Devil's Advocate: Valuing Creativity

So from time to time we're called upon, somewhat blandly, to prove -- Yes Prove -- the value of public art, and by extension, creative placemaking, and by extension, creativity.

Some of us believe in the intrinsic value of living creatively, and some of us, on an intuitive level, believe that there are real, measurable, tangible benefits. Yet to anyone but the most die-hard statistician, faced with measuring those benefits, the task can't appear anything other than daunting. 

The problem is that the benefits are so many, they feather out so far . . . who can say where the limit falls?

If I'm a wealthy entrepreneur in 10 years because I am an nurtured by a supportive community of innovators today, will the future money I pay in yearly taxes count? Or even simpler: what about the money saved each year by not cleaning up graffiti from a wall that's now a mural . . . does that count? And what about the deterrent effect on the next wall over? Does that count, too?

It's not that we don't have some language to talk about these things -- sure, foot traffic. sure tourism. sure talent clustering. sure.

But for the many of us who care about creative placemaking -- who are at the forefront of the dialogue or in the trenches making it happen -- we ourselves are creative. We care about and believe in creativity deeply, as a way of life, and may be a wee tad bit romantic and disinclined -- just sayin' -- to spend too much time convincing people of something we see as self-evident or splitting hairs over numbers.

So what can be done to fold data collection into our efforts, encourage monitoring of outcomes, and promote distribution of these numbers in a field that could use some bolstering in this regard?

We're operating in the penumbra left by Richard Florida's glaringly optimistic pre-recession parade of books, lectures, and profitable (for him) recommendations. Even with more conscientious efforts at turning this emerging practice into accepted policy, the information is still often vague, tirelessly recycled, or circularly referenced, with much of it tying back into the NEA's Creative Placemaking by Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa, whose work -- under their own names, their consultancies' names, and the names of various clients -- forms a huge bulk of the information being released.

It's a great primer, but we need more to justify claims about the economic importance of this practice; whether such claims are necessary, of course, being a whole 'nother field of inquiry. I'm not saying -- as many detractors are -- that this field is only viable if the facts and figures prove it so. But we do often reference this instrumentalist viewpoint, and as such, we'd better have quality numbers on our side -- after all, numbers are what we're looking for when we approach foundations and investors.

So, suffice it to say, when I had the chance to hear opinion on this issue straight from the horse's mouth -- Jamie Bennett was at the City Club last Friday -- I asked.

All this preamble is a bit much to fit into a quick question for a general audience -- though I tried, and the result may have been  . . . less than eloquent. Mealy-mouthed though I was, I think it was important to play, for a minute, a representative of the number-hounding crowd that wants to see everything in columns with decimal points and ten-year projections -- the devil's advocate. I think it's important to win these people over -- play their game and our own too -- but the hesitancy to meet these folks where they are from our side (or the NEA's) is, I think, telling.

I was hoping Jaime would provide for me the argument I've so often struggled to make myself. Instead of affirmation, I got confirmation that much more work is needed.

And more, to be fair, is on its way.

Anne Gadwa begins to explore the "fuzziness" of vibrancy, comparing the NEA's definition to the slightly softer version offered up by ArtPlace; but the paper, which is primarily based on self-citation of her and Markusen's earlier works, doesn't really move beyond an admission of this fuzziness.

Create Equity moves further in cataloguing some of the challenges and approaches used in valuing creativity thus far, and even more encouraging is the Philadelphia Culture Blocks program, which has actually made strides toward concrete metrics taken through a variety of approaches -- and funded, most hearteningly -- through an Our Town grant.

 For better or worse, we are (Jamie's words, not mine) "creating a field."  And like any field in the natural sciences, the social sciences, even the arts -- after all, what is music if not math, and painting if not chemistry -- there are numbers to be reckoned with. Numbers, after all, what fill out the checks that get the projects built.

 

Cleveland's Brain Gain

A surprise today from Richey Piiparinen, a Cleveland blogger and geographer at CSU's Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs . . . We're getting smarter!

Well, not exactly. But we are, for the first time in a long time and most unexpectedly, actually gaining more college-educated young people than we're losing. For Cleveland, this is HUGE. It ties into urban planning and development from so many angles: housing and jobs, economy and entertainment, and above all, arts and culture.

Over and over again, we turn to the discourse on arts and culture to mediate our relationship with the young, talented workers we hope to attract. This ties so directly into the work that I hope - and plan - to do here in Cleveland that when I heard the study announced this morning on Sound of Ideas, I was so amazed I had to chime in. I commented: 

I grew up in Cleveland and got my degree in architecture at Yale. After college, like so many of my peers, I Went West, Young Woman. In California, I studied permaculture and sustainability, biked to work, practiced yoga at a donation-based studio where everyone paid what they could afford, built giant sculptures out of recycled metal and became an ardent advocate for the power of art and creativity to transform public space. Not even a month ago, I moved back to Cleveland, and have begun working with a fabulous organization, @LAND studio, that supports many of the same principles I found informing my work in the Bay Area. Though I was always involved in the arts as a kid growing up in Cleveland, the atmosphere of creativity, openness and collaboration has absolutely taken off in recent years -- I know; I've been watching and plotting my return!
What drew me back (and I suspect this holds true for many others) is the feeling that not only is this a time of growth and excitement in Cleveland, but of great opportunity, as well. We are making many of the same changes, and exploring many of the same values and strategies traditionally associated with places like San Francisco -- a deep commitment to fostering unique and (if you'll excuse a word that's often over-used in this context) vibrant local culture, coupled with a renewed commitment to sustainability, local business, great programming and . . . fun. Frivolous though this last one may sound, it’s been a central topic in the debate over the best strategies in urban planning for a number of years now, and I think Cleveland’s new influx of young, educated people (often those without children and with the most disposable income) proves that it will continue to be an important factor moving forward.
Our 20-30-somethings are looking for jobs, affordable living, good-possibly-local food, and a home that won’t be swept into the ocean in 10 years . . . all things that Cleveland has. But they are also looking for the space and opportunity to participate in and build community in new creative ways that keep pace with the cutting edge of what’s happening in San Francisco, Brooklyn and Los Angeles. Cleveland affords that opportunity in abundance, with a critical mass of young folks in arts-focused districts like Tremont, University Circle, and Ohio City, and space to expand in places like Collinwood, Detroit Shoreway and our untapped industrial quarters, plus an economy that’s diverse and flexible beyond just Eds and Meds -- I think we’re poised for a blossoming of ideas and innovation for many years to come.

More on Leaving the Garden: Does placemaking mean playgrounds for the urban elite?

Last week Tim Redmond, my former editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, published on his excellent blog 48 hills an incendiary, comprehensive and whip-smart speech given at a business conference on the “Mid-Market Transformation” last week by the former CEO of Salon, David Talbot. 

The piece is significant because it contextualizes the growing, palpable rage over everything from Google Busses to tech-friendly tax breaks that have dominated conversations on the future of urban planning in San Francisco, addressing what many see as an inexorable, shuddering earthquake sliding over the land — the subduction of a thriving and diverse city by a technophilic elite.

Talbot’s assertion that he is “no luddite” should be obvious to anyone familiar with the digital pioneer and his award-winning online publication, which frequently covers topics in tech, innovation and business. But it is nonetheless an important precursor to a discussion that, while granting the great potential of tech entrepreneurship to do good, also outlines a host of real and tangible negative effects directly attributable to the cult of digital capitalism, which promises to strengthen its hold on this city, and plenty of others, in coming years.

I’m a strong believer in the power of technology to liberate the human spirit. And I’m very proud that San Francisco is a beehive of this kind of buzzing innovation.

Talbot writes, and then continues

But over the years, the innovation bubbling up in the Bay Area has become much more market-oriented than socially driven. Vast fortunes have been created overnight by raiding the intellectual content that others have painstakingly built over the years. Other new empires have risen by convincing millions of people to give up their privacy and reveal their deepest thoughts and desires for free – a kind of Tom Sawyer business model based on persuading the public that it’s lots of fun to paint someone else’s fence.

The Tom Sawyerism to which Talbot refers applies to everything from the offering up of private information to a bevy of salespeople eager to pummel it back at us in the form of targeted advertising . . . to the relatively more glacial, but no less tangible, process by which populations create the "cool" that will later be rewarmed and served back to them -- at a fair markup, of course.

