A Silver lining

       Ron Silver died Sunday.

Even for an actor, he had an unusual range. In his art, he stretched from Broadway productions of gritty David Mamet plays to silly TV sitcoms such as “Rhoda” and from film versions of true-life characters such as ferocious lawyer Alan Dershowitz and learned Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on one end to showoff tennis champ Bobby Riggs and ’60s rock-concert promoter Bill Graham on the other. In his active political life, he headed the stage union Actors Equity Association and helped out on Council on Foreign Relations committees. Supported Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama … and Republicans Ronald Reagan and Rudy Giuliani.

So it maybe it makes sense that he also co-founded The Creative Coalition, a nonprofit social and political advocacy group dedicated to educating arts-community leaders on public issues related to First-Amendment rights, arts advocacy and education - and mobilizing them.

Actors know that creative people  need to speak the truth, no matter which side of the political line or what unnerving  human experience it comes from. They know it because they play all of us – all the tangled, dark, bright and blithe characters that we humans are - and find something that matters in every one of them.

So I hope they and the rest of us can carry on Silver’s work and keep creatively crossing the lines between opposites until we find we have linked the encampments with our daring steps.

Creativity smackdown? Europe vs. the U.S.

Happy Monday! It’s the start of a new business week and here, to kick things off in an interesting direction, are a few words from an interview with Edward de Bono, described as a leading authority on creative thinking  and the European Community’s  recently appointed ambassador for the European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009:  

What are the main hurdles to unlocking creativity and innovation in Europe?

“There needs to be someone who takes it seriously. I think businesses ought to take creativity as seriously as they take finance and legal affairs. We need someone in every organisation who is directly responsible for creativity and new ideas, who organises training and puts together lists of new thinking, who listens to new ideas, who transmits them and stands behind them. Otherwise you risk having an individual innovator who doesn’t have the political muscle to make things happen and nothing happens.”

Sounds like a good idea to me. But I get the feeling de Bono thinks the United States wouldn’t have the chops to make the concept work within our own borders. Here’s what he has to say about American creativity:

“In America, they have quite old-fashioned ideas about creativity. They think it is just about feeling good and sitting around and brainstorming some answers. And it is not.”

Zut alors, a challenge! What do you think? Is he right? Read the rest of the interview here. 

Creativity Talent Show

To get your own or others’ original work featured in the Creativity Talent Show, send digital clips and images to carolyn@geniocity.com.

 Above, “Ariel” by Nigel Helyer (an interactive sound installation of radio objects resembling sea creatures); below, “Ariel” detail

 ”Garden of Words” by Willem Boshoff (Fifteen thousand ”flowers,” each made of fabric with the name of one endangered plant species written on it)

D.C.-Baltimore area becomes arts-ed mecca in May

Check this out: The Learning & the Brain Society will hold its 23rd conference in the Washington-Baltimore area May 7-9, co-sponsored by Johns Hopkins University School of Education and the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives. The title of it is “The Creative Brain: Using Brain Research on Creativity & the Arts to Improve Learning.” 

It will be preceded on May 6 by a special summit and roundtable discussion at Johns Hopkins University on Learning, Arts, and the Brain, the title of a significant Dana Consortium study on the relationship between arts and improved learning that was led by Michael Gazzaniga . (Gazzaniga, who is director of the University of California-Santa Barbara’s SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind, answers some important questions about the study and the relationship between the arts and improved learning skills in an interview by Carolyn Asbury posted on the Dana Foundation site.)

As its posted public-relations material explains, the conference’s overall purpose is to ”explore the latest brain research on how the arts can improve achievement, learning, reading, math, mood, and interventions for learning disorders, and offers strategies to create more creative-thinking students and schools.”

Exactly what’s needed.

(You can become a member of the Learning & the Brain Society by clicking here and then clicking on the Join the Society button on the left side of the site. )

Voices silenced, a community scattered

The newspaper industry is on an almost continuous death watch now. The Rocky Mountain News died 13 days ago, age 150 years.  The next to go, apparently, will be the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. 

There’s a strange sense of diaspora developing in the journalism community as our great news-gathering institutions falter and collapse. Though no buildings have been demolished, just like bombed cities or the World Trade Center towers, the dissolved newspapers are physically scattering people who once made up tightly concentrated and connected societies, united by work and interdependence. Our professional homes are disappearing; we have nowhere to go and the structure of our lives, office friendships, resources - our entire daily environment – is evanescing like dust.

We’re losing each other, as well as our livelihoods.     

It doesn’t help to have left by choice – you can’t work in an industry for 30 years without it becoming part of your genetic code. I think most of us who changed jobs or took buyouts or both feel as if we’re peering from our little makeshift shelters on the edge of the forest, watching in shock as the strongholds of civilization topple to earth and wondering how we’re going to make room for all the survivors.

Is there a doctor (of sociology) in the house?

