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Episode 287: Creative Ass (Patreon)

Published:
2023-04-27 13:43:49
Edited:
2024-03-05 17:01:18
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Our old friend David A. Banks is back to talk about the release of his new book, The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America. We also discuss the complicated legacy of Richard Florida and the false prophets of the creative class. 

Buy the book here 

Check out David’s substack here 

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Comments

Franz

I’m first 🫨

Jack

you’re gonna like the way you look

original gay pussy eatah

I live in the city of Indianapolis which has recently adopted the tagline “no mean city,” or at least it’s peddlebar-going Mikaila’s have which I think is really funny. It comes from a letter some old dude who jacked each other off wrote to each other in 1890 something when do say “Indianapolis is no mean city” kind of just meant it was mid.

Broadway Joe

They didn’t change names at Ellis Island. Immigration officials went with the name that was listed on the steamship company manifest so if your name was misspelled it was done by a steamship company employee or after you left Ellis.

John Douglas

Been waiting for this book ever since the last interview with the author. Sounds great! More Boba and axe throwing places the better! Ha!

Dirt Dog

small and midsize cities self promotion is some of the funniest shit of all time

Mike Malloy

You guys alright? Feel like you are recording at a frantic pace, I can’t keep up listening. CIA raise your quarterly performance targets?

Mark Owen

C'mon Baby, let's do My Dingaling! - Rock 'n Roll legend Chubby Berry

Dani

I don’t think I’ve ever met someone irl who didn’t enjoy true stories (if they’ve seen it)

Josh Miller

St. Louisian here. We built an arch because we definitely can't package our history 👀

John Swan

I know Liz loves her hot takes on graphic designers (and design in general). They’re all pretty tired and shallow in my opinion and the UX designer throw away comment wasn’t different. UX designers take care of the parts of applications that you really don’t want software engineers to be in charge of. It’s fair to not like that as a concept. It’s fair think the idea of siloing “experience” to the way an application looks is bullshit. It’s fair to think geeking out about UX or graphic design is cringe. But we gotta face the fact that as overly online as we are, those designers shape what the world looks like. I mean that in a literal “they shape what your eyeballs are looking at for hours and hours everyday” kind of way. Is that worthless? A waste of time? I’m not so sure.

Rrrrrrrrrrrr

Chuck Berry did 'Johnny B. Goode' ; 'The Twist' was Chubby Checker

Ian H

As a native Marylander and former longtime Chicagoan, I take major umbrage at the claim that NYC is the best at "above board corruption"

AfroCommie

liz on creativity from around 1:03:00 preaaaaaaaach

bob

Brace really hit me hard around the 35 minute mark where he talked about having a big social network, a ton of people around, and a place in a bigger whole in San Francisco, then watching it rapidly vanish and be replaced with tech workers. I been living in Seattle for about 10 years and that exact process has happened to me and the place around me; the city has been so fundamentally reshaped for tech workers that it is completely unrecognizable to me now, both physically and socially.

