Mouse poop, pubic hair…and Winnipeg’s future

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/10/2003 (8119 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OF all the dozens of events going on in Winnipeg this week, two were particularly intriguing.

The first was Thursday’s city-sponsored address by U.S. urban economist Richard Florida, the so-called creative-class guru. As the Free Press reported yesterday, about 500 movers and shakers heard him give his slick motivational pitch at the Fort Garry Hotel, and the ideas he raised will percolate through this town for months to come.

The second took place a few hours later — the opening of a humble little art show at the Manitoba Craft Council Exhibition Gallery in the Exchange. Maybe 50 people turned out for that one, despite the enormous attention the artist got in the media the last few days.

Aliza Amihude has made some necklaces out of vinyl tubing and filled them with some goofy things such as pubic hair, fingernail clippings and mouse poop.

She got $5,000 of taxpayers’ money from the Manitoba Arts Council to make them.

You couldn’t turn on a radio or TV newscast without encountering some reference to her. Either she was being denounced as a pox on humanity or she was articulating her intentions in interviews in the most charming and competent fashion.

After chatting with her for 10 minutes at the exhibition opening, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to make the connection between Amihude and Florida.

He, a first-generation Italian American raised in New Jersey, promotes the rise of the creative class. These are essentially knowledge workers who now account, he claims, for 50 per cent of wages and salaries earned in North America.

She, a first generation Yemeni-Lithuanian quadrilingual Canadian raised in Winnipeg, is the walking, talking personification of Florida’s ideal.

At 37, Amihude has been making jewelry since the mid-’80s. She also acts and sings in musical theatre. She performs in a rock band. She did a fringe festival play a few years ago. She teaches in the artists-in-the schools program.

Meanwhile, she and her husband, Joseph, are renovating a house in Point Douglas they recently bought for something like $1.

She came to the media’s attention, not because we are hard-nosed investigative journalists ferreting out examples of wasted taxpayers’ dollars.

She sent us a press release.

Next, she phoned us up, gave us the angle (“The arts council gave me money to make jewelry from mouse poo”), and then handled the predictable outrage with more aplomb than Mayor Murray has with Charles Adler.

She played us all –the media, the politicians, her critics — like fiddles. She seems to come honestly by her entrepreneurial skills.

She has a younger brother, Matthew, who owns a couple of small businesses, including an Internet website design firm, and a younger sister, Tamar, who says she’s a month away from launching the continent’s first sugar-free gourmet chocolate bar.

As Florida noted, in the 21st century, traditional manufacturing jobs will continue to flee North America. Wealth and jobs will come from those who add human creativity to the products they sell.

He uses the example of eyeglass frames. His father worked in a New Jersey factory that made plain black frames, which sold for $8 a pair. Today, Florida wears $500 frames. He pays the difference for creative design.

In materials, each of Amihude’s necklaces cost her a few bucks. (Vinyl tubing and mouse poop come cheap.) But she’s selling them for several hundred dollars a pop.

Will she get that much? Now that she’s a self-made local celebrity, maybe she will. All the more power to her.

There are several classic arguments as to why public dollars invested through arts councils, as long as they’re well accounted for, are dollars well spent.

Yesterday morning on CBC Radio One, local writer and filmmaker Caelum Vatsndal summed them up in persuasive fashion.

I couldn’t do it better. Florida couldn’t either.

But he would add that Winnipeg’s future well-being hinges on our ability to retain and attract the creative class, people like Aliza Amihude.

With luck, all the screamers won’t scare her away.

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca