On The Grass & Book

I’m making an effort to keep an even lower profile than usual because lately I’ve increasingly felt myself becoming a tempting target of violence and robbery. Steps I’ve taken towards this end:

1. I’ve stopped carrying my backpack. I leave it in my locker, together with most of my other things. I exit the shelter with approx. $20, map, water bottle, and cell phone (turned off so that correct pin # must be entered to activate).

2. I refer to my map for development of alternate routes to and from the shelter. This lowers the risk of ill-intentioned loiterers picking up on any kind of daily routine.

A couple views of the modest downtown skyline:

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— Saturday, 6.13 —

Hung out with this girl I contacted through couchsurfer. She just finished grad school in architecture at the U of Minn. and reported that, like her classmates, she has little to no chance of finding a job in her field in this economy. It made me feel less bad. We went down to uptown and walked through the sculpture garden. It’s a park with sculpture installations spread about, notably a large spoon with a cherry. My favorite was this rabbit on a bell.

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We had some time to kill before meeting up with her friend, so we went to this homemade ice cream shop, sebastian joe’s. I chose malted vanilla, placing my order confidently and in a manner typical of one who has grown up in the ice cream business, providing the server at the outset with all the information he needed: size, flavor, cone type. How cruel it would be if I found myself behind the counter filling customers’ orders, the dairy cows taunting me with their moos from the depths of the ice cream boxes as I scooped their sweet product.

We picked up her friend and drove to lake calhoun, a body of water with a 3+ mile perimeter that is outlined by two paths, one for foot traffic and the other for bikes/rollerblades/etc. There are 3 sandy beaches spread around the lake and each was packed with bikini-clad sun bathers, like a scene out of the florida keys, the only things missing being palm trees and salt water mist. Bad photos:

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After walking the loop, which hardly felt like 3 miles, we dropped her friend off and continued to the last attraction of the day: Guthrie Theater (no relation to Woody Guthrie).

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It’s a building for stage productions and contains three theaters of different design: one where the seats are arranged as in an amphitheater, another as in a movie theater, and then one called the dowling studio, where productions by university students are put on and the seating/stage is of experimental structure. It’s a new building and location for the apparently long established Guthrie Theater, one of 3 construction projects undertaken and completed around the same time in an effort to put Minneapolis on the map for tourism. She cites the library downtown and the modern art museum near the sculpture garden as the other two projects.

It’s a public place, so anyone is allowed to walk around inside during the day for free, though the theaters themselves are closed. It really is a pretty cool place, only a few years old and exhibiting some nice design, as well as the longest escalator I’ve ever seen (4 stories). Being an architect, she pointed out the many aspects of it that she particularly likes, and lamented that it’s under-appreciated by the general public. Hometownmpls connection: she says the architect who designed UAF’s new Museum of the North is from Minneapolis.

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On the wall are stills from past productions.

Structure and architecture are interesting, but what I found equally worthy of memory allocation were the stories of spider infestations. Shortly after completion, the exterior of the building was overrun with large spiders from the river nearby. Even though the worst of it is over, it’s an ongoing problem, and thick cobwebs decorate the edges of windows. It’s easy to imagine that when the arachnids were in full force, the place felt like a horror flick, like Hitchcock’s The Birds, only with another species.