In San Francisco, this process is playing out on the physical landscape, as tech entrepreneurs flock to the city and its outposts -- not least of which is Burning Man -- to slurp up what's innovative, repackage it digitally, and use it to finance the very real "reinvestment" by which the city is becoming attractive and commercially viable for a certain set - to the necessary exclusion of others. 

As I begin to contemplate my own move from the Bay Area and the art community I've been part of here (more on that later), it's a constellation of issues I'm struggling to reconcile all the time: my belief in the power of place and in the importance of using space to rebuild community, with my fear and mistrust of the bright-eyed and buzzwordy discourse of creative placemaking; my love for the way new forms are born and breed in the crevices of the city and the cracked desert landscape, with my skeptical mistrust of those who say it will "change the world"; my grudging acceptance of the superstructures of real estate and finance and politics and technology that govern what is likely to happen and what is even possible in the complex system we inhabit, with my intense, prideful, jealous, possessive, passionate and perhaps irrational love of the places I have built a home over the past few years.

If you want to struggle with me, perhaps start with Leaving the Garden, Part 1, or

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Matter out of Place, Matter in Place

Recently, I had the opportunity to apply for a position with a coworking space, helping to forge relationships between members and link them to projects where their skills could be applied. Readers of these pages will know of my great enthusiasm  for places where ideas can be exchanged, talents traded, and resources shared – coworking spaces, yes, but also many other innovative (and traditional) public spaces and forums rendered fertile not only through proximity of shared resources, but through serendipity – the happy accident that creates something new and precious. 

Thinking about coworking spaces in this way – not just as physical places but as collections of resources that can generate new value simply by virtue of the convergences they create – I got to ruminating on collections in general, and the idea of “collecting” as a valuable approach to better planning and better living – a remedy to isolation in the urban context as much as it is a system for creating meaning and memories in a personal one.

When I was younger, I had the sometimes-inconvenient habit of saving everything – artful cardboard packaging, empty spools from thread, those funny little pie-tin-shaped paper covers keeping the drinking glasses in hotel rooms clean (do they still use those?) – driven by the vague notion that whatever I collected would someday come in useful for . . . something. 

I’d become convinced at an early age of the idea that nothing was really trash. In the right place, at the right time, in large enough quantities, anything could be useful – just google “dryer lint art.” This way of thinking stretches way beyond everyday choices like recycling; In my work as an author and artist, architect and urban strategist, student of and advocate for sustainable systems, this concept has come to repeat itself as a powerful trope, illuminating all sorts of efficiencies that create healthier, more productive, more satisfying and more inspiring human experiences.

In California and Hawaii, I traveled and learned to build communities from the dirt on which they stood and to shape the land according principles of permaculture, mimicking natural systems where waste materials in one context became valuable resources in another. 

When I began working with teams to build large-scale sculptures out of recycled metal for Burning Man, where discarded materials find new life and friendships are built over hundreds of hours in the piece-by-piece creation of unfathomable works of art, I came to love the idea that litter was referred to not as trash but as MOOP — Matter Out Of Place. 

This naming speaks to that lifelong love of collecting, embodying a simple but potent concept: anything that can be out of place also has the potential to be in place — we can generate value and eliminate unwanted objects simply by reframing them, changing their situation or their relationship to each other.

These same principles can be applied in the urban context  — to physical things like waste streams and energy usage (the consolidating of which will only become more automatic as databasing and big data analysis become more second nature and intrinsic to our daily operations) — but to less tangible and easily identifiable resource streams as well. In the fields of urban innovation and social entrepreneurship, we are beginning to rearrange the components of modern society to create new modes and systems that increasingly emphasize efficiency and synergy over consumption and competition, to the benefit of all. It’s not so different from those biological principles I mastered, and eventually led workshops in.

Many of the trendiest new urban forms - start-up spaces, business incubators, all those coworking spaces and even some coffeeshops – fill a variety of roles for the public, fostering new ways of interacting and promoting networks that, like healthy ecosystems, support growth. But at their simplest, many of these spaces take on the role of collector: adding value by grouping things (in this case, people, ideas and resources) in new ways.

This concept, inherent in the natural world, where matter is constantly broken down and rebuilt into new ways, holds the key to innovation in the man-made world as well. Those growing networks and databases allow for materials exchanges that help industries sort and use all kinds of raw resources which would otherwise go to waste. On an individual level, they provide an easy infrastructure for sharing everything from tools to cars to couches for the night and homes for the week. Used to their fullest, they might enable the trading of underused capacities of all sorts.

A parallel process is taking place in physical space, with a slow return to models arranged around the density and mutualism that sustained communities for generations. Renewed investment in city centers and the movement toward transit oriented development are obvious examples, but it’s a movement that filters all the way down to urban innovations that push for more and better public amenities, creative events where leisure time is “shared,” rather than provided to an individual user in a private home, and other structure like pop-up retail where barriers to entry which might otherwise be too high to allow an individual entrepreneur or artisan to participate in the market are lowered.

Collecting people for a given cause can also have unexpected, generative effects. Our modus operandi for generations, recognized by social and cultural critics across space and time (From Karl Marx to the incindiary creator of the Zeitgeist movies, Peter Joseph, to psychologist Jean M. Twenge, whose recent Generation Me describes how today's young people are more driven and entitled – and unhappy – than ever before) has been to seek individual fulfillment through competition and consumption. But, as these critics have commented, finally being able to look so much of what we thought we wanted in the face has left us so unhappy, prompting the question, maybe all of this striving and getting and owning isn’t really all that fulfilling. 

The open source movement centers on sharing and collaboration as a “greater than the sum of its parts,” game, and in many industries, such as fashion, which have been “open source” since before the term was coined, the lack of copyright or other intellectual property protection does not hinder the proliferation of ideas, but rather enables it. More importantly, we may find the collaborative or communal model more emotionally sustainable, for most of human evolution we did things in small dedicated communities, where individual compensation took a backseat to the entire community’s continued well being. Psychologists are repeatedly finding evidence that we are chemically and psychologically hard-wired to find satisfying group interactions more nourishing to the psyche than success-based individual actions, even when the outcome of an individual or competition based event is good for the individual. 

Of course, there are only so many “winning” scenarios to go around – that venture-capital deal or promotion – so even if an ambitious individual can amass a record of successes and derive happiness from it, such a scenario tends to invoke a “fixed-pie” model with regard to other competitors and to environmental and social externalities. By contrast, collaborative models rely on everyone participating in a project’s success, which can effectively “grow the pie,” creating more efficient workpaths, more prolific and beneficial new models, more creative solutions based on a wider swath of participants, and a more powerful and satisfying end result. 

Doubtful that participating as a tiny individual in a large group can be as satisfying as being the star of the show? Ever participate in a flash mob? It’s a silly example, but the impact of the spontaneous, authentic, exuberant interaction – though the majority of the participants possess no special skill – is arguably far greater than, for instance, a high-cost dance performance by professionals in a theater. And while, elsewhere in these pages I’ve lamented how the rush to participate in open-source or trendy innovation has at times led to the eradication of a skill or the diminishing of a particular expertise, the flip side of that argument is that the total “mass” of what’s produced is greater, with a greater dispersal of utility, than in most situations involving true expertise – the line between audience and performer is broken down, and everyone comes away feeling that they’ve participated. 

It’s what makes Burning Man Burning Man, where there are said to be “no spectators,” and where everyone participates in building a larger-than-life experience through innumerable small contributions, be they in cooking, building, engineering, massaging, fortune-telling, solar-panelling or what have you. But Burning Man is certainly not the only populist art movement to buy into the theory. Nearly a generation before anyone built anything on Baker Beach, Peter Schumann was busily spreading the Cheap Art Manifesto through his Vermont-based Bread and Puppet theater company. 

When groups of volunteers collaborate on projects at Burning Man (though the same is true in many other contexts), it is often for no payoff other than the satisfaction of seeing the project born into the world. But what motivates participants during the day-to-day operations required to conceive, plan, and construct some of those truly monumental works of art may have more to do with the day-to-day environment than with a vision of the final product. Working hard among likeminded creative individuals, learning new skills, and enjoying a flexible and supportive working environment are all powerful motivators, and show up in all kinds of social ventures with no quantifiable payoff for the individual. Volunteering to build a community garden or hold a bakesale or carswash – even if you are not the direct beneficiary – has a social value, just like the quilting bees and barn raisings of yesteryear. 

