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1. Perez Prado, “Mambo #8.” Say what you will about Lou Bega’s cheesy 1999 hit, “Mambo #5.” It was catchy enough to make me want to know more about the sampled song at its core. Which led me to Perez Prado’s infinitely better tune of the same name . . . and while Bega was a one trick pony, Prado was not. I don’t pretend to have tapped his oeuvre very deeply, but what I’ve found makes me very happy indeed.
2. Ray Charles, “What Would I Do Without You?” A weeper and a wailer from Brother Ray. I don’t think this was ever a major hit (not on the pop side of things anyway) — and that’s a cryin’ shame.
3. Elvis Presley, “A Big Hunk O’ Love.” I know. There’s Elvis . . . on my iPod? Surprise. And that’s not really a wishbone in his pocket: he’s just glad to see you.
4. Tom Waits, “Shiny Things.” There’s a lot of Waits on my iPod, too. He’s come up three times now since I started the MMM game. And it’s always been one of the more obscure and less remarkable tracks from Orphans. And so you get an unremarkable bit of commentary here. Ah well.
5. Warren Zevon, “Werewolves of London.” For years, I thought the exclamation point line towards the end of this track was “And his hair was purple!” Why I ever thought it made sense for Zevon to be singing about some sort of punked-out lycanthrope, I dunno.
6. Dinah Washington, “All Because of You.” Straight-up sweetness from the Queen of the Blues.
7. Aretha Franklin, “Call Me.” Speaking of soulful sweetness from musical Queens . . .
8. Gladys Knight & the Pips, “If I Were Your Woman.” Sometimes, the shuffle feature deals you a lovely three-part history lesson. Or at least a sequence of artists, each of whom arguably owes an awful lot to the one who shuffled up immediately before. I don’t plan these things. They just happen. Does the chain continue past Gladys? . . .
9. Eddie Cochran, “Summertime Blues.” . . . No, of course it doesn’t. We jump backwards in time and skip over a genre or two. But this is a nice forward-thinking tune on the first day since October or so where Minneapolis has seen the thermometer push past 60 degrees. Let’s keep that rhythm going now, okay?
10. Stevie Ray Vaughan, “Pride and Joy.” And we finish up with some fine, fine, superfine grind-it-out Texas blues. I gave up on fetishizing most of the guitar heroes of my youth a long time ago. But somehow Stevie Ray’s licks — like the love he has for his pride and joy — never seem to grow old.

Yesterday, my car was involved in an accident.  Sort of.  It was parked on the street in front of the house at the front end of a series of three vehicles.  Someone managed to drive their car into the back rear corner of the truck at the back end of that line. They did a serious bit of damage to their own car.  The truck, at least from what I could see from inside the house, appeared to be virtually unscathed.  But the force of the collision seemed to push it forward a notch into the car that was parked directly behind mine . . . which, in turn, was pushed forward into my rear bumper.  No one was in my car at the time.  Neither Margaret nor I talked with the police officers who showed up to handle the accident.  And if there was any real damage to my car, it’s the sort of damage that only shows up much later when one discovers that one’s rear end alignment is slightly out of whack.

Today , I received a phone call from City Chiropractors.  The woman on the other end of the line asked for me by name.  She said that I’d been involved in an accident yesterday and wanted to know if I needed their services.  I said (in effect), “What the fuck?”

As far as I can tell, the best explanation so far (if we want to assume that Minneapolis’ Finest aren’t getting kickbacks from selling information to local businesses, anyway) is that the officer of record on the scene ran my license plate number in the course of filing his/her report . . . and then mentioned me by name in said report.  Which meant that my name showed up in the public record of the accident . . . and that trolling lawyers and chiropractors could then call me at home the next day to see if I wanted to avail myself of their services.

I hadn’t planned for this entry to be entirely about my friend Nikki. And, after a fashion, it’s not really all about Nikki. But it’s been a day where multiple circumstances have had a strong Nikki aura to them, so it only makes sense to put a name to that.