Jaime Christley

I have been bellyaching about new architecture for years. By virtue of my previous jobs, I've seen just about every square inch of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens - ESPECIALLY the circa post-2000, post-2010 luxury high-rises - and everything the gang & guest say about them is empirically true; true facts stated; incontrovertible; however you want to call it. I was banging my fist on the dashboard hearing this stuff. You don't even have to go further into a new-ass building than the curb-facing side, the vestibule, the lobby, the elevators. These fucking common areas are all designed by indifferent psychopaths who all wrote their Masters thesis on how puddles are praxis and think the height of interior design is those useless twine balls that go on coffee tables that sell for $50 at Ikea and $500 at Crate & Barrell. These are Cheescake Factories-ass lobbies. Dangling shiny strips for some reason. Chairs that ought to be at the kid's table. Hideous colors or no colors at all. Irrational lighting. Nothing matches. And did I mention totally disorienting, spatially, for again no reason? And furthermore, 10000% right about how there's a hard ceiling on how nice your apartment is going to be. The hottest 1- and 2-BR and so forth apartments, say 1000-2000-ish sq ft, all look the same, just more space than the studios. Maybe you get a partial view of the street or something. All the fixtures look like you could twist them off with no effort, but also everything feels hard-edged and heavy like if you stubbed your toe you'd die from your wounds. Construction dust is just a permanent texture. Cabinets that you can't reach, or conflict with one another and/or the appliances. The thing is, taking in how ..... I don't want to say horrible, because the goldfish people who are renting these places while working at Deloitte or NBC or whatever, they've been trained to look at these places and think the following: (1) "yeah kid, I fuckin made it" and (2) very soon afterward, "Well if I grind for 3 years I can REALLY step up." But anyway seeing all these places - the lobbies, the common areas, the gyms, the stairwells, the garages, and absolutely the apartments - you have to think, ok, but if you're one of the POWER ELITE with, whatever, Saudi oil money or you're a 74-year-old pedophile trillionaire banker, you get it, you can just get one of those SUCCESSION-tier apartments. The ones with 14-minute YouTube videos showing off all the cool shit. Here's the thing. THESE PLACES AREN'T BETTER, THEY'RE JUST SWOLLEN UP BEYOND RECOGNITION LIKE TETSUO AND KANEDA. Because the challenge to designing these mega-giga-tera-peta-exa-scaled apartments is this: you have to fill up this place with SOMETHING, and what's the best thing to fill a place with when you are stupid and have no taste but you landed a big job designing trillionaire penthouse apartments? TRASH! What do you put over here - oh a conference room for some reason. How about a sink that's .... invisible? A Koi pond? secret passageways? A personal car elevator? Uhhhhhhhhh a bowling alley? Eucalyptus accents? A ballroom? what the fuck are you doing I challenge anyone to watch one of those YT vids where they show off apartments that are on Billionaire's Row and/or are listed for north of $50 million, and to tell me, "Yeah, that to me is fancy living. If my kitchen has 'custom stone', I know I've made it. I need 100-ft ceilings and a panoramic view of shitass New Jersey." Jesus I've got one of these vids in another window and the guy showing it off and explaining everything has on a black suit jacket covered in white polka dots. Matthew Lesko ass looking mf. Anyway good episode have a good weekend everybody p.s. you might be wondering, where does JC live? I'm living in Nowheresville in the midwest USA after peacing out of NYC after 21 years. My house was built in 1916 and my mortgage is $425/mo and my ass drives a Nissan Kicks and I have a dog and I go to the Y and honestly I wouldn't live in one of those new construction penthouses if you gave it to me as a gift.

Alec

Richard Florida is Virgil Texas’ new alter ego

Jaime Christley

this is only tangentially related but one of the details I loved from Morrison's SONG OF SOLOMON is that the main character's legal name is Macon Dead because the guy who wrote up his birth certificate was drunk and mistook the fields stating what county his father was from (Macon) and if he, the father, was alive or dead (Dead) and put them in as First Name Last Name. That book is wild for a lot of reasons and that's one of them. Morrison could cook

henologist

went to UT Austin for the first time in a while last week, they've taken down the Thai restaurant with the Daniel Johnston mural on it, so all that's there is the mural standing in a pile of rubble with rows of Those Shitty New Apartments in the background, felt like an appropriate metaphor for what Banks is describing

Jacob

Same way I felt watching Madmen- though dripping with the influence of capital and bourgeois society, what advertising executives and designers were creating heavily influenced the lives of millions and therefore has a level of intrinsic societal gravity (and in some cases actual, artistic merit!)

