Something I promised myself I’d do once we moved was start running again. To stay motivated, I’m using a couch-to-5k program that exports to my google calendar and tells me how far to run and on which days. I’m in week 3 and it’s going pretty well so far, but this morning while cooling down and reading news.me I discovered ZOMBIES, RUN!

I’m fairly obsessed with games that integrate real life activity and people. The Beast was the best ever in my opinion, because at the time it felt like a completely new and exciting way to use the internet. Shadow Cities is interesting to me because you ally with or compete against people who live and work near you, it’s place-based and therefore connects players who don’t already know each other.

So far, the arts apps I’ve tried that used place-based technology are pretty lame. ZOMBIES, RUN! looks intriguing and I can’t wait to try it out.

New tree for our new place! Photo by @iamdanmckinley

Dan and I live in San Francisco on nonprofit salaries. When we moved here three years ago we went from sharing an apartment in North Adams, Massachusetts to renting two places and flying to see each other every four to six weeks. Our finances took a nosedive and even when we united in SF we thought we might never own a home. Housing is infamously expensive here.

And yet … we started saving. And saving, and saving. We stayed in our little studio apartment even though Dan worked from home, which meant he stared at the same four walls all day long. The housing market continued to plummet, interest rates and prices dropped. Dan got a new job in the city and our life started to feel more stable. Rent prices started increasing, which meant that if we ever wanted to move into a bigger apartment it was slim pickings and we would be paying twice as much as our studio, not much less than a mortgage payment.

Friends who know me well know that owning a home has been an obsession of mine for many years. I’ve had landlords who didn’t pay for heat and I’ve been evicted by a move-in owner. I’ve lived in an artist cooperative that was low-cost and high-stress. I’ve been the victim of an apartment fire that destroyed all my belongings. When it comes to art, I love risk and surprise and discovery. When it comes to housing I am all about stability.

Most of the people I know in San Francisco think that home ownership here is beyond their reach. However, of the few people I know in SF who are homeowners, many are artists and arts workers who either a) bought in the 1970s, when housing affordability was comparable to what it is today, or b) qualified for a subsidized housing program.

if you are an artist or arts worker and think you will ever want to own a home, I strongly recommend taking a checking out your city or state assistance programs and taking a free class now. It’s worth it. You will learn about what’s possible and not possible and if your income is close to the below-market-rate eligibility limit, you may discover some windows of opportunity that you weren’t aware of. If you are thinking of buying a home with a partner, learning together will help get you on the same page.

When you consider the whole picture, including cost of studio space and tax breaks, you may learn that the cost of buying is closer to the cost of renting than you think, especially since the average rent in the city is now around $2,361 and rising. According to the National Association of Realtors Housing Affordability Index—which compares median home sale prices to median incomes and interest rates—housing affordability hasn’t been this strong since the 1970s.

If I sound like an evangelist, it’s because I am. I believe that homeownership is to community as marriage is to love. It is weighed down by taxes, politics, finances and the expectations of family and friends. It is easier for those who grew up with privilege to become homeowners, and it’s not necessary—you can be part of a community without it. But homeownership is also about commitment. It’s about roots, about going “all in” and tying yourself to a neighborhood and a city. I want to see as many artists and arts workers as possible living in their city of choice, invested in their community, un-evictable and empowered.

So, I will follow up on this blog with some details about our process in the hope that it will help someone else buy a home. If there is anything in particular you want to hear about  (navigating big decisions with a partner, negotiating an offer, choosing a neighborhood, working with a lender) let me know and I will try to write something.

Platform programming. This framework—a combination of artist honoraria, subsidized rental rates and lots of hands-on technical, production and marketing support —is a highly customizable and scalable model for collaboration that gives communities and artists creative control.

Speaking from an administrative perspective—pros & cons:

Pros:

-Platform programming helps us break out of a static presenting model and share resources.

-It’s more accessible than the old models of presenting and producing.

-Because participation is more accessible, it is inclusive of a wider range of cultural perspectives and allows for innovation.

-Platform programming demands a greater reliance on earned income, and contributes to the diversification of revenue.

Cons:

-Platform programming demands a greater reliance on earned income, and is less likely to inspire relationship-building between audience and organization.

