Grow nothing but relaxed

You have a crop growing in your head. I’ll leave it to you to imagine what kind.

It’s a crop reflective of your own tastes and behavior and maybe even appearance.  (I suspect Dick Cheney’s is Brussels sprouts.) But whatever it is, you keep producing it too long and you deplete your brain. 

See, creativity is like farming ideas. (Well, at least, the fertilizers are similar.) A tour of the Internet reveals that there are a lot of people out there trying to help you figure out how to grow creative ideas more often and more efficiently in all kinds of fields,  from education to business to dance. Whole systems resembling irrigation networks have been developed to permit you to be creative on demand, as many of us have to be in our particular occupations.

And yet, as any farmer can tell you, you can’t keep raising the same thing in the same spot for years and years without wearing out the soil. And you can feel when that soil has about turned to gravel, can’t you? All those pathetic little gray cells surrendering,  piling up in strata of calcified corpses. Nothing but weeds going to be coming out of that wasteland.

This is why people in their 50s  flip out and start entirely new careers or  sell everything they own and take to the highway in campers. They know instinctively that they better rotate those crops, let the south 40 go fallow or become mental brownfields.  

It’s better not to let yourself get to that  level of sterility. I don’t know how many of these get-creative philosophies and regimens admit the success of this tactic but, frankly, sometimes – and more often than you’re letting yourself – the best way to be creative is not to think at all.

Luckily, it’s summer here in the Northern Hemisphere and the impulses and opportunities for flatlining are  rich, indeed. We just have to take them. None of your half-hour meditations or 10-minute power naps or 30-second screen breaks, either. Those are important only during the other three seasons when there aren’t hammocks to lie in, beaches to read on and bright sun to bake our empty skulls like clay pots.

It’s time to slowly, indulgently and unconsciously refill those skulls with impressions and experiences to quietly feed the seeds of thought that will only later sprout into fresh ideas. That’s why it’s a terrible idea to make children go to school nearly year-round, and an excellent plan to make like the French and just shut down for an entire month. 

So go see junky movies and soak in the pool and drink icy stuff from frosted glasses until you slosh. Let the gray matter recuperate.  Your imagination will be a lot more fertile by September.  

This is your brain.

This is your brain on vacation.

Public Art: Change appearance, change destiny

Public art can revolutionize the look, atmosphere, significance and fortunes of a community. Americans for the Arts recognized some good examples for its 2009 Public Art Year in Review. Here are some other cool creative ones:

“I See What You Mean,” by Lawrence Argent at the Colorado Convention Center, Denver 

“Cambier’s Quilt,” by Mark Fuller at the Municipal Parking Garage in Naples, Fla.

“Long Wave” by David Rokeby at Allen Lambert galleria, Toronto

Check out FestLab – and see what’s on the slab

In the United States, we have incubators for artists and arts projects of all kinds, from dance and theater to popular music and digital design. Why not an incubator for festivals?

Europe has one. It’s called the FestLab for Creativity and Innovation.

Set up by the European Festivals Association as part of the European Commission’s European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009 - a multinational effort to encourage awareness of the personal, social and economic benefits of creativity and innovation and promote better education and training in related skills – FestLab aims to draw attention to the important role of festivals in creative social and cultural processes and help individual festivals fulfill their artistic missions.    

The European Year site currently features a conversation with Ruta Pruseviciene, executive director of the 13-year-old Vilnius Festival, which has resisted catering to popular tastes and trends and set its own artistic agenda. We all need to learn how to do that better, no matter what creative enterprise we’re developing.

Innovation makes winners of public artworks

Western states including California, Washington and Arizona did well this year in the Americans for the Arts ninth annual Public Art Year in Review selection of the best and most innovative public artworks in the United States  – but Cleveland, Ohio, will be happy to find that it made the list, too.

From 300 entries, independent public-art experts Janet Echelman and Mildred Howard chose 40 works – representing 32 cities in 15 states - worthy of recognition at the 2009 Americans for the Arts annual convention this past weekend in Seattle, which was home to a lot of the winning artworks. The pieces could be either permanent or temporary, but had to be created or unveiled in 2008.  

The artists and commissioning organizations whose pieces were chosen will receive congratulations and letters of recognition from Americans for the Arts President Robert Lynch.

