Pacific Views

Is Fargo, North Dakota hip?

That's what the LA Times says. Or, rather, that Fargo is aspiring to hip-ness.

Downtown development director Dave Anderson has focused his early marketing efforts on business travelers who come to Fargo by necessity. He's put menus from local restaurants in all hotel rooms in an effort to get guests out strolling downtown. If that works, he'll turn to persuading folks to come to Fargo by choice.

Musing about television, radio and print ads, Anderson has played around with several possible slogans. "Fargo. You know we're cold. We're also cool," he suggests. Or: "We're cold, but our downtown is hot."

[Fargo mayor Bruce] Furness likes the concepts. He also knows that, thanks to the Coen brothers, Fargo won't be an easy sell.

"People think we're up here on the bleak plains, snowed in eight months of the year. People want to think that way about Fargo," he said. With the sigh of a man resigned to rebuff, the mayor added: "I tell them the movie was not a documentary."

As someone who spent a decade living next door in Minnesota, we have to admit that the notion that anything in North Dakota is hip strikes us as very strange. But then, as a snotty West Coaster, the notion that Minnesota could be hip strikes us weird, too.