Posted 4:07 PM by Blah blah

Bookmarks for myself. The Mercury News had a great column in Perspective about this and what this says about the decline of the classics and arts.

San Jose Symphony performs final concert. My city is now the largest city in America without a symphony orchestra. It's very sad.
____________
Be creative -- or die (Salon.com):

"A new study says cities must attract the new 'creative class' with hip neighborhoods, an arts scene and a gay-friendly atmosphere -- or they'll go the way of Detroit....

What that means for cities is that instead of 'underwriting big-box retailers, subsidizing downtown malls, recruiting call centers, and squandering precious taxpayer dollars on extravagant stadium complexes,' the leadership should instead develop an environment attractive to the creative class by cultivating the arts, music, night life and quaint historic districts -- in short, develop places that are fun and interesting rather than corporate and mall-like. It's advice that city and regional leaders can take or leave, but Florida contends that his focus groups and indices -- reporting the important factors needed for economic growth in the creative age, from concentrations of bohemians to patents to a lively gay community -- are more accurately predicting the success and failure of metropolitan areas.

By Florida's estimation, the top cities when it comes to attracting the creative class are San Francisco at No. 1, followed by Austin, Boston and San Diego, with New York coming in at No. 9. Decaying industrial centers like Detroit, Buffalo and Grand Rapids, and Southern cities like Memphis, Tenn., and Norfolk, Va., bring up the rear. However, the book isn't an ode to the survivors of the new economy or a utopian vision of the future. Some of the widening rifts between the creative and other classes are somewhat troubling, forecasting growing economic and regional differences. In the end, Florida writes, this will be another challenge the new creative class must face....

Gays are the canaries of the creative economy. Where gays are will be a community -- a city or a region -- that has the underlying preconditions that attract the creative class of people. Gays tend to gravitate toward the types of places that will be attractive to many members of the creative class. That said, a high score on the gay index, for example, New Orleans or Miami, does not translate into being a creative center, unless you couple that with technology assets. It's not that gays predict high-tech growth, it's that gays signal an environment that would attract creative-class people from a variety of backgrounds....

So in order to understand what moves creative people, you have to first understand that, of course we want money, we're not going to live dirt poor. But in a post-scarcity, post-materialist society, we find ways to feed ourselves. Some of us are even waiters and waitresses and do our creative things secondhand. And, this is the best example, some of us are software programmers, bored shitless at our work, so we do open-source software at our desks, while IBM or Hewlett-Packard are paying us. That's the way we get our intrinsic jollies. I do the work that I have to do to feed myself, but then I write books like The Creative Class. So you do the work that motivates you somehow.

Creative people are highly intrinsically motivated. Therefore in order to understand their location choices or their workplace choices or their lifestyle choices, we have to understand that they are choosing things based on intrinsic motivations....

They created a lifestyle mentality, where Pittsburgh and Detroit were still trapped in that Protestant-ethic/bohemian-ethic split, where people were saying, 'You can't have fun!' or 'What do you mean play in a rock band? Cut your hair and go to work, son. That's what's important.' Well, Austin was saying, 'No, no, no, you're a creative. You want to play in a rock band at night and do semiconductor work in the day? C'mon! And if you want to come in at 10 the next morning and you're a little hung over or you're smoking dope, that's cool.' I went to the Continental Club -- I was invited by Austin's leading political officials -- and we went to see Toni Price the singer-songwriter, and there were hippies smoking dope right there on the back porch.

The point is, this sense of having fun, being yourself, expressing yourself fully, is valued. But as long as people continue to try to prop up the downtowns, throwing money, burning money, by building stadiums and convention centers, it's not going to happen. [This describes MY city to a T.] Cities have become cities of ideas and cities of consumption. They are no longer cities of production, and people in Detroit and Pittsburgh keep thinking, 'We're going to have a headquarters, we're going to have the stadium, mom and dad are going to come from the suburbs and take little Johnny to the game, we're going to have retail.' That's just not what drives a city now. What drives a city we know increasingly are good places to live, great neighborhoods, great cafes, night life, places to have fun. Austin saw this from day one."

Israeli Device Detects Cell Phones Acting as Bugs