i’ll try anything once

I got the news, from City of Palo Alto that Peter Kageyama is booked to either speak, read from his book or maybe it’s a clinic, soon, this winter. Sounds pretty good, but I wonder the backstory. And dear me I hope they pay him less than the $160,000 they are paying the two flunkies who are birds learning to prey I mean tweet. (That’s a Sondheim reference for the occasional Philistine and hater making his way to Plasty).

I never heard of Peter until 12 minutes ago. He is a protegee it seems of Richard Florida “Creative Capital” or “Creative Class” I read the title into the record once, apropos of the failure of leadership to work to get 456 University the historic and beloved Varsity Theatre onto the cultural inventory.

He is from Akron, Ohio so I rang him and am suggesting he kick back a wee amount to get Ralph Carney to tweet some excellent clarinet sounds in between interstices of the program. I don’t speak for Ralph, I just play hunches.

God does not play dice with the universe but Weiss sticks his little plastic…

I would have preferred producing a lecture by George Packer, on “The Unwinding…”

I wrote yesterday cautioning about the public sector, especially our suspiciously unrepresentative and unresponsive one, the subject of a Grand Jury report, producing content. For instance, we spend $2 Million plus to revise (I say “gut” and “flush”) our Comprehensive Plan, part of the Our Palo Alto campaign, an all-time great euphemism.

We also have a $200K spin meisteress Claudia Keith, a mesmer.

I thought it downright bizarre that in order to develop the former Roth Building at the former Palo Alto Clinic we have to, if you believe Pat Burt, let the Thoits descendants add another $10 M of value to the fully-leased buildings (including Bryn Walker, House of Bagels) they are tearing down and re-building. The default should have been: Arts and Culture Division buys or condemns the building and we the people run it.

I think it equally bizarre that Palo Alto Little League is run by people who want to make them selves useful to a huge corporation and that trumps baseball per se. Why not ask Alex Blandino, who told me he played four seasons there, to set aside part of his $1.7 million Cincinnati Reds contract to subsidize the league, if regular Palo Altans truly cannot afford it anymore. Or Joc Pedersen. There is no center field foul pole in baseball, peeps.

If Kageyama is merely another toy of the build-build-build Billionaries I will be pretty disappointed. Begs the question: who booked him?

edit to add, already:
Packer has 513 reviews, while Kageyama has only 15 total. Richard Florida, for “Rise of the Creative Class” has only 80. This does not look good.

Let’s see if he returns my call. PK

and1: here is a clue: Jim Keene tweeted this in April:
Peter Kageyama ends #TLG2014 on the highest note. For the Love of Cities!!!

To what extent is Palo Alto even a city?
We have a billion-dollar-per-year-each-year commercial real estate industry drooling in our soup, sure, but there is probably a remote patch of desert in Saudi Arabia with a billion dollars worth of pumps but that does not make it Savannah, GA either.

And2: Kageyama tweets of this, and it has interesting set of sources. Times article recently about where college grads want to live and why. (And I had proposed to Michigan gubernatorial candidate Mark Schauer that I write a white-paper about the feasibility of artists moving to Detroit based on meeting one graduating Stanford student, a singer, who thought about moving there. I lost $600 on the proposition in that Southwest Air will not let me re-use the funds of my missed or cancelled or “no show” flight, not to mix causes).

edit to add two months later: one, I did get a return call from peter kageyama and chatted him up for a few minutes. Two, I will try to take in his talk tomorrow, Friday Feb. 20, 2015 at Mitchell Center but three I also wrote to the Mayor suggesting his purported $5,000 fee is too much, and better spent on the arts.