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March 15, 2005
adventures in gonzo-vision: Come on, Piper people, throw your hands in the air!
Someone once told me that the best and most real news doesn’t happen between the 9ą5 working hours. Anyone walking down Snelling Avenue between the straight and quiet hours of 9ą5 won’t see much in the way of action or news.
Don’t get me wrong here: Hamline is a beautiful and important place. We have plenty going on, whether it’s politics or achievements of students and professors making the news, but there is more lying beneath the surface of Hamline’s maroon-and-brown faŹade.
Anyone who wakes up early enough on the weekends and Monday mornings before Hamline’s excellent grounds crew is able to clean up the campus is witness to the shards of glass and aluminum that thinly coat the ground (I know this well; I’m on the grounds crew). In the air is the faint smell of human bile and lingering cigarette smoke. But forget the actual campus grounds č take a look at the nearby student-rented houses. The aroma and litter paints a post-riot scene. Something must have happened here!
My goal is to get to the heart of it and understand what happens on these wild and depraved nights. Why do we, mild-mannered liberal-arts students, find the need to let loose and destroy come Friday night, or on particularly heavy weekdays, such as Thursday or, God forbid, Monday nights? My goal is to observe and consume our generation’s (and particularly Hamline’s) non-9ą5 culture, to expose it for what it is and offer reasoning behind the madness we find ourselves in.
Some will get to this point and wonder how this pertains to them; they spend quiet nights at home with the family outside of old-time St. Paul. It doesn’t. My goal is to take a “gonzo” lens and observe what exactly makes and forms the Hamline social identity. Of course I’m not going to come upon a single answer; in fact, I’m not seeking one. If it were that simple, I’d have no reason to take this trip. For those of you who spend quiet weekend nights at home, I commend you, and now leave you. This journey is meant to uncover greater meaning in Hamline’s night-owl scene.
As an initial example, I’ll offer the following observation I made last fall.
A dark, unusually sweaty night. Sometime around midnight. I’ve finally found the “----team house.” The house sways back and forth with a thousand perspiring undergrads. Outside is a miniąMilky Way, near pitch-blackness, broken up by hundreds of cell phone keypads. I wonder who any of these people could be calling; nearly every Piper is crammed into this St. Paul architectural relic. Wails, whistles and whines fill the heavy humid dying-summer air. Near the pine tree I see the girl in my lit class whose hand finds its way into the air no matter the question, no matter the contrived response she has in mind. She’s crying on a cell phone, wondering, “How could he do that to me?” As I pass her, the sharp scent of vomit stops me in my tracks, causing me to think twice before continuing on down her road. I enter anyway.
Look forward to more of my “gonzo” observations in upcoming issues. And if you have any suggestions for stories or places to cover, I’m here to listen.
Posted by msveum at March 15, 2005 02:05 PM
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