Coming this April, IND Media is launching a new magazine, investigating the cultural changes that will carry Lafayette into the future.
Sooner or later, one of my peers will be mayor. A chilling thought
for the boomers currently in power, perhaps, but nevertheless an
inevitability.
That eventual Millennial
Mayor — as a 32-year-old at the time of this writing, I submit that
“Millennial” is more demonization than demonym — will have grown up in a
vastly different Lafayette than that which produced Mayors Durel and
Robideaux, and thus will be a remarkably different sort of mayor facing a
different set of challenges.
New leaders will
navigate our community through changing cultural seas. That future
leadership needs a publication that’s representative of its values and
its interests. That’s why, this April, we’re launching The Current — a
journal of Lafayette’s arts and ideas.
Lafayette
is in dramatic cultural transition, one as natural and powerful as
aging. Boomers may yet be running this town, but their time is measured.
In
that regard, Lafayette looks a lot like some of America’s urban
centers. It’s getting more mobile and more educated, more tolerant and
more diverse, more tech-savvy and more urbane.
That
development should not be taken for granted. Working for a D.C.-based
nonprofit last year, I toured several dying communities in America’s
heartland, bereft of their youngsters and gasping for growth. They’re on
the short end of the demographic trends that have blessed Lafayette in
recent years. Their kids were raised and educated cheaply, but migrated
to the nearest metropolis to find coterie with their peers. It’s not
just an exodus to Brooklyn. It’s an exodus to New Orleans, Atlanta and
Houston.
Lafayette’s grip on its youngest crop of nationals
is precarious. Every year we risk looking less like the places these
kids go, and more like the places they leave behind.
As IND Media’s newest publication, a monthly magazine and online outlet at the thecurrentla.com,
The Current will examine the local and external forces that are shaping
this emerging generation, and the city that they will shape in turn. In
a way this has been a long time coming. The fruits of nearly three
decades worth of investment in the arts, in technology and in our
celebrated culture have worked. We’re more economically and culturally
diverse than ever before, and more resilient and dynamic to boot. But
the slog is far from over.
Much of that work was initiated
by a generation that will one day retire and, more to the point, die
off. Passing the baton to upstart Millennials, that most maligned and
misunderstood of generations, will be an exercise in focus and
collaboration.
Across age brackets, we should beg a whole new set
of old questions — What do we value? What makes Lafayette a place worth
living in? What does our culture say about who we are? What trends are
taking hold and which are letting go? What underlying ideas shape our
conventions and our politics? Who is conceiving them? And how can we
climb with one hand while clutching our traditions with the other?
We here at The Current do not pretend to know the answers to any of these questions. We just work here.
Writers, artists and thinkers, drawn from that emerging generation, are best equipped to do the searching. Demographers
and sociologists have taken to calling that cohort, toiling away in the
knowledge economy, the creative class. The Current is their medium.
Before
The Current was ever conceived, this labor force was hard at work
chiseling the city into its image. Lafayette has more artists and
artisans than ever before, working in an ever more diverse set of
disciplines, painting new murals on our buildings, innovating on our
traditional cuisine, reinterpreting our music, exploring the music of
other worlds and inventing new traditions.
The Current is
their gallery. And like a gallery space, The Current is open and
expansive. Its pages are walls on which Lafayette’s new leaders can hang
their portraits and their ideas. Through person-oriented storytelling
and artist-curated spaces. Through frank reckonings with our past
mistakes, and daydreams about our future. Through critical evaluation of
the city we continue to build. Through an inquiry about who we are and
what we do.
With The Current, we hope to forge an intimate
bond with the arts community in Lafayette, providing space to publish
the swelling ranks of painters, photographers, collagers, sculptors and
conceptual designers who are producing an enviable brimming of work,
just begging to be shared with the world. We will train a sharp focus on
Lafayette’s burgeoning live theater scene and give voice to a restless
and misfit crop of young musicians. We will be restless in our pursuit
of context and understanding, both in our pages and in our programmed
events.
Lafayette is racing in a new direction. And we intend to cover the whole ride.