The realities of creating, in black and white

I can’t believe I never ran across this guy before now …  but if you’re struggling to succeed creatively, be prepared to do some fist-pumping. Just read this excerpt from Hugh MacLeod’s book “Ignore Everybody” and see if you don’t think this cartoonist/writer/career advertising man has written the inventive-person’s bible.
The truest words of all? “Nobody cares.” That is a plain, simple fact. You really do have to do it for yourself. Probably all Read more

Sounds more creative than it is

Buying non-existent merchandise with real money has become a trend, as today’s New York Times business story  points out — a total bonanza for companies seeking to advertise themselves and increase their customer base at practically no cost.  But, in fact, people who purchase virtual items – whether a house on Second Life or a cyber-copy of  Paris Hilton’s underwear — aren’t getting nothing for something. They’re buying entertainment. And we humans have proved over Read more

All we need to be creative is … grass?

And not even the kind you smoke.

The Crown Plaza hotel chain is installing real, living, grass lawns as flooring in some of its conference rooms  across the United Kingdom with the intent of freeing up the imaginations of business people who sit – or maybe even walk barefoot — on the turf.

Want to bet who’ll end up getting creative? My guess is the hotel laundry staff , about grass-stain removal.

Creativity – huh! What is it good for?

Newsweek had a cover story a couple of weeks ago noting that the creativity levels of children in the United States are dropping, especially in grades K-6.  Titled  The Creativity Crisis, the July 19 piece by parenting-science writers  Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman  recounts the history of creativity testing over the last 50 years and — after noting that the causes of kids’ recent creative decline are unknown and briefly suggesting that excessive screen time and lack Read more

A candle for the creative everydayness of Harvey Pekar

Harvey Pekar became internationally famous for living a humdrum life.
But the truth is that Pekar, who died early Monday morning, July 12, at his Cleveland Heights, Ohio, home, was a highly unusual person whose life — working-class-ordinary though it appeared – became extraordinary because he made it so. And he made it so simply by imagining it as a comic-book story.
Like most intially simple creative inspirations, Pekar’s American Splendor series and the personal experiences, feelings Read more

This is what we’re talking about here

Watch:

Extreme Urban Makeover

Some days, don’t you just want to level everything and start over? All the hideous dead buildings. The cratered concrete. The rusted, sagging chainlink, the miles of cockeyed telephones poles, the trashy billboards. Every graffitti-ed and decrepit factory, warehouse, and weedy parking lot. The whole wretched, mad scribble of ill-planned, ugly roads and ruined waterways.
All of it — the whole Augean stable — gone. Nothing but trees, meadows, rivers and lakes left behind. It’d be tempting never Read more

Sucking it up for creativity

So if panel discussions don’t increase a city’s creativity (and they don’t), what does?
The usual suspects have had lots of chances to weigh in on this topic over the last, oh, 10 years or more, and they’ve mostly cited concepts such as lowering barriers, developing new skill sets, encouraging  collaborative brainstorming and shared projects, advancing the arts and artists, aggressively attracting and/or growing high technology companies, investing in mixed-use real estate projects, and a lot Read more

What makes a city a center of creativity? Probably not panel discussions….

 For an event that purported to be about imaginative thinking, the 2010 Creative Voices Summit held Monday at Cleveland, Ohio’s downtown Idea Center was a thoroughly left-brain kind of exercise.
A panel of experts opined, dissected, compared and contrasted. The moderator probed. The audience queried and deduced. And everybody analyzed. 
The final score? Statistics cited: 7. Problems rehashed: 26.  Models examined:  832. Original ideas: zip. As panel results go, not surprising , but still profoundly frustrating Read more

A different way to shrink ailing urban areas

Depressed? City or region in trouble? Can’t get anyone to take any significant creative risks or pay attention to anyone outside the old power elite?

Read http://www.gcbl.org/blog/richey-piiparinen/cleveland-do-we-have-future-if-we-never-leave-our-past.  Then let’s overthrow failure.