Last night I attended my first Northern Spark, an all-night mega art festival that this year was held in six major “zones” of Minneapolis. I attended only the Minneapolis Convention Center/Peavy Plaza zones but I feel like a cherry picked pretty well.

I saw Cloud Cult perform an hour plus opening concert (for free!) after being a fan for probably a decade.

People lost their shit when a bunch of huge glowing white balloons were released into the crowd near the end of the show. One shithead teenage dude beside me purposefully popped the last one with his car key and grinned the grin of  a true future serial killer right at me. Other than feeling the strange urge to strangle someone while listening to beautiful Cloud Cult music, it was a great, great show and they played every song I could have thought to request and one brand new one.

Then I attended my old Pal Andy Sturdevant’s Foopath’s ’92 spiritual seminar with another old pal Shannon and her friend Sara (who were nice enough to let me bum around with them all night). Footpath’s ’92 was a humorous take on seminars and set in 1992 and has prepared me for the power of powerful energy in my own life. It also featured some familiar faces in the cast and some amazing power wigs. With the help of a rotating cast, Andy was going to recreate the energy packed seminar all night long, something only he could pull off.

Filled with a renewed sense of energy and purpose, we left the seminar and headed back out into the night, meandering our way past the model-sized wooden skyline of Minneapolis (decorated by all in chalk and lit with tiny interior lights) and went to Peavy Plaza, which was a hotbed of action. Among the events there was a video game you could log into with your phone (and play for about five seconds before you died), human-sized Foosball on a Foosball court (the Foosball was a Nerf-type soccer ball), and Write Fight, put on by Revolver magazine. In a single-elimination type tournament, writers battle each other by writing pieces while being distracted by outlandish distractions (I was part of an instant dance party encircling two writers) and then read their pieces aloud: whoever gets the loudest applause moves on. Think Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome without the Dome and more writing.

Going down into the plaza amid all these events was great. I expected to be down there for a minute or two but suddenly a half-hour had passed and I was still engaged. After I’d had my artsy fill, I ate a delicious pulled chicken corn patty type thing from a West Indies food truck and said goodnight-it was midnight and Cinderella was more than satisfied with the evening.

Total $ spent? Five dollars. Gotta love the Twin Cities.