35W Expansion Public Hearing

This is an edit I created this year from video that I shot in May of 1992 but had never edited until now.
The Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) had proposed in early 1992 to do a massive rebuild of interstate 35W through south Minneapolis. Talk about rebuilding the freeway started not long after the highway was finished in the first place, in the 1960's.
In May of 1992, MnDOT presented several options, asking for feedback on them. Their plan was to construct one of those options, which were all pretty similar. They all called for widening the freeway by taking houses in both the Windom and Phillips neighborhoods. The options varied from taking hundreds of houses to taking around a hundred. All the options also called for a stacked freeway where 35W and 94 come together.
A public hearing was scheduled on those options. It was to take place at the Richfield High School, a place not very accessible to transit, though I took the bus there to get to the shoot, which meant that I walked several blocks to get to and from the High School.
The day before the hearing, groups opposed to the plan held a rally at Franklin Steel Park in the Elliot Park Neighborhood. The park sits right beside the freeway. I went there because I was filming all kinds of things happening in the Phillips Neighborhood, where I lived, and wanted to film this too. I filmed the speakers and also did some interviews.
I also went to the public hearing, but did not stay for the entire thing. It went until 2:30 the next morning. Rather than get a seat in the auditorium, I walked around to get interviews, film the media, and step in now and then in the gymnasium of the high school, where the hearing was being close circuit televised for an overflow audience.
I filmed an interview with a MnDOT Project Manager. I'm not sure what he thought of me with my small Hi8 camcorder, but he did do the interview for me.
At the time I thought I might do a documentary that looked at transportation in Minneapolis, and especially the disinvestment in public transit since the 1950's. Where the freeway now ran there used to run a very extensive streetcar system. That was long gone and people opposed to the freeway expansion were asking for light rail in the corridor instead of more freeway lanes. Around that time I did some filming of historic photos of streetcars to make this longer documentary project, but I never did. I filmed and edited other things and the tapes from these two shoots just sat in a box.
Now in 2018 35W is being reconstructed through the Phillips Neighborhood. Some houses were taken for this final plan, but nothing like the number of houses that were proposed to be demolished in 1992.
Light Rail Transit is not being built in that corridor, but a Bus Rapid Transit line is. That BRT line was give the green light for the federal share of its funding on the day that I finished this edit of this public hearing that happened 26 years ago.

A Drawing a Day March 2018

Here is a drawing a day for March 2018.

A Drawing A Day February 2018

The Name Has to Go: Super Bowl 26

I had bought my first Hi8 video camera just a couple weeks before this. It was small, a Sony TR30, I believe. I could carry it in my backpack, I could carry it in a pocket.

This was 1992. I was a student at the University of Minnesota and worked a night job that allowed me to sleep. So I had some extra times during the day. I filmed as much as I could that year, I filmed more than I could edit.

I lived in the Phillips Neighborhood of Minneapolis. I lived near Little Earth of United Tribes, which was the center of the American Indian community in the city. When the Super Bowl was coming to town, and one of the teams playing was the Washington, D.C. team, the American Indian Movement organized a conference and a protest to ask Washington to change the mascot of their football team, a racist derogative term.

I don't really remember filming this video, and am not sure why I never edited it (until now). At the time I usually liked to film interviews, and for this I just filmed the speeches and the march. I began filming at East Phillips Park, where Clyde Bellecourt, Paul Wellstone, and others spoke. I then followed the march to the Metrodome, where we circled the stadium and then listened to speeches from Vernon Bellecourt and others.

The Super Bowl is once again taking place in Minneapolis this weekend, and it is truly amazing to compare the level of security between the event in 1992 and 2018. In 1992, AIM has set up a teepee on the plaza right in front of the stadium entrance. We marched just a few feet from the open doors of the Metrodome. There were a few police officers around, but their presence was pretty minimal.

This year, a wall of chain link fence on concrete blocks surrounds the new U.S. Bank Stadium for a block. Downtown is peppered with National Guard humvees. It seems like there are hundreds of private security guards in downtown at any time. The comparison is simply unfathomable.