-It requires a high level of DIY. Artists and their collaborators must take on some of the producer roles and responsibilities.

-Funders haven’t decided how to best support it yet.

-Collaborators struggle on how to best measure impact and share credit.

The best argument for platforming I’ve heard to date comes from Tom Stocky, director of product development for Google. If you think in terms of analogies, apps are to the internet what productions and exhibitions are to the arts—creative people make them, users pay for them and they are part of a HUGE network that can be leveraged to achieve a wide range of goals.

I’ve taken the liberty of adapting Tom’s language to fit the arts:

We think of it in terms of an developer/apps artist/audience user cycle. As the apps arts platform improves, then it attracts more artists to it, which leads to more applications activities, which leads to more users and increased use of the internet audience and increased participation in the arts, which in turn attracts more developers artists and increased investment in the web platform arts. And this virtuous cycle, which is ultimately driving usage of the internet participation in the arts is good for Google your organization and good for every other site on the web every other mission-driven arts nonprofit.

—Tom Stocky, Campfire One: Introducing Google Apps Engine

If you are experimenting with this model as an artist, administrator or funder I’d love it if you shared in the comments section.

Happy Saturday everyone!

The biggest thing about turning 35 for me is that I’m now either teetering on the brink or officially disqualified from  several emerging leader support systems that have been critical to me in recent years. Which is as it should be … time to send the elevator back down.

With the combination of birthday + writing exercise fresh in my mind, I wrote a letter to myself at age 25 when I was just starting out my career. And if I had read this when I was 25 I would have been all like “I am totally doing all this already.” Because I knew everything. Anyway …

Dear 25-year-old self,

It’s 2001, which means you are living in New London—boyhood home of Eugene O’Neill, current home of poets, puppeteers, playwrights and should-be rock stars. The Wailing City. It’s small and gritty and it’s on the water and you love it. You just started work at The O’Neill and you love it. You are directing plays with amazing creative collaborators and you love it. Not having any money is hard … but it won’t kill you. Not having heat will drive you crazy so move already! You will be so much happier.

You already know this, but these are the big years. You are nostalgic for these years and you are living them. There will never be more bonfires on the beach, late-night puppet shows, poems, exploring abandoned buildings, riding the subway, coffee in Brooklyn. Over time you will become less dazzled by someone’s job title or the fact that they live in The City. People will become less interested in dazzling you and more interested in opportunities for collaboration, less interested in romance and more restrained in their joy, less interested in dreaming and more interested in networking … so be dazzled by everyone and everything. Try to stay up late (although you are bad at it). Be alert, be inquisitive. If there’s an experience in front of you, have it. See as much theater and live music as you can.

I wish I could tell you, 25-year-old-self, to say yes AND no more often. To have difficult conversations before it is too late. To drink tea before asking for that raise because if you don’t you will start crying and it won’t matter that you prepared a letter detailing your expanded skill set and responsibilities. Make decisions. Commit. Stop trying to keep every door open, you can’t keep every door open, nobody can keep every door open. As your Russian acting teacher says, “be bravier.”

Savor lazy mornings and slow weekends. Be patient, the future will find you sooner than you realize. Don’t be bullied, and don’t be so hard on people. You don’t have to be nice to someone just because you feel sorry for them, that’s your Midwestern roots talking. You do have to be compassionate. Age and experience really do make a difference in this area.

And … although these are the big years, years of glamour and discovery and adventure, there will be other years. Years of deeper feeling, shared years, meaningful years, years of change. Be dazzled by them all, appreciate them, live in the moment. Keep learning and changing. As they say at The O’Neill, “risk, fail, risk again.”

Your friend,

Future Lex

*p.s. despite rules and guidelines, I think when we stop emerging, we stop living. Corny and true!

-people talk about it, hear about her and discover her work
-RADAR gets $5k to continute building community through literary arts
-fabulous health benefits

Every now and then I get emails from my arts friends who are running a 5 or 10k for a cause—usually health related—and I always think, why not run for art? Training for a run is social, it’s healthy, and it is something that can raise money on a shoestring. These health people have their fundraising DOWN. Why do the arts organizations throw big expensive parties and auctions when if we do our jobs right, every single event we have is a chance to meet artists, be social, learn about and enjoy art, and it’s usually free?

