Sunday, April 11, 2010

Some More Notes on Creative Cities Summit

The "summit" is over and they have been to the mountaintop, they have seen their prophet-the voice crying out in the wilderness- Richard Florida and they are charged up to now go out and BE creative.

I said that there would be more Twitter conversations and I was right. There was a short back and forth about the morning speaker and whether or not the Cox St parking area of the Lexington Center needed to be redesigned. I believe that this was just a hypothetical.

Another picked up where they left off from the day before concerning the power poles on Euclid.
DougMartin10th @Lshevawn Everybody hates KU utility poles on Euclid. Will public pay higher utility costs 2 bury? I'm for it, but are citizens?
Quickly followed by

bself Did anyone ask us?
Is this meant to imply that all major utility upgrades or new development is to be by referendum? Nothing gets done until an election can be held?
EricPatrickMarr Lemme guess. Umm, no?
Eric is one to not let a chance of an uninformed comment go by
@PohlRosaPohl: Leadership means knowing what's needed and pursuing it, not submitting every idea to a public vote. That's followship.
Asking about cost of burying utilities misses the point: the cost of FAILING to bury is IMMEASURABLE. Failure, forever.
The point is: That there in no money for that size of a project in anyone's budget these days
@Lshevawn Why he's my HERO
Can't you just see her clasping her hands and batting her long eyelashes.
Lshevawn @DougMartin10th YES. I would pay for it bc I value beauty of place/space & believe we MUST invest in future of our city
I now doubt that if all 600 attendees agreed as such that they could pay if off in their lifetimes.

The two most telling tweets came from amartindesign which said:
...90% of the tweets from there have been nothing but name-dropping and ass kissing. Which is from an outside perspective it seems like self-help horse shit (and those are not my words for it)

There also is a bit of a superiority complex vibe coming off of a lot of the tweets.
And boy did feel that way too. I have a feeling that the majority of the attendees have little or no understanding of just who this "creative class" is. They seem to discount anyone not in the arts, or design, or music, or even the offbeat and weird looking realm of their world. That feeling is summed up by none other than our old friend Eric.
@EricPatrickMarr Siiiince WHEN are lawyers "creative"??? ;)
It looks like poor Eric does not even believe his creative guru Florida's own Martin Prosperity Institute. The ones attending this "summit" most likely make up about 5-19% of the whole "creative class". The lawyers are in the 49%.





4 comments:

Alison said...

A wee correction: @amartindesign did not tweet those things; they were tweeted AT him by someone else, @bluebelleinbg.

The Lexington Streetsweeper said...

Thank you, Alison. I stand corrected. The main point of the post is still that these were some of the Twitterverse goings on at the time.

Anonymous said...

Eric Patrick Marr is a huge fraud. Lexenomics is nothing more than a one man show and now he is hosting Run the Bluegrass, marathon. What a joke this guy is. Expert on conartistry.

The Lexington Streetsweeper said...

Nearly two years after the original post and we still have folks telling me that he is a walking failure. I could tell that from the first time I read his rambling in ACE Weekly.

I know some people who attended high school with him, they say that he hasn't changed a bit.