Brats vs. Obama

I’ve about had it with a large part of the American public.

Recent news stories have reported that U.S. President Barack Obama’s approval ratings have dropped considerably. Apparently, growing numbers of citizens are unhappy that the economy isn’t all better yet and have decided that the country is moving in the wrong direction.

Could we please have a survey that determines how many of us think these particular citizens are actually petulant two-year-olds?

They must think Obama is a wizard who has only to wave his wand (Reparo!)  to put the banks and the real-estate market and all the lost jobs back in place, good as new, instead of a regular human being who’s having to undo at least eight years’ worth of avarice and criminal irresponsibility on the part of financial institutions, as well as all the hideous mess of the environment, the energy crisis, health insurance, decayed infrastructure and, lest we forget, a two-front war.

They want it fixed right now, and because it can’t be fixed right now, they’re cranky and bored and have let their flea-like focus hop elsewhere, looking for the instant gratification they’ve come to expect from their electronic gadgets, credit cards and 6,000 available stores.

A lot of people in this country have gotten used to easy fixes. They have no patience for anything that requires them to think or labor or deny themselves. They’re used to having someone stick the bottle in their mouths or hand them a new toy the moment they start wailing. They have no self-discipline and, frankly, no sense.

They’re the ones who are going to endanger the effort to bring about the serious, creative changes this nation desperately needs. Creative change takes time. You can’t give it five minutes and then throw up your hands when nothing’s happened yet. It’s not magic – it’s hard work, some of the very hardest, and it has to be done properly and fully or it won’t hold up, the same way a building that’s rushed into being with a poor design and cheap materials will end up collapsing. 

Obama and his administration are trying to do that work. They won’t do it perfectly – no one could. But they will be able to do it much more effectively if the nation’s legions of oversized toddlers grow up for once, stop demanding immediate results and help the rest of us think through the problems we face.

Besides, even in worlds where wizards are possible, we’ve seen that magic can’t reverse what indulgence, greed and impatience have spoiled.

Are creative and crazy the same thing?

Back in January, I wrote about some theories related to the scientific causes of  creativity. One of them was about a possible relation or similarity between schizophrenia and creativity - a study done three years ago found that the behavior of some highly creative people is rather like that of people with the mental illness.

Now comes a study that finds a certain gene mutation may result in intense creativity in some people and in schizophrenia or psychosis in others. The scientific community will probably want to see this mutation examined further before subscribing to this one study’s results, but the connection is intriguing. I just hope people don’t use it to reinforce the widely held notion that artists are nuts.

  Read the story and see what you think.

Cat images painted by artist Louis Wain during the period when he became schizophrenic.

Ontario sees – and gets – the green light of renewable energy

Ontario has begun setting the pace for North America’s change from fossil fuels to renewable energy and that pace appears to be quickening.

First, the Canadian province’s government passed a landmark Green Energy Act (GEA) in May of this year. Then three weeks ago, Ontario’s deputy premier and minister of energy and infrastructure, George Smitherman, halted plans to build two new nuclear reactors because of excessive costs, pleasing anti-nuclear activists who had objected to the GEA’s continuation of  provincial reliance on nuclear power.

These developments have positioned Ontario to dramatically grow its green-energy industry, eliminate coal use,  diminish dependence on nuclear  power, create an estimated 50,000 jobs and allow everyone – from individual citizens to large groups - to contribute renewable, clean energy to the grid and profit from it.   

But questions remain about an essential piece of the plan, called a feed-in tariff (FIT). Created as part of the GEA, the tariff sets up a systematic, comprehensive structure of guaranteed price rates for energy generated by community wind, solar, hydro, biomass and biogas projects, both small and large. The idea behind the tariff is to make clean and renewable energy-generation profitable for all who engage in it by giving a somewhat better rate to small or fuel-limited projects that won’t generate a great deal of energy and and a somewhat lower rate to projects likely to generate a lot.

Details of Ontario’s tariff remain to be worked out, such as where financing for energy projects will come from, what guarantees (if any) will be required for loans, what constitutes a “community” project and whether or not multiple communities will be allowed to collaborate on a single project, said Deb Doncaster, executive director of Community Power Fund, an nonprofit funding and advocacy organization. Discouragingly, the tariff also does not yet have a wind-source differential built in that will allow projects in less-windy areas to earn a slightly higher rate on the small amount of energy they generate, she said.  

“It’s taking a long time, but I don’t mind,” she said. Eventually, Doncaster noted, the tariff will result in gross revenues of about $250,000 per megawatt per year: “$50 million a year that’s staying in Ontario, that’s going in the pockets of citizens and voters.”  

Her colleague Kristopher Stevens agreed. Executive director of the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association, a nonprofit that supports renewable-energy community power projects and that founded Community Power Fund, Stevens noted that with feed-in tariffs,  “the success is largely because it isn’t just large corporations” doing energy projects and enjoying the profits.

“You need to have a really broad base of support” among ordinary people,  he said. And collaboration is essential: On his trips to nations with advanced sustainable-energy programs such as Germany, he’s seen a few landowners collaborate on wind farms that generate “millions of euros.”  

The GEA includes the specific goal of helping all of Ontario’s local communities, including those of aboriginal First Nation and Metis peoples, develop renewable-energy revenues.  But both Doncaster and Stevens think that, in addition to the opportunity to collaborate and pool resources, Ontarians need the capacity to connect to the power grid, which is currently full, as well as antiquated. Other vital steps to success include creating an expanded “smart”  grid with access for the entire public; getting government-backed loan guarantees for start-up energy projects; and encouraging investment from, and community partnerships with, commercial developers to reduce risk.

Stevens and Doncaster agree that Ontario already has two of the elements most important to