Linked In
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The more people I meet, the more surprised I am by how connected we actually are. Linked in. Like a chain fence.
Hidden Dragon
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The St. Paul Winter Carnival kicked off this past weekend, and although the snow sculptures were canceled for obvious reasons, the show went on for icy art. While temperatures last!
In February 1886, the inaugural carnival was held to showcase St. Paul as well as disprove a New York newspaper reporter who had described the city as “another Siberia, unfit for human habitation in the winter.” But in 2004, the last year St. Paul featured an ice palace, it might as well have been Siberia. You know it’s cold when the 2004 Ice Palace closed for several hours due to cold weather. It was a palatial, 27,000 blocks of ice (each weighing 400 lbs.) covering a steel frame and wired for a sound and light show.
This year’s carnival was much simpler. As I surveyed the sculptures, I heeded some recent photography advice to not just take the picture, but make the picture. After all, nearly everyone takes the same photo on the first approach. But if you study the scene, you can find more. And that’s when, while crouching like a tiger, I found my “hidden dragon.”
Classical Mural
Footsteps from my front door are music venues galore. This afternoon, I traveled ’round the globe during a free one-hour concert at Orchestra Hall. I heard Gershwin’s Caribbean rhythms in Cuban Overture, the festive music of An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise (including a finale with bagpipes!), the Spanish-infused Boléro, and a new concerto from India for violin and tabla drum. The tabla player was amazing. I’ve never seen such fast working phalanges. (See an example below the jump.)
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Listen to the tabla:
Minnesota Hoodie
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After a long but productive week, some Fridays all I want to do is come home, make dinner (roast chicken with butternut squash risotto) and throw on a Minnesota hoodie. And that’s what I did.
Skyline Aquarium
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You don’t have to look too closely at the Minneapolis skyline at night to notice something distinctly different. Not all bulbs are created equal. Atop the Target building is something bolder: a digital light art display featuring 700,000 LED lights. Tonight, I captured an aquarium with schools of fish, a shark, and the comical but shy orange Puffer fish. A couple new designs are featured every month. As I leaned against a wall snapping photos, smiling passersby shared:
- Are you taking photos? (Um, yes.)
- Make sure you get the Puffer! He moves fast. (I know, right?!)
- Cool, huh? It’s like my personal aquarium outside my condo living room. (Yes indeed.)
Learn more: Top of the Target Building Glows
Support Group
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Hi, my name is @JoeJCurry, and I have a social media #addiction. Depending on who you ask, that may not be far from the truth! However, considering social media is part of my job, it’s no different than other folks’ curiosity for their careers. Today in Dallas was a reunion of sorts for people like me–people who work in a converging space of communications, marketing and technology.
Every couple months, my pioneering peers and I turn off our digital devices and meet face-to-face to talk ideas, swap solutions & success stories, and rally each other in our goals. It’s energizing. It’s humbling. It’s even a bit therapeutic. Over the past three years, I’ve not only been fortunate to attend 8 sessions with these extended colleagues; I can count many of them as friends.
Step Up
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My day began with my worst nightmare: I overslept the morning of a flight.
Something I’ve never done before. And by a whopping 105 minutes! I woke up at 7:45am for my 9:15am flight; I didn’t need a 5th alarm, no, I needed a low voltage electric shock to get out of bed today. It was questionable whether I’d make it, but I stepped up to the challenge. Luckily, I was already packed and my clothes were selected for the day. A sprinkle in the shower (literally), a stick of gum & a bottle of water, in under five minutes, I was out the door. I drove like a Chicagoan, rode the elevators like a New Yorker (waited for no one), and hopped on airport trams like a local Minnesotan.
May the Force be with me, I prayed. And it was. Miraculously, at the airport security checkpoint, there were only 2 people there, and I arrived at my gate with 30 minutes to spare.
Something I never want to do again.
No Dice
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I was hoping to photograph something sunny or yellow today, but no dice. Winter is finally here. Tonight, my friends and I celebrated the Chinese New Year with Thai food and Farkle. Thai because the Chinese restaurants we like are closed for the holiday, and who doesn’t love a good curry? (Not what I ate, but it sounded poetic.) You might think that Chinese checkers would be a more authentic game to play, but you’d be wrong. That game was created in Germany.
No sun today, but I’ve got sunflowers. I chatted with my Alaskan friend tonight, and I’d taken this photo during my visit last summer at Fairbanks’ Pioneer Park (formerly known as Alaskaland). Right now, -25 degrees is warm there. However bad the Midwest winter is, I know not to play the winter weather game with my friend Casey; after all, she always wins.
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History Matters
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This afternoon, I went to the Minnesota History Center. Nestled between the Capitol, Xcel Energy Center and the Cathedral of Saint Paul, it’s bizarre that I’d never been here before. You see, I’m completely fascinated by history. How others lived before us. How we came to be. How I came to be.
So I was unexpectedly elated to see traffic congestion (seriously) of people swarming to soak up some history. Today I also became a card-carrying member of the Minnesota Historical Society–definitely a deal. My photo shows the ceiling of the Great Hall, with its eight-pointed star. The points on each star form the letter “M” for Minnesota, also known as the North Star State.
Transporting through time, I learned from the exhibit “1968” about a year of comedy and tragedy, achievements and violence, love and hate, and the hope for a better tomorrow. I became versed in Minnesota’s Greatest Generation, of the Depression, WWII and the post-war boom. I watched a recreation of a WWII combat flight in a C-47 plane. I heard the tale of a soldier who survived Vietnam. So much history, so many stories. Even more intriguing though was overhearing real interpretations of history by the visitors around me. And if you listen carefully, the museum experience becomes that much richer.
I learned how Minnesota’s landscapes, people and communities have changed over time in “Home Place Minnesota.” I stepped into an “Open House,” the recreated home of 470 Hopkins Street from the the Railroad Island neighborhood on St. Paul’s East Side. I read stories of the families who lived there, from the first German immigrants through the Italians, African-Americans, and Hmong who succeeded them.
It all reminded me that people change and places change. But, the memories we hold dear to us shape the stories of our lives and become our history and influence our future.
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