1. Today, I wound up having lunch at the Dinkydome after my morning teaching. Which meant that the most convenient route for me to take to the strike location for my afternoon graduate seminar [sorry, no link yet, since the syllabus is still in flux] took me across the 10th Avenue Bridge . . . which gave me my first up-close, in-person look at the wreckage of the I-35W Bridge . . . which, even more than a month later, is a mind-blowing sight to behold. I’m not even going to try to capture in words what it feels like to see that much twisted steel and buckled concrete in one place — if you can count the full expanse of the Mississippi River plus several hundred feet on each bank as “one place” — since words won’t do it justice. But it makes it even harder for me to imagine what it would have felt like to be on the 10th Avenue Bridge precisely when the bridge right next to it crumpled without warning. Nikki didn’t have to imagine such a thing (though I’m sure she wishes that things were otherwise), since she was there.
2. My graduate seminar — which happens to include Nikki — looks like as strong and promising a group as any I’ve ever had the pleasure of teaching. And I’ve taught my fair share of stellar groups of students. Saying something like this in public, of course, will undoubtedly inspire some former student to wonder what was wrong with the cohort they were in when I taught some previous seminar. So let me assure any such folks, here and now, that any shortfalls in their cohort were someone else’s fault entirely. If nothing else, the occasional weak links in my graduate seminars — they’ve been rare, but the ones that I’ve had have tended to be pretty memorable in their weakness — are probably not folks who’re keeping tabs on my blog.
3. The ongoing saga of the AFSCME strike at the U. continues to be . . . well . . . ongoing. If there are active negotiations underway again between the administration and the union, neither side is saying so publicly. So folks like Nikki — who’s also one of the striking workers — will apparently be walking the picket lines for the foreseeable future. And I’ll be teaching my graduate seminar off campus for as long as the strike lasts.

I’ve been meaning to post about the Cultural Studies Now conference and my trip to London ever since I got back . . . but Margaret’s mother arrived for a week’s visit three hours after I got back . . . and then three hours before she left, the roofers showed up to start what turned out to be a three-day job that drove Margaret and I out of the house for much of the duration (have you ever tried to write coherent prose while half a dozen men pounded on the ceiling directly above you for hours on end?) . . . and then three hours or so after the roofers were done, the I-35W bridge collapsed . . . which has been its own distraction for the past 24 hours or so, partially for the “disaster porn” that goes along with tragedies of this sort, but mostly because of the varied and multiple rounds of “checking in” that have taken place since last night.

Sometime over the past week, I did actually manage to HTMLify my presentation from the conference, but let me save a more detailed report on the event as a whole for a later post. For now, I’m still processing the bridge collapse. So far, at least, no one from my circle of friends and colleagues and acquaintances was on/under the bridge at the crucial moment yesterday . . . but given the where and when of the situation, it’s still perfectly plausible that someone I know wasn’t so lucky, and I simply don’t know it yet. The bridge is — was — right next to campus, and I-35W is the major north-south highway running through Minneapolis. I didn’t use that bridge every day, but it also wouldn’t have been unusual for me to have done so: I crossed it at least twice last week, walked by it on two other occasions, and was more or less right around the corner a mere hour before it fell.

For me, though, I think the biggest chunk of my “there but for the grace of Elvis” reaction to yesterday’s tragedy is the fact that Minneapolis is very much a river-straddling city. Unlike, say, St. Louis or Memphis, where the river marks the line between the city and the suburbs (and not always the most desirable of suburbs either) and one can plausibly spend years living and working in the area without ever needing to cross a bridge, here the river pretty much runs through the heart of things. I’m sure there must be people in town whose lives are such that they rarely have to cross the river, but I suspect they’re the exception, rather than the rule. There are six or seven different bridges across the Mississippi that I might use on any given day for any number of reasons, and I can easily need to cross the river a dozen times (or more) every week. I’m not exactly worried about crossing those bridges again — the odds that a bridge that’s stood for decades will crumble at precisely the moment you’re on it are still pretty damned small — but I’m also mindful of the fact that I could very easily have been on the I-35W bridge at the wrong time yesterday . . . or that those long odds might’ve kicked in during any of the other bridge-crossing moments that routinely happen.