Convulsions. That’s the only word I can think of to describe what the United States is going through now. 

And what’s causing them? People have focused strictly on an economy that’s pumping ever more weakly, but we have a wide array of symptoms: a rapidly deteriorating skeleton of steel and concrete structures; ruined or exhausted resources and compromised defenses; an obesity of wealth aggravating a flesh-eating poverty; an educational nervous system whose synapses aren’t firing. And now a painful rash of failing newspapers, inexorably spreading. 

This last is becoming agony for us journalists, for whom every sale or closing is like losing a family member to some horrible pandemic. A story in TIME online predicts more deaths and soon.   

I can’t believe these problems are unrelated and I suspect that money is not the real root cause, though it’s certainly a factor. What we need is a differential diagnosis.

What could account for all these ills? Could it be our attitude?

Yes, I’m suggesting that the U.S. has a psychosomatic problem – and psychosomatic doesn’t mean the problems aren’t real, just that they started in our heads.

Look at where those heads have been: For decades now, Americans have been absorbed with amassing personal wealth and spending it ostentatiously, needlessly, on unwholesome toys and pursuits, from SUVs and multimillion-dollar homes to environmentally destructive industrial products and practices. Until recently, the majority of us have voted for leaders who ripped away regulations, encouraged overdevelopment, neglected schools and food safety and the health-care system, turned corporations loose on the public like strep colonies in a neonatal ward, ignored – even defied – the warning signs of a dying  planet and a sickened generation of children and kept indulging the rich while depriving the poor.

Why did we do it? Why didn’t we invest our obscene incomes in better education and medical services and more nutritious food? Why didn’t we clean up the air, water and soil and the stupid, polluting cars and industries that poisoned them in the first place? Why didn’t we insist that our leaders accomplish these things?

And why are we letting our news organizations go under?

Apparently, because we enjoy being rich and not thinking about anything but our own comfort and fun. Or because those of who weren’t rich so wanted to be that we were willing to let the wealthy do as they pleased, in hopes that one day, that would be us. Only now – irony of ironies – we are all becoming the poor and afflicted that we didn’t used to care about.

And I wonder if, at long last, we’ll change our attitudes. Electing Obama was a tremendously encouraging sign that Americans at least wanted a new economic strategy for our nation. But I’m looking for a different sign, now. The one I’m hoping to see will show that we care about more than our own wallets, that we care what’s going on in the world and demand the most accurate information about it that’s humanly possible to provide.

If the last major newspaper dies, will Americans suddenly discover that they miss the on-the-ground, eye-witness, reliably researched news they used to get from the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and all the other papers that invested money from subscriptions and advertising in huge networks of skilled reporters and editors? Or will our society just blow the whole thing off and contentedly derive its impressions of the world and what’s happening in it from YouTube and the aimless minutiae of Twitter?

Americans can’t run their country without dependable daily news and news organizations can’t produce that news unless Americans are willing to pay for it.  Foreign correspondents and  Capitol Hill reporters – and all the people who make professional-quality print, radio, TV and even online news possible - represent enormous amounts of ability, training and experience. If they can’t get paid for their work, they can’t do it at all and their skills will disappear from our society. And then we will become a nation of people without a clue, unable function and ripe for takeover by whatever oppressor wants power over us.

But maybe Americans won’t say “good riddance” when the news disappears. Maybe they’ll realize they need it back. I’m waiting to see. … with the journalistic defibrillator paddles in my hands.

We have to solve the property problem

If ever a city needed to get creative fast, it’s Cleveland. We need some top legal, financial and business minds to lock themselves in a conference room with proven idea people and not come out until they have a workable strategy for untangling Cleveland from the poisonous spider’s web of mass home abandonment and foreclosure described in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine story .

I’m thinking a streamlined legal process. Nimble public-private partnerships.  Mandatory jail time for nonresident property owners – be they bankers, mortgage brokers, developers or landlords – who neglect their properties and cheat  their buyers and renters. Heavy damages, too, so there’d be money for the city to repair or demolish those houses. And incentives for responsible people to buy, fix up, and live for a long time in, the salvageable homes.

This real-estate disaster is Cleveland’s Bay of Pigs, its Black Plague, its Apocalypse. And it hasn’t descended on us from out of the blue – it started a long time ago and is simply getting much worse quickly. For decades, our leaders haven’t done enough. And now, there isn’t going to be much of a city left if we don’t hurry.

So I’m not kidding: If Cleveland’s and Cuyhoga County’s political, business, law and creative leadership will do this much - select and invite the best minds from these national sectors - I’ll book the room and pay for all the pizza. Cleveland’s strangling in its own sticky mess. Let’s set it free.

Creativity Talent Show!

Detail View: “After Vermeer 2,” 2006, by Devorah Sperber, 5,024 spools of thread, stainless steel ball chain and hanging apparatus, clear acrylic viewing sphere, metal stand

Enter the Creativity Talent Show! Send in images or clips of cool stuff you’ve made or discovered to carolyn@geniocity.com

A new application for a deadly process

Bureaucracy kills creativity the way rock blunts scissors.

