Creative economy filibuster

Stacking large events in only one neighborhood of a city ends up detracting from the quality of life and success of businesses.

Date: Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 11:03 AM
Subject: Re: races along Esplanade
To: afielkow@nola.gov, sgguidry@nola.gov, jbclarkson@nola.gov, kgpalmer@nola.gov


To Councilpersons Guidry, Clarkson, Fielkow and Palmer:

I am writing about the proposed use of the Fairgrounds to stage large events in the future. I found out about the idea of allowing the well-respected Susan B. Komen race to start, end and celebrate at the Fairgrounds from a local business owner. Let me say first that I would hope that in the future, your offices would send someone out to actually poll the most severely impacted neighbors, rather than rely completely on input from talking with neighborhood groups that represent a small portion of the active citizenry. I appreciate these are early days, but even better to knock on some doors before things heat up!


Second, I would like to throw my support behind races using City Park as much as possible, as the park needs the revenue badly. As it is a public amenity, it is our responsibility as neighbors to use it, care for it and assist it whenever possible. Although I am in favor of City Park being used for events such as VooDoo Fest, races et al, I also ask the city council to realize that the wear and tear on one set of streets being used for every race is short-sighted and most likely, sooner or later to actually mean a significant business loss for those along the route.
As for the Fairgrounds, the support that it needs was given to it by allowing it gaming (far beyond what the neighborhood wanted) and to be allowed to continue to stage JazzFest and have extended night racing.
I know that I am restricted from going to the French Quarter (where my parents live and so whom I save time on non-tourist packed weekends to see) or to the businesses on Carrollton or anywhere downtown for that matter on all of these weekend days. You may say that the inconvenience is slight, but it would be even more fair if it was shared with Uptown routes or maybe sending some needed life to parts of New Orleans East. Since we have the cache of JazzFest, the Fair Grounds (both racing and gaming) 9 months a year, the Crescent City Classic, the Mardi Gras race, Endymion, I'd be happy to offer other events to the lovely St. Charles route- or maybe using the levee as a race route.

The race track has no barrier between it and neighborhoods like the parks have. I live on its very edge and the lights from night racing and early morning trainings alone shine strongly directly on my porch and noise can be a factor. Certainly traffic (including parking in neighborhoods rather than in lot) and trash are often a factor. However, I have only mildly protested that, because I have felt the race track has been a good neighbor, using its purpose fairly and with some restraint. This of course, is my biggest protest-that the racetrack is thinking of adding more events that have no relation to its purpose and would be out of scale as well.


I ask that your offices take my input and share it with those who are making these decisions. I understand that the race will not happen at the Fairgrounds this year, but I ask you to refrain from changing any language that will allow future decisions to be made without significant public input.


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Fortin Avenue

Creative economy: It's a rhizome, not a tree root.

Reading this morning about the Travellers, Irish nomadic people that little has been written about. They may be descendants of the Tinkers, or a much older population of religious peoples (some even tell a version of the Wandering Jew story of the metalworker who fashioned the nails for Jesus' cross) , or conversely, rise from the more recent Famine times.
In any case, author Rebecca Solnit went to find them in the 90s while in Ireland and reviews their clash with the settled people of Ireland in her "A Book of Migrations." Much like the Gypsies, laws have been designed to stop them and altercations with settled citizens recorded by officials when the Travellers attempt to stay or send their children to settled schools for a short time. Travellers do not want to stop. As one of their activists told Solnit, "Just as settled people remain settled people even when they travel, Travellers remain Travellers even when not traveling."
She sees how this would rankle those rooted citizenry and how the Travellers are lumped into a pillaging, roving mass whenever there was trouble during their stay, even when it was an isolated case or had nothing to do with a Traveller.

The following analogy struck me (as tropical gardeners will understand): "The French theorists Deleuze and Guattari declare that the hierarchical model of the tree has dominated too much of Western thought and offer in its place the rhizome, the loosely structured, horizontally spreading root system of plants such as the strawberry." Horizontal roots are the visual patterns that work best for creative economy structure. Allowing the rooted citizenry to hold their traditions and mores and flourish with their own growth while welcoming nomadic tribes to camp and offer a sidelong culture is an example of that. Even though people use the term gutter punks quite loosely, they are not the totality of young people in New Orleans, nor are the opportunistic carpetbaggers that come in the city's various moments of weakness and then go with our gold, the sum of the entrepreneurs. The ARK and Recycle For the Arts and Iron Rail Collective Library and Plan B (for example) were designed with the involvement of tribes of nomadic people, many who have since left, never to return.
No better example exists than those who came in March of every year from their own alternative lives and stayed until June, building, running and breaking down our New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in its glory days. Those tribes are mostly gone, replaced by corporate and professional festival designers, but not forgotten.

