Garnet

Women in the Arts through the Ages
Angela's Improv
People*watching is fun.
I'm an intense thinker and will voraciously analyze everything that interests me.
I manage to get paint on all my clothes, so I guess I could say that I wear rags all the time. I prefer wearing rags than throwing money away buying overpriced labels of the latest trend. I actually feel sorry for people who feel that they need to tote around a designer handbag to make them feel more important. Eckhart Tolle's book, THE NEW EARTH, says it all: see page 35-38. Here's some highlights: "As a spiritual practice, I suggest that you investigate your relationship with the world of things through self-observation, and in particular, things that are designated with the word "my." You need to be alert and honest to find out, for example, whether your sense of self-worth is bound up with things you possess. Do certain things induce a subtle feeling of importance or superiority? Do you casually mention things you have or show them off to increase your sense of worth in someone else's eyes...?" MY-MY-MY... I suppose that's why I like T'ai Chi and walking in the woods. It grounds me to the more important things in life and keeps me from getting sucked into the vortex of possessing things, and people for that matter. Some careertrackers think that having a lot of friends around them is a good thing. But I look at this as a cautious step beyond healthy relationships and more as another form of grasping at possessive adornments under the guise of genuine affection.
As such, I have no interest in being friends with people who lie, always have excuses for not paying their debts, and those who think that they have more "important" jobs because it pays better than other occupations. As far as I'm concerned, all jobs are important in the food chain of life. I get physically nauseous around people who like to "go shopping." What a waste of time... Fortunately, my highly-sanctioned morals and inept social skills with frivolous, materialistic people allow few to be accepted into my tribe of true friends.
"Being honest with yourself and with others is the best thing you can do for inner peace."
FYI• Art increases a child’s ability to create abstractions and mental processes in the abstract (ASBJ) • Musical training has been linked to the development of higher brain functions (ETM) • Nationally, the nonprofit arts contribute an estimated $37 billion to the economy every year (NEA)
How can anyone in her right mind believe that artists are useless? Take your corporate-merging, number-crunching mentality and stick it in your office shredder so that the paper can be recycled into drawing paper and be put to better use! When an "accountant's life's work" is done, it gets destroyed after 7-10 years to make room for more archival files. When an artist's life's work is done, it gets preserved in a museum and studied for centuries. Hmmm...
THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS SO TRUE... SO TRUE...What a great vindication for artists!
Real Estate February 26, 2007, 12:00AM EST
T Bohemian Today, High-Rent Tomorrow
Creative types are essential to urban and regional economic growth. Here's why—and the cities artists should flock to now by Maya Roney
Want to know where a great place to invest in real estate will be five or 10 years from now? Look at where artists are living now.
Sociologists and policymakers have long been touting art and culture as the cure-all to economically depressed neighborhoods, cities, and regions. The reason? It has been proven that artists—defined as self-employed visual artists, actors, musicians, writers, etc.—can stimulate local economies in a number of ways.
Artists are often an early sign of neighborhood gentrification. "Artists are the advance guard of what's hip and cool," says Bert Sperling, founder and president of Portland (Ore.)-based Sperling's Best Places and compiler of BusinessWeek.com's list of the Best Places for Artists in America.
Creativity Leads to Growth
Not all artists are starving.
Anne Markusen, an economist and professor at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and a leading researcher on the effects of the arts on regional economics, once profiled an abstract painter whose work is now displayed on ceilings and in MRI machines in hospitals across the country. In Markusen's research, artists have also been found to stimulate innovation on the part of their suppliers. A painter may need a certain type of frame that is not manufactured, forcing the frame maker to create a new design that happens to also work well for other artists.
But Markusen also maintains that artists bring more than culture to a community. "Businesses don't often understand the extent to which art affects them," Markusen says. "[Artists] are just as important as science and technology companies."
Nonarts businesses also use artist contractors to improve product design, help with marketing, or even use dramatic theory to solve employee relationship issues. Being a cultural center also helps local businesses attract employees who want to be able to regularly go to the ballet or the theater, hear authors read from their latest books, or attend art gallery openings.
Follow the Money: Where to Go Now BusinessWeek.com and Sperling's Best Places came up with a list of the best places for artists in the U.S. by identifying the metro areas that have the highest concentrations of artistic establishments. We also looked at the percentage of young people age 25 to 34, population diversity, and concentration of museums, philharmonic orchestras, dance companies, theater troupes, library resources, and college arts programs. Lower cost of living played a part in the selection of some cities but had to be overlooked in others because of other very favorable factors.
Some of the top ten are traditional art "super cities"—one of the reasons Los Angeles leads the list is because it has 56 artistic establishments for every 100,000 people, a diversity index of 84.2, and an arts and culture index of 100 (on a scale of 1 to 100). New York City and San Francisco are also in the top ten. Other places are midsize cities, like hippie havens Santa Fe and Boulder, and country-music nucleus Nashville. Smaller, less-obvious additions include Carson City, Nev., which ranks third for its high concentration of art establishments, and the city of Kingston in New York's Hudson River Valley.
Ready to quit your day job and make art your profession? These metro areas are good places to start. And with all the economic benefits you'll be providing, they should welcome you with open arms.
Article by Roney is Real Estate writer for BusinessWeek.com.
And to know that people still think that artists are useless. Ha!