South 12th

A lousy drug phone photo of a wonderful sight: the Black Dog Cafe, in Lowertown St. Paul. Windsor and Helvetica together!

Memory is not enough.

A few months ago my pal Rebekah was kind enough to send me a few tiny, spiral-bound art books from Chicago called Memory is Not Enough. They are collections of photographs made with 2005-era drug phones, very much like the model that I own (the LG2000, which some cell phone camera connoisseurs have dubbed the “Leica M4 of mid-fi cell phone cameras”) (that link goes nowhere because I made that quote up). 

This morning, I was rushing to catch the bus at Bloomington and Lake, and passed another snowbank that had an empty, dry Little Caesar’s pizza box resting on top of it, very much like Mt. Hoettenreiddie. I didn’t really have time to stop, since I could hear the bus approaching from behind me and I was still a hundred yards from the stop, but I stopped anyway to take a quick shot.

Of course, when I hit the button with the tiny camera embossed on it, the screen flashed this message: “MEMORY IS NOT ENOUGH.”

Damn it! The LG2000 may be the Leica M4 of mid-fi cell phone cameras, but it only holds about 10 images at a time. I couldn’t spare the time to go in and erase one, so I had to stuff the phone back in my pocket and run to catch the bus, leaving Hoettenreidie’s sister peak uncaptured.

Sitting on the bus and thinking about the lost opportunity, I thought then about the poignance of that phrase, “memory is not enough.” I understood why the publishers of Rebekah’s book had chosen it. Memory isn’t enough. Memory is never enough. That’s why you have been unable to go to a party in the past six or seven years without cameras flying out of people’s bags and photos of you ending up on Facebook the next day with your hair looking all crazy and from a not-very-flattering angle. I have certain friends I feel a great deal of anxiety going out with, because I know the whole evening is going to end up documented no matter how awful I look. If it didn’t happen on camera, it’s like it never happened!

So you’ll just have to trust that I passed Hoettenreidie’s sister peak today on the way to the bus, at Bloomington and Lake, without the benefit of photographic documentation. Drawing on memory, I have depicted it below on paper with pen. I will call it Mt. Geringhoettenreidie, which is mangled fake Germano-European for “Little Hoettenreidie” (unless any of our German-speaking readers rule otherwise).

In this instance, the presence of the pizza box is less surprising, since the nearest Little Caesar’s is only nine block away.

Do you think it’s the same party that left the first box, at Dupont and 34th? Was this a set of earlier provisions on their westward journey, consumed in a panic and then abandoned? Frankly, it seems unlikely. But it would be pure hubris to rule it out entirely.

Since the recent blizzard, I’ve talked to at least three separate artists that have been going out taking photos of the enormous four-foot snowbanks that have accumulated between the sidewalks and roads, and are cataloging them in the way one would catalog mountain ranges: names, heights, locations, expeditionary notes.

So I’ve joined them for this one post. This particular range is located at East Lake and Minnehaha, right in front of Town Talk and El Nuevo Rodeo. Of course, the Denny’s in the background ruins the illusion. But it’s a formidable range nonetheless. 

One of the outstanding features of the upper Midwest is that there are no mountain ranges at all; perhaps this is why people must be so moved to create them. One of my favorite parts of watching The Heartbreak Kid recently was the endearingly cavalier attitude the filmmakers (Neil Simon and Elaine May, an ur-East Coast combo if there ever was one) took towards not knowing the most basic specifics of the geography of the film’s Minnesota setting. The most egregious example was when Cybill Shepherd’s character entices Charles Grodin to come up to her family’s cabin “in the mountains.” In the beat following the invitation, I imagined a theater full of Midwesterners laughing. Presumably Neil Simon was thinking of the Canadian Rockies, located a mere 1,300 miles from Shepherd’s character’s house in Minnetonka. 

In tribute to the missing topography of Minnesota, I dub this one “Mt. Shepherd.” 

In Ben Katchor’s The Beauty Supply District, he imagines a character mapping the puddles of New York for a comprehensive atlas. There’s a similarly ephemeral snowbank mountain range atlas imaginable for the Cities during the winter months. It’s not just the peaks that are mappable, either — in traversing the city streets, you’ve probably noticed that there’s a whole geography that also includes passes, as well. Some ranges are more easily passable than others due to cut-outs and foot trails. At an intersection on Chicago Avenue, I found that instead of carving it out entirely, someone had actually carved a little three-step stairway over a particularly icy snowbank onto the street. Three steps off the sidewalk, three more steps onto the crosswalk.

If you come across a particularly inspiring mountain range in your own treks across the cities, take a photo and mark the location with any notes you might have, then send me a note so I can link to it. 

On a semi-related photographic note: are my shitty Bush Administration-era cell phone photos more or less aggravating to you personally than iPhone vintage camera photography applications? Is it a stinging irony that they look even more legitimately analog than a Hipstamatic photo? 

Q: Brother Danny, where did you get those sea foam green shoes? 

A: A place called “Tomorrow’s Fashions Today,” on 4th Street. They were $30. They have them in every color and fifteen different types of snakeskin.

Q: Will you take me to buy some before I go back to Minneapolis?

A: Yes.

Do you remember the blog Falling + Laughing, which seems to have lapsed into a period of inactivity? Last year I was at the airport, which is where I am now, and I saw the above sign. And the first thing I thought was, “If Erik from Falling + Laughing saw this sign, he would take a photograph of it and make a hilarious joke along the lines of CART STOP WONT STOP.” I later emailed him this information, and he confirmed that he would indeed have done this.

Man, I miss that guy. Cart stop, won’t stop. 

Wait, what? I don’t get it. Damn it, New Yorker cartoons never make any sense.