Turning Blue – Todd Reminds Activists “People need to get a life.”, by Cindy Lamb
Trying to contact Todd Blue for a comment or suggest an interview has been difficult but not without it’s enlightening and frustrating moments over the past seven months. I’m trying to make sense from a volatile email I received a week ago from Cobalt Ventures CEO Todd Blue, so the following timeline leading to the outburst is hopefully therapeutic for this scribe.
New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? Since 2004, we’ve been observing the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town. If it’s true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Peering into Todd Blue's cranium.
The web site http://www.louisvilleky.com/ seems to be making strides toward justifying its "pulse of the city" claim. Lamb's account of an oligarch in waiting and his variable communication skills touches an appropriate note of Kurtz ... but I may be giving Blue too much credit.
I know that he'll never see this but..
ReplyDeleteMr. Blue,
I believe that I qualify as a "risk taker". You are full of shit.
Sincerely,
Mark Cassidy
Mark's right.
ReplyDeleteIn believing that their "entrepreneurial" trajectories have anything to do with what the average "risk taker" faces, Fischer and Blue share the same peapod on what might as well be a garden on Uranus.
Of general interest, here's a quick comparison by Brian Tucker showing how poor ol' Blue's case was handled as compared to a similar one concerning an owner not so well connected.
ReplyDeleteFrank Faris versus Todd Blue: Louisville’s two-tier system of preservation justice
My impressions of Mr. Blue’s e-mail are as follows:
ReplyDelete1) He sees public discourse as unproductive, or non-contributing to the future of this city. (Who needs ongoing discussion and analysis of the issues of the day?)
2) He doesn’t see forums and blogs as part of America’s fourth estate, and therefore key to the democratic legacy we as citizens of the United States are to uphold.
3) He doesn’t see forums and blogs as the businesses many of them are.
4) He doesn’t understand that as business owners, many of those who run such sites are risk takers, not only in the business and legal sense, but also in terms of personal reputations being risked.
5) He seems to believe that only “risk-takers” of his particular brand (the monied developer brand) get to decide the cultural fate of this city.
6) He seems to have low regard for citizen activism, without which this community’s political and civic lifeblood may as well be nonexistent. Apparently to him, only monied developers get a say in the city’s purpose and movement toward the future.
7) He seems to think that he can merely make assertions about his good deeds, and that people will just have to accept those assertions because he is a “risk-taker” of the monied developer brand.
8) He seems to imply he is an omniscient political dealer with respect to all the businesses who operate in the Louisville area, as if all the people running these businesses are in lockstep agreement with his specific feelings. In his line of thinking, businesses just up and scurry away at the drop of a hat, with little regards to the plethora of reasons why a business would instead choose to stay put.