Productive day, but in a gab-yap sense. Did the morning news, did the headlines, then off downtown in the cold to interview people about the Vikings game. It’s here. Interviewed a sweet old lady with unnervingly active teeth; couldn’t have been dentures, unless she bought the SnaggleTooth model down at the Wal-Mart. She was named Ethel. Also interviewed some really tall guys who make me look really short, as opposed to just . . . short. So: by one PM I’d done three videos, or rather talked for three videos; the editing and titling fell to our crew of crack technicians. I had a pathetic lunch and went off to write other stuff.
Really, no excuse for a pathetic lunch; I passed many delicious places on the way to the interview, but I knew a sad sack of stuff was waiting in the office fridge. As much as I love the StarTribune building, I sorta kinda wish the Vikings had won, and would have gone on to win the Superbowl. Because then they might have knocked down my workplace to build a new stadium, and we would have moved to new digs, and the entry point for the skyway system wouldn’t be three blocks away. Trust me: on a raw day that’s a disincentive, and I’m not an hour-for-lunch kind of fellow anyway. But oy, the choices. And the people! The goil-watching! The architecture. I love downtown in the skyways at noon, its main thoroughfares, its eddys and backwaters. I remember how grown-up I felt when I first came here. The Big City. Bridges of steel across the street, emptying into the grand plazas. Tall thrusting towers thrusting tall into the sky! Ten, twenty stories! Still peeved we didn’t get a good skyscraper out of the last boom. We got condos, which filled everything out and rehabbed the dead hulks, but there was one big tower that would have stamped the Boom of the Oughts on the skyline, and it was cancelled. (It was a condo.)
I walked around with my little camera, disguising it from suspicious security people by putting it up to my ear now and then, and talking. Because no one talks into a movie camera, right? I hate this paranoia, and I hate the top-down iron-clad rules that just say “no filming” and leave it at that, because it covers all bases and they don’t have to worry that a security guard exercised his own judgment and let a coupe of kids from rural Minnesota film themselves in the big thrilling town. Sorry, policy. I don’t make the rules, I just enforce them with a quiet sense of satisfaction.
Nevertheless, I managed to get something. Non-Minneapolitans may find it interesting – yes, we have double-decker skyways and reasonably tall buildings, including the Rand Tower. Locals are welcome to name, in order, all the places I go. To explain the end: the enormous GOVERNMENT CENTER, where GOVERNING is done, has a subterranean tunnel that leads to a sealed circular enclosure – a waterfall in the summer, a view of the old City Hall in the winter. Beyond that, a tunnel under the street takes you to the City Hall, and thence to the magnificent interior of that gobsmackingly incredible structure.
Here it is.
Later today: Comic Sins, and the start of a new project. Below you will find an entire entry about something else. I broke the Bleat up into two portions, because sometimes they just need to stand alone. Ask the Cheese. He’ll explain.
No, I never understood why the Cheese stood alone, unless it was one of those extrovertedly stinky kinds.
Pass it along, if you wish
33 Responses to Downtown in Winter
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Was that a Sunday? Where are the people? Governing?
Anyone know the name and artist of the song in the video?
I’m glad you were able to get away with videoing in there, almost a “up yours” to the paranoid security people there. I think that’s my faveorite part of the video, that you got away with it. But it also brings me back to when I went to my only visit of the Twin Cities in 1997. Wish Portland ME had skyways, but then our tallest buildings are only one quarter the size of your average height buildings there.
Aha! That vid was all I needed to complete my nefarious plans!
I like to imagine that someday we’ll have cybernetic-prosthetic eyes with a record function available. What will over officious security types do then, huh?
Seriously, am I _really_ the only person in Lileksland that finds the vertical scrolling of the New Bleat to be slower than Brie in a Minnesota January?
Nice video–beautiful building. At first I thought the music was “We’re havin’ a heat wave” a song my friends and I would sing through clenched teeth while running laps during the winter track season (in Long Island, NY). What is the song credit, by the way? I liked it.
Wagner–I don’t have any troubles. I use Safari.
Am I the only person who started counting the days to spring as soon as it was officially winter?
And I live in sunny California – where we’ve had a good soaking rain for oh, the past NINE days.
Only 53 more days…
I think I just decided never to move here. But it’s too late for that.
Great Vid! Love all the skyway shots.
Frypan
Ow. New format hurts my eyes.
Wagner, I don’t have a problem with the vertical scrolling slowness.
I wouldn’t mind having the comments numbered, so I can know where to pick up a thread (hint, hint)
I thought it was Tropical Heat Wave, too. Well, it’s a variation of sorts.
John Cheese stands alone because he’s taller than everyone else.