It’s killing a whole bunch of it right now, because this is grant-writing season in a lot of places. And it’s going to be grant-writing season on steroids as soon as the federal stimulus money starts running downhill into state and local agencies and programs. We’re likely to experience something of a national nervous breakdown as desperate applicants start searching for obscure financial documents, thrashing their way through contradictory instructions and answering page after page of earnest, dim and repetitive questions, probably on poorly designed websites.

The irony is that the people who win grant support are often not  the most talented and imaginative, or even the most responsible – they’re simply the ones with a high tolerance for tedium and the blunt perseverance  to plow through the process.  (Or the ones who already have enough money to hire someone else to do it for them.) So grants don’t necessarily reward you for being a good artist or entrepreneur. Just a good bureaucrat. 

Luckily, some folks are both or we’d never see any positive results from any grant program.

This is on my mind right now because I’ve been helping a friend with a ridiculously long, complicated and frustrating grant application that measures all the wrong things. It measures accuracy of record-keeping.  It measures the power of an artistic concept by how many snacks and souvenirs are sold during the show.  It measures, ultimately, how persuasive my friend has been in wooing money from other grant-makers.

This is a great way to discover good operations managers. It’s a terrible way to find and foster visionaries.

I think the way to improve the situation is to get creative people to think up the application questions. They could ask stuff like , ”If a box of paper straws, a bowl of dirt and a string of plastic pearls were on the table in front of you, which would you choose to work with and what would you make from it? What would you make with all three if you could add water to the dirt?” Or, “You’re lost and penniless in a foreign country whose language you don’t speak. To get back to your hotel, you’ll have to sell something you own to the locals in exchange for train fare. What would you sell, why and how?”  The answers would tell you a lot more about a person than what he’s budgeting for fliers.  

Next, a little retribution: Make bureaucrats  face questions like these on their applications for paper-pushing  jobs at foundations and government agencies.

That’d be sweet.

It’s a fit: Creative-conference promotion gets Brand management

Stephen Brand believes in creativity. And what he believes about it  is that there’s little good in having an idea if you don’t do anything with it.

  Brand has found a place to work that’s all about both getting ideas and putting them to work. The first president of the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio – who also served as Innovation Fellow at NorTech, Cleveland’s technology-based, economic-development association,  and earned an executive doctorate from Case Western Reserve University by studying the early childhood influences of successful inventors – has landed at the Creative Education Foundation in Amherst, Mass. 

CEF specializes in helping people learn creative and effective problem-solving techniques. As the foundation website explains, “Every day principles fostered by CEF programs are helping someone, somewhere in the world develop new products, make business operations run more profitably, restructure organization and agencies to become more effective and less encumbered, reinvigorate economies, make improvements in our schools, revitalize communities and replace ineffective methods and systems with new, more workable ones.”

Through the Journal of Creative Behavior, which it publishes; a youth-outreach program; awards (“Creative Class”  economic-development guru Richard Florida won CEF’s 2005 Sid Parnes Pioneer Award); and the annual International Creative Problem-Solving Institute, CEF has been trying to get people to innovate since the 1950s.  

Brand, who recently moved to western Massachussetts, was out driving one day about a year ago when he saw the CEF sign and thought to himself that he ought to be working there, he said. He’s currently helping the foundation promote its next CPSI conference, called the Revolution of Creativity, in Boston this coming June. And it sounds like man was matched to task by some Heavenly Headhunter, because CEF teaches what Brand has been practicing for years. 

Creative problem-solving is not so much like the flashes of inspiration that lead geniuses to make great art, he noted, as like a means of organizing your ideas, and following a process of deductive reasoning to a solution.  With regular mortals, Brand said, “All you need to do is lead them through a journey from A to B to Z.”

But  imagination is required and Brand thinks the times have never been better for putting it to use. Instead of being worried by the recession, he said, “I’m excited about it. This is a great opportunity for innovators.”

He also thinks it’s vital for businesses - nonprofit and for-profit alike – to keep innovating.  (“The traditional nonprofit model will not work into the future. Period.”) But most do it only when times are bad and their companies are in crisis. Instead,  they have to innovate even – and maybe especially – when times are good.

“They’re crazy to be happy when things are fine,” he said, pointing out that Starbucks, for instance, rested on its laurels and look what happened: Competitors such as McDonald’s got smart, took away customers who wanted fancy coffee without the groovy sit-down-coffeeshop experience and high prices, and by the time Starbucks woke up and smelled the,  er, you know, it had lost so much business, it had to close 600 stores. 

Education is crucial. “We have to teach the next generation of innovators and problem-solvers” instead of just training young people for assembly lines, Brand said.

That’s where CEF tries to help. And how exactly does it teach these skills? Stay tuned.