Conscious Choice: Local Culture in Bloom

February 2000 | Citizen at Large

Local Culture in Bloom

by Jay Walljasper

As I write this I’m hurtling skyward at hundreds of miles an hour scrunched into an uncomfortable seat aboard a jetliner bound for New York City and a board meeting of the Institute for Alternative Journalism. I am not alone — thousands of sales reps, executives, professors, honeymooners, artists, technicians, students, and tourists arrive in New York every hour. And for each of them it promises a taste of urban sophistication and adventure not to be found at home. The skyline rising with a sculptural elegance above the East River. The little-known Burmese cafe in SoHo or the no-holds-barred transvestite club in the East Village. The fabulously exotic (and shockingly expensive) fashion and artwork in the store windows of the Upper East Side. Russian or Spanish or Yiddish or Arabic conversations echoing along the sidewalks. The always romantic allure of landmarks like Rockefeller Center and Washington Square Park.

New York is the only American city whose street signs provide metaphors for entire fields of human endeavor: Wall Street (banking), Madison Avenue (advertising), Broadway (nightlife), Fifth Avenue (shopping), Times Square (sleaze), and Christopher Street (gay culture). There’s no city across the land that comes close to matching its seductive whirl of glamor and grit. Yet New York is no longer the center of American culture as it was during the twenties, thirties, and forties. Some observers of urban life make the case that Los Angeles stripped it of that honor in the fifties when it stole away both the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team and the bulk of television production work. But Los Angeles is no longer the center of American culture either, nor is Washington, which has always suffered some of the drabness associated with being a one-industry town.

San Francisco has long been America’s highest-temperature hotbed of cultural experimentation — birthplace of the traditional jazz revival in the forties, the beatniks in the fifties, the hippies in the sixties, the gay movement in the seventies, the deep ecology movement in the eighties, and now the pioneers of the brave new universe of electronic communications. But the city’s unabashed pride in celebrating the fringes means that it could never be considered the center of American culture.

The truth is, American culture no longer has a single center. Cities and regions from coast-to-coast are asserting themselves in the social, artistic, intellectual and commercial life of the nation. My home of Minneapolis, for instance, was once viewed as simply another farflung speck of population in America’s vast outback. A half-century ago it was known, if at all, for grain milling, sturdy college football stars, and an overly talkative young mayor named Hubert Humphrey. Even 35 years ago local residents needed to travel 300 miles to see a big league sports event and another 200 on top of that to see a professional acting company.

We now claim professional baseball, football and basketball teams along with several dozen serious theaters, and more new ones coming all the time. The last three years has seen no less than six new theater and dance companies relocate here from New York. One of America’s two major public radio networks is headquartered right next door in the city of St. Paul, as is "Alive From Off Center," an influential national television program showcasing the best in avant-garde performers. The platinum pop star Prince and the celebrated humorist, novelist, and radio host Garrison Keillor still reside here and local-girl-made-movie-star Jessica Lange is moving back from New York. More than a half-dozen feature films are being shot here this summer.

More importantly, cultural activity is flourishing all over town innocently oblivious of what tastemakers on the coasts say. Each May Day, a local puppet and theater troupe stages a rousing political parade and splendid pagan festival in a low-income inner city neighborhood. My local neighborhood improvement group marched this year alongside the tribes of black-clad youth from the Backroom Anarchist Center and the drum-pounding, flower-wearing followers of the Mud Lake Men’s Group. My favorite new band, the Cafe Accordian Orchestra, has issued no CDs but can be heard playing excellent renditions of classic tango and Paris Musette tunes at the cafe below my office every other Thursday. I don’t think New York or San Francisco offers anything similar.

Time was when these musisicans and actors would have all left town in search of artistic success and appreciative audiences — even if they had wanted to stay Minneapolis arts-goers would have spurned them as no-talent local yokels. F. Scott Fitzgerald in the twenties and Bob Dylan in the sixties never looked back after forsaking Minneapolis-St.Paul for New York. And many young artists still leave, but staying here and coming back are now both genuine options.

The same thing is happening in other fields, from fashion to finance, and in other cities. Seattle, Portland, Atlanta, Miami, New Orleans, and Baltimore can also legitimately claim status as major cultural centers along with more established regional capitals like Boston and New York. And smaller places like Madison, Wisconsin; Austin, Texas; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Iowa City, Iowa; Boulder, Colorado; even Hardwick, Vermont and many other towns are bursting with good bookstores, lively cafes, and creative people who are not simply counting the weeks until they can escape to New York or California.

One reason for this blossoming of regional culture is the advance of technology — first air travel and long-distance phonecalls, then overnight mail service and fax machines, now computer modems and networks, and soon teleconferencing via video hook ups. These all conspire to put the backcountry of this vast nation on an equal information footing with the traditional centers of power. But Americans are too quick to attribute everything to technological breakthroughs. (I’m sure that futurists in 1959 dazzled their listeners with descriptions of the coming decade’s robot housekeepers and two jets in every garage, never even suspecting the impact of the civil rights movement, the youthful counterculture, the revolt against the Vietnam War, growing environmental consciousness, and women’s liberation.)

The eternal tendency of the universe toward entropy might also help explain things — the biological processes of building up and breaking down applies to empires and cities, as well as rock formations and human bodies. Like Rome and Athens, New York can’t be the center of things forever. But there’s something more at work here because Los Angeles wasn’t New York as long as New York was. And New York certainly rose and fell far faster than Rome.

I believe a decentralist tide is beginning to sweep over the world, as Leopold Kohr predicted in 1941 and E.F. Schumacher elaborated on in the 1970s. People around the planet are instilling themselves with a dawning sense that bigger is not necessarily better and that the grass is rarely greener in the big city off in the distance. Americans seem to be taking a new pride in the places where they live, serving regional cuisine, preserving area customs, and cultivating local culture with a renewed pleasure. People are seeking out what’s special about their home, and enjoying it as something that sets them apart from the often stultifying sameness of American popular culture. There’s a new spirit telling us that New York is a nice place to visit but that you don’t have to live there to play a creative role in the shaping of American culture. Ditto for California, Boston, and Washington.

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