Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Have You Been to Westopolis Lately?
Of course not. No such place exists. But that hasn’t stopped the “destination-marketing organization” Discover St. Louis Park from rebranding as, yes, Westopolis. To be fair, they did need a new name, since the org also serves Golden Valley. But according to Caitlin Anderson at the Business Journal, Disc—er, Westopolis believes there are additional benefits to the name. “The ‘-polis’ suffix, which means ‘city’ in Greek, also provided the organization with a more cosmopolitan vibe, reflecting the more urban feel of St. Louis Park and Golden Valley compared to other suburbs,” Anderson writes.
Also, according to Westopolis President and CEO Becky Bakken, the new name “helps avoid confusion with St. Louis, Missouri,” which is certainly a very real problem that St. Louis Park faces. Westopolis, incidentally is the brainchild of the renaming firm Pollywog Inc., and on their site, I see that they also renamed Headway Emotional Services “Youable.” Sometimes I gotta ask myself why I’m in journalism when I could be renaming tourist bureaus for a lot more bucks? We did come up with Racket on our own, you know.
Does MN Sports Have Too Much ‘Razzmatazz’?
The quite Britishly named Briton Elgan Alderman was wondering if someday the folks on his silly little island will begin consuming sports the way we Yanks do. So where did he visit? Why, Minnesota, of course, “a state of diverse sporting options in apparent harmony.” Indeed!
Alderman had quite a busy trip—he saw the Vikings, the Gophers, and the Twins play in one weekend. That’s a lot of, er, sport. He then reported his findings in the Times (their Times, not ours) under a headline for the ages: “Future of British sport or too much razzmatazz?” His verdict?
American fans buy passionately—and buy is the operative word—into things widely viewed in Britain as gimmicks, harbingers of terror. Crowds here are human orchestras conducted by the jumbotron, “getting loud” when the big screen tells them to, ready and willing to spend, spend, spend.
It’s so true. We suck. “Everywhere I looked, I saw things that grind gears in the U.K.,” Alderman writes of his visit, while recognizing that the rampant commercialism of U.S. sports is “what administrators in the U.K. crave.” And capitalism being capitalism, it may be the one they make happen.
Coastal Elites Celebrate Duluth Man
Alan Sparkhawk gets the deluxe treatment in his New York Times profile— by which I mean, some of the photos move when you scroll past them. (I believe they call this “video” in the biz.) As Sparhawk prepares to release his solo album White Roses, My God on Friday, Grayson Haver Currin turns in an empathetic look at the always thoughtful Duluth musician. Sparhawk looks back on his Minnesota youth, recalls seeing Eddie Rabbitt at the State Fair before becoming a Suburbs fan, and says of his younger self, “My tendency was just nihilism. I wanted to challenge people, to get in people’s faces, to make them uncomfortable.” You know the story from there—he meets and marries Mimi Parker, and their band, Low, becomes an indie institution until her death in 2022—but Currin tells it well, while also covering what came after. And I love this detail from Sparhawk on how Parker exercised quality control: “When Mim would sing, that was all I needed to know…. That was as much approval as I ever needed.”
Miss Her Yet?
Don’t call it a comeback: Former Minneapolis City Council Member Lisa Goodman hasn’t been out of office for 10 full months, but the Frey administration has *Pacino voice* pulled her back in as the director of initiatives and partnerships. Goodman replaces… nobody! This is a new position, Wedge Live reports in an exhaustive look. “One of Goodman’s last acts in her old job last December was to vote on the city’s 2024 budget that created her new job,” we learn. “The annual pay of $156,000 is roughly 140 percent of her old salary as a council member.” As the Wedge looks into the situation they also link, via the Wayback Machine, to a great City Pages profile of Goodman from 2009. Seems it would be very useful to journalists if the *Minnesota* Star Tribune spent one-zillionth of the money it funneled into rebranding to make those archives easily available online. (Semi-related: 10 Thousand Design, the Colle McVoy affiliate that handled that Strib rebrand, still touts its reimaging of Yelloh, fka Schwan’s, which... just went under.)
