For what ever reason

[sombrefan]

These two articles are my favourites of the week

The first is a guide to Britain by the guy who made Four Weddings, Notting Hill and Love, Actually.



http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,1084021,00.html





Curtis Britain: a brief guide

For many Americans, Britain is a strange and exotic land glimpsed only through the work of Richard Curtis. While the picture he presents is, let us say, broadly accurate, first-time viewers may find some further explanation helpful

Tim Dowling


Thursday November 13, 2003



The Guardian

Weather
In most of mainland Britain it snows frequently and reliably throughout the winter. London is regularly dusted with snowfalls so uniform that to the untrained eye it may appear that white blankets have been lain across the road.

Hair
Floppy is still in, as it has been for more than a decade.

Americans
The Americans you see in Curtis films are not like the Americans in your hometown in America. They are thin, have passports and tend to speak perfect idiomatic British English with American accents. This is a different breed of American; they actually come from a little island in the mid-Atlantic with special diplomatic status, which is why no one ever gives them a hard time about US foreign policy at dinner parties.

Friends
In Britain people prefer to form tight social clusters, rather then large networks, choosing close friends from a wide variety of social backgrounds. The largest proportion will naturally have gone to either Oxford or Cambridge, in keeping with the fact that approximately 70% of the population attended one or the other. Each grouping will also contain a representative from Scotland or Wales, plus a single minority or a differently abled person, but not both: there simply aren't enough to go round. The exact balance is governed by complex legislation.

Love
It is all around. They feel it in their fingers; ditto their toes.

Obscenities
There are few, if any, social situations in which it is unacceptable to curse, at least not since the Disestablishment of Obscenities Act (1985) liberalised swearing by divorcing words from their arcane, outdated meanings. Thus "Bugger!" no longer means "Sodomise this!"; it is just a fun, Englishy thing to say, and perfectly acceptable in any company. Come on over and give it a try.

Work
English people rarely go into work, and if they do they generally carry out their jobs with an endearing incompetence. They just happen to believe there are more important things in life, like swearing and snow.

Money
Most Britons appear to be rich and live in large town houses or cool flats, even though none seem to have proper jobs. Luckily, property prices in the famously bohemian Notting Hill area of London remain incredibly low. Prices are rising slowly, but it is still the perfect place for a person of modest means to buy a huge house and open a failing bookshop.

Lighting
The average British person gets through 14 candles a week.

Christmas
Christmas is more than a holiday in Britain: it is a national dramatic turning point, when personal problems are suddenly put into perspective by hymn singing and candles. It is when you finally realise that the guy you thought was a complete bastard is actually... Bugger my auntie! It's snowing again! Everybody outside!

And this one is about which US cities are cool for restless American youth. Any Americans agree with it?



http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-896120,00.html

Restless young redraw map of ‘cool’ America



THEY are “hot” — and we’re not talking about the weather. Seattle is rainy, while the northern twin cities of Minneapolis and St Paul are snowed in for the winter. But they have what the new generation of young Americans want: ambience, attitude and creativity, writes Sarah Baxter.
The latest analysis of population data from the 2000 census shows a marked shift in America’s urban landscape. The coastal cities such as New York and San Francisco still attract ambitious, well-educated 24 to 35-year-olds in abundance, but they are being challenged by mid-size places such as Denver, Colorado and Atlanta, Georgia.

The brain drain to the provinces is even tempting Britons. Sam Shipton-Hill, a 30-year-old fragrance analyst from Northampton who moved to New York two years ago, was headhunted to Atlanta last summer. “It’s a very cosmopolitan city, even though it’s in the south,” she said. “It has everything you could want. There are yuppie chic areas and urban grungy ones, with everything in between. The restaurants are as good as in New York and you can spend all night in a martini bar.”

The guru of the movement is Richard Florida, author of the bestselling book The Rise of the Creative Class and one of the most sought-after speakers by cities anxious to attract new talent and investment. “People want more than just a good job now,” Florida said. “They want a good job and a good life.”

He says that cities become successful “largely because creative people want to live there. The companies then follow the people or, in many cases, are started by them”. The creative class, in his book, includes not just artists and musicians but also scientists and software planners.

Florida, a lecturer at the Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, a blue-collar city, drew on the experience of his own town. In the early 1990s, the new internet firm Lycos was hailed as a “magic bullet” which would regenerate the city. By 1994 it had packed up and left for Boston. The city did not offer a congenial enough environment for its staff.

The conventional wisdom — attract firms and talent will follow — was turned on its head. Florida said that cities should compete for talent instead of competing for firms.

“We’re witnessing a number of cities pulling away from the rest of the pack,” said Bruce Katz, director of the Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy in Washington.

“The educated elite are looking for places with diverse, tolerant cultures where they feel they can participate in leadership networks very quickly.”

The trendsetter that cities all over America are trying to emulate is Seattle, where 40% of over-25s are graduates. Once heavily reliant on Boeing aircraft manufacture, it reinvented itself as the hottest city of the late 20th century thanks to Bill Gates and Microsoft.

Whenever city officials complain to Florida that their young people are leaving, his advice is: let them go —but start thinking about how to become “the kind of place people around the country want to come to”.

In other words, be cool.

The only places to be

Hot

Seattle, Washington state

Atlanta, Georgia

Denver, Colorado

Austin, Texas

Minneapolis-St Paul, Min’sota

Not

Cleveland, Ohio

Pittsburg, Pennsylvania

St Louis, Missouri

New Orleans, Louisiana

Baltimore, Maryland

Comments

Love the first article.

[sternwieser.livejournal.com]

Having just seen Love Actually, I have to admit I was marveling at Liam Neeson's apartment, in particular.

And Boston's not even on the list. Bugger.

Re: Second Article

[wondersheep.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's about right. Everyone I know either wants to go to those five cities or is already there. Shoot, I was looking at Austin not more than two years ago.
SWS

I kid you not

[(Anonymous)]

The USA "NOT" list is my exact list of places I'm looking at to move to in June. Figures, huh...

JennJenn (http://www.jennmiller.com).

A few comments on the "Hot or Not" list

[kuzibah.livejournal.com]

Atlanta and Denver are hardly "middle-sized." They both have populations of about half a million with large (and growing) industrial centers. I think their location and outdated reputation as "small-town" leads to a misconception among Europeans. I used to do the Atlanta edition at TV Guide, and one of my contacts there was saying how tourists were disappointed to find out that "Gone with the Wind" was a long time ago. To digress a bit, the new Joe Millionaire has a group of European "bachelorettes" this year, and when they heard their potential suitor was from Houston, they immediately began laughing about being down on the ranch in a small town where everyone knew everyone else, clearly unaware that Houston is the fourth-largest city in the U.S.

And the most successful creative people I know of don't live in cities--- they live in small towns in Northern California, upstate New York, New Jersey, etc., where the cost-of-living is low and they can concentrate on their work. Luckily, creativity is a highly transportable commodity.

I like Austin a lot.

[thecuckoo.livejournal.com]

And Minneapolis-St. Paul is nice, if effin cold.

But otherwise...I think it's just a list to make a list.