All of which speaks to the Matter In Place ideology: there is a reason that barns were raised and quilts were bee’d in big groups – not just that many hands made the work lighter, but that they also made it more fun. These sorts of events were social occasions for the community, and the ‘fun-factor’ acted as a commodity to pay for the input of capital – time and labor – that was freely donated. 

As eye-roll-inducing as it may be to describe this process in terms bland enough to be borrowed from Economics 101, we’ve become so automatically and unthinkingly dependent on consumption-based modes for our entertainment and social stimulation that it seems non-trivial to describe how satisfying group interactions could slowly begin to stand in for that CD purchased or Pay-Per- viewed. The also non-trivial result is, of course, a stronger overall community with a richer social structure and more resources to go around.

It’s a model that applies not only to artistic caprices, not only to community enterprises, but to all manner of human endeavors. It’s the coworking space that prompted this musing through its commitment to providing not only the ability to share physical resources, but more importantly, mentorship, community input and cross-pollination.

Ask any collector: it’s a careful act. Amassing things, yes. That’s the creating efficiencies part of the story. Ten people sharing one printer in a communal office is better than each person buying their own. But collecting is also about creating a narrative. You pick and choose objects that support each other, that multiply the power of those numbers by the quality and type of their interactions, the contrasts and repetitions, to create a story that otherwise couldn’t be told. And that is where participating in community trumps individual ownership or success any day.

 

On Collecting: New Contexts

Just as much as the act, the nature and meaning of collecting has long enthralled us. Those whose work tends to emulate the art of collecting – authors who gather words and thoughts, artists who make arrangements of tone and texture – have helped us realize their profound power, their deeply rooted place in civilization and the human psyche. 

Introspections like those of Walter Benjamin, on the act of unpacking his library, or more recently William Davies King, whose psychotherapy (itself a "collection of recollections") led him to examine his own journey down the path of the collector, show the occupation to be as much about the construction of personal meaning – a type of self-creation – as it is about showcasing external truths inherent in the world. The newly published anthology Contemporary Collecting: Objects, Practices and the Fate of Things reinforces the idea of collecting as an essential human activity through its very scope; its authors adroitly shuttle through the warp-threads of the topic a broad weft that here uncodes the semiotic meanings embedded in everyday objects and there details the devastating sense of loss accompanying an author's accidental deletion of his MP3 collection – an archive which he has come to see as a catalogue of life phases and defining events.

In At Large and At Small, essayist Anne Fadiman uses the opening piece, "Collecting Nature," as a sort of organizing aperçu, providing readers with a framework for understanding the zealous passion – in herself and a host of other s who were brilliant or crazed or both – for the art of collecting, the joy and addiction inherent in conquest followed by categorization. That collecting, specifically lepidoptery, should be a common thread linking so many figures of historical weight she sees as logical bordering on expected:

Is it surprising that the revolutionist Jean-Paul Marat, the author of a 1790 pamphlet advocating that “five or six hundred heads be cut off,” was an amateur lepidopterist? Is it entirely a coincidence that Alfred Kinsey, before he collected eighteen thousand sexual histories (along with innumerable nudist magazines, pornographic statues, and pieces of sadomasochistic paraphernalia), collected tens of thousands of gall wasps?

But in just exactly how the results of a life spent amassing and chronicling, loving and possessing, can be read in a figure's work and legacy, she takes considered interest. She describes author Vladimir Nabokov's lifelong fascination with lepidoptory – "only Nabokov, eloping at age ten with a nine-year-old girl in Biarritz, would have taken, as the sum total of his luggage, a folding butterfly net in a brown paper bag" – and makes the case that his long and influential career, which lasted six decades and included a stint at Harvard, helped shape his prose. 

Many of the themes in Nabokov’s fiction – metamorphosis and flight, deception and mimicry, evasion and capture – are lepidopteran. And to my ear, his very language is too. The first canto of Pale Fire contains, within its four-and-a-half-page compass, the words torquated, stillicide, shagbark, vermiculated, preterist, iridule, and leminiscate. Nabokov collected rare words, just as he collected rare butterflies, and when he netted one, especially in the exotic landscape of his second language, his satisfaction is as palpable as if he had finally captured the brown and white hairstreak that once eluded him when he was a boy. Nabokov’s style is not just poetic; it is taxonomic.

Of course, all the same is true of Fadiman herself, who admits within the pages of her essays her own love of rare words, her own continued enslavement – though she weened herself off lepidoptery – to the collecting of things like books, a pursuit in which her connection to sense of self is no less palpable than Benjamin's.

Above all, it is the lingering propensity toward the taxonomic that she shares with the figures she writes about; this is the point of opening with "Collecting Nature." It teaches us to reflect with game study  on the disconnected ephemera of everyday life, to regard what could be seen as haphazard agglomeration instead as meaningful assemblage. This is the lesson we must understand to see the true beauty of At Large, which meanders with the scientist's paradoxical mix of excitable attention and staid passion from topic to  topic – considering things as disparate as ice cream and mail and the drowning death of a trail-mate in her youth – and within topics, becoming through sheer preponderance of evidence and associations ever more granular in its observation.

This ability to see meaning iteratively – the world in a grain of sand, so to speak – is the task of the essayist and collector alike, for what are the objects and ideas collected but tiny fragments that represent larger wholes?

For a collector like Benjamin, to whom the activity necessarily connotes something of a disorder, a feverish love, the true collector is not so much concerned with the objects of his infatuation for the objects' sake, but rather, for the place these tiny fragments of meaning allow him to build for himself – it is not, as he says, that the objects come alive in the collector, but rather, that he comes alive in them.

Living within one's collection may seem an abstract concept, and yet, in many ways it the perfect interpretation of collecting in the modern era, when it is practices as a highly emotional and personal art. 

The popular home design and lifestyle website Apartment Therapy frequently relies on the idea of collecting as a method of making a space meaningful for its occupants. For a great collection of their articles on collecting, click through the photo.

The popular home design and lifestyle website Apartment Therapy frequently relies on the idea of collecting as a method of making a space meaningful for its occupants. For a great collection of their articles on collecting, click through the photo.

Collecting has burst free from a rigid realm heretofore confined to stamps, coins, or high-end art. Today, it's a populist activity available to just about anyone, as perusal of any popular home, design or lifestyle magazine will suggest. Article or how-tos on collecting today (excluding the very technical) free collectors from the necessity of investing wisely or making a profit, reminding them that it's more important to assess whether the objects collected will be in storage in five years than retain resale value in fifty. Collecting today is about personality rather than mastery, and enjoyment rather than rarity or (except in the most general, anthropological sense) cultural significance. Thus freed from stifling restrictions of taste and economy, collecting objects (like collecting words and stories for the essayist) is free to be a truly creative enterprise, able to generate new forms and values in a way that the restrictive act of cataloguing simply couldn't.

Martha Stewart, whose dogmatic DIY-iscm can seem over-the-top and has gained her criticism over the decades she has spent as a home-design and lifestyle maven, frequently includes notes on collecting. In one sense, she is similar to Benjamin's true …

Martha Stewart, whose dogmatic DIY-iscm can seem over-the-top and has gained her criticism over the decades she has spent as a home-design and lifestyle maven, frequently includes notes on collecting. In one sense, she is similar to Benjamin's true collector, a man of such excess leisure that he has the time to dedicate himself to his passion (after all, who, but someone with too much time on their hands, could patiently glue micro-collections onto accordion-folded pages contained within a matchbook?). And yet, Stewart also shares with him the idea of collections as self-defining.  She has a very Benjamin-esque interpretation of the art, looking more at how collections enrich our spaces through juxtaposition and surprise, becoming an outward expression of personality, rather than conforming to strict rules about category and worth.  

Given its indisputable place within the realm of archetypal human activities, collecting as metaphor has the power to back up the practical advances it can yield as we such for new paradigms around which to organize our public and private lives. For more thoughts on collecting and collections, click here.

Stone Rolls through Symbiosis

Since we've been occupied, as of late, with ruminations on the interaction between mass culture and creative culture, it seems appropriate that I take a moment to register something like shock, if not exactly surprise, at seeing this article trending just below an analysis of Miley Cyrus’s twerk-worthiness on Rolling Stone this week. It's a twenty-five-photo spread from the Symbiosis Gathering — a phenomenon most likely to be associated with the local festival in-crowd: large-scale installation artists, hoopdancers and firespinners, and of course the semi-nomadic, sometimes-dreadlocked itinerants who sell crystals, handmade clothing and food ranging from super-healthy to stoner-friendly along the increasingly bloated West Coast festival circuit. Of course, to anyone paying attention, the proliferation and increasing exposure of these events means a lot more than a seasonal influx of alt-lifestyle youngsters and the spread of Peace, Love, Unity, Respect. It means a thriving cultural phenomenon to mine for music, fashion, art, ideas and . . . it goes almost without saying, profit.

