Papers for Mac

Holy smoke! How did I get through almost two years of grad school without even knowing about Papers? I’d heard of ProCite and EndNote, but Papers looks like it was developed especially for Macs. See, it’s like iTunes for your PDF files, categorizing everything according to title, author, journal, and publication year. You can even group the files together into playlist-like collections. I spent all day digging out old files that had been buried in obscure, long-forgotten folders, and then imported them into this handy organizational tool. Thanks, Papers!

WIP: New York theatre blogs

I decided to delete this excerpt because we finally submitted our paper to PION Journals this afternoon, and I didn’t want to entangle myself in any complications having to do with copyrights and publications. If you’d like more information about buzz, pipelines, or blogs, please contact me and I’ll be happy to tell you more about it. Thanks!

Sometimes going out counts as work

Seriously. Sometimes going out and hanging with your buds and building that social capital counts as work. Because that’s how you develop trust and networking opportunities and sharing tacit knowledge and all kinds of other things that help you get by in life, both personally and professionally. So next time your buddies ask you to go out for a drink, tell ‘em the first round is on you. Cheers!

Review: Cultural-products Industries and Urban Development

Allen Scott has written prolifically on the subject of the so-called “new economy,” a term used to describe flexible production systems and agglomeration economies. His 2004 paper attempts to clarify heretofore ambiguous definitions of “creative industries”, just one of the many sectors that comprise the new economy. Scott defines cultural-products industries as those enterprises that 1) offer service outputs focused on entertainment and information, and/or 2) manufactured products that contribute to consumers’ own senses of distinction and individuality. Such products are valued more highly for their subjective meanings than their utilitarian purposes.

The authenticity question

I’m not very well read when it comes to philosophy. I took an Intro to Western Philosophy class when I was a college freshman and hated every minute of it, so I’ve kind of gone out of my way to avoid philosophy whenever it comes my way. Still, I find myself confronted with a persistent question lately that almost certainly requires an explanation rooted in a  sound philosophical argument. The question, specifically, deals with the nature of “authenticity”. It’s germane to the study of art and culture, postmodern urbanism, and the built environment, especially as it relates to the hipsters and bohemians who strive to lead lives of authenticity.

There’s a discourse out there that reasons that modern urban life is not authentic. Rather, it is full of places and spaces that are built to evoke another time and place that plays on our nostalgia and a yearning for a bygone era in which “times were better”. These places therefore become a caricature of what they attempt to duplicate, a sanitized, efficient, Disneyfied version of the real thing. Shopping malls probably provide the most ubiquitous example of this phenomenon, but it’s the “Irish” pub down the road that’s really gotten my noodle going on this subject.

Must we reject these shallow re-creations? Must we only inhabit those spaces that are not a product of fantasy fulfillment? How do you tell the difference between the two? A logical fallacy emerges, for inauthentic spaces are still a product of very real and authentic social and economic forces that shape the urban environment. We may express a cynical disdain toward commodification, consumerism, and the mass market, but that does not negate their existence, much less the influence they exert over the places where we live and work each day.

So where would you recommend I begin my philosophical inquiry? Bourdieu? Baudrillard? Sartre? Someone else?

A whole month

A month has gone by without any new posts or updates to Work. I suppose I could blame it on the holiday season and the start of a Winter Quarter, but those are just obfuscations of the truth. The truth is I’ve been avoiding Work because it’s easier than actually working on Work. This coming from the guy who admonished himself to work on Work at least a little bit every damned day.

So! The past is past, it’s best to let it go. Right now I have a new year. A new leaf to turn over. And lots more work to be done.

The Chihuly Factor

A friend recently helped me devise a clever new term which may or may not catch on with academia. Named after famed glass sculptor Dale Chihuly, the “Chihuly Factor” is used to describe an object of token distinction. To illustrate, any cultural institution that wants to be taken seriously displays a Chihuly sculpture somewhere in its lobby. According to Wikipedia (which you should never cite for academic work, kiddos), there are no fewer than 48 Chihulys on permanent display throughout the U.S. and Canada.

This is, in some sense, a new name for a very old concept – the cycle of fads, fashions, and trends – as anyone who’s gone out of their way for a Thomas Kinkade painting can tell you. But I like to think the Chihuly Factor takes the commodification of art to a new level by virtue of the fact that the cultural institutions themselves have become the mass consumers. Ironic, no?

New book: High Stakes

I started reading a new book today, High Stakes: Big Time Sports and Downtown Redevelopment, authored by a trio of researchers: Timonthy Jon Curry, Kent Schwirian, and Rachael A. Woldoff. Looks to be a pretty good summary of the political machinations that led to the Nationwide Arena District. At the outset, the authors seem to be arguing that sports stadiums and arenas alone are not enough to spur urban redevelopment. Rather, such stadiums must serve as an anchor to the development of a larger mixed-use urban district. However, even a successful entertainment district is limited in its ability to drive economic redevelopment throughout the greater downtown area. That is, cities that seek to turn around urban decay by building a fancy new stadium or even an entire sports entertainment district are lamentably chasing after a red herring.

Neo-bohemia: a critical review

To loving tension, no pension,
To more than one dimension,
To starving for attention
Hating convention, hating pretension
–“La Vie Boheme”, Rent (1996)

The first act finale of Jonathan Larson’s wildly popular rock musical Rent includes the preceding verses, an affirmation of the complex and conflicting forces that shape the image of the bohemian life. Here the idealistic protagonists unconditionally embrace a life of uncertainty, of starvation, of marginalization, but declare it a worthy tradeoff for an unconventional life of self-determination, originality, and authenticity. The drama is a distillation of what Richard Lloyd terms the “neo-bohemian” experience, a social phenomenon that flourished in various urban neighborhoods across the U.S. in the mid to late 1980’s. Lloyd’s adopted home of Chicago was no exception, and his fascination with these unique districts and their colorful mixture of people culminated in the writing of Neo-bohemia: art and commerce in the postindustrial city (2006).

Coming into place

Location, of course, refers to a specific point on a spatial plane, like Cartesian coordinates. Place, however, refers to a specific context associated with a given location; the history of economic, cultural, political, and social processes that distinguishes one place from another.

So places are produced through social relations. We see examples of this in consumer culture, economic production, and labor markets. In turn, these socially constructed places produce social relations of their own.

An overview of socially constructed processes would be incongruous with a study of location. A relationship between locations is one of physical distance and time, where historical context matters little.

A progressive sense of place is an idea developed by Doreen Massey to delineate how places are constructed, not only by social processes, but by contested meanings between different people and their different experiences. In this view, places have multiple meanings and identities, and the construction of such meanings and identities can change significantly over time.