If you click on the Public Art Year in Review hyperlink above, you can get to the pdf that lists the 40 winning artists, their pieces, where they’re located and for whom they were created. To save Clevelanders some time: The winning piece was The Verdant Walk by Toronto artists Peter North and Alissa North of North Design Office, a temporary work commissioned by Cleveland Public Art for Mall B downtown.

The Verdant Walk. Photo courtesy of Cleveland Public Art

The Verdant Walk in daylight. Photo from elaur

Creativity: Nerves redirected?

Creativity remains a mysterious byproduct of the wiring in our heads. Maybe what has happened to the woman in this CBS news report from last Friday is something like the “creative explosion” that some scientists postulate may have changed the human race somewhere between 200,000 and 45,000 years ago, when people began to create artwork and establish religions – possibly because of brain development that made new neurological connections between areas of the brain that had been previously been unlinked.

Watch CBS Videos Online

If Equity got creative, could stage actors earn a better living?

It seems like a good time to ask this question: Why, when theater companies and stage artists generally have trouble surviving even in the best of economic times, is Actors Equity Association still preventing them from making potentially lots more money off their own work  by selling recorded versions of it?  

It’s an issue that’s bothered me for some time, specifically since the First National Performing Arts Convention that took place in Pittsburgh in 2004. I was there reporting on the convention for a newspaper and, at many of the workshops, heard discussions about how nonprofits were having to explore for-profit-style ways of earning income because  – and this is even more the case now – there were no longer enough private grantors and donors or government funding sources to keep all the organizations alive. 

Many, such as orchestras and opera companies, had been doing this for a long time, making commercial recordings that earned them revenue for years afterward. Dance troupes were beginning to think about it, too.

The only performing discipline that apparently couldn’t plan to take advantage of this source of income was professional theater. And that’s because the stage actors’ and stage managers’ own union forbade the making and distributing of recorded stage performances. 

The original idea behind this, I gather, was to prevent artists and their work from being exploited by the mass media – i.e., denied pay for their own recorded work – and also to protect the vital live quality of stage performance that keeps at least some people buying tickets to theater productions. It seems Equity didn’t want America to be able to see plays performed on TV, because it was thought that if stage shows could be accessed there by everyone for free, no one would come to the theater anymore.

This is a position still held by some professional theater artists, I find. Even the unionized Norwegians subscribe to it. Or did. I have to say I think it’s outmoded. And I don’t think I’m alone: In recent discussions with theater artists around the nation, I’ve detected a rueful kind of resignation – numbers of them really wish they could record and sell their productions, but don’t think Equity is going to budge.   

It was an e-mail I received today from Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater that got me wondering again why Equity doesn’t change its mind. The message announced that, through the NT Live  broadcast series, a live stage version of Phedre produced by Britain’s National Theatre would be screened twice at the Guthrie as a high-definition re-broadcast on July 8 and 9 (and as a re-broadcast or live simulcast on other dates at other selected stage theaters across the U.S.).

Now, why can the National Theatre do this mass-media thing apparently without danger, but American theaters have to be protected from it? 

National Theatre Director Nicholas Hytner, who is also directing Phedre, says in a release, “The NT Live events are designed to bring what we do on the stages of the National Theatre to a far greater number of people than we would ever be able to reach otherwise. Through high-definition broadcasts, we have the technology at our disposal to present our productions beyond the four walls of the National, to reach passionate theatre-goers all over the world, and to do it really well.”  

Do Equity members disagree with that?

To me, the pros of selling recorded shows appear far greater than the cons. First and most obviously, the better-known theaters could make a lot more money and the lesser-known theaters could make at least a little more money and also raise their profiles. Second, all theaters could reach global markets made up of people who will never be able to get to most of the in-theater performances in faraway places, but might yearn to see the work of companies they’ve heard about – theaters’ followings and paying audiences would grow and their likelihood of survival would increase. Third, safeguards could be put in place to protect theaters from losing audiences that could actually come to see the live shows on stage – how about releasing the DVDs only after the run of the production or tour has ended?  Four, to paraphrase The King and I, might Equity not be protecting actors out of all they own by refusing to adapt contracts so union members could get residuals from recorded work? I mean, the film industry does it – why can’t theater do it, too, and let its artists make better livings? 

And five, a lot more great productions would be preserved instead of lost, providing unique artistic, entertainment and educational experiences to countless numbers of people who otherwise would never get to benefit from them.  