Bay Area Photographer Tom Tomkinson captured Bryan Tedrick's Coyote for Rolling Stone. The 25-foot sculpture provided a hangout spot and chance to meet new friends at this year's Burning Man before traveling to Symbiosis just a few weeks later.

Bay Area Photographer Tom Tomkinson captured Bryan Tedrick's Coyote for Rolling Stone. The 25-foot sculpture provided a hangout spot and chance to meet new friends at this year's Burning Man before traveling to Symbiosis just a few weeks later.

Art and music festivals aren't new, of course, and even those trying hardest to retain a character all their own (Burning Man being the prime example) owe plenty to traditional celebrations like carnival, as well as a mashup of rave culture, mainstream music events, Woodstock-and-Grateful-Dead-esque stereotypes, and various utopian and communitarian impulses that have been circulating the globe since the 1960s. But that something uniquely identifiable has cohered within Burning Man and spinoffs (though event organizers would most definitely flinch at that term) like Symbiosis, Lucidity, and Lightening in a Bottle, seems undeniable.

It is anti-establishment sensibility, an offbeat creative streak, a shared culture which – though it stretches to encompass old hippies, young app developers, circus performers and world travelers – is somehow nonetheless distinctly identifiable as both itself and as 'other.' That is, other than the percieved reality-TV-watching, McDonalds-eating 'mainstream.' Of course, that mainstream, if it ever was the middle, is quickly shifting - or being shifted - as organic food, artisan products, and hyper-local everything scrunch their way toward center. So within this rapidly shifting constellation of values and ideals, what does it mean that Symbiosis has made it to the most iconic media outlet for music and pop culture?

Last year, when we brought Charlie Gadeken's 30-foot metal LED-lit tree Aurora to the scorpion-and-rattlesnake-ridden stretch of the windswept Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation, Symbiosis was a not-totally-for-the-faint-of-heart event complete with sagebrush sharp enough to make you curse Mother Nature. When a hearty gale sent art installations, including an 80-foot dome, crashing to the ground, my confederate Salty and I dashed out into the storm, chasing after tents that were careening across the desert like tumbleweed. In a frenzy of anonymous heroism, we lashed them down for unknown beneficiaries, and felt pretty badass.

That gathering, Symbiosis's fifth, was held after a several-year hiatus and received relatively little press attention — though the Huffington Post did dip into the always-lively debate surrounding the fetishization of indigenous culture by new age tribalists . . . to me a perennially interesting topic dramatized by the event's location on sacred Paiute grounds and its timely concurrence with 2012's annular solar eclipse, along with an Mayanism and all-around cataclysmania brought on by the year's occult galactic significance, in general. 

Having made it past that acute eschatological hurdle, the event's organizers decided to relocate to milder, less-punishing climes; this year's setting, the beautiful Woodward Reservoir just an hour outside San Francisco, must have seemed positively Elysian by contrast — which did nothing to dissuade the waves of hardcore fur-and-feather-clad neo-tribal post-apocalyptos and did much to boost the event’s appeal among the general public. It was covered not only by Huffpo, Rolling Stone, and a smattering of Bay Area newspapers, but also by High Times, LA Weekly, and Last.fm, to name a few prominent lifestyle publications.

My interest in the event's entrance into popular culture could be chalked up to pride (the Rolling Stone photo montage rendered beautifully, for all, candid images of friends dancing in full bliss, artists I know whose work I admire, and those I've yet to meet with whom I nonetheless feel a certain kinship), or jealousy (nothing I worked on graced those pages; funding issues kept our crew from bringing its latest piece, which debuted at Burning Man this year) . . .  but these caprices of internal emotion pale in comparison to the larger conflict that must surely be felt by the community as a whole, whose private personal paradise was cracked open wide for the world to see.

Dandelion, a friend and Santa Cruz - San Francisco electronic music regular, is part of the tight-knit community that brings events like Symbiosis to life.

Dandelion, a friend and Santa Cruz - San Francisco electronic music regular, is part of the tight-knit community that brings events like Symbiosis to life.

Obviously, where a cultural phenomenon stands in relation to the mainstream is a matter of perspective; I started building large-scale artwork in the Bay Area in 2007, and still consider myself a relative newcomer to a scene that is constantly evolving. There will always be, for instance, those Burning-Man-Types who – driven by in-crowd snobbery, jadedness or genuine resentment – complain, no matter what the year's event holds, that "last year was better." Indeed, some have been lamenting the festival's death from overexposure ever since growing numbers prompted the official formation of the Organization in 1997; the subsequent outlawing of dogs, guns and cars made Burning Man favorites like the drive-by-shooting range impossible and did much to curb the event's lawless nature, which for many attendees was the whole point.

A more recent schism erupted around the two-year incarceration performance artist Paul Addis served after he torched 2007's Green Man, in what he insisted was not felony arson but merely an act of self-expression in the extreme, a protest against Burning Man's departure from its radical roots. And perhaps the most dramatic indicator of the event's changing nature has been the first-ever sell-out in 2011 and the ensuing ticket lotteries, which have struggled to address admission for long-time artists and event participants in the face of flooding newcomers. And while a rash of books, documentaries and pop-culture shoutouts in movies and TV shows have helped make Burning Man something of a social reference point for a while now, the event was unambiguously outed with this year's Spark: a Burning Man Story, which has enjoyed widespread distribution on Netflix, and has two songs on its soundtrack shortlisted for Oscar nominations.

But these are superficial indicators when compared to other markers of Burning Man's effect on mainstream culture, especially its very real, if often nebulous, connection to Silicon Valley, paradigm-shifting startup companies, and multi-billion dollar businesses such as Google. It's no secret that entrepreneurs and CEOs (along with movie stars, politicians, famous musicians and other celebrities) attend the event in significant numbers and finance some of its largest projects; tech innovators openly cite Burning Man as inspiration behind the success of hugely profitable companies like Zappos, and while it's easy to shrug off evidence of the event's revelatory nature — like Adam Lambert's decision to try out for American Idol while 'shrooming at that Burn — with an eye roll, the tangible evidence of the event's deep social and economic impacts is impossible to ignore. What is not known, however, is how much of the original innovation that makes it out to the desert ends up back in the default world, profiting someone other than its original innovator.

Sold-out tickets and a murkily disclosed transition to nonprofit entity (comprising unspecified payouts for the Burning Man Org's current partners) have stoked widespread discontent over a seeming departure from the festival's central tenet of decomercialization — unrest important enough to earn a thorough musing in the New York Times. It's all part of the growing sense that, perhaps, what we bring out to the desert somehow isn't for us anymore.

It's hard to know how to handle this sense of unease, and especially hard when it concerns earnest efforts at community improvement that are nonetheless tied implicitly or explicitly to profit and notoriety for the most zealous entrepreneurs charging into the world under the aegis and protection of the Burning Man umbrella. I'm a great believer, for instance, in the Burning Man Project's efforts to use the festival's principles to positively impact urban design, but can understand the impulse to question when and how those positive changes will emerge, and how they will stack up against the perks garnered directly by the program's evangelists. Even though I worked directly with the Project a while back and staunchly support its efforts still, the question of how an ineffable phantasm created by the masses can be reined into service for a real-world organization, an alter-ego with budgets and equity and payouts for the few, remains. And the question is even more crucial when the organization is no longer Burning Man itself, but a third party altogether.

For those who relied on the miracle and refuge of this place to recharge their creative engines and redirect real-world work and ideals implicitly, there will no doubt be something strange about the dizzying pace with which it is now seeming to migrate, wholesale and explicitly, to the wider world. Everything from the increasingly self-referential nature of Burning Man art (paintings, t-shirts, and even art cars and whole installations covered with pictures of . . . past art cars and installations) to the very alt-referential nature of Zappos founder Tony Hsieh's plan to Burning-Man-ify downtown Vegas appearing online at CNN Money, points to the quickening pace at which this culture is growing and reproducing itself. From a fertile soil laid down over more than twenty years, the fruits of our labor are springing at an ever-faster rate, and if we want to share them (as, of course, most of us do), we'd better get a move on it, because they're being harvested right now. It's incredibly validating and also bit unnerving, in the exact same way as flipping through those photos of Symbiosis.