Jaime Christley

I hate more than anything the idea of trying to provide a ray of hope but if you fuck off out of the big cities and find a nice small town that's nevertheless big enough to have all the basic amenities (regional chain grocery store, you know which one you have), you can really amp your standard of living on a much, much lower budget than you'd need just to scrape by in a big dense metro area. A lot's changed since that scene in ACE IN THE HOLE (1951) where Kirk Douglas is pacing up and down his office in a misbegotten sticks town called ALBUQUERQUE NEW MEXICO and complaining about how there's no Madison Avenue, no Lindy's, no New York Yankees. American towns with sub-100k, even 50k populations have enough variance in terms of quality of life that anyone reading this right now can balance their budget against a decent standard of comfortable living. And as a longtime follower of the leftist despair podcasts (this and others), no one is more surprised than I am when I can square my accounts every month.

Jaime Christley

One could make a big effort to go offline and the experiences are modded and molded in much the same way. New cars, book cover art, new medical buildings, fucking new highway overpasses, movies, TV shows - all designed by overworked tired folks who don't have the energy or time to make anything look good or interesting. Whole industries being sanded down, squeezed, bled, etc. Of course one could say "It's always been like that" but the sanding down, the squeezing, the bleeding, it's just gotten more and more efficient over the past 10-20 years.

Chas Padunski

They do it in the small towns now too. Belatedly, but yeah. Maybe they won’t anymore with interest rate changes. But I have a dozen of these going up in a tiny radius near me. And my town is only about 4k people.

SF

Richard Florida instantly made me think Roger Mexico

Claire Simon

former graphic designer here. the field doesn't get nearly as much hate as it deserves

Claire Simon

did you guys know there's a Royal Tenenbaums themed condo in portland? it's called the margot lol

pepto_azymuth

Thank you. Us chubby heads were raging at that

Claire Simon

i've been in seattle for about 12 years, and yeah, it's basically turned into the place techies go if they can't hold their own in the bay area

Jaime Christley

I have a lot of thoughts about this but imo putting people into apartments in small towns is depraved and I would compel everyone to do anything up to and including crime and terrorism to put themselves into a house rather than an apartment. Even moreso than in big cities, apartments in my town are in a permanent entropy decline and I'm sure it's the same everywhere.

Tvvvv

Chuck berry reusing the same riff is not remaking the same hit like chubby did

ayla

i worked at the new albany lobster ravioli place and let me tell you kmart building next to a pet daycare is not the move for a $90 steak…. lots of coke there tho if ur into that

danny hotsauce

Not really true everywhere. I think you missed the point of the authors thesis. It’s not the idea that city living is depraved but that people with fake jobs and real capital are in control of the way cities are being built.

Jaime Christley

The SoHo evolution/devolution is mirrored in a ton of NYC neighborhoods, like Meatpacking, Hell's Kitchen etc: 1) industry 2) industry vanishes leaves a void that's replaced by 3) crime doers and squalor and despair, driving property values down to 0, leading to 4) artists and students and other classic Russian novel protagonists moving in and producing a big new art scene, making the neighborhood COOL, leading to 5) rich twats who also fancy themselves as artists or novelists or whatever moving in and making the neighborhood both NEW and AUTHENTIC at the same time, driving property values up to ∞ 5.1) tech workers and other 6-figure drones get the studios and 1BRs and basement units Key to 5 is that the legacies of 1 thru 4 are all baked into the pricing: the rich twats in 5 want the ghost of industry, the ghost of the Ooooh DANGER! of the crimey druggy squalor days, but best of all the prestige of the bygone art scene, being able to say yeah Basquiat used to go here.

Jaime Christley

not really what I'm talking about but thamks

Jaime Christley

watch CGP Grey's YouTube vid ranking the state flags, it's great

Char Kelly

TrueAnon on PILOTs would be an an episode for the ages for all the municipal heads in the chat

Daniel Thomas

Y'all ever read Hinterland? Lots of overlap with this ep👍👍👍

Robert Armstrong

Why no cold open? I like my opens chilly and funny. Bring back funny cold open!

Brian Long

Absolutely worth googling San Francisco flag

Axel H.