It might be a bit painful for the theater industry to go through the thinking, negotiation and adjustment periods necessary to get a policy and new contracts in place, but unions are adapting to changing member needs and industry circumstances all the time. It took a while, but symphony orchestras and the musicians’ union finally got around to dealing with streaming performances on the Internet. 

Finally and most obviously, if the likes of the National Theatre and New York’s Metropolitan Opera can find ways to get their work to the world through mass media, there has to be a way for American theaters to do the same.

Or does Equity really want most of its members not to be working in their field full time and most theaters to be in constant danger of closing?

Not just being, but making the change we want to see

I can’t believe I found this. It’s about everything we need to do to change the world and about how creativity can help us do it. All told in a lovely British accent. With Legos.

Mini-summit with maxi blinders

Change is hard. And it’s hard because people – especially people in public positions – have so much trouble getting at, and acknowledging, the truth.

The difficulties were vividly demonstrated last week at the Restoring Prosperity to Cleveland Mini-Summit sponsored by the nonprofit, nonpartisan organization Greater Ohio and held June 8 at Cleveland State University’s Wolstein Center. I attended, not as a member of the media, but as the small-business owner that I also am.

The five-hour meeting was part of a series of discussions about economically reviving Ohio that are being held in cities around the state as part of a research and policy-development collaboration between Greater Ohio and the Brookings Institution. Elected officials, including City of Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson, Cuyahoga County Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones, Ohio House Speaker Armond Budish and Ohio Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher, were joined by members of the Greater Cleveland business, philanthropic, NGO and community-development sectors to hear the Brookings Institution’s findings about the state economy and take part in panels and workshops.

What the sponsors apparently hoped to accomplish was not just to reveal that Ohio is ineffectively using its federal stimulus money by giving equal amounts to all counties instead of concentrating it on the state’s job-and-industry powerhouses, its major cities. Greater Ohio Director Lavea Brachman and Brookings Institution Vice President Bruce Katz indicated that they also wanted participants to cast aside old patterns of rhetoric and thinking and evaluate Ohio’s problems with truly fresh eyes.

Tough assignment. And, judging from what was said and what was offered as solutions, none of the speakers and panelists even came close to accomplishing it.

Here’s why:

Ohio’s leaders in general and Cleveland’s leaders in specific have what seems like an unbreakable habit of looking around to see what other communities are doing and whatever the trend is nationwide, adopting that policy. Sometimes these policies are necessary and good, but many times, they don’t address this community’s specific needs and problems. It’s the trickle-down theory of  change: We copy other cities and states instead of inventing our own fresh solutions to our own unique problems. And by the time Ohio and Cleveland get around to embracing ideas from elsewhere, often they’ve become copies of copies – diluted, out of date and no longer effective.

Maybe even worse, hand-me-down solutions reinforce  popular wisdom, and popular wisdom - because it takes a long time and a lot of simplification to become widely accepted – often amounts to deeply entrenched bias. It’s a shallow, knee-jerk, easy response to complex and ever-changing situations whose effective resolutions actually require new  insight and creative approaches.

Ohio and Cleveland have copied many, many ideas from other places to try to solve the deeply rooted and horribly tangled messes that are our economy, educational system and other vital processes. All any of us here have to do is look around to see clearly that this doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work.  And we all know it doesn’t work. But at the Mini-Summit, as is typical of big gatherings of established community leaders, participants maintained a smooth, smiling, we’re-on-it attitude as they urged worn-out policy trends and a bland civic optimism on listeners as cures for the community’s cancerous ailments.

The copied policy that got to me the most was the one about technology – specifically IT and biomedical technology – being the answer for the state and Cleveland economies. It’s an idea that’s been talked about all around the nation, as if this were 1958 again and the World of Tomorrow gadgetry that hard sciences can provide were all our society needs to be prosperous and fulfilled again. Ohio and Greater Cleveland have joined this parade of venture capitalists and government grantors by creating a slew of business resources and programs – the Third Frontier, JumpStart, MAGNET, the Cuyahoga County New Product Development & Entrepreneurship Loans, etc. - for technology manufacturers and, essentially nothing for any other kind of entrepreneur.    

To hear this technology bias offered as a truism at the same time that panelists were paying lip service to economic diversity and full use of our human capital made my blood boil. The world has uncountable needs that cannot be met purely by inventing and manufacturing new technologies – needs from nourishment and clothing to news, knowledge and, yes, government - that have given rise to enormous numbers of successful businesses, both for-profit and nonprofit.  Cleveland and Ohio have many talented, creative, hard-working people whose skills do not lie in developing scientific or technological products, people who can and must be included in our economic future if we’re to have an economic future.