@RPD: “someday we’ll have cybernetic-prosthetic eyes with a record function available.” – this was how a bad sci-fi film started once, IIRC- it was a Roy Thinness (sp?) movie, and he went to the far side of the Sun in a rocket to discover a twin Earth.
Interesting how the film showed some very beautiful architecture inside. I guess if it is cold and bleak outside, you need that to stay centered.
BTW, James: NO SNOW on the ground here at my Canadian location, nor has there been since Yuletide. But then, my berg is actually further south than yours.
Ah, Minnesota! Diane Ford in one of her 80′s stand-up comedy bits waxed rhapsodic about the place. I think it went something like, “Just imagine the immigrants, leaving the old world, coming here to the new world, to the upper midwest, the one place on earth where the climate was just as bad as the place they left.”
I’ve been to Minnesota a number of times, it was a great place to canoe. Never been there in the winter. Illinois winters were hard enough. I hesitate to go where even more wooly mammoths lumber around in the snow.
Thanks for the tour, James. It’s a wonder you weren’t Tased.
[...] nice video from local writer James Lileks’ blog today, a montage of downtown Minneapolis on a winter’s day. Lots of skyways and office [...]
Y’all need to grow a coastline and a huge ocean off the west side of Minnesota. That way you can get an El Nino winter like we’re having here in Washington State. 40 to 50 degrees and all the rain is moving to Cali.
” It’s a wonder you weren’t Tased. ”
He probably will be next time – now that he’s on their list of dangerous persons
Nice little film, btw. I’d be tickled to work in such abuilding (I’ve always worked in semi-dumps).
BTW, the link to the interview in the first paragraph is not functioning.
At about 1:28 of the video, the singer sings:
“But in the winter, just like the groundhog, I’ll turn into an….”
A what? An ‘endosporn’?
Okay…I googled it. Never mind.
The mistake is trying to film with a tiny little camera. Looks suspicious. The key is a big, honking movie camera, its housing chipped and worn, carried around by someone with a cap and a shirt with some kind of TV-station-related logo on it. Preferably fictional.
Nobody in security looks twice at someone who seems to be an “official” filming person. Of course, you don’t get a lot of candid footage that way either.
Be careful what you wish for James, they’ll bulldoze the Strib building for a stadium and relocate you to the Strib production facilities in North Minneapolis, across the street from semi-vacant warehouse loft-condos.
the story now is that the Howling Wilves don’t want downtown, they want back in the suburbs again. someplace where a kindly government is willing to give them all the land they want and five or six pallets of slightly used 20s to spend as they wish, hopefully on a new stadium for the VileQueens.
that would be in the suburbs of Ghangtzu, China, between the melamine plant and the cadmium smelter. it ain’t going down in Minnesota.
and while there are advantages to having the Minnesota Vikings in Minnesota, the state is five billion in the hole, and as local governments are concerned, Hennepin County Medical Center is desperate enough to maintain their teaching and welfare hospital that they’ve gone begging to nearby counties for cash. got none.
none to get.
so the Strib building is safe, no idling bulldozers waiting for the ink to dry.
I hadn’t considered the Butterfly Effect of Vikings as world champions – new stadium, new digs, goil watching. Whew. All the more reason Favre should have run instead of succumbing to Hamartia (http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/100126&sportCat=nfl).
For a news guy who is forced to cover sports Lileks is still slow to make the connection that NFC Playoff + Fox = No 24 (see Twitter).
sorry, did 24 move to Monday night? It looks like it was on.
“It’s here. Interviewed a sweet old lady with unnervingly active teeth; couldn’t have been dentures, unless she bought the SnaggleTooth model down at the Wal-Mart. She was named Ethel.”
Every so often you hit a sour note in the Bleat along the lines of the above making some innocent that crossed your path into a punchline. It’s probably not smart to make fun of or even speculate about your interviewees teeth on your blog.
Might want to change the title of the Video. If “10-25-10″ is a date, it suggests a certain prescience and a potentially cold Halloween.
I think that 10-25-10 is how they do it in Europe.
Yes, it’s because that puts it in “big-endian” order; Year/Month/Day, biggest unit of time down to smallest unit. The other way (day/month/year) is “little-endian”.
The typical American practice (month/day/year) is like saying that the time is “34:12:2″ to mean the 2nd hour, 34th minute, 12th second.
I wondered about 10-25-10, I guess our author has the ability to time travel. Yeah it will be a crappy halloween in the twin cities.
Walter:
I have the same scrolling problem.
bgbear(roger h):
“24″ has always been on Mondays. They just can’t help annoying you by premiering the season on Sunday(so it’s two nights in a row, to start). And this year, they did two two-hour episodes back-to-back, to start–I very seriously considered not bothering this season.