This is very interesting, especially as someone who lives in the Bay Area and is surrounded by tech workers and “affordable” housing that’s $3000 a month, but I am curious what the better alternative is. I can definitely see the problem, the gentrification, the tech bros shaping the design and the “authenticity” and yeah, I hate it all too. Just not sure what we should have or want instead, what is a better “vision” for a city and housing, or how we can get it, beyond just pining for the past.

Jaime Christley

sorry but this is making me insane: everyone is making the same Richard Florida Virgil Texas joke, TRUE STORIES gets a full minute of chatter on the episode, and Virgil, TX is the fictional town in TRUE STORIES that the IRL Virgil Texas took his name from... anybody? I know it's hack to say ooowoo we're living in the Matrix and there's no more than 40 people in the entire universe they just switch faces to fool you but honestly sometimes it feels right. can I get a witness?

ploob

Just remember your brain is evolved to recognize patterns and extrapolate, for better or worse

K H

Heard reducing lead poisoning by taking it out of gasoline as a theory for declining crime. Because if you lived in a city you were getting gassed.

boop

a/b testing is what determines what the digital world looks like lol

K H

Is there an episode on why Japan stopped scaring Americans?

K H

Fine. Voluntary concentration camps. It's a choice.

Andrew

Rare trueanon miss, good guest but annoying fit from the hosts at the end

N

Don't forget step 6, where shit gets so expensive not even tech bros will pay and 1/3 or more of the enormous expensive units getting built on the ruins of older more affordable housing sit empty

K H

I enjoy Brace explaining the tribulations of the factory goer persons. In factorum persons. Person bodies in factory spaces manipulating brooms. A think tank researcher is the most trust fund cia money blaster job I've ever heard. Wow. That shit is fucking fake. If someone tells you they are that they're a bot. Your hand could pass through them.

K H

Are you a user interface designer? Because I have a lot of rage at how media sites like hulu are baffling hieroglyphics and an obnoxious search bar. I want to know where you learned that was good or an ok way to make things. Stop it. Use words and translate between languages by region like before. I don't know where anything is and I don't want what the algorithm "thinks" I want and it's pissing me off I can't find it and nothing is organized in a way a human can parse. Like why are they fucking bad at it if its their focus?

K H

Well for one, building housing intended to specifically be actually affordable. Also more public toilets. If there is shit in the street there aren't enough still. Also get rid of cars. Too many cars too much traffic. Authenticity in so far as it exists comes from people living their lives as they want to, and not with objective of obtaining some other thing to get what they actually want, or to be observed doing a thing, nor constantly hiding. More and more we lose the value of our own subjective experience. That is replaced by work and consumerism while human interaction becomes a profane thing to be avoided.

K H

Nailed it.

John Swan

I’m a former architect, actually. All these professions deserve way more criticism. I just get tired when it’s lazy.

boop

Smash Mouth was formed in San Jose right around the start of the first tech bubble

Rene Saller

Hey, if you do a Chuck Berry episode, be sure to read RJ Smith's excellent new biography (which came out earlier this year or late last year). And also read Berry's autobiography, of course, because his writing style is unlike anyone else's, and it's an astonishing cultural product. I 'm a huge fan of the music, not the man, so I hope you all aren't planning to trash him if you ever do the episode.( I got to interview CB once in person, and it was one of the highlights of my career.) Also, count me as among the people who would like a Why Airline Travel Sucks episode or series.

Major bit me

Chubby Checker who wrote the twist and let’s twist again like we did last summer, he sued an app that measured penis size called Chubby Checker and he lost which really says a lot about our society

Vincent

"The Jazz Pivot"

J.P. McD.

Hell of a post. Incredible job describing what happens when I try to open my fridge wide enough to get the drawers out. And I feel like you’re right here with me listening to my light fixture click randomly.

J.P. McD.

If you learn to do a nice twist (it’s very easy), swiveling hips, knees, and toes, you will be a huge hit at weddings when the song comes on

Iro Kalogeropoulou

Great ep! There's a great book on gentrification, "The new urban frontier Gentrification and the revanchist city" by Neil Smith. Written in 1996. Read it in 2007 while studying architecture in Athens, it was not dated at all. It would be actually a good moment to reread it, see how it holds up in our current situation.