As I was finally editing this video, twenty-six years after I shot it, I had to do some searches to find the spellings of some of the names. It was sobering to see all the people in this video who have since passed on, from Vernon Bellecourt and Paul Wellstone to Brian Roberts, at the time a law student, Dixie Latu Riley, Matthew Little, and E. Randal T. Osburn. Look for a shot of Congressman Keith Ellison standing near me in the crowd around 4:45.

After I did this edited I found a few more minutes of Super Bowl video on another tape. That video had some issues, but I will try to edit a little out of that one too.

A Drawing a Day January 2018

Here is one drawing a day (or something like that) for January 2018.

CAVE 2 Day 2

The second day of the second annual CAVE (Festival of Cinematic Audio and Video Experimentation) included lots of moments when the theater of the Bryant Lake Bowl was just full of people talking to each other. Festival director Kevin Obsatz explained that he programmed shorter blocks of films to open up those opportunities for discussion.

Saturday afternoon's screening of Arab-American experimental film was co-presented by the Minnesota Museum of American Art and MIZNA, which puts on the Arab Film Festival. Co-curators Michelle Baroody and Andrea Shaker explained that they selected work for the screening that went beyond the stereotypes and dominant narratives.

The program began with Shaker's On Silence, which included a live performance element. Shaker stood on stage to the right of the screen to read a poetic narration while looking out a video window onto an endless expanse of water, sometimes the view blurred by waving bare branches and curtains, sometimes the view was so clear you could see that there was no distant horizon. She spoke about the luxury of stillness, the luxury of forgetting, and created a meditation both personal and universal on displacement that connected herself and us to the stories of refugees of Syria.

Shaker's use of news footage, both frozen still and rendered without sound, was echoed in other films in the program, many of which appropriated media images and sounds to pin and enlighten them. Ariana Hamidi's The Covenant Adam intercut home movie-like images of young people with TV images of a cartoon incredible Hulk to show how superhero images condition young people to problem-solve with violence. Usama Alshaibi's The Muslim Meme countered rabid anti-Muslim AM hate radio audio quotes with quiet subtitles that detail that pain that comes from being the human-being target of such vicious propaganda.

Following an afternoon break, CAVE resumed with two evening screenings featuring visiting artists. First up was Christopher Harris of Florida, who was also on hand to conduct an in-camera editing  workshop as part of the festival. His films featured lush 16mm images pristinely transferred to video. His 16mm frames were bursting with edge fogging, the sun flying through the edges of his films to re-assert itself, particularly in a dual screen rendering of a roadside passion play where the sun coming through the film edges was like a divine presence trying to strangle the Hollywood phoniness of evangelical Christian crucifixion re-enactors. The sun itself, and the transience of our whole universe, was at the heart of his film Sunshine State (Extended Forecast) which paired primary color images of beach ball planets floating in a swimming pool and suns drawn of sidewalk chalk with an audio track of scientific predictions of the sputtering out of our sun, and the end of the potential for life on earth.

The reflection or absorption of light on faces was referenced in Reckless Eyeballing, which set up a conversation between the lynch-victim Gus from D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation with Pam Grier, star of Blacksploitation films in the 70's. Both The Birth of a Nation and Grier could have flashed on the screen of The Criterion Theater in St. Louis, whose deterioration Harris documents in detail in still/here, an excerpt of which closed the screening. The long-closed building's brick walls were burst open to let in the sun to the Criterion's dusty tumbled seats, both suggesting the liveliness and community that once happened here with the devastation and emptiness that is its dereliction.

The final screening featured work of Jesse McLean of Milwaukee, who introduced her films by saying that she is a collagist, both in that she appropriates images and sounds, but also in that she collages ideas. Her films look at how media gets to the middle of our brain, from the mediated spaces of big box stores and surface parking lots, which may be our actual homes, to the sparkling international postcards we get in our email boxes via spam.

