If there’s only one area to go in Ann Arbor for entertainment, that’s at East Liberty and State Street, home of the Michigan Theater and State Theater.

They’re both historic theaters, which seem to be the creative choice for the best entertainment in our five-city tour through Cambridge, Madison, Athens, Burlington and Ann Arbor.  Independent and foreign films, midnight showings, live music and comedians make up the daily schedule, but the most appealing trait of these theaters is that

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Ann Arbor is the final stop in the CoolTown five-city tour, and while it integrates not one, but two main streets into the University of Michigan, it’s creative edge appears to be giving way to the words ‘trendy, swanky, upper class, pride, and bourgeois’, as spoken by the locally concerned who have taken an active interest in the future of the city, as well as student reviews, and would you believe an entire web site?

Ann Arbor has a lot of creative, inspired people (like Jim, Patricia,

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That’s a bit of an oxymoron there, but the best way to make a chain cool is to make it seem like an independent.  The most effective way is not to call it the same thing with the same products everywhere, but of course, I guess that’s what a chain is.  The other strategy is to make the locale as unique to the local culture as possible.

Espresso Royale Caffe is in a few college towns, but at least they’re unique in each place, have live entertainment (which of course reflects the local

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...even though the educational talent is similar?

Because they can.

Students are people too, and they’d much rather be in a great place to live.  The same goes for faculty, which explains why the universities in the towns that are rated highest by students/faculty as far as quality of life, entertainment and recreation are often the highest in tuition.  Then of course, because only those who can afford that hike in tuition can attend, they’re the ones who can afford the hike in rents that

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What’s immediately striking for such a small town of 40,000 people is that there is such a large pedestrian-only zone at its heart.  I mean, how often do you see a Mapquest entry look like this for a small town in the middle of recreational wilderness?  Most cities that are at least ten times larger argue that they don’t have enough pedestrian-mall-supporting people and tenants to have just one block, yet Burlington has three, and just opened the fourth!  In fact, they were laying the brick

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If it wasn’t for the unrelenting, frigid winters, Burlington would be too popular for its own good.

We met with Erik, Peter, Elizabeth, Walker, John, Michele and James, and you can read about their thoughts throughout the next few blogs.  One things that stood out was that they were unanimous in saying that living in Burlington is a great place to meet people (and interesting ones at that) - if you meet one person, you’ll meet dozens more, and dozens of their friends.  I ran into three people

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That’s according to Rolling Stone Magazine.

Ath Fest, a nonprofit annual music and arts festival in downtown Athens, Georgia that largely showcases the Athens area musical and artistic community for four days in June, was first started in 1997 because no one heard of or heard most of the 400 bands in Athens. It attracts 145 music acts (and 40 Southeastern artists) each year - the majority of them from the Athens area.

It’s a lot of fun, to be sure, but it’s also about serious business

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No, I’m not going obscene, this is the title of a new motion picture that’s changing people’s perceptions of the world and themselves.  I saw it tonight and I think it deserves at least one blog in reference to providing new insight into understanding our emotions and behaviors.

The movie uses the field of quantum mechanics to scientifically explain that we literally (in no exaggeration of the word whatsoever) create our own reality, that how we think and what we say changes our environment

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The business manager of Athens Weekly News, a popular local political paper, answered this question last week while in a focus group of the community’s creative leaders - “Because nobody’s trying to get rich at this table.“ The group also agreed that many of them participate in no less than 5-7 nonprofits each, and get to know one another through those organizations’ meetings and events.

Indeed, there is no shortage of things to do in Athens, and this has nothing to do with drinking and

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All of the above.  This is ‘Clocks’ in Athens, GA.

We’re become a lot more acclimated to diversity and choice - we’re seeing mixed housing, retail and office in our communities, and even in the same building.  This trend is continuing down to single venues within buildings, and people like it.  Why only recently?  We now have more access to knowledge, and that means it’s no longer considered crazy to run both a bookstore and a restaurant in the same venue.

Or a bar and a restaurant.  Or a

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