When the ARK was closed down, or when the Eris parade was stopped, statements of literate, progressive neighbors and friends went like:
I hate the gutter punks/everyone has to follow the same rules/troublemakers are not artists/who started it/I need a permit, why don't they/they're not from here/
What I hear in that tone is what was said about the Travellers:
Nomads are literally unsettling for sedentary populations. People are uncomfortable with traditions not being melded.

But the port (al) that is New Orleans needs vibrant people that create rather than extract. And defining the extractors as all of "those who will not stay" will not do.
New Orleans' creative economy should be welcoming and as diffused as light through a thick, wavy old piece of glass, with its source of energy is as collective and mysterious as the sun itself.

Creative economy: It relies on roots

So, let's imagine a tree:

Glossy leaves, wide trunk and branches supporting birds in almost every part of its foliage, shading people and plants all around it.

How do you think it's roots grew? I suspect loads of nutrients in the soil with room and time...

If one is to allow living things to thrive, start by feeding the soil and allow it to grow away from stresses.

Agreed?

Then if we want a creative economy:

We need to support our elders, our neighbors and remember those who came before us. Who built your neighborhood? Where did those floors come from? What do the names on your street signs mean?

All of us need to trace the history of cultural items we talk about here back to their source and honor those individuals, their families and their crafts.

Things that occur to me:

When you take a picture of a Mardi Gras Indian without any credit to him, you take his craft. If you start to mass produce pralines and push out a home business to do it, then you do not honor your creative economy. When you stand in front of a singer's audience for an entire song taking picture after picture blocking those who sat with enough time to view him or her, you steal the moment. Or when you go to a musician's show and talk loudly on unimportant matters and break the moment. (Go.)

When you bypass a mechanic who has a hand made sign on his garage door and head instead for Speedy because you think the corporation has more aptitude based on signage, you slice into our root structure.

When you don't know why building new structures that are completely different in size from their neighboring ones is a abomination. Here's an idea: Take a look at a grove of trees and notice the relationship between them.

Moving into a neighborhood and renovating a house to new perfection, topping it off with a security system and wide fence and cameras is not rooting yourself. It's camping out til everyone else leaves. Your roots don't need to take all of the space.

Who are your area's roots? Who has been here, who knows the stories? Who belongs to that old chair or milk crate by the tree? That old, listing truck in front of you may hold more years of knowledge than your computer chip. Areas of our city are not only headlines: St. Bernard Avenue does not have to be feared, but honored for its past and potential future workers, men and women. Your corner store may not carry your top 10 items, but it's been there and is there for you to use for the other 30 you do need and get there. The neighbor who moved here after a 1970s JazzFest and has defined that corner with life and friendly banter to all. That newspaper-selling corner. Neutral ground activity. The parrot lady on Burgundy.

Those roots can create:
That 1.50 breakfast on Broad . Buttermilk Drops with the old Mackenzie taste, yeah. Kayak lessons on the bayou. Gondola rides in the park. Bird houses on the sidewalk on Claiborne. Electricians who bring you a used light fixture saying "This looked right for you." Bamboo groves in clumps. Recycling through foraging on trash night. Recycling via picking up leaves and then some organic coffee grounds for the garden. Less allergies and more greenery from volunteer plants being passed along. Quiet time at libraries. Music continuing on the street after school with instruments played on the way home. Hand made, decorated bikes slowly making their way down the street. Art, yes, Music yes. Those are the high priests and priestesses of the creative economy. Honor them of course. Make it easier for them to vend, to play, to create.
Just don't forget the bbq pit guys under the tree too.

Part1:
filibuster part 1

Creative economy filibuster

As you can see from some of my most recent series of posts on this blog, I am trying to come to terms with the term "creative economy" and what the implications are for us (once defined) politically, economically and socially.

My early thoughts on the definition I will use (this may change slightly or mostly):
Any undertaking among the rooted citizenry that is the opposite of mass production and does not use labor or natural resources as a commodity to produce the thing. Also, using ones hands or hand-maneuvered tools form the core of the work.

The definition includes the part of the process to think through how to build, illustrate, define, or re-imagine what is being built or crafted .

As most mass produced goods use a formula that includes efficiency which relies on undervaluing labor or natural resources,
efficiency should be replaced by sufficiency as a factor in ALL production.
Mass production also gives centralized systems an unfair leg up over smaller facilities that could be placed throughout a city. Centralization clearly needs to be opposed in order to reduce fuel consumption, the wear and tear on the roads and less hoarding of the tax base.

Next:
"Rooted citizenry": who they?