Corny and Cheesy
more postcards
Traveling east to Wisconsin last year, I wasn’t really prepared for all the cheesiness. Going west into the Dakotas this year, I was greeted with much corniness. So, one might say that Minnesota is located at the intersection of corny and cheesy.
The tradition of ice palaces in St. Paul goes back to 1886, and I suspect whole corn palace phenomenon is related. According to some piece of tourist literature I can’t find right now, this corn palace had some competition from another, perhaps earlier, corn palace in Dubuque. But the Iowa corn palace has long since faded from memory, leaving the corniness crown in the hands of Mitchell, South Dakota.
At least it makes for interesting postcards. The swastikas on the 1907 palace are quite striking.
June 23, 2006 12:01 AM | Comments (1)
The Strangest Mall
Tuesday Morning Fever
Minneapolis' Finest
BBQ & Blues Festival, Minneapolis
Just Looking
St. Paul from on high
Shooting photographs is a strange addiction. Even after returning home, I can’t stop. I tell myself that it’s research. As Jenny Edbauer phrased it in another RSA panel, “documentary is a method of inquiry.” There are several more RSA panels I want to record reactions to, but I can’t seem to stop obsessing about pictures.
I remembered a project that stalled from last year at this time photographing arcades. I hadn’t photographed the world’s first climate-controlled indoor shopping mall yet. That was easy to fix. There’s a lot more to say, of course. But just in case time runs short, here’s the preliminary set.
*The Minnesota Historical Society has a nice set of vintage images of Southdale Center online.
Red Hot Art
Took a few hours to go to Red Hot Art. A Flickr set resulted. I’ve relapsed into a dangerous picture-making habit. The seductive part about digital photography is that it is relatively inexpensive. I don’t find it as satisfying as what I used to do, but it’s still fun. Woody Allen’s comment about sex without love being an empty experience comes to mind. As empty experiences go, it’s one of the best.
Felix Adler
I did a double take when I saw Felix Adler. I suppose it is easy to spot which one they mean— this one, not that one. Looking for other names, I came across e-podunk. Seems fitting somehow. Scratching around, it seems that they have an array of interesting statistics such as cities with the highest coffee quotients. Naturally, Little Rock tops the charts for Arkansas— I'll have to add Stillwater, MN to my caffeinated “to visit” list
No Parking for Purgatory
No parking for Purgatory, Bettendorf, IA
You’ve got to applaud yankee ingenuity. I noticed a chain of laundromats with liquor licenses along the Mississippi River in Iowa called “Scrub Pub.” The premise is amazingly simple—either drop your clothes off and drink while someone else does them, or have a drink and do them yourself. Much of the drag of doing laundry in public revolves around the pesky screaming children; having a bar at the laundromat would certainly solve that problem. Purgatory, of course, is right next door.
Authentic
Authentic Musical Washboard, River City Music Experience, Davenport, IA
After touring many historical and not-so-historical sites, I begin to wonder just what constitutes an “inauthentic” artifact or experience. Some attendees at RSA complained about the crassness of Beale Street, as if it were somehow a “phony” or sham experience. But is it any more contrived than other “managed” tourist districts like the French Quarter in NOLA (before or after the flood)? If everyone knows that it is artifice, why be outraged that it is artificial?
Often, artificiality is more moving than the real thing. Visiting the “authentic” summer home of Buffalo Bill was interesting enough—that is, until I visited the tourist museum in his birthplace in Iowa (to be uploaded tomorrow). Though the pretense of “Buffalo Bill’s birthplace” had little or no claim to authenticity, it served as an organizing trope for one of the best small town experiences I’ve ever had. I’ll have to expand on this later.
Travel Kit
Part of our new travel kit
Though the pictures I’ve been posting don’t really suggest it, I am back home in the Twin Cities now. There are a few more places to get caught up on, as far as the uploading goes. This was the longest road trip Krista and I have ever done together—around 4,000 miles in two-and-a-half weeks. Certain innovations made it quite smooth.
I don’t drink hot coffee often—probably around two months in the winter, and that’s it. Most of the time, my beverage choices are iced tea (from tea-leaves, never instant) and a morning iced latte. Cold coffee in bottle or can really sucks—I hate sugar and flavorings, and those things are full of them. That had been my morning routine on previous trips—typically, a Starbucks doubleshot or two. I took a two quart pan to make tea in the hotel rooms so I wouldn’t have to dominate the ice-chest with my tea (typically I drink 2 liters a day). I also brought a stovetop espresso maker for my morning cup. Krista, of course, could get by with an infuser and a teacup. Life is more complex for me. I tried a hotpot before, and it just didn’t cut it. I need a full hotplate.
But the biggest innovation was the rolling collapsible ice-chest that held the supplies. I used a hardside ice-chest in the car for most of the trip, but when we got to the four-day stretch at the Peabody, we need an ice-chest for the room (no refrigerator available). I simply loaded the container I’d been transporting all this in with ice, and I could have my morning iced latte without relying on expensive room service, or a half asleep trip down the hall.
It came out of the sky
landed just a little south
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Skinny's Diner
Skinny's Diner, Missouri