Having big galas for small, grassroots organizations usually feels status-y and weird. The people you are selling tickets to are usually about 90% different from the people who use your services on a day-to-day basis, and because of both the similarities and the differences it is hard to create an effective fundraising event that like a true celebration of the work. Few organizations get it right, and the ones that feel right in SF are usually called fundraisers but described behind the scenes by staff as “more friend-raiser than fund-raiser.” (Aside: what is with this trend of calling every concert and performance a fundraiser? I don’t understand the long-term benefit of giving people a false impression that what they are paying is above and beyond the cost of doing the work).

Of course, I hurt my foot and I’m getting married in a mont so my own Run for the Arts may have to wait a little bit. But my lame excuses only serve to make Seinberg’s success seem all the more awe-inspiring.

Photo credit: 5k, woohoo!

I’ve blogged before about my frustration regarding media coverage of the arts. It’s an ongoing theme, but this week was a catastrophe. I wish I could send every so-called objective news journalist a copy of Artists in the Workforce, and take every parent who discourages their child’s participation in the arts to a 10-year reunion of my BFA Theater class, because we all still have our jobs! Which is unfortunately more than I can say for all of my friends with MBAs right now.

Anyway. Getting mad isn’t the solution. We need to get  really smart and really loud and frequent about communicating the value of the arts. Barry’s Blog offers some suggestions in today’s post.

On a tangential note, I attended a performance by Culture Clash on Friday night. They were hilarious. I laughed, I learned, and I enjoyed the wonderful and rare live-ness of the experience. There was a moment when one of the actors was poking fun at hipsters in the Mission District, and all of the sudden he stops and says “hey, we bash hipsters but really this night wouldn’t have been possible without all of the hipsters who worked to make it a success.” And someone in the audience hissed! And the actor shrugged and said “hey, you hiss but I don’t see you at CalArts!”

I am paraphrasing, but the dialogue made me wonder about the demographics of our BFA, MFA and other fine arts training programs. I wonder if these demographics need to change. I wonder how we can change them, and what impact that might have on media perception of the arts and arts funding. And I know that unless we work to change media perception of who participates in the arts, and of what it means to participate in the arts, the backlash will continue.

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I think I broke one of the cardinal rules of blogging by skipping town and blogging on another site without warning. And now, I have just returned from four days in Philadelphia, where I attended the 2008 Annual Convention of Americans for the Arts.

What did I learn? First and foremost, to REGISTER EARLY. Staying at an overflow hotel makes it hard to blog, power-nap, or pace ones’ self throughout the days.

What can I use? Within hours of my Career 360 session with Dewey Schott of Next-Step Consulting, he forwarded me an article about high-functioning teams that I hope to utilize at our next staff retreat. The advance workshop on Better Program Evaluation will be useful in consensus-building with board members and teaching artists about how (enrollment numbers? student testimonials? mission relevance?) to define programming success.

Who did I meet? As Ruby Classen noted on her earlier blog, I traveled far from home to meet some people in my own backyard: Maren Brown of the UMass Arts Extension Service, Brian Hornby from New Haven’s Office of Cultural Affairs. A slightly awkward and rushed meeting between the Emerging Leaders Council and the State Arts Action Network resulted in one of my most enjoyable conversations of the Convention, when Anne Katz and I discovered that we both got early career breaks at the O’Neill Theater Center (many years apart, and many shared memories nonetheless). And, near the end of my stay, a chance meeting with Susan Pontious of the San Francisco Arts Commission revealed that the Hestia Mural, which I enjoy daily in my hometown of Northampton, was her very first public art project, in 1980.

Where will I go? Perhaps the better question is, where won’t I go? Members of the Seattle emerging leaders network were so compelling with their visions of next year’s UNconvention, I might head west in the fall for Bumbershoot or another long weekend. Tucson would be an exciting addition to my list of travels. And the Public Art Year in Review was a reminder that I should drive down to New York, see the waterfalls, and check out fellow emerging leader Marisa Catalina Casey’s new Starting Artists space in Brooklyn.

But for now, it is good to be HOME! Big thanks to everyone who made this convention inspiring, challenging, irreverent, and unforgettable.

Lex

p.s. I am also back to my “home” blog, http://www.lexleifheit.com.