Its not to say that participants' creativity and hard work don't bleed into the wider world without the help of venture capitalists and big organizations. Festival-goers in the Bay Area basically created their own security force, High Rock Security, which has become adept at dealing with the specific challenges (everything from dangerous art installations to the complications of psychedelics) that sometimes accompany out-there events. They are now a go-to agency, whether at a remote location or in the city. Likewise, thousands of crafters have contributed to a unique and totally identifiable body of fashion, emphasizing convenience in concert with other-wordly looks: giant furry jackets that guard against falling temperatures, vests and belts with built-in pockets, fuzzy legwarmers and flat platform boots for cozy comfort over fashion-at-all-costs. Online marketplaces such as Etsy are fairly erupting with festival-inspired fashions that support individual artisans and small-time clothing brands, and these looks are becoming more and more common as daywear in the Bay Area. Hundreds of artists and entrepreneurs in all fields still receive funding, exposure, and the inspiration to follow their dreams without ever interacting with the capitalist forces widely perceived to be making inroads into Burning Man and festivals like it.

But it would be foolish not to question how long such small-scale successes can hold out when every year more and more cameras are interloping (drones taking video and a large IMAX-shooting blimp were unavoidable at the Burn this year), more blogs and articles are emerging, and more people are wising up to the resources and opportunities inherent in the strange and tender miracle of these gatherings.

So what does it mean that Symbiosis has made it to the most iconic media outlet for music and pop culture? In a word, money. And that might not be bad. Money is going to be made in this world, no matter what, and if it can be made according to, or inspired by, models highly committed to creativity, community and social justice, all the better. 

But that doesn't mean that participants' concerns, including my own nebulous unease over the migration of artifacts and ideas from Symbiosis, Burning Man and the like into mainstream culture, are unwarranted. It's not because I don’t want to share these wonderful cultural curiosities with the whole world. It's not even because I'm worried about all those unnamed artists whose beautiful notions are swept up into some wider scheme without their directly benefitting. This is the nature of creativity, and though it behooves us all to make sure that original work is recognized and compensated fairly, there are practical limits to that notion.  

My concern is that, removed from their context, something of the power of these places gets lost. They make it into Rolling Stone because they are hotbeds of passionate expression, made all the more fabulous because everyone participates in making them so. They are where the traditional artisit-audience or performer-audience dichotomy breaks down — radical participation, for those of you who familiar with the Playa’s ten principles. They are delicate ecosystems, and no glossy magazine pages, not even an IMAX film, can quite capture the unique nature of the spontaneous interaction that happens out there. Though the strange exotic fruits of these places can be shipped out, their habitat – their rich soil of innovation laid down over all those years – must be protected like a rare climate. If the whole world is to benefit from the beautiful things that bloom out there, then it only seems logical that some sort of "out there" remain, even as we germinate its seeds everywhere. If the whole exercise is reduced to snippets, images, fascimiles simplified into a developer's agenda or reproduced by the media, we are forced to admit that the experience is just that — mediated. It's fine to partake of, but it is not the same as generating something new and authentic. Authenticity is what makes these images Rolling Stone-worthy in the first place. It's what makes the business models viable, the fashions fresh, the urban planning strategies vibrant. As soon as these images and facsimiles become persistent in the environment, there is the danger that they will be mistaken for the real thing. And with that danger comes the danger of disappearance of the real thing altogether. 

Practically speaking, what does this mean? How does one differentiate between a valid reinterpretation of something learned during a revelation in the desert, and a crass capitalization on the ideas of others? I'm really not sure. Except to say that we must go slowly and carefully, never being so thrilled with the magic of these richly-yeilding soils that we use them up in their entirely, rather than feeding them so that they to help sustain and inspire us for the long term. We can never take more than we give back, or the delicate balance is destroyed.

 

 

What a long, strange trip it's been . . .

They say it takes seven years for every cell in your body to turn over. In astrology, 27 years is the period of the Saturn Return, something that was brought to my attention recently as I prepared to finish up my 27th year on this planet — an event that coincided almost perfectly with the realization, incidentally, that it had been seven years since I took a leave of absence from school and came to the Bay Area to study . . . other things.

What’s changed since then? In some ways, a lot, and in some ways, not much at all. I still work with many of the same artists and entrepreneurs I met when I first tumbled off the Greyhound Bus in Oakland. Many of them are still my closest friends. And many of them are still struggling with the same issues of what of means to be a creative person in the urban landscape as when I first set foot in their world.

Recently, an article published by economist Richard Florida, who edits Atlantic Cities, caused me to revisit my opinions on his theories about the creative class and how it interacts with the city. Writing that post inspired me to look up a piece I’d written shortly after returning to school – when I was still just getting to know the scene out here in the Bay Area – for a round table discussion about Urban Landscapes in America.

Surprising or not, the piece is just as relevant as it was when it was first written, despite (or maybe because of) the major economic reshuffling of the past few years.

Falling property values in much of the country have caused Florida to pull what many consider an about face from earlier writings touting the economic benefits of attracting artists, bohemians and creative workers to cities. Summing up the ways in which the crash will reshape America, Florida wrote, "We need to be clear that ultimately, we can’t stop the decline of some places, and that we would be foolish to try."

Critics took his words to be a death sentence for  cities – even those that had bought into the creative class meme – already facing decline. Meanwhile, land values in places like San Francisco have remained high and are unlikely to drop at any point in the near future, meaning that gentrification will continue to sweep through poor neighborhoods, minority neighborhoods, and culturally attractive neighborhoods alike. Does this mean a nation in which Florida's theories are no longer relevant, with growth continuing in already-bustling cities and decay the inevitable fate of contracting cities, regardless of where the creative class plants itself?

Quite the contrary. 

The main thrust of Florida's creative class theory is toward the development of profitable districts. He capitalizes on counterculture (the creative core) as a one-time resource to be mined and consumed in the building of attractive new urban environments for those who generate economic activity (the creative class). Here and elsewhere, I've challenged such a reductive view of the role creativity plays in cities by applying a 'renewable resource' metaphor, positing that creativity is part of a healthy urban ecosystem whose value is ongoing, integrated, and generative. Commodification of creative culture ultimately sterilizes it, while undermining and disabling those who generate it. Extracted all at once, it ceases to be a functional component of the urban ecosystem, building and storing human capital, digesting old into new, and contributing to a cyclical regeneration and invigoration of the landscape.

Worrying about whether creativity will provide an immediate bump to a shrinking urban economy feels dangerously like jumping back into old patterns – particularly the impulsion towards high-cost, transportation-intensive, low-density, single-family home ownership – which, despite proving to be destructive, have typically been measures of growth and progress.

In the wake of a crisis created by over-speculation, maintaining diverse urban eco-systems is key. The true value in Florida's creative class theory is not the shallow and mercenary conclusion that artists create hip, edgy neighborhoods ripe for development, but the underlying recognition that creative people, well, create. They come up with new forms, new synergies and new ways of using space – a useful characteristic in an expanding economy (as Florida's books are testament) but an even more crucial function when the economy is contracting. For places struggling, my message is: don't give up, give creativity full rein. 

In the study of evolution there is a concept called punctuated equilibrium, popularized by Stephen Jay Gould's analysis of fossil findings at the Burgess Shale. The theory argues that speciation – the development of new life forms – does not happen along a slow, gradual path, but rather, it occurs in short bursts following major environmental stressors. If the same holds true in cities, then reserving 'petri dish' neighborhoods, and space in all  neighborhoods, where new forms can incubate is particularly crucial following economic catastrophe, when pressure is sure to push innovation. Or, to put it more simply, as Florida does in quoting the Stanford economist Paul Romer,“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” 

Instead of just focusing on what generates dollars, new buildings, and more business, we should also focus on what generates livability and happiness — with equity, social justice, and sustainability as measures. Rather than struggling to keep building and growing in an unfriendly economic climate, we should take the time to discover the new ideas and efficiencies that will make cities, the second time around, more stable, diverse, engaging places. To me, this is the value of the creative people I live with, work with, and write about. And it is at its most valuable when it exists in natural symbiosis with the city around it - poor, rich, professional and not – rather then being shuffled endlessly to make room for the next most profitable urban monoculture.

