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

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It's also encouraging how spontaneous a phenomenon like this can be. Sherpafish, for example, recently started a monthly reading in East Vancouver where people may read poetry they wrote. I'm working on him to bend the rules to let me read a poem that hasn't circulated widely, if at all.

Or another case in point was a reading session sponsored to allow our dear Lord judym of Muck to read portions of her book. The place this was held was a coffee bar that had nothing in it newer than the early 1970s except for the coffee machines and the cash register.

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any desperate lack of coffee houses and art galleries.

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... which, in any case, scarcely had the cachet in the 60s, when Detroit began its grim slide, that they do now. Coffee-house districts in particular were regarded with suspicion by city fathers -- too many long-haired hippie-type pinko fags in those neighbourhoods, doncha know.

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clersal: I finished 'A Fine Balance' by Rohinton Mistry. It is quite a book. I see now when Zatamon and nonesuch question when we judge other culture values.

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Here is a synopsis:

"Novel and film alike revolve around the character of George Orr, a young man whose dreams sometimes come true. Orr (played with exquisite passivity by Bruce Davison) hates and fears this ability, eventually attempting suicide before coming to the attention of dream specialist Dr. William Haber (Kevin Conway).

The pragmatic Haber quickly fixates on Orr's "effective" dreams as a source of unlimited wish fulfillment, and sets about to manipulate his patient into dreaming the world into utopia.

As in fairy tales, the price of Haber's interference is that he gets what he says he wants -- fulfillment is both the reward and cost of wishing, even when the wish is as seemingly altruistic as Haber's "greatest good for the greatest number."