Jaime Christley

The future! Brought to you by the contractor who submitted the lowest bid.

Emioly

Duluth 4 ever

Karl Childers

only good thing to come from the south bay around then tbh

0_dp_0

The reason the mixed use luxury apartments brace mentions as projects look so shitty is because they’re just slapped together by an engineer and yea the materials have to be the cheapest. Architects in this country only work on government buildings or on projects for the wealthy - there isn’t enough money or interest to hire architects for the big developments and because engineers can get all approvals through themselves, they are often (probably always but don’t wanna talk in absolutes) the only ones to oversee a project. That means less eyes pay attention to what’s going on, and a lot of the designs elements are pulled from one building to the next. A sort of shitty, nightmarish Lego game of telephone

Kamran Husain

chomsky my guy plz prank brace and play the beginning of burning down the house when he says brace noise

Wes

To not mention highway construction and divestment from public amenities and into private single family homes in the 50s/60s is a pretty big hole from the backstory. I am most familiar with the context of Milwaukee but the declaring suburban towns is basically a mass scale tax avoidance scheme whereby suburbs try to leech on resources (water/roads/parks) while returning the least tax revenue possible, while maintaining the least efficient development patterns (detached single family homes). Further, in recent history the red state dynamics in Wisconsin have channeled shared revenue away from Milwaukee to serve their more rural, less efficient exurban development. It's a complex situation and segregation is very real but cities are also hamstrung by utilities leeches in the suburbs and exurbs as well. Not to mention I think Milwaukee police overtime costs doubled their budget lol.

Zach

nice ep! the homogenization of US cities is truly depressing / some years back I made a short film about the similarity between condos & projects in San Francisco & the wish to burn it all down https://vimeo.com/53624890

Mark Owen

That's rough. Hank Ballard and the Midnighters originated the Twist. Chubby's euro-only psych album is good. And Limbo Rock is one of the great earworms of all time.

bob

I had a friend who moved into one of those new high rises like the ones you describe, in Seattle around 2015. Mf paid $3500 for a 500 sqft apartment and when he moved in the plumbing and electrical would go out randomly. But at least they had a rooftop rec room with a scenic view of the port of seattle

Lindsi Bollinger

this connected very strongly with mackenzie wark’s framework of the “hacker” class emerging from what she calls a new mode of production, vectoralism, in which capital is even more abstracted. the defining feature of the hacker or creative class is that rather than laboring to create interchangeable commodities, they labor to create novel ideas/products/whatever else is sellable.

Sifl

I live in a large southern city. In 2010, I bought a little bungalow for @$250k in a close in neighborhood that was the artsy historic neighborhood in an otherwise soul sucking city of suburban sprawl. We arrived on the first wave of gentrification. Rental houses were being sold off and renovated for young professionals working downtown. New restaurants, coffee shops, bars, etc. were some of the best in the city as low rents and disposable income attracted some very creative local talent to open their passion project. But that just attracted more and more money to the neighborhood. The bungalows got torn down for generic Modern Victorian Farmhouses, midrise generic apartment complexes and all the great local shops and restaurants lost their leases and were replaced with VC backed chains of rich people lifestyle/beauty shit (yoga-fitness, botox/beauty salons, etc.) and chains of coffee shops and restaurants that appeal to higher end consumers. Every time I travel to another big metro area, I basically see a carbon copy of my neighborhood. MVFs, midrise apartments, all the same yoga/barre/salons and restaurants/coffee shops/juice bars.

NigelBOpinion

Sorry if anyone has said this already but, yeah, it's his real surname. He's Italian-American.

