a more nuanced discussion of creative class
22 Feb 09
Yesterday’s post about joining the creative class was kind of meant as a joke, but kind of not. The amazingly successful pecha kucha night held at Artcite last Thursday (and organized by my hunny, Jodi Green) inspired me to start getting better connected to what’s going on in Windsor.
All the talks went really well, and the energy and excitement both in the gallery and at the after party were remarkable. Phog’s Tom Lucier taped and uploaded all six Pecha Kucha Windsor talks. Tom, also one of the presenters, subtitled his talk “Growing Windsor’s Creative Class”, and this expression, creative class, was picked up by others over the evening.
During the discussion afterwards, I was tempted to challenge everyone to think beyond the term “creative class”. It makes me uncomfortable, but at the time I couldn’t think how to articulate exactly why, and I’m still not entirely sure. It reminds me entirely too much of knowledge worker, but being a member of the creative class sounds so much less like being a line worker in the manufacture of “knowledge”.
Years ago, I read Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide through the American Status System (Leddy Library: HN90.S6 F87 1983), in which he lays out a persuasive statement of what is obvious to any non-America: that America has a well-defined and fairly rigid class structure. But he also posits the existence of an “X” class of people, usually either impoverished artists or wealthy drop-outs, who (sort of) live outside the class system. These are the Bohemians in Florida’s formulation of the creative class, but note that they make up a small minority. The majority of this creative class are defined by the nature of their contribution to the economy, mostly in the private sector. Which isn’t to say that creative economic activity isn’t what Windsor needs, lord knows we need all the economic activity we can get.
Thursday night a very diverse group of people were brought together by their love of this city (this polis). To me, the unifying theme of Pecha Kucha Windsor’s six talks turned out to be citizenship. What does it mean to be a part of a city, to love that city, to be hurt by that city; how can we make that city better, how can we get more people thinking about, talking about, and making the change we need; how do we encourage residents to interact with their city as active participants, as citizens, rather than as passive consumers of utilities and services? And how can we live up to that ideal ourselves?
Posted by pzed on February 22, 2009 at 1.22pm
try some SORBET!
21 Feb 09
Those who read Jodi will recognize my new theme (code name: SORBET!) has basically the same structural underpinnings as the theme we developed for her. Getting away from the gawdawful wordpress default theme has been a three-year procrastination for me, but no longer. Still some bugs to work out, older posts not formatting quite like newer ones probably because of changes in wordpress, for example. If anything looks funky to you please let me know.
Posted by pzed on February 21, 2009 at 8.17pm
how to join the creative class
21 Feb 09
Step one: Finally get around to adding links to your sidebar.
Step two: Start lurking hanging around with other creative types.
Step three: Reap the benefits of your new, creative lifestyle!
Posted by pzed on February 21, 2009 at 1.35pm
the numerology of Scrabble
2 Feb 08
Time is, of course, flat, like a piece of paper. And if only we weren’t ourselves inscribed on that piece of paper, we could rise above and, looking down, read it. Like a novel. Or perhaps a computer programme.
Time being flat, there’s nothing inconsistent in suggesting that perhaps when Fate (or whoever) was handing out names, she thought about each and checked its Scrabble value for consistency with a variety of conspiracy theories. These are the words of the prophet. Or, if they aren’t, they probably will be.
Do you need evidence? Then try my new ScrabblizeIt! application.
Of course, you can probably guess the value of the name “Jesus Christ”, a coincidence on which this post’s entire hypothesis is based.
Posted by pzed on February 2, 2008 at 7.39pm
the little things
9 Jan 07
Yesterday was the first day of what I’m now calling my Every Day Project. The idea is to try to do a little something every day to make life better. Usually for me. Of course, every day won’t actually mean every day, that’s just unpossible; rather, it’s meant as an ironic nod to the power of positive thinking. But it seems to be working (as these things usually do for the first week or so): yesterday I succeded in cleaning up my dresser, and in the process I wrapped some coins. Today, I took those coins to the credit union and deposited them. Oh, and I also cleaned off the top of my filing cabinet and started a glorious shred-o-rama. Highlights? Gone are the records of the Royal Bank savings account I closed in 2001, and equally gone are my tax returns from 1996-1999. The fun never stops.
