An astonishingly beautiful day in Montreal. I spent much of the afternoon, nursing a hangover, wandering through Mile End - which has become a proper hipster quartier: still affordable, interesting independent cafes and boutiques, an actual aroma of authentuc bohemianism. Cities change constantly. Mile End was once an Orthodox Jewish area, as was Williamsburg in Brooklyn (now sadly trending away from hipster into serious BoBo terrain...Bourgeois Bohemian, if you aren’t familiar with this acronym). Cities are mutable organisms - and can collapse (note Detroit) or rejuvenate (Portland, Maine is now a hyper-cool town, but was a depressed dump when I was at Bowdoin back in the early 1970s). Collective will and imagination is required. And as the urban theorist, Richard Florida, has noted, if a city puts its money into culture and all sorts of creative endeavor not only does it attract more interesting people (a no-brainer), but it also shifts the quality of its metropolitan life upwards. Of course we live in a paradoxical era when we only seem to value intelligence and creativity if it is eventually profitable. The slashing of education budgets, the largely poor wages paid to teachers and university lecturers, the way politicians so often sneer at the intellectual classes, and care little for the excellence of public broadcasting or the absolute need for serious arts subsidy... Theatres and concert halls are packed these days... but culture has also never been so expensive. And because we are living through a time when plutocracy has so set the economic agenda, is it in any way surprising that there is a strong streak of anti-intellectual philistinism running through the Tea Party, Fox News, and so many other right-wing mouthpieces? (mind you I have met a few Stalinist lefties over the years who are just as doctrinaire and extreme as their counterparts on the other extreme side of the political divide). Devaluing intelligence is something that we do at our peril. And people who criticize others for being too smart should not be in positions of power.
Posted on: Sat, 23 Aug 2014 22:11:50 +0000
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