That means that Ohio and Cleveland can’t create opportunities and funding only for technology-making companies. That’s putting all the eggs in one basket – a  failed policy of the past.  Has Ohio learned nothing from the collapse of the steel industry? There must be moral and material encouragment for entrepreneurs of all kinds, support for creative and productive people of all kinds.  

It’s time to grow a spine, throw out all the borrowed junk we’re hoarding, and think for ourselves. We must do things differently and better. And right now.

It’s already almost too late.

Creepy technology uses your own feet against you

 The invasion of privacy made possible by technology went beyond disturbing years ago, when hidden security cameras began to be trained on public streets and unwitting citizens, and tracking devices in cell phones and automobiles suddenly prevented all of us from going anywhere without the eye of authority following us.

Meanwhile, social networking started seeming pathologically obsessive - and pathetically trivial – with Twitter.

Now these two oddly reciprocal aspects of the human pack mentality – the unsavory avidity to know everything about everyone and the equally distasteful impulse to tell others far more than they should want to know about us –  have been connected through an electronic innovation that should make all of queasy right down to our soles.

Meet the “social networking shoe.”  

The newest product from Daniel Isaac Group, a company whose Global Positioning System (GPS) sneakers debuted in 2007, has just revealed a new kind of GPS shoe called Blue GPS that has Bluetooth capability and will allow family and friends – and who knows who else? – to track the wearer via cell phone.

As the press release explained,  ”The wearer simply inputs up to five phone numbers of family/friends into his cell phone (eventually this capability will be able to be expanded to up to 20 people) and pushes a button on the shoe to activate a link with those on his list. The Blue GPS can be enabled with all cellular phones.”

So at $150 a pair, you can own shoes that tell everyone that you’re at work, at the grocery, en route home. Or maybe at the apartment of another woman, in the bathroom, in a crack house, or crossing the Canadian border.   

In his statement for the release, company chairman Isaac Daniel jovially describes the shoes as “a fun product to have. People will be able to see where their friends are — and have a better idea of estimated arrival time — without having to call them. And, because the wearer doesn’t have to be talking on the phone while driving, it will definitely improve safety.”

So, apparently, will a button on the shoes that can be pressed for an E911 call, sending a signal to  IDG’s monitoring division, ID Conex™. Monitors then try to contact the wearer and if he or she does not respond, the proper authorities are alerted.

GPS shoes might have some real value if parents could get their children under 21 to keep them on. Or if children over 21 could get their senile, wandering parents to keep them on. Or if people being kidnapped could keep their abductors from noticing that they have them on.  

But for social networking? Who would truly be delighted to have up to 20 family members or friends knowing exactly where he or she was all the time? And even if you didn’t mind having them alerted to the fact that you were at the gun shop or at a bar or at Krispy Kreme – again -wouldn’t it be a hideous mistake to get them used to knowing exactly where you are? What happens when you don’t wear them?  Will you come home from a movie to find the cops breaking down your closet door?

What if you tried to wear them on an airplane? (“Please shut off all cellphones, laptops and footwear at this time.”) With security the way it is now, you’d probably find yourself flying to San Francisco in your socks, while your mother frantically phones the airport authorities to find out why you’ve apparently been squatting under a scanner for five hours.

But the most alarming part of having your own shoes reporting on you is the step our whole society would be taking in them: even farther away from our vital right to be individually anonymous, independent and free. Sometimes – and for no wicked reason – it’s a great relief  to have no one know where you are. To be quit of responsibilities, troubles and the means of being reminded of them, even for a just a few minutes.  

To sit under a tree or wander a street without being watched – surveilled – is becoming impossible. To do either without phoning, e-mailing texting, tweeting, posting or otherwise imparting some lame thought or unnecessary information to our networks of acquaintances has already become unlikely. 

Around the world, their shoes have been all that most people can rely on to take them away from misery and the past and toward a new life. Blue GPS shoes may have a few valuable applications. But it’s a scary kind of creative genius that would co-opt our first and last means of escape.

Isaac Daniel, chairman of Isaac Daniel Group, and his company’s new Blue GPS shoes

Anything, everything

On Fridays, it’s nice to let the pictures do the talking.