July 4, 2007

Drove Sha to Minneapolis. She'd never been on a US road trip, so it was a good time to take off on one.

Notes:

1. The Gay Pride celebration in Minneapolis was on the weekend we arrived. Hotels booked. Young ripped men without shirts everywhere flashing tanned 6-pack abs. Positive energy all around. People came from all over the Midwest for this. This gave me a good feeling about Minny (having never done more than driven through before).

2. Target seems to have its name on everything.
3. The next weekend, free jazz in the downtown mall area. Several stages. Jazz youth outside of Dakota's did the standards credibly. Bratworst & kraut at the comcessions.

4. Didn't get ripped off by the car repair guys who could easily have hosed me for a couple of hundred and didn't.

5. Rent is cheap. Sha got a big one bedroom for much less than I'm paying for my studio. But then again, they get snow and lots of it along with their free heat.

6. IKEA's build it yourself model took two days to complete Sha's set-up. Allen keys and plastic strew nails for everything.

7. Watching a DVD of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, so Sha could get the reference of the MTM statue in the mall area.

8. The used bookstore (forgot the name, on Nicollet I think) had a decent contemporary poetry selection spread somewhat helter-skelter in boxes on the floor and on a shelf right before the stairway to the basement. Modernist poetry, however, was in with the rest of the literature alpha by author style.

9. Church bells, all day.

10. Nicollet Village Video. Smelled like cat urine the first time we visited, but not the second. Good collection, better staff. When we rented The Day of the Locust (1975), the guy behind behind the counter said that if we were trying to skip out on our [film studies?] homework, that we should just go ahead and read the book as it would take like 2 hours. Pretty good classic, cult, indie and LGBT titles.

11. The Twins ballpark is in walking distance of everything downtown Their new park will also be downtown. [Take note Oakland: remember the Jack London deal? Thank you, Jerry Brown. Fremont is not even a suburb of or all that near to Oakland. It's a commuter line terminus, hence the sticks, not a draw.]

12. Nevermind the travelling Picaso show, the Walker is top drawer. They are now showing works on paper from their collection by a lot of folks you [read I] wouldn't immediately think of as paper folk. I also liked the Myhtologies exhibition, even if it was chock-full of the usual heavy-hitters, heavy-hitters being the curatorial price to pay when trying to run a world-class art museum in Middle America. The Walker is just awesome.

13. The view from Sha's balcony has a view of both Loring Park (which has an official-sized horse shoe pitch among its wonders) and downtown.

14. The decision to get Sha a blender, and the subsequent decision to end nights with nightly ice-crushed Margaritas.

15. The fact that the elderly Volvo (as yet unnamed, but soon) made it back over the mountains [always mountains after mid-Nebraska] and through the boring-boring Utah Salt Flats to Oakland uncrippled if not quite full of pep, which it lacked from the git-go.