Cheap Airfare, the Engine of Culture Childish boosters of our city, whose notion of promoting life here involves little more than touting the "low cost of living" and urging frightened suburbanites to dine downtown, probably aren't much concerned with how our local culture--with all its quirks, imperfections, backwardness, and originality--has been gradually disappearing since, say, the groundbreaking of Gateway in 1994. But forgive Madeline Bruml, the Hawken High School student and child of the well-to-do who founded Brain Gain Cleveland. She's young, and knows not what she does, and her program at least contains the very good idea of giving local high school students and opportunity to shadow people doing business downtown. Cleveland Uber Alles suspects that Bruml's project will look wonderful on her application to, say, Harvard, or some other elite, out of town school. Now if only she had thoughtful adults around her who might help her pro-Cleveland marketing message reflect more than emptyness about our region's economic future, like this from Adam Paulisick a Manager in Channel Sales at Amco :

“To be rich or not to be rich? That is the question. It is not the question of whether or not you can obtain success in other cities but the speed at which you want to get there. After attending college in Cleveland and actively networking throughout college, I hit a harsh reality. Did I want to work until I am 35 and be middle management or did I want to focus my energy on becoming successful now? If you are willing to be confident, respectful, and listen to the guidance you have in this city, you have nowhere to go but up."

Oh, our city's "respectful" intellectual cheapskates, who'd sell you Cleveland on the basis of its low rent (which, in fact, isn't all that low) and the fact that "it's easy to be a big fish in a little pond." These are the same people, I am certain, who blather on and on about how this restaurant or that bar is "like New York" or "like Chicago"--their logic running something like this: "See, we have all the same glamour and finery, really, as the big city markets, and better yet, we pay only $7 for a Cosmopolitan, instead of $10 or $12, so there's money left over for splitting an appetizer now or a Pannini sandwich later, and this, plus a chance to drive my car home drunk later tonight, is really living," as if the only reasons anybody would choose to make a life somewhere were the ready availability of fattening foods and cheap, poorly mixed cocktails. (Ah, Cleveland, forever an Eastern European city at heart, forever marching on its stomach and searching for that existentially soothing buzz!) No matter that the people next to you at your Cleveland bar are likely to be lost if they tried to make conversation without prompting from the two giant TV's overhead, especially since only 11.4% of city residents over 25 have achieved a bachelor's degree or higher; nevermind that almost no one among the pool of people you'll meet while you're out there enjoying the city on the cheap is at the top of their profession--just keep slugging down those drinks and believe in Cleveland. And the Cleveland you'll be believing in will look a hell of a lot like everywhere else, as each and every mid-market city strives--a la, Target, which offers fine design at a low price--to be more "like New York" and more "like Chicago." That's what you'll enjoy: metropolish lite, the big city made easy, or a simulacrum of it anyway. Gateway, by the way, is hardly the cause of the sleek urban sameness that is blotting out regional character throughout the Midwest, though the sports complex's arrival, way back when, along with Michael Simon's Caxton Cafe, the first real money behind gentrification in the Warehouse District, etc. was concurrent with this latest explosion of our city's longing to be like somewhere else (it goes back much further, of course, to around 1910, when Cleveland actually did compete with Chicago and New York). And as for the cause of all this "other city envy": my money is on the arrival of low cost air carriers, which allowed foolish Clevelanders (including most of our local restaurant and bar owners) to visit other cities on the cheap and use the restaurants and bars they saw there as fodder for their own half-rate designs. Consider this, non-scientific, anecdotal information: A Google search of Cleveland "Like New York" yields 52,000 webpages; the current two week advance purchase airfare for a trip to the the Big Apple is just $171 via Expedia A Google search of Cleveland "Like Chicago" yields 28,200 webpages; the current two week advance purchase airfare for a trip there is just $131 via Expedia A Google search of Cleveland "Like Los Angeles" yields 16,700 pages; airfare here bought two weeks in advance via Expeida is higher, at $319. But of course there are a lot of other reasons why Cleveland is not "like Los Angles." Still, as it gets easier to go from place to place, more and more of America gets the same. And all those new makers of "local culture," like Great Lakes Brewery, which appeared around this same time, are mere attempts to grasp at what has already gone, and what's now fading. Note how the Euclid Tavern closed. Note how seldom anyone talks up going out to an odd, truly local place like the House of Swing. To me, you can't believe in Cleveland without remembering places like these.

I should add, too, that we're fools to reduce our talk of cultural life to talk of bars and restaurants. I might just as well say that you can't believe in Cleveland by talking about whose playing at the Scene pavilion and not talking about who's learning to play music at CIM.

And so on.