Creative DC Community Seeks PR and Urban Design Geniuses

This week has been a veritable creativity orgasm! Last night I attended a cocktail hour at Left Bank hosted by Pink Line Project and CoolTown Beta Communities, designed to help self-described "creatives" meet and build working relationships. I learned about the event through CreativesDC (not to be confused with this site, Creative DC - est. 2006 :)), which is turning out to be a pretty dynamic platform for spurring creative activity in the city.

Here's Jordan, me, and a guy we met there, Pol Klein -- we chatted with him about bringing more mixed-use spaces to DC, how jobs can suck people dry, and the situation in Georgia, among other things!

I also met:

• Phillipa Hughes from Pink Link Project, fellow creative evangelist and the event's hostess (the photos in this post are hers);
  
  
• George Charles Koch, who helps run Artomatic, and blogs about "the creative economy";
  
  
• Peter from albus cavus, a multi-city artists' collective that creates public art;
  
  
• A Hollywood expatriat named Stryk (pronounced "Strike");
  
  
• And a local composer, pianist and educator named Thomas, who shared some of the interdisciplinary project ideas brewing in his mind at the moment (experience some of his past projects on his website, Arabesque Rising).

As you can see - a stimulating mix of people and ideas! And, apparently, magic:


Many of us at the event reflected on how puzzling it is that with so many people passionate about participating in, and evangelizing, the city's creative community -- there is still the widespread perception that DC isn't a creative place; this is, of course, a recurring conversation on this blog (for example, see last week's post, "Does DC have a strong art community?" - be sure to read the comments).

My conclusion: I wish we could hire a PR firm whose only job was to sell the city of DC to its own residents...and, an urban design genius to make more areas of the city feel creatively stimulating.

My other conclusion - on a more practical level - is that as part of the upcoming redesign I have planned for Creative DC, I need to find a way to aggregate the huge volume of information I now receive about creative happenings city-wide. I'll probably create a page that simply aggregates a bunch of RSS feeds. If "RSS" is Greek to you, don't worry -- just stay tuned! (And, for now, you can check out my "creativedc" bookmarks on del.icio.us.)

(By the way, links of the week coming soon -- there are a lot of them! Like I said: a creativity orgasm...)