I was listening to MPR News the other day.<\/p>\n
I heard a “Jennifer Vogel” on the air. \u00a0She’s working<\/a> for MPR’s “Ground Level” project. \u00a0Her mission – and that of the “Ground Level Project” – “focuses on complex issues playing out in Minnesota’s cities and towns”<\/p>\n Check out the page above.\u00a0\u00a0Ms. Vogel is spending all sorts of time in Greater Minnesota.<\/p>\n She sounded familiar.<\/p>\n So I checked the archives. \u00a0Yep – it’s the same Jennifer Vogel who wrote the seminan patricial classist rant,\u00a0“F**k The Suburbs<\/a>“, for a Seattle version of a\u00a0City Pages<\/em>-style\u00a0Village Voice\u00a0<\/em>knockoff – an article which provided us all sorts of fun in this space<\/a> back in 2004.<\/p>\n It started:<\/p>\n Minneapolis and St. Paul sit on either side of the upper Mississippi River, in what amounts to the middle of nowhere. For three hundred miles in any direction, there are no cities of size, only prairie, gas stations, and big open sky. We may be on the Mississippi but no one comes here by boat. There are no containers from Japan piling up on the dock. People arrive by bus and car, dusty and road-worn, mostly from the small towns of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas–places where ambitious and misunderstood kids grow up despising their parents’ lives.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n OK, a lot of us who move from what Vogel calls “The Big Nowhere” think those sorts of things – at one point or another.<\/p>\n