The sofa- and musical tour of Minneapolis

Saturday, October 19th.

Today we got up at noon and had quite the tasty brunch at the dorm cafeteria. The three of us then drove the van down to the U of M campus to take a little tour around the area and to take a few couch pictures. The campus sprawls onto both sides of the Mississippi river and is connected by a long covered bridge across the river. So we did a walking tour of each side of the campus, including one of the lecture halls where Mark has one of his classes, and walked through the covered walkway across the river and saw the many more or less artistic paintings on the inside walls advertising all the different extra-curricular clubs at the university. On the way back to the van we popped in to see a few of the exhibits in the Art Gallery, including a couple of impressive wall-sized oil paintings and an exhibit on "the interior of the automobile" which included a VW Rabbit that had been taken apart and put back together with the interior on the outside and the exterior facing inward. Quite a sight.

After taking the tour on foot and scouting out good photo-ops we went back to get the couch out of the van. We took a series of pictures on the bridge over the river and experimented by placing the camera and tripod on top of a piece of construction equipment that happened to be parked on the bridge. We then drove the couch back around the covered walkway, taking turns riding on it, and parked it in front of the art gallery to get its interesting space-age architecture as a back drop. On Mark's suggestion we took a series of alternative pictures by laying the couch on its back and attempting various sitting positions. After those experiments we wheeled the couch over to the main campus "mall" and took a few pictures there, including one with a couple of cute girls that Mark knew as guest couch-stars.

After making a stop back at Mark's dorm we decided to start an expedition in search of the Sculpture Garden located somewhere downtown Minneapolis which we thought would be a fun place to do some couch-shots. Because of construction-detours downtown, though, we got side-tracked and didn't actually find the Sculpture Garden until we'd decided to head back to the dorm, at which point it was to late to make a stop without changing our plans for the evening. We'd gotten a driving tour of downtown Minneapolis, though, which wasn't too bad either.

Back at the dorm we met up with Mark's friends Mike, JD, Catherine and Shelley who we were going out with that evening. We all ate dinner together in the cafeteria and then hopped on a bus to catch a show downtown. The main act was Amon Tobin; a Brazillian trip-hop dj. Preceeding him were two other dj's that performed a similar style of music, mixing heavy hip-hop inspired beats with a mixture of recorded samples, electronic riffs and more organic world-music sounds. Although the style of music was relatively unknown territory for both of us we really liked most of it. But simply watching a single dj on stage was a bit lacking on the visual side of the experience, and only Amon Tobin had an actual light and picture show to add a visual backdrop to his performance. Yet it was still quite an experience. But it was not nearly as cool as the other musical performance we witnessed that evening.

Mark's roommate Varun is a percussionist and has a lot of friends in the local music scene. Through him we'd found out about a house-party being held by a band in celebration of one of their friends' birthday. So we continued over there together with Mark and Mike and found quite the festive party going on. A jam session was taking place in the basement between a constellation of some of the band-members who lived in the house and some of their other friends who were there for the party. Though completely impromptu the music was simply awesome. The different band-members all seemed to be pulling the music in their own stylistic direction, yet combined they managed to produce quite an eclectic and funky style of their own. The trumpet player in particular added a great touch to the music with jazzy riffs played through a microphone hooked up to various chorus-, reverb- and wah-wah effect pedals. The basement was conveniently furnished with several comfortable couches (and for once we hadn't brought our own...) so we simply sat back and enjoyed the music.

Out of consideration for the neighbors or respect for their ability to call for the long arm of the law to descend on the noisy party the band ended their jam session a couple of hours after midnight. Since we had an hour-and-a-half walk ahead of us to get back to the dorm we decided to head back at that point. In high spirits we headed out into the cold night in the general direction of campus. We even ran for quite a few blocks before giving that up in favor of just walking home. A ways down the road two girls pulled over to hear if we wanted a ride. We gladly accepted, after which they informed us that campus was actually not in the direction that we were headed but rather back in the direction they had just come from. We took this as sober advice and happily wandered down that direction. It took us a while to realize that we were actually walking down an on-ramp to the highway and that we had obviously been mislead. Not about to turn around, though, we scaled the small hill up to the rail road bridge across the highway and followed the rail road tracks towards town. By some coincidence we managed to find a route home that was quicker than expected, and even included a food-stop at a 24-hour White Castle restaurant along the way.