I came to no conclusions, but as it tends to be a recurring theme of mine, I did indeed want to share my Michigan Love. So, here it is:

You Come and You Go, Michigan Stays With You

Hop on over there and enjoy.

Having acquired an iPhone not two days before I headed up north last week, I was able to catch the beautiful thunderstorm that passed over us on US23-I75 North near Flint with the phone’s video camera.

One of the things I always loved about taking film production classes as an undergrad was scoring the films. I felt like you could give me anything, and adding the music would allow the footage to zing off the screen. I never played the role of a DP, but I managed to win Best Soundtrack (or maybe it was Best Score– I don’t know; it was a few years back now) for a digital animation I made my senior year in our department’s student festival (I used the sounds of Mogwai). However, it bothered me at the time and still bothers me today that while using the music of known or semi-known bands for student projects is usually some degree of acceptable (one might plead “Fair Use”), using music from the CD you bought/ripped/acquired magically from the man in the moon isn’t fair play.

So almost as soon as the thunderstorm was over I decided to conduct an experiment. I would cut out the car chatter I recorded and replace it with Creative Commons-licensed music.

In case you want a little refresher on the Creative Commons, it’s “a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright (About – Creative Commons, http://creativecommons.org/about/, retrieved August 18, 2009).” You can use the Creative Commons website to define your own creative work, and the CC folks make it really easy to embed the license you choose in your own work.

I figured there must be a whole galaxy of musicians out there who publish using a Creative Commons license that allows me to understand exactly the kind of permission I have as a random creative type, wanting to rip, scratch and work other people’s work on a whim.

First I stumbled across Magnatune, a music distribution site with the tagline “we are not evil” that more or less allows users to set the price of the music. I came across the artist C. Layne, whose album Shark Week I liked a lot, possibly for my movie. According to Magnatune’s website, they have a liberal policy toward non-commercial uses of the music. However, my budget for this teeny-tiny project is a staggering $0, so I decided to keep looking.

Next, I found my way to Jamendo. Jamendo lets you download music for free and all music is available under a Creative Commons license of some kind. There was plenty of music to explore here, and finally I settled on a nice little folk harmonica tune by a Japanese band called Secret Ocean.

I learned that there are other similar services to Jamendo. I could have kept looking for days, but one of my goals was to keep it simple. There’s the Free Music Archive (which a really nice looking logo, design friends), ccMixter, BeatPick, and Sutros.

The license associated with the music I chose is Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. In other words, I have permission to share and remix the work as long as I attribute and share alike– in other words, as long as I let you share and remix too. So here you go, if you want to.

As you may have heard, Michigan has kind of an image problem. Anthony Bourdain described Detroit as a city that’s “fucked up.” I’m sure if you’ve seen a photo essay about the city in the past six months, you’d agree with him.

Yet Michigan is as vibrant and dynamic as it’s ever been in the 26 years of my life. Admittedly, I’ve never been alive to see Detroit’s, or even Michigan’s heyday, and admittedly, I live 40 solid miles from the city of Detroit, but to me, Michigan is a playground for creative thinkers and raw talent. Rent is cheap, friendships are solid as oak, and M-75 calls you to Northern Michigan on all the weekends where you can scrounge together gas money and a carful of friends.

I live by a motto that describes this place well: we make our own fun. We make horror movies in the woods. We dance twice monthly at the Elks Club Lodge. We write incessantly, and some of us write exceptionally well (uh, hello Jeffrey Eugenides and Ernest Hemingway!). We rock and roll. Detroit is the only city that could have raised a guy like Jack White of The White Stripes, from a Polish family with nine (or so) siblings. It is also the city of Eminem, of course, and Sufjan Stevens.

Michigan is the setting for scores of recent and upcoming films; take Whip It for example. The rural roads and pathways you see in the movie’s trailer might look like anywhere else, but they are only 5 miles away from Ann Arbor, home of Google AdSense, Border’s Headquarters and one of the top public schools in the country. You can walk everywhere in Ann Arbor, but we have plenty of culture to walk to. Ann Arbor is also home to 826 Michigan, a non-profit writing center for kids.

When Silvia came, I made sure that she had a Bell’s Oberon. So did everyone else. My friend Erin attempted to describe the feeling of tasting your first Oberon of the summer. After my friend’s rehearsal dinner in Glen Arbor, we all headed over to Art’s Tavern. We drank pitchers of Oberon, all 20 or so of us.

While I hesitate to use a local (well, regional) beer as a metaphor, let’s visit the comparison: an Oberon is a wheat beer, easily drinkable, tasting of orange. Non-beer drinkers have been said to be content with this beer, but I also know die-hard beer fans who swear by an Oberon on an August evening just shy of dusk. So yeah, we’re beer drinkers here in Michigan. But we are mild and welcoming. We make our own fun. We are a vibrant community.

Over the past few years, I’ve stumbled across a lot of people who are committed to sticking with Michigan and its offerings. It would be easy to spend my whole life here and still miss something. Whether or not I stay, Michigan has really served me well. Yet I’ve mostly only lived here, and I dream of finding new homes on further shores. I feel the tug to leave and explore, but I do feel that it’s so I can one day come back.

Finally, I must say that the people of Michigan are built of solid character. We can be serious and funny, all in one sentence (think sad clown– wait, don’t). We make great lifelong friends. We also make great lovers. If you stumble across a Michigander you think is cute, I would recommend  you take him/her out on a date. As a people, we are a catch, and how could we not be with all the freshwater fish surrounding us on three sides?  …Right???