Of course, close readers of this blog (and much of the Bay Area art scene) will already know that creative people do tend to generate value wherever they go — Dan and Karen, for instance, did in fact move out of their Hunters Point studio to take over the American Steel Building. Dan has since gone on to found Big Art Labs in Los Angeles, and under Karen’s direction, American Steel Studios has grown to a six acre facility housing more than 150 tenants engaged in art and entrepreneurship of all flavors. Meanwhile, Lennar lost the ‘49s contract to Santa Clara, but still broke ground (“officially” this summer, though work has been going on for years) on the extravagant new development that will reshape Hunters Point, and much of the city, by extension. Oakland, as chronicled elsewhere in this blog, is assimilating more and more artists, while struggling to mitigate the pressures of gentrification. The artists of the Hunters Point Shipyard continue to fight eviction and relocation in the face of development. And the Box Shop, run by Charles Gadekan, is not only hanging on but thriving – in fact, its lease was just renewed for another 8 years.

Every day, the landscape and culture of the Bay Area continues to challenge and affirm the creative individuals here. While sometimes the evolution is hard to swallow, even to a relative newcomer like myself — I have mixed feelings, for instance, about the photos of the Symbiosis Gathering plastered across the pages of Rolling Stone, and even though I am totally one of them, it’s easy to be annoyed with the ever-increasing waves of writers and designers camped out on laptops in coffeeshops — there is no denying that it’s always interesting. All in all, it’s a good time to be an artist in the Bay Area.

Berkeley: Local Paradise

Gurachi's interpretation of the author, hard at work in Cafe Yesterday. See more at www.berkeleybeings.blogspot.com

Gurachi's interpretation of the author, hard at work in Cafe Yesterday. See more at www.berkeleybeings.blogspot.com

I have a friend who – because I’m about to reveal that he wears women’s clothes – I’ll call Alfonso instead of using his real name. Now here’s the thing about Alfonso: he looks fantastic in women’s clothes. In fact, I was trying to describe him to my mother one day, and I couldn't quite sum him up without mentioning it: he used to work in a bike shop but now he designs solar systems for a growing company. He’s got a giant mop of curly hair and is really good at random things like roller-skating. And he pulls off wearing women’s clothes better than anyone I know. 

This year, he went to Burning Man for the first time and wore a flowered women’s onsie. He introduced himself as Pancho Flora and didn’t take it off the whole time.

Now, here’s the other thing about Alfonso: he’s a professional who makes a good salary and basically has his shit together — probably as much as anyone I know.

But it's in a weird, Bay-Area-ish sort of way: he still goes to punk shows in garages and house parties that screen foreign films, much to the delight/consternation/self-admiration of the guests. Nothing makes him happier than free stuff, and taking advantage of things that don't cost money plays a large role in shaping his social landscape. He rides his bike everywhere and could be mistaken for a high-schooler by someone who didn’t know better. And he likes it all this way. He’s living the good life in very quintessential Berkeley fashion, to the point where, in describing Berkley to his mother, he says this: it’s like paradise.

And in a number of ways that might not be immediately obvious, it is. Sure, there are bike racks and bike lanes everywhere, and nice weather pretty much all the time, and trees that grow food right in people's yards. And there is, indeed, an abundance of free activities and resources here and in the larger Bay Area, ranging from slackline yoga workshops to movie nights to bike kitchens to soup kitchens, plus free clinics and mental health organizations and spaghetti dinners and the Berkeley Tool Lending Library, just in case you need to borrow a posthole digger.

But there's more: warehouses converted into performance and art space for circus schools and glassblowers, urban homesteading and hacker collectives that teach people real-world skills, and impromptu meet-ups, gatherings, and workshops all over the city, that are underwritten by the same can-do meets anything-goes attitude that is so common here . . . the one that allows people like Alfonso to exist and thrive, peacefully undisturbed as they head to work sharply attired in tight brown twill pants, black ankle boots with just the right amount of scuff, a sage green blouse with pheasants and pearl buttons (on the left), and a tweed vest. 

It's an attitude that I see every day, in new ways that surprise and delight me. If you live in Berkeley, or in a place like it, you already know about this kind of magic. And if you don't you're saying either, "I don't want that kind of magic; Alfonso sounds like a freak," or you're saying, "so what?"

Here's what.

Making space for the free, the unusual, the unencumbered in the day-to-day urban landscape is the same as making space for growth and progress. Because growth and progress stem from innovation, and innovation stems from weirdos being weird – and letting that weirdness, whatever its particulars, shine through.

Right now, I'm sitting in my neighborhood coffeeshop, Local 123, where I have never once failed to delay my work by entering a hopelessly interesting and esoteric conversation with a fellow café-goer. Mathematical modeling of sacred geometries in nature; early childhood development; last week, it was an architectural student who spent her youth traveling internationally as an equestrian vaulter. The week before, it was also an architect. I noticed him working outside in the courtyard on some beautiful colored drawings. We got into a conversation – it turned out, he had designed the coffeeshop, teasing its current form from the walls of an abandoned painters’ union, hence the name – and he promptly invited me back to his firm to interview with the three managing partners for a job.

And just moments ago, it was an unaffectedly outdoorsy looking fellow (flipflops, torn jeans, striped cotton shirt with world-may-care wrinkles and tousled blond hair that could perchance use a cut) who started rearranging the tables next to me and rolling up the glass garage-style door that faces the street. When I asked what he’s up to, he replied, “Meat.” In a snap he unpacked coolers of organic free-range pork chops, spareribs and sausages, hung a sign (“Highland Hills Farm”), and attracted a gaggle of similarly flip-flop clad urbanites to his pop-up market.

Why does this kind of thing happen so often in Local 123? And why does it happen around the corner in Café Yesterday, where amid the dozens of regulars who make their offices, no-doubt engaging in dozens of equally esoteric conversations, an entrepreneurial young story-boarder who calls himself Gurachi uses the spot to base Berkeley Beings, an online collection of sketches of the characters he encounters? (If he happens to draw you, he’ll snap a photo of the drawing to complete and post on his website, then hand you the original – all the while regaling you with an overview of his professional talents, which include weaving from just a few seed words – “princess,” “treasure,” “spaceship” – a tale to interest, should you happen to be one, even an A-list producer.)

And why, more importantly, does it not happen at oh, say, Starbucks?

I don’t know the specifics of the arrangement between the coffeeshop and the Meat Man, but clearly it is a coming-together that benefits both — the coffeeshop building its character and street presence and the Meat Man, a former building contractor gone save-the-world-type-rancher, attracting customers in the effortless sort of symbiosis that happens naturally. We got to talking – about the state of organic agriculture, world population growth, his latest project to document nontraditional farms across the region – and vowed to keep in touch. Now, to be sure, this is the “coffeeshop dynamic” that is frequently touted by urban theorists (a la Richard Florida), wherein people gather, ideas are bandied about, connections form, and prosperity blooms. But I’ve rarely seen it work so well in the trendy, pre-fab chain coffeeshops that are the obvious extension of a deep faith in this belief, plopped haplessly into urban developments with the vague hope of producing a similar sort of generative (or at least, robust economic) interchange.

So why is Local 123 better at fostering spontaneous cultural expression than the local Starbucks?  Well, for one reason, like truffles that only thrive wild in certain old growth forests, the climate for growth has to be specific and authentic. That is, what makes local coffeeshops unique – not just the Meat Man, but open mics, comedy shows, local art on the walls, dogs, live DJs and more – helps create an environment that caters to all types of creative exchange, even if it’s just vibrant conversation. The unique character of the space acts as a signal for participation, which is neutralized, sterilized, once that space is coopted and reproduced generically.

It’s like a major clothing label that may look at what “cool” (ie: countercultural) skateboarders wear, then copy it and re-market it for mass consumption. People may buy the product, but those people are rarely the ones who authenticated the look. Similarly, Starbucks may see what a dynamic neighborhood coffeeshop looks like, copy the couches and tables and art on the wall, and create an environment that mimics the original (and to be sure, they do – teams of corporate designers are scouting for new ideas to update that trendy vibe all the time) but the people who populated the original space are seldom the same as those enjoying the canned version on every street corner.