Her film See A Dog, Hear A Dog, was all about intelligence, and its YouTube images of a dog playing the piano and singing, and its dog facial expressions acted out by humans, really pointed out that it isn't really intelligence and emotion that distinguish humans from other animals, it might just be that our difference is that we have the media, and that doesn't really make us better.

Although we humans had media, we also had each other at CAVE. And after the very human Q and A with Jesse McLean ended, the unmediated humans in the Bryant Lake Bowl Theater formed a collective voice to sing Happy Birthday to Kevin Obsatz as a chocolate cake topped with slightly skewed burning candles was carried to him. But we also could also have been singing a happy birthday for CAVE, which lives and will live another year. Obsatz announced that there will be a CAVE 3 in 2019.

CAVE 2 Day 1

CAVE (the Festival of Cinematic Audio Visual Experimentation) is now officially annual, and once again taking us to a place of light and sound on some of the coldest winter days. You enter CAVE 2 at the Bryant Lake Bowl past all the crashing of bowling balls on pins around the corner of the kitchen and that strange box office inserted in a cubby that could have once held a phone booth and grab the luscious printed program in black and blue with a brown paper insert of Andy Sturdevant words about other equally cold nights when people gathered to watch movies together in town and found warmth and inspiration, wonder and community.

The 7 pm Friday show featured local work, mostly videos that featured images and sounds of nature, of water and waves and physically improbable human shadows in Julie Kouneski's Shapeshifter, of the interplay of water and rock with fingers and insects as landscape in Jonathan Kaiser's Canyons, with water and ice holding and releasing in Jason Cole's Same Bare Place and Kate Casanova's Slow Black Glow. Trevor Adams' Rumors of Train Barn broke the nature line with his images of night and people-rich places filled with ghosts etched and painted over and behind the lights and shadows of somewhere somewhat familiar but also maybe not. There were also a couple short videos by me.

For the 9 pm slot, both the cinema and the audience expanded, with people sitting on the walls and standing by the door and John Marks starting things out with his great wall of 16mm projectors to show Spirit Leveling, a four movement sonata for trees, water, water lilies, sun and sound. The sound was created on the spot with his analogue synthesizer, which he operated while turning projectors on and off. At one point the side by side sun was two eyes reflected in water looking back at us. The piece ended with one joyous sun reflection circling and sketching delirious commas on gently lapping water.

HIJACK (Kirsten Van Loon and Arwen Wilder) performed Volleyball, Basketball, Hanky, a dance that doubled down on Janis Ian's "At Seventeen," channeling teenage awkwardness into movement of body with repeated shadows on the screen and a dance-partner TV set with a clip of the volleyball/basketball they didn't get called to play. Kleenix turned into the pom poms of beauty queens but also reminded me of the snow and cold outside, and the cold inside that sometimes comes from seeing yourself through the eyes of others rather than just thinking about how great you really are.

The last piece, Kinski Wanted Herzog to Direct but He Turned It Down by Guillaume Vallee and Hazy Montague Mystique of Montreal, combined a film clip of Klaus Kinski that was transferred to videotape, distressed, and then transferred back to film and expanded and repeated with live video feedback to give us a multiplying brightly hued approximation of Kinski's grinning theatrical madness, or impatience and recalcitrance in general. Film scratches and dust conspired with the teeth of TV static to take us further and further down into a place of extreme color and lunar brain echoes. Mystique's synthesized sounds reprocessed voices and other kinds of unidentifiable blips and beeps and hums that kept on rising and up falling to match the feedback of the images. It was both cave painting primal and futuristic techno, eye opening and closed-eye rattling.

And then it was time to get out of there quickly to catch our bus. There are still two more days of CAVE! CAVE is presented by Cellular Cinema, which is a monthly series of screenings at the Bryant Lake Bowl.

A Drawing A Day December 2017

Here is one drawing I made every day of December 2017. All were done pretty quickly, some by pencil, some by pen and some by brush. Some were images from my imagination, some were observational on location.