Sufjan Stevens, Where ARE You?
Posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 4:39 pm
© Denny Renshaw
The most job-depressing quote of the day comes from Judy Putnam, spokeswoman for the Michigan League for Human Services, in an interview with the Huffington Post. Optimism “hasn’t been a problem in Michigan,” she says. “There were no signs of hope in our numbers.”
Poor Michigan! It’s cold up there! And now the jobless rate is at 14.1%, “a distinction the state has held for 25 of the last 26 months.”
Sufjan, I know you found love again and moved on to Chicago (Illinoise), and then, in fact, to Brooklyn – but your ripped tee and faraway expression tell me that you still care for your homeland. You think of them often.
Not to mention, the unemployment rate in Illinois is but 10.1%. And here in NYC, well, you know, we’re not so bad off, comparatively (although a girl could always use a drink).
Can’t you help a Wolverine out?
Maybe I’m partial because my grandma used to live in Michigan, and my dad went to college there. And when I was a kid we used to ski in the Upper Peninsula, which was so freaking cold you would freeze your nose off, really, if you didn’t have it covered up. You know all this of course. See “The Upper Peninsula”
What you don’t know about is that one Christmas Eve when we skidded on some ice driving from our ski trip in the U.P. to my grandmother’s house in Ludington, and the minivan ended up upside down in a snowbank, “Phantom of the Opera” blasting from the speakers. See “Oh God, Where Are You Now? (In Pickerel Lake? Pigeon? Marquette? Mackinaw?)”
But several friendly Michiganites stopped to help, and we were in a Days Inn with warm pasties and the Care Bears Christmas Special by nightfall (albeit in a roundabout sort of way involving a broken-down hatchback transporting a drooling dog, a trip to Rent-a-Wreck, and Mom in tears at the police station).
What I’m trying to say is, those kinds of good people shouldn’t be jobless. See “Flint (For the Unemployed and Underpaid)”
So before you move on to your albums on California, Dirty Jerz, Rhode Island, or Oregon (each with lower unemployment rates, I might add, than our Water-Winter Wonderland), what about some sort of charity tour? “Stimulate Michigan” by Sufjan, perhaps? “Reinstate the Great Lakes State”? Or your own brilliant title, “Say YES to Michigan!”?
C’mon. You’re a classy guy. The Michigan state motto is, “If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you” – in Latin, for goodness sakes. Does that say “We want to be unemployed” to you? See “All Good Naysayers, Speak Up! Or Forever Hold Your Peace!”
We all know you were born in Detroit.
Get back to me soon or I’m talking to Eminem.
