll just hope these people who can't really afford to pay anyone to do it for them will manage to get their act together for the next snow.

Which brings us to the final and greatest offenders, the opulent houses, those all well cared for, full of brick and paved stone drives, many with half a dozen bathrooms, one with a tennis court, many sporting high up river views. All these pretty, million dollar houses were, but for a scarce few exceptions, not shoveled at all.

This, I'm afraid, is unforgivable. Every one of these houses shows signs of work from the last five years that had to have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. More than one place I passed is adding some monumental wall, or a seventh bedroom at a level of style that surely costs more than the whole house my wife and I just sold. These homeowners have every tool at their disposal to clear their sidewalks, from shovels made out of diamonds, to drivable sidewalk snowblowers stored in their own beautiful, heated brick sheds, all the way to simply paying some company an amount of money they could hardly miss from their lavish budgets to keep their sidewalks in ever perfect condition.

To those millionaire homeowners I offer no dispensation, but, if you are one of them, you will see that I did wrap this note around a brick and throw it through your front window.



Happy New Year,



F. Calypso

Demographics for fun

Up and down the streets and river and creek of my neighborhood, driving the breadth of the Twin Cities in all the wild and mundane pursuits of 27 years of my adulthood, and relentlessly out with the teeming public at the front desk of my large, public library where I work for a living, I feel I have come to know my city with some level of detailed knowledge. So when I am hiking along the Mississippi River in South Minneapolis, in front of the river road houses there all costing between 800,000 and 1.5 million dollars, and I see a lawn sign that says:

I love my Muslim neighbors

while I am right in recognizing the impulse towards decency driving the planting of said sign, I am also quite correct in thinking:

You don't have any Muslim neighbors.

Dog and cats: the rapproachement

During my accustomed walk today a group of dogs were barking. There were four of them in the front corner of a chain-link fenced yard. They were upset and making a racket. But they weren't barking at me. I was across the street, coming from down the street and they were barking ferociously at a man who was on their side coming from up the street. 

There was a little dog, a medium small dog, a medium large dog, and a big dog. They were all insensible with fury, wild with some kind of doggish alarm and their varying voices combined together in an entirely unmusical way.

I did not like it. I thought bad things about the dogs because I am inclined, unless given specific information to the contrary, to think poorly of dogs.

But these dogs were very much not barking at me, they were barking at some man. And I had a moment of reconsideration.

What if the dogs knew something bad about the man. What if, with their acute animal instincts, they indeed knew something truly horrible about that man? What if they were desperate to alert everyone to the terrible things they sensed about this person.

What could be so horrible about a man to warrant such an outcry?



What if they knew the man did not like cats?

Yeah, I know you

I am not particularly good with people's names. I don't learn them quickly, but I understand that that's more a function of my will than my brain. When introduced to people I don't immediately start memorizing their name in my head. I don't make the necessary point of remembering who they are.

But there are a lot of repetitions in the library I work at. There are hundreds and hundreds of people I see at least a couple of days each week. Out on the public side of things many of my interactions with patrons involve access to names, checking names, and typing names into a computer. So though by nature I am not a networker, and by what I value I am no great recollecter of names, by vocation I know great numbers of people around here, all throughout the library, by their names and faces, some of them even without any real personal connection.

This is great for magic tricks.

My favorite magic tricks work best with our thriving collection of middle aged and older, lone, crusty, male patrons.

I don't profess to know much of the personal details from this collection of people. I'm sure it's diverse enough in its psychology, circumstance, and income. But by their very category certain things about them are true. They have a lot of free time (they must have to be at the library so much). Their social relationships are limited (I see them often. They are by themselves at all times and are rarely seen talking to or with anyone else). And they operate in their own orbits (working on idiosyncratic personal projects of their own). From these facts I can guess that they are not used to being known, recognized, or considered a part of things. All of this is a guess about them, but I suspect that it is true often enough.

So if someone turns in a lost library card, or perhaps some other name-labeled thing, and I know the man it belongs to, I can often find them in the library, albeit with some searching, and, without ceremony, hand it to them. Astonishment fills their eyes. "You know who I am?" They ask, befuddled, baffled, slightly amazed.

"Of course."

Oh I love that trick.

Squirrel neighborhood

I live in a neighborhood of squirrels. It is the squirrels' neighborhood, and I and all my human neighbors are mere aliens, landed in our houses like spaceships, separate from the world as if the very outside air is hostile to us. I think I live in a neighborhood of humans, but that's an act of simple human prejudice. I look around and see house after house, I see cars, I see roads and sidewalks and all creations of people, and of course I think it's a neighborhood of humans. But I don't actually see many people. I see squirrels.

There in the trees and the grass, on the roads and the roofs and the high wires and fences. There is a squirrel sleeping on a branch and one coming out from under a shed. Any objective count will tell you it is the home of squirrels. The squirrels, who are far better at being objective than people, would also tell you that it is the home of squirrels, if they could talk, which maybe they can and maybe they can't. A census taker too would tell you it is the home of squirrels, but only if they deigned to count squirrels, which is really the key here.

Through the windows of houses I can see a few sad dogs looking longingly on. A cat or two wanders a porch. Rarely I pass a neighbor by, or see one sliding past me in the glassed in bubble of a car. Perhaps flesh to flesh contact with Squirrel Neighborhood would pollute that delicate driver. The squirrels wind under the wheels of the speeding car, only rarely making a tragic mistake. We won't count the squirrels that made a tragic mistake. Birds come in waves. Sometimes there is a storm of crows, sometimes a bucketful of thrushes on a single tree, but go ahead and add up all the numbers, count up all the creatures. We will count that guy we can just barely see through a window, making pancakes in his little kitchen. We will count this stoned looking raccoon, perched over a storm drain in the middle of the day, worrying us. We will count the bunny meditating in the grass ignoring the wind. We will count me and that cat and that old man and the weird thing he has at the end of his leash. We will count everyone. 

It is a lot of counting. 

And every time it's the squirrels that come out on top. The squirrels predominate no matter how we add it up, no matter how we stack or divide. They win even when we figure that we might have counted the same squirrel three or four times, which is easy to do. This is the world of the squirrel.

And so it's a good thing they don't seem to mind us.