Landscapes that support the unexpected are not just about coffeeshops where anything goes, free events to attract artists and innovators, or free services support them when they're underpaid for their creativity. And it's not just artists and innovators who benefit from a diverse and fluid urban environment. It's that, in a sense, good communities turn everyone into artists and innovators. On every level that a community comes together to create, to serve, or to support, more connections are made, more inspiration is generated, more people find ways to connect in work and play, and happier, healthier, more productive communities are born.  Wherever there is open dialogue, people interested in what everyone else is doing, confident and passionate in what they're doing.

Berkeley certainly fits this model, with a unique urban fabric that seems open to spontaneous intervention by community members at all levels.

Just blocks from the two cafés, a self-proclaimed Junk Man oozes his wares onto the sidewalk most sunny days, displaying racks and racks of books, rounders of antique clothes, old tools, and an assortment of irresistible odds ‘n’ ends spilling from the bed of an antique truck. Chat with him for a minute, and you’ll find yourself pulled to the side of the house, where he propagates succulents, stores salvaged building materials, and displays collections of everything from old tin buckets to Corning Ware to sprinkling cans – all available to passer­­s by for a low, low price. Does the City of Berkeley bother him for his unlicensed and off-the-cuff business? “They used to,” he says, “but they’ve sort of stopped. They can see I’m not doing any harm.”

The City of Berkeley does still bother another longtime resident, sending him a $6,000 bill monthly for a garden of “rescued” plants that he’s allowed to overtake the sidewalks surrounding his corner home in an elaborate tangle of arches and canopies – mind you, the sidewalk is still perfectly navigable, it’s just covered by a bower of junipers and figs and resuscitated Christmas trees found abandoned on the curbs of Yuletides past. On his roof, the plot thickens: bins and buckets of composting avocado skins and eggshells from local restaurants cradle fruit trees sprouted from pits and seeds discarded at the local farmers’ market. Thick hedges of kale and collards support tangles of tomato vines, and bees oversee the whole mess, buzzing through their empire then retiring to a royal palace of whitewashed plywood to produce their golden elixir.

The architect of this magnificent streetside garden believes that food grown in the public right-of-way is an imperative, and when he takes groups of neighbors and schoolkids through the jungle he’s created, he’s teaching them, he says, not just how to grow food, but how to feed a rebellion – one which Berkeley is apparently none-too-keen to actually squash, seeing as all those unpaid six-thousands have resulted in no further action.

Then there’s the Gorilla Chorus (yes, it’s a play on words) that practices on Thursdays and Saturdays, doors flung open to welcome passers-by, just kitty-corner from my house. Their motto is that everyone can sing, and to be honest, they sound pretty good – key to this, I believe, is the generous basket of tambourines provided for those who may not be fully aligned corroborate their core operating principle. And their mascot is a barnacle. They claim he enjoys the music, and I hate to say it, but it seems true. When they get to really wailing, he extends feathery fronds from the top of his little stovepipe body and waves.

There’s a pay-what-you-can flower booth with a rusty mailbox nailed to a picnic table for donations, morning yoga in the median of a major thoroughfare, plus weirdos and musicians of all stripes milling about performing for spare change. A lady down the street has a sign nailed to her fence advertising a women’s spiritual support group on one day a week, and ceramics classes on another – simply stop on in. None of these things is, in itself, unheard of for any urban area, but the frequency with which I see it – even on quiet suburban-type Berkeley streets – never fails to amaze me. These are not the organized events pinned to community boards and posted on online calendars and listed in the weekly newspapers, though Berkeley has those too, in great numbers. This is a more homegrown phenomenon, a little more impromptu and raw. It’s the sort of thing that can’t be found on an iPhone app. It has to be discovered where it grows, sometimes in the most unexpected of places – and because of that, it touches every person in the community, making the whole shebang more connected, vital and, yes, just a bit closer to paradise.

City College Task Force to redefine 'Success'

My best friend from back East recently told me about NBC’s television show Community, now in its third season, which takes place in a Colorado community college and tells the story of an offbeat group of students: a lawyer suspended from practice, an aging millionaire, a straightedge and strait-A student with an erstwhile Adderall addiction, a football star, a single mother, and so forth.

If I were on the show, I guess I’d be the studious and serious Annie Edison – not because an addiction to prescription study aids caused me to have a nervous breakdown and jump through a plate-glass window, but because I am not, according to a task force assembled to review educational and financial policy at City College of San Francisco, the community college "type."

I take classes at City College, despite already having a degree from a well-regarded university back East, and I love it. I have amazing teachers whose dedication to their jobs measures up to anything I experienced during my undergraduate career. But if the Student Success Task Force’s agenda passes in Sacramento this spring, my access to these opportunities will be targeted — along with that of many other students who don’t fit into the task force’s streamlined model of successful community education.

The SSTF has assembled an eighty page document recommending that sweeping changes to the funding model of California’s community colleges be passed in state legislature. The intention is to make more funding available for “typical” community college students – those on the fast track to their Associate’s Degrees or to transfer to a four year institution – but the point (one that NBC's comedy makes lavish use of to draw its laughs) is that community college students are rarely typical.

The recommendations are meant to support full-time students, but even among students who have the same goals in mind as the task force – an AA or transfer – the ability to attend classes full time is rare. Many students can only take a partial load because of work or family obligations; students struggling hardest to make ends meet, working multiple jobs, are those most in need of the funding the SSTF would deny part-timers. In addition, there are those who want to improve their skills in order to find work or do a better job in the work they already have — goals which will ultimately serve to boost the state economy, which is, of course, where the motivation for the task force’s recommendation lie in the first place. There are older citizens looking to stay sharp and expand their horizons, there are high school students seeking enrichment — and yes, there are those, like me, who are simply there to be educated. After all, that’s the whole point of a “community” college in the first place, right?

In addition to eliminating state funding for any student not transferring to a university within a strict two-year deadline (regardless of that student’s residency),  the report recommends eliminating non-credit courses, creating a one-size-fits-all placement test system, and cutting down on any course offerings which don’t feed directly into a degree-granting program.

These changes would not only be detrimental to students who see ongoing education as a vital part of a fulfilling life, and to professionals seeking to develop their skills, but to the degree-seeking students themselves. They would lose the opportunity to interact with a wide range of students from all sorts of educational and professional backgrounds. They would lose the opportunity to supplement their core courses with a wider and more enriching curriculum, and they would lost the opportunity to participate in a system of community education that values learning for learning’s sake – not because a degree or a job depends on it, but because it makes us better, fuller human beings. 

The Path of the Urban Indian

On tramping through the woods as a kid, reconciliation, and the new urban frontier . . .

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To explain where the name “Urban Indian” came from — and why, as a white, Jewish girl lacking a speck of Indian blood, I feel the right to claim it — we'll have to start with a childhood rooted in the not-so-vast wilderness of suburban Cleveland, Ohio.  Growing up, my family’s primary signs of affiliation with the Tribe were parsimony, unmanageable curly hair, and a love of things fried in the name of religion.  So though I was given a Hebrew name —Shoshanna, which means lily — it was not to honor a dear departed relative (as per Jewish tradition) or because anyone had visions of a delicate retiring beauty, tinged with a pale blush.  Which is good, because I turned out to be more often brash, bruised, and unlikely to be tinged with anything but dirt.

No, my mom named me Shoshanna because she thought it sounded like the Shoshone people of the Western United States — the tribe from which Sacajawea, the celebrated interpreter for Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, was captured as a youth.

In my own youth, I was quite happy to live up to the romantic image of what I thought my name connoted: I tramped through the woods, caught tadpoles, built houses from sticks, and coerced my young playground-mates to grind up rocks of different colors, mix them with water, and paint their faces.  I was astounded to meet my literary double in Sharon Creech’s Newberry Award-winning book Walk Two Moons — the main character Salamenca is so-named because her mother mistook it for the name of her great-grandmother’s tribe — the Seneca.

I shared with Sal a well-meaning if misguided vision of what emulating my namesakes might entail: treading lightly upon the earth, living frugally off the fruits of the forest, and perhaps even casually passing the time of day with wild beasts both fearsome and cuddly — in their own language, of course.

All of this is surely to the consternation of plenty of real American Indians, and the scholars, Indian and not, who strive to understand and preserve their history. But then, it is also much in keeping with a long tradition of pasty and bewildered Europeans on this continent — one that we struggle, even today, to address and remediate.

Take the word “Indian” itself.