Valentino

Toronto Mentioned :)

saaffie

2007, "creative accounting" anyone?

zdfdjngdz

There's an excellent episode of " Well there's your problem" about 5 over ones, the type of mixed use wholefoods-with-condos-on-top building that is everywhere in the US. Long story short - they're all a ticking time bomb

Doug Cartel

it dovetails really nicely with the nation-wide real estate scams of the late 60s/early 70s, where the government dropped a big block of cash in the middle of the room and told corporations to use it to make cheap housing for black folk so they could escape the urban slumlords. Whoops, they took the free money and used it to build houses they sold to white people while bullying/tricking black folk (their favorite targets being single moms) into buying dogshit houses at 300% markup. The media kept blaming the home buyers for the shitty condition of the houses and quietly went "mea culpa" when they saw a full 30% of the houses get bulldozed after the FHA bought them.

Gulb

Liz's creativity rant was really good

Sneakaboard

Yeah, those buildings are basically 'one weird trick to build a death trap without running afoul of fire code'.

Cameron Young

Game 7 is Sunday. In Sacramento.

Shiv

Jinx Brace! had the same crane conversation yesterday but about Nashville in 2017 😀everything is fine

Shiv

Unpopular take: I like the SF flag, nice and phoenixy

opal

brace pls lemme teach you 9th grade algebra, i think you would like reading graphs

michael benham

Is this pod still about Jeffery Epstein and the sickos or is it more an urban planning pod now? Jw thanks

michael benham

Did you enjoy the city planner logistics business ep?

Baron

As a bit of geography nerd liberal growing up, one of my first entries into non-voter politics was trying to restart this petition to change the flag for Oklahoma City. That 99% invisible shit and the TedTalk associated with it caused like a wave of 20something cities to have liberals run ballot measures to re-design their flags. TFW the superstructure sublimates the base, etc.

Doc Adna

I cracked up too hard at that "look at this graph" and in general the musical interludes

Doc Adna

Great episode, you guys seem to be in top form

Do They Ever Shut Up

Lol instead of the ai and humman inversion we had the hipster inversion.

Ben

This is so good, and we need a Vice News episode

Oliver Crane

What, you don’t want to come hang out at the axe throwing bar? At least the Beacon Cinema and Scarecrow are still going.

D

I was taking a giant drink of ice water at the exact moment Yung Chomsky inserted the Logan Roy "Fuck off" and I ended up shooting ice cold water out of my nose. I'm not exaggerating.

Double Creature Feature

I tried to buy it at my Fort Worth, TX bookstore and they told me they probably wouldn’t be carrying it. 😭

Bellololol

Missed a punch down opportunity on Virgil Texas.

xnfec

So Authentic is the new Fake?

wolfgang

the “naughty aughties” describes bush doing 911, oops! Naughty boy! Also to a lesser degree, in 2008 when those naughty bankers did an oopses with mortgage back securities. they sure did a baddy 😘

DarylBarenziah

Comrades, half of us have read imperialism here. We’re suckers for charts and numbers. Give us that airline episode and I raise you a couple more with numbers and charts. Give me an episode on the Rockefeller’s and industrial farming sponsored by the petroleum industry and I’ll double subscribe to Patreon.

David A. Banks

Neil Smith is a great read (I site him often in the book) and was a huge sex pest.

David A. Banks

My house was built in 1874 and it rocks. The guy that built it even signed it in the attic. everything is built to be forgotten.

Dani

I’m watching my back

Wes

Tight looking forward to checking it out!

Justin Cox

This is fucking retarded

Jenny K

Wait are you the real cletus bocephus

Femi Agbabiaka

The sideshow is the solution to gentrification. Start shooting guns and doing donuts in shitboxes at 3 am

Sardonic

It's worth pointing out that the origin of Austin's tagline as the 'live music capital of the world' was a chamber of commerce slogan

JD Sanchez

Just drove past the giant Whole Food apartment complex in DC and it made me open up Patreon just to comment here

LPO Crane Jefferson

@1:09 I swear if this isn't a reference to the fleeting restaurant Tatu in Saratoga Springs, I'ma freak.