Posted by pzed on January 9, 2007 at 5.39pm
resolutions are for sissies
8 Jan 07
I’m just going to try to do something every day that makes my life (and hopefully the lives of those around me) just a little better. Yesterday, I finished putting up smoke alarms in our house. We are officially no longer in contravention of the law! Tonight, I’m going to create two new categories on this blog (the other is for recipes†) and clean off my dresser.
One of the things on my list for the not too distant future is to buy a decent digital camera, after which I will add photographic evidence to the documentation of my “every day” project. Won’t that be exciting.
† Why recipes? Because the house is full of misplaced slips of paper on which I write these things every time I have to call my mum to remind me.
Posted by pzed on January 8, 2007 at 8.09pm
chasing tails
18 Oct 06
This blog is on the verge of being stricken by smallpox, or some such disease that kills infants before they can even walk. Fact is, I haven’t had a lot of time for reading lately; more importantly, I haven’t been reading anything particularly inspiring. I sometimes drift into reading too much non-fiction, but I haven’t had great luck with fiction lately either. I picked up D.M. Thomas’s White Hotel a few days ago, and am pretty unimpressed out of the gate. It all seems rather implausible, and the symbolism heavy handed.
I’m tempted just to stop reading it only about a fifth of the way in, and have actually already picked up something else: Fall On Your Knees, by Ann-Marie MacDonald. Like White Hotel, Fall On Your Knees is something I’ve been meaning to pick up for quite some time. The early going is much more promising, but I have to say I may not be able to finish it if it means I’ll have that godawful xmas carol in my head for the next month.
Posted by pzed on October 18, 2006 at 5.02pm
cyrenaics
3 May 06
The Cyrenaics were a school of ancient Greek philosophy, “notable mainly for their empiricist and skeptical epistemology and their sensualist hedonism” (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy). It’s possible that epicureans would be a better name for this category than cyrenaics, but Epicurus “taught that the point of all one’s actions was to attain pleasure (conceived of as tranquility) for oneself, and that this could be done by limiting one’s desires and by banishing the fear of the gods and of death” (also IEP), and that doesn’t quite cut it. Besides, “epicurean” has come to be used almost exclusively to refer to the pleasures of food—just drop the word in Google as evidence.
So cyrenaics it is.
Posted by pzed on May 3, 2006 at 9.50am
words, metawords, and scripture
13 Apr 06
words is intended as a sort of external memory, a place to put stuff that otherwise will be only dimly remembered. As the passive mood of the previous sentence illustrates, and with the exception of this and the very first post, use of the first person pronoun will be forbidden. There’s nothing worse than subscribing to a blog because the subject matter seems interesting only to discover a rapid deterioration into personal diary. (Not that diaries can’t themselves be interesting, it’s just that they so often aren’t. Don’t worry baby… I’m not talking about you.)
The metawords category includes an element of self-parody. Librarians and other geeks have taken to adding the prefix “meta” to just about anything, sometimes in jest, but other times quite seriously. Metawords could be taken to mean “words about words”, which in this context means “words about words”, or posts about this site itself. Perhaps, since this post is in part about the metawords category, one could argue that this is a metametawords post, but hopefully no one would do such a thing.
The scripture category is both one of the main purposes of this blog and an example of what motivated its creation. Somewhere not too long ago I read in a work of fiction the idea, expressed well, that in a way everything that is written is a form of scripture. It may have been in Eco’s Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, but having flipped through the book a dozen times since, I can’t find it, and of course I never wrote it down, nor do I have the patience to read the entire book again, at least not so soon. The scripture category will feature thoughts about things that are written (scriptura), but limited to those things I read in print. For me, at least, it is still only with a book in my hand that a text can be not only a thing that is written but also a thing that might resonate with something that could be called holy.
Posted by pzed on April 13, 2006 at 2.11pm
