Looking Down
Sidewalk Satellites
“Don’t look down!” is a cliché of Holywood and TV thriller dialog from Hitchcock’s Vertigo, to Shrek, to Dr Who. It’s not bad advice when you are crossing a busy street at rush hour either. But if you do look down when you walk the streets of a city you find new landscapes for the imagination every 20 feet.
By the strange math of fractals, a crack in the concrete is indistinguishable from a satellite photo of a rift valley. The spray paint markings of utility repair surveyors are the crop circle communication of aliens preparing to invade. A piece of string or wire echoes the lines of a Miro painting.
Modernist and minimalist painters have given our minds permission to see the ground under our feet as athestic forms. Post modern philosphers and semioticians have retrained us so see signs with double and triple meaning, to read it all as quotes and opportunities for deconstruction.
Viewed with an open mind, the sidewalk we cross to reach our morning Starbucks fix becomes a source of beauty and pleasure.