It was used, generally unchallenged, well into the 20th century (the American Indian Movement was self-christened in 1968) despite the fact that the term was long understood to be a misnomer. At the time when Columbus bumped haplessly into the Antilles, he’d been looking for the "India" he knew to be the provenance of valuable spices; the name was often applied to the entirety of South and East Asia, and on some maps of the time, it referred to basically anything that wasn’t Europe.  Needless to say, the “Indians” were so-called upon the mistaken belief that Columbus had hit his intended mark, and the name stuck.

After the civil rights movements, “Native American” became the preferred term because many felt that “Indian,” in addition to being the result of serious geographical discombobulation, had accrued an unshakeable set of pejorative undertones.

But then, “native” has a storied and troublesome past of its own, raising plenty more objections, which have spawned a plethora of additional phrases, each accepted by some and deplored by others to the point where we’re tongue-tied with the task of distangling our language from the social histories it preserves and, indeed, generates. In such a context, using the term Indian to describe my own urban wanderings may seem frivolous at best. But stay with me.

The battle over terminology is a valid one.  Our language patterns fossilize old power structures, but also create a template for the construction of new ones — often with far-reaching, if not immediately obvious, effects.  

In this country, one of the most enduring examples of this phenomenon has been described by geographer William Denevan as the Pristine Myth. It is the idea that the pre-Columbian Americas were "natural" — empty and untouched, save for a mere smattering of natives who stirred nary a leaf, living in a prelapsarian paradise free from the ills of modern mankind — wait, that sounds a little familiar.

So what exactly is the problem with the romantic, if naive, bent of this fantasy that so stirred me as a child?

One problem with this idealized vision is that it is simply wrong. Denevan and others have fully discredited the notion, showing how the landscape European explorers first marveled at was, in fact, extensively shaped by human populations — in numbers far exceeding what scholars would generally acknowledge for the next several centuries.

But the Pristine Myth goes beyond a merely whimsical re-rendering, supporting a number of crucial biases: the view that the land was unused and there for the taking, and the suggestion that the decimation of Indian populations following European settlement was less extreme than it actually was. It fails to acknowledge the very real needs and desires of native populations who, historical accounts have shown, traditionally warred with other tribes, stole from each other, hunted some animal populations so unsustainably that they at times risked starving themselves, and made eager use of technologies from Europeans (like guns, metal, and horses) that made their lives more convenient, even at the expense of the natural world. 

The false dichotomy between greedy, disruptive white man and the noble savage creates a difficult paradox for indigenous people today, whose political will may run counter to our deep-seated romantic notions.  Furthermore, this sort of schism between reality and fantasy makes it difficult, despite even the best intentions, to remediate troubled pasts, by falsely invoking some identifiable point from which we can measure the damages, and some irreproachable ideal to which we can return.

When John Muir famously effused on the beauty of the Yosemite Valley, the “natural” churches that so moved him were grassy meadows that had been maintained by very real, very extreme human intervention. Over time, environmental advocates seeking to uphold Muir’s dedication to preserving the immaculate landscape found themselves with quite a dilemma: their ardent protection of the lands had, in fact, begun to destroy the very scenes which drove Muir to such heights of religious ecstasy. Without the periodic burning practiced by native tribes, the grasslands had succumbed to the natural cycle of forestation, and trees were creeping in and squishing out those lovely sun-filled meadows. Now the movement was in a pickle. Restore the land, yes, but restore it to what? Muir’s vision? A truly wild state? What type of intervention was preservation, and what was degradation?

Humans and landscapes have complex, intertwined pasts, just like humans and other humans. Though understanding these pasts can be key to healing them, there may be times when finding footing amid forever-shifting historical accounts is less important than taking stock of where we are now and figuring out how to go from there — even if it means approaching bigger questions of truth and justice by addressing more granular, even prosaic, matters first: are we enabling a diversity of species to thrive? Preserving cultural autonomy and promoting economic prosperity for those who need it most? Are we holding extinction at bay? Advocating for clean air and water?  Leaving something breathtaking for our children to see? 

One way forward may be to borrow from the emerging study of political ecology, which seeks to understand the complex interplay between socio-economic structures and the natural and cultural landscapes in which they are set. One of the field's leading voices, Paul Robbins, has introduced the concept of the Hatchet and the Seed: a methodology that emphasizes not only exposing and pruning away — deconstructing — the myths the prop up many of today’s undesirable social and environmental realities, but also using our knowledge to plant new and better realities.

Political ecology can be a practical means to explore the legacies of, and make amends for, the complex histories between postcolonial cultures and the populations they have marginalized in the quest for land and resources. But it is a field that aims for a moving target — a productive, sustainable relationship with nature, and with each other, is best described as a dynamic equilibrium, a balancing act that requires constant reevaluation, innovation, and compromise.

This is not to negate the very real need for serious inquiry and reparation in this country — many have called for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission modeled after the one that followed the dismantling of Apartheid South Africa, and I don’t think it would be a bad idea. But we must also recognize that talking about the past — reconstructing our notions of what happened or refining the terminology we use today — will not alone move us forward.

In Twelve Step programs, there is the concept of living amends. Some things you just can’t apologize for, and you can’t truly take back. Instead, you must simply change how you live, do better as you go along. And — this is where I’m sure to get myself into trouble — I say, if holding onto our romantic notions, just bit, helps us do that, then why not?

Increasingly, experts in fields ranging from architecture to zoology are making the case that cities hold the key to a more just and sustainable future. While they have always created efficiencies in housing, transportation, and energy consumption, it is the relative novelties of electricity and, oh, say, sewage treatment that have made them infinitely more livable than they were even a short hundred years ago.

Meanwhile, those aspects of life affecting population and environment on a global scale that have always fallen under rural purview — agriculture, for instance — are increasingly manipulatable by city-dwellers, either indirectly through choice in the marketplace, or directly through bourgeoning interest in urban foraging, home cooking, preserving, community-supported agriculture, and the thriving urban homesteading movement.

We needn’t each of us own a hundred acres in the woods — indeed, this would be the biggest ecological and political disaster of all — to honor the values we ascribe, accurately or inaccurately, to the first people of this land. “Real” or not, those values, applied today, can help overcome the obstacles of land and resources that have germinated over time into stories of oppression and destruction.

Frederick Jackson Turner famously expounded on the importance of the frontier in defining the American spirit of gumption and pluck. He delivered his thesis at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (officially, the World’s Columbian Exposition, held to honor the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of America), at what he saw as the end of an era. In the 1890 Census, just three years earlier, the US government had declared that there was no longer a discernable line between civilization and the savage, untamed wilderness — the frontier was dead.

Since then, many things have been dubbed “the new frontier,” not the least significant among them urban America itself. The retreat from this country’s urban centers in the second half of the twentieth century did, undeniably, leave untamed jungles of despair in many places. In this context, the term “urban frontier” has been used for many purposes. Some have been brash and mercenary, resulting in the wholesale re-development of city districts where another solution may have sufficed. But many have been less dubious, and even valiant: sensitive, fine-grained approaches to urban renewal, incentives drawing energy back to the urban core, and the many not-insignificant grassroots efforts to create urban culture and prosperity at street level.

Amid this new wave of exploration, we might do well to think of ourselves not just as Urban Settlers, but also as Urban Indians. Cities are ecosystems, webs as tenuous as any forest or meadow, and change — plucking any string — can have dramatic results, both good and bad. It is crucial that we understand issues like gentrification, attendant to this new wave of Manifest Destiny, and recognize the impacts upon all city dwellers — after all, urban landscapes, even those ravaged by disinvestment and disenfranchisement, are no more “empty” than were the forests and plains of the frontier. “Urban Indian” is my nod to the past, a reminder to stay humble, move slowly, tiptoe where necessary, through landscapes that each have a unique ecology, a matchless balance of triumphs and challenges.

And, problematic as the term may be for some, I think there is something deeply evocative about it. “Urban Indian” calls upon us all to live — among skyscrapers or suburban lawns — more like we imagine Indians of the past living among the trees: with creativity and parsimony, attention to our surroundings, a sense of pride and self-reliance, abundance wrought by using what is available and wasting little, and above all, joy in simple things and in each other.

As for why this blog isn’t called “Urban Native American”? I’ll let Sharon Creech answer that one through Sal’s mother, the character who shares so much in common with my own mom: “My great-grandmother was a Seneca Indian, and I’m proud of it. She wasn’t a Seneca Native American. Indian sounds much more brave and elegant.”