On Monday, March 25, the high in Minneapolis was 81 degrees. Record for the day. Two degrees shy of the record for the month. I don’t think anyone had any illusions that we’d simply bypassed spring and headed straight into summer for good — or even that we’d seen the last of temps in the 30s and 40s. But spring appeared to have well and truly sprung.

Right.

It’s snowing today. For the second time since that balmy March Monday. And we haven’t seen the sunny side of 50 in more than a week. This does not make me happy.

The pictures don’t quite do it justice . . .

. . . if only because they don’t necessarily capture . . .

. . . the openness of the space very well . . .

. . . but Margaret and I are on the verge of a crosstown move to a new home.

My neighborhood coffee shop is a very child-friendly place — which I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, there’s a lot to be said for the existence of public (or semi-public) spaces where parents can bring their young’uns, especially when it’s too cold or wet (or both) to hang out at playgrounds and public parks. On the other hand, the mad frenzy of screaming, running, misbehaving toddlers is not always conducive to the prospects of using the coffee shop as a comfortable space for reading, writing, grading, and the like. Sometimes, my iPod cranked up to 11 is the only thing that allows me to concentrate on my work. Other times, even that’s not enough.

Today was one of those other times. And my breaking point came at the moment when one of the mothers attached to the small army of boisterous three-year-olds laying siege to the place pulled one of them aside and started singing to him. And while I suppose that I should have appreciated the song in question — it was, in context, intended to help remind the wee one in question that he wasn’t supposed to be running laps around the coffee shop and screaming — the moral embedded in the words of the song was actually more frightening than the prospect of a half dozen toddlers on sugar-induced rampages. “Rules are cool,” she sang, “rules are cool.” Over and over and over again.

Not exactly a childhood mantra that’s likely to inspire a generation of independent thinkers.

Michael Omi was on campus tonight, where he gave a smart and engaging talk: “The Contradictions of Colorblindness: Race and Its Discontents.” During the Q&A period, two different audience members — seemingly with noble intentions — commented on the racial/ethnic make-up of the audience and on which members of the audience were (and weren’t) asking questions . . . and it was clear from their comments that they were relying heavily on visual markers to make their respective claims. Their eyes apparently told them everything they needed to know about the identities of the people in the room.

Of course, for pink-skinned mulattoes such as myself, moments like these are always loaded. Whether either of the audience members was actually including me in their reading of the room is impossible to say — the crowd spilled over into the hall, and so there were a lot of faces for them to focus on — but I’d be willing to bet that I wasn’t the only person in the room who typically gets read as white, but who would self-identify as something else. And I found it particularly ironic that a talk as nuanced as Omi’s — where one of the issues specifically on the table was the sloppiness of racial profiling — led more than one audience member to slot a crowd of 150 or more people into discrete racial categories solely on the basis of visual appearance.

Skip ahead to the trip home after the talk. Margaret had taken the car so she could attend a different function just off-campus, and our arrangement was that she would pick me up when she was through with her duties. The side street where she pulled up seems to lead around the side of the building and onto a major thoroughfare . . . but it really doesn’t. And we discover this at the moment when we’re suddenly squeezed in on both sides and stopped on a sidewalk facing an iron gate that’s way too narrow for a car to pass through.

At this stage, Margaret gives up — she’s had a long day and is usually happier as a passenger anyway — and she asks me to drive the rest of the way. So we switch seats, I back out of the predicament we’re in, find my way back to something resembling a real road — and then I proceed to take a wrong turn which has me heading down a “street” that’s technically a pedestrian-only zone, but that I know will actually get us where we need to be. I hadn’t intended to do the illegal thing (honest), but suddenly I was past the “Do Not Enter” sign — and I made the split second decision to cheat the half block or so it would take to get onto a legal road again.

Only problem was that I did so right in front of one of Minneapolis’ finest.

So Officer Friendly pulls me over and asks for my license and proof of insurance. The insurance card I show him was expired (by a few weeks), and he says “close enough.” (The proper one turned out to still be in the glovebox.) He wanders back to his car, checks my priors, comes back, reminds me of the speeding ticket I got in 2004, offers me a firm lecture about paying attention to road markings . . . and then lets me off with a warning. I thank the nice man, and we drive away.

And I suspect that Officer Friendly did just what those two audience members had done: he profiled us. He looked at me and Margaret (and her colleague Sonja, who was also in the car), saw what he thought were white folks with good jobs . . . and that visible whiteness is what spared me the expense of a ticket. While I’d like to be wrong about this, I suspect that if my blackness or my native-American-ness were more clearly visible in my pigmentation and features,* this story would’ve had a different ending. Especially given that I initially handed him an expired insurance card: compounding one offense with another is usually not a recipe for success when people of color get pulled over. I’m not exactly itching to have the ticket he could’ve legitimately written for my moving violation. But I’d feel better about the break I was given if I could believe that I wasn’t being rewarded simply for having pink skin.

*Mind you, in some people’s eyes, I amvisibly non-white. It happens often enough that I’m not completely surprised when it happens again . . . but more typically, I get read by people who don’t know me as just another white guy.

It’s time to flip the script on my list of top ten things I’ll miss about Tampa and offer up the companion list of things that make the Twin Cities a great place for me to live. As with the previous list, there’s no firm ordering here . . . at least not once you get past the Top Two items.

1. Love. Commuting 1200 miles for a relationship was no fun — and so it’s a Very Good Thing (to say the least) that Margaret and I share an address full-time. There’s undoubtedly more that could be said here . . . but there’s also no way for me to do justice to all that is good and glorious about “life with M” in a single blog entry.
2. My new job. It’s hard to detail all the good things about my new gig at UMN without sounding like I’m running down my former colleagues/employer more than I really want to. So I’ll simply say this: if I’d been given the chance to design my Dream Job, I couldn’t have improved significantly on my new gig without straying into the realm of fairy tales and impossibilities.
3. Blue (and green) politics. Minnesota’s certainly got its fair share of conservatives — enough so to have been considered a potential “swing” state in the 2004 elections — and it seems to have been slowly creeping to the right for a while now. But compared to Florida, it’s a hotbed of open-minded tolerance and progressive ideals.
4. Public transit. I know folks in Minneapolis who complain about the inadequacies of the local bus/rail system. And maybe it doesn’t stack up so well if your main point of comparison is someplace like New York. But I’m quite tickled to have a regular door-to-door commute of only 20-30 minutes where someone else does all the driving.
5. A real downtown. After nine years in a place where the center of the city becomes a ghost town after 5 pm and on weekends, it’s exciting to be living somewhere that actually has a vibrant downtown, even outside of conventional business hours.
6. Riverview Theatre. A beautifully maintained old-school (single screen!) movie theatre that specializes in second-run films . . . and where the priciest ticket is $3.
7. The Current. A radio station that is actually exciting to listen to. Great deejays and a delightfully eclectic blend of music: new and old, local and international.
8. Ichiban. There’s a lot of great sushi in Minneapolis — all the more surprising given how far away the nearest ocean is — and I’m not saying that Ichiban’s is the best of the best (though it is pretty damned good) . . . but it’s hard for me not to feel a special affection for an all-you-can-eat sushi bar.
9. First Avenue. All the things a club-sized venue for live music should be. Gigs I’ve enjoyed here since moving north include Garbage, Neko Case (twice!), El Vez, the Meat Purveyors, and Liz Phair.
10. Town Hall Brewery. There’s lots of good beer brewed in the greater Twin Cities area (Surly, Rush River, and Summit top that list), and lots of good casual watering holes (the Chatterbox, the Kitty Cat Club, the Riverview Wine Bar). But Town Hall brings the best of both those worlds together in one place . . . and, as the name suggests, they brew their own.

This could have been a much longer list (even the “cheat” of squeezing multiple “Best of” highlights into several of the individual items above) . . . but that’s exactly what should happen in the wake of a good move: the benefits of your new hometown simply become too numerous to mention.

And it really is a move now, it seems. What had been left of my Tampa belongings arrived in Minneapolis yesterday . . . just in time for me to leave it behind for a week or so while I head off to Istanbul. Internet access permitting, I’ll try and slip a blog entry or two in from Turkey.