Travel Account, I: Eyeliner and the City

The word of the day today is vibe.
I used it as a verb a few nights ago while at an outing.
Blame it on extensive travel, I guess. I turn more colloquial during the summertime, apparently.

I remember the specific 'vibe' instance because I excused myself from my company, stepped into another area, and sent the following text, ‘I want you to know I just used 'heart' and 'vibe' as verbs.'

It’s rather bizarre to me how linguistic petpeeves get morphed into clichés but a good number of them have already.

Fastforward to a few days later. I found myself vibing very well again.
I was in a hypemodern store looking for an eyebrow pencil. It was a present for someone blonde. Very blonde. The blonde entity had a birthday hence the gesture.

The gentleman who came to my aid was very blonde himself and before you know it we were discussing Richard Florida’s book Who’s Your City? and got to cover such topics as urban living, the vibe of a city, travel, surfing, on the net and the ocean out in New Zealand, family, things of the realm of hobbies, eye color, personality traits, and of course, eye liners.

I’m a fan of eyeliners. It’s the one makeup item I find useful to my quotidian maintenance routine. Naturally, I’m inclined to finding most eyeliner-related info tidbits relevant.

Ergo, when he asked me how I was finding the city, I said, “Ah. Well, I dig its vibe, you know? I always have. Every time I find myself on a street I’ve already experienced, it somehow feels new and fresh. We vibe well, you know?
“OMG! Totally. Vibe. That’s it. That's the word.”

His eyes had a kind of sincerity I usually see in those I already know well. He oozed familiarity, the kind that genuine and sincere people do. That kind of familiarity is endemic to their natures, I think.

I usually get annoyed by unsolicited verbal attention when in a foreign land/city, but I rather enjoyed my repartee with the eyeliner specialist. How often does one come across an abroad-living Scott originally from Los Angeles with a flare for urban planning books, surfing, and, of course, eyeliners?

My iPhone tells me to rely on what the locals approve of and explore the new environs the way they do.

Like I’ll start ignoring my gadget of choice now while visiting a new land?

As if!

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graph per forums.eidosgames.com

The Creative, the Berry, and Productivity

I had a most enjoyable conversation with my friend Polly tonight. Polly is what I would call a highly successful member of the creative class who is both switched on and tuned it.

We were talking about a cornucopia of things, one of them being the importance of context-decoding and connection-making. A successful 21-st century creative is not just one who has acquired much information of a general and esoteric nature but especially one who can make connections, contextualize things fast and effectively, and make the right linguistic choices.

I agree with both cognitively and experientially.

While talking to Polly, I thought of a Richard Florida article on the creative class and the human capital and I thought I’d include a snippet here. In it, Florida and his collaborator Charlotta Mellander, observe:

‘The role of talent and creativity in economic development has been a subject of growing interest to social scientists. Human capital is observed both to be an important contributor to growth and to be unevenly distributed
geographically.

While there is consensus on the importance of human capital to economic
development, debate takes shape around two central issues. First, there is the question of how best to measure human capital. The conventional measure of human capital is based on educational attainment (share of population with a bachelor’s degree and above). But more recent research suggests that it is more important to measure what people do than what they study, and thus occupationally based measures, associated principally with creative class occupations, have been introduced.’

An interesting study, no doubt. However, it does seem to leave out one important point: the necessity of immediate connection-making as facilitated by technology. A successful creative cannot simply be one who is well-educated, lives in a place where other like-minded creatives live, and has the ability to create in the niche s/he finds her/himself. But as Polly also mentioned, a successful creative is one who can clearly see what the nature of thing is and what connections to make and create accordingly.

Being switched on is a good thing, but being switched on and tuned in is better.
graph per blackberry
text per creative classroom

The Geist of the Zeit is THIS?

Yet another example of the 'creatives' being reduced to nothing more than a cliché
Tip of the hat to Richard Florida.
Read the beauty here.
You might just react to it the same way I did: "What the flip?!"

The Creative Class

I am working on a few posts which I will name 'The Psychology of the Creative Class.' The inspiration for these pieces came after I became familiar with Richard Florida's work on the subject. This post will feature a snippet by Florida himself as featured in his 'Globe and Mail' column.

Richard Florida's text:

I recalled those Saturdays recently when I had my hair cut in Toronto. It turned out that the hairdresser, a stylish young man in his late 20s or early 30s, was once a resident of Birmingham, an upscale suburb of Detroit that I knew well because my wife lived there when we met. Without thinking, I said, "My wife used to get her hair done in Birmingham; what salon did you work in?" "I wasn't a hairstylist then, man. I worked for General Motors," he said. "Really?" I said, trying to dig myself out of a hole. "What plant did you work at?" "Plant?" came his reply. "I didn't work in a factory — I'm a mechanical engineer and I worked on new product development."

My jaw dropped. This man had quit a high-paying job in a good company so he could cut people's hair. He had left the creative class because it wasn't creative enough for him and had gone into a service industry to express his creativity.

Does Place Matter?

Benjamin and I talk about the 'text' of place as often as the caprice of the weather is observed and felt. Which is daily, of course. The message of ths story is that place, indeed, doth matter!

While technology and the internet allow us to have easy access to many thing in the world and to communicate sans frontiers, the very place in which we find ourselves is hugely important as well.

According to Richard Florida's new upcoming book "Who's Your City," place is not only important, it’s more important than ever. He observes that,

'Globalization is not flattening the world; on the contrary, the world is spiky. Place is becoming more relevant to the global economy and our individual lives. The choice of where to live, therefore, is not an arbitrary one. It is arguably the most important decision we make, as important as choosing a spouse or a career. In fact, place exerts powerful influence over the jobs and careers we have access to, the people meet and our “mating markets” and our ability to lead happy and fulfilled lives.'

The bottom line is that we all face our daily realities in our respective locations and the quotidian cannot be bypassed by technology. And there can only be one or a small few egg places that know how to make your brunch menu just so.

I am looking forward to the book which is scheduled to come out in March of 2008.



graph per Richard Florida's blog

Creative Mind

What makes a creative person creative?









via Richard Florida's blog