I was reading an article that was advertised on the www.talkingpointsmemo.com blog. "Creative Class Warfare" ( http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0401.florida.html) by Richard Florida. It is an analysis on why America is facing a Waterloo moment in the sciences and arts because of the policies that are implemented by the BushCo administration.
Florida writes, "Last March, I had the opportunity to meet Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, at his film complex in lush, green, otherworldly-looking Wellington, New Zealand. Jackson has done something unlikely in Wellington, an exciting, cosmopolitan city of 900,000, but not one previously considered a world cultural capital. He has built a permanent facility there, perhaps the world's most sophisticated filmmaking complex. He did it in New Zealand concertedly and by design. Jackson, a Wellington native, realized what many American cities discovered during the '90s: Paradigm-busting creative industries could single-handedly change the ways cities flourish and drive dynamic, widespread economic change."
(In an sidebar item from Wired magazine, the computing power of marrying live action to digital creations in the final episode of the Rings trilogy required a computer rendering farm of 1700 dual processor computers networked over a multi-gigabit fiber optic channel. I believe that is a record for digital filmmaking.)
Florida continues, "Think about this. In the industry most symbolic of America's international economic and cultural might, film, the greatest single project in recent cinematic history was internationally funded and crafted by the best filmmakers from around the world, but not in Hollywood."
What is happening is that there is the beginnings of a reverse flow of creative, scientific and intellectual people willing to move to foreign cities in order to have the creative and financial means to carry out their ideas. This is happening now because the perception and reality under the bootheel of BushCo is profoundly unworldly, self-centered, morally simplistic, belligerently militaristic, and has fanned flames of the American anti-intellectual trait that has been a part of America since it's inception.
Florida writes, "Last March, I had the opportunity to meet Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, at his film complex in lush, green, otherworldly-looking Wellington, New Zealand. Jackson has done something unlikely in Wellington, an exciting, cosmopolitan city of 900,000, but not one previously considered a world cultural capital. He has built a permanent facility there, perhaps the world's most sophisticated filmmaking complex. He did it in New Zealand concertedly and by design. Jackson, a Wellington native, realized what many American cities discovered during the '90s: Paradigm-busting creative industries could single-handedly change the ways cities flourish and drive dynamic, widespread economic change."
(In an sidebar item from Wired magazine, the computing power of marrying live action to digital creations in the final episode of the Rings trilogy required a computer rendering farm of 1700 dual processor computers networked over a multi-gigabit fiber optic channel. I believe that is a record for digital filmmaking.)
Florida continues, "Think about this. In the industry most symbolic of America's international economic and cultural might, film, the greatest single project in recent cinematic history was internationally funded and crafted by the best filmmakers from around the world, but not in Hollywood."
What is happening is that there is the beginnings of a reverse flow of creative, scientific and intellectual people willing to move to foreign cities in order to have the creative and financial means to carry out their ideas. This is happening now because the perception and reality under the bootheel of BushCo is profoundly unworldly, self-centered, morally simplistic, belligerently militaristic, and has fanned flames of the American anti-intellectual trait that has been a part of America since it's inception.
posted by Ken at 7:33 PM
<< Home