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As promised/threatened on CULTSTUD-L, I’ve typed up the talk I gave at last week’s Crossroads conference and put it online here. Watch this space in the days to come for actual commentary on the conference itself.

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.

The title of yesterday’s post was cribbed from the chorus of “Me and Bobby McGee.” But you probably knew that already. (Less likely, though, is that you also knew that said tune — most famously performed by Janis Joplin — was penned by Kris Kristofferson.)

So imagine my chagrin when I was poking through some recently saved items in my RSS inbox, and I realized that, just a smidgen more than two weeks ago, Michael Bérubé used the exact same top-of-the-pops allusion as the title for a post on academic freedom. Some days, it seems, even my quotations are unoriginal.

But maybe I can make up for that oversight by offering up my favorite alternate ending for the original lyric . . . which comes from an article Greil Marcus wrote a decade or so ago (in Esquire, if my memory serves me well) on the death of rock. “Freedom’s just another word,” Marcus opined, “for a mess someone else has to clean up.” If that’s true, then maybe “we” (and I use the collective pronoun advisedly) are bringing “freedom” to Iraq after all.

For my dog (Mocha Java, Empress of All North America), Independence Day is all about the fireworks. Not the big ones that get sanctioned by the city, but the little ones that ordinary people around the neighborhood shoot off every night from sometime in late June until their supplies finally run out in mid-July. And Mocha hates fireworks. In Tampa, she would hide in the tub and tremble for hours (and you know that your dog’s really terrified when the place where she gets bathed becomes her chosen safehouse). In Minneapolis, she simply heads for the basement and refuses to leave. She, for one, will be very happy when freedom rings out less frequently. Or at least with fewer explosions.

I’m less certain what Independence Day means to my undergraduates — if only because there are more of them, and thus the range of answers to the question is undoubtedly a bit broader. But perhaps only a bit. On three different occasions — twice in the Freedom of Expression course I taught at USF, and last semester in the Media Outlaws course I taught at UMN — I’ve given students an in-class exercise on the Hancock Coalition. The scenario in question is fictional — at least insofar as no such organization exists today — but it’s also a very thinly disguised version of the story behind the Declaration of Independence. The scariest thing about the exercise isn’t that my students usually don’t recognize the origins of the tale (though that’s disturbing enough): it’s that, even after I point out the allegory, they’ve still always sided with The State against The Citizens, and the majority have still felt that military force was an appropriate response to a press release. This past spring, the final straw vote we held was actually unanimous. Freedom, it seems, is for other people.

My students, of course, aren’t the real problem here. Whenever I do this exercise, I also always discover that the vast majority of them have never actually read the Declaration of Independence . . . or the Constitution . . . or the Bill of Rights. Not even in the context of a high school US history class. Freedom, it seems, isn’t something worth teaching.

Of course, these days, freedom’s clearly not something that The State is keen on people exercising too readily. There are far too many real life examples of this problem to mention here, but this one, which crossed my desk this morning, is particularly appropriate today. [And props to the cool folks at Sivacracy.net for the link.]

Happy Inde-fucking-pendence Day, indeed.