[wburg]

I guess I don't run into the folks Ozone does very often. Nor do I run into many people who think that Sacramento will never change, whether they were born here or not. And maybe I just know more unconventional folks, but I meet plenty of people born and raised in the Sacramento region who define "avant-garde," including people who moved from whatever suburb they grew up in to Sacramento proper in order to be part of the local creative community. But perhaps we just run in different circles.

Sacramento is a middle-class city, partially due to that tendency for folks to move away once they strike it rich, partially because we have lost a lot of our working-class character as manufacturing/processing jobs moved away from the city. The middle class tends to be a little conservative, because when you're middle class you aren't financially suited to take big risks, and the reality of falling into poverty is very present. But the middle class also produces a lot of the so-called "creative class"--artists, musicians, designers and engineers.

I suppose I also see a difference between the folks in what I'd call "Sacramento" (that is, within the city limits) and folks in the greater Sacramento area. Folks who live outside the city limits seem to see themselves more at odds with what happens in Sacramento than in parallel. This isn't an uncommon attitude--you run into folks in the Chicago suburbs who haven't been inside the Loop in decades but have plenty to say about how things are horrible there, while others go downtown to visit or work but wouldn't want to live there. I suppose in some regions, the folks in the outer reaches look to the center city as the source of their identity (the Bay Area in particular seems to gauge the hipness and vitality of a place as inversely proportionate to its distance from San Francisco--the farther out, the more boring a place must be--in a process I call "Inverse Franciscanism.") But here, the surrounding regions seem particularly uncomfortable with the central city, even if they still come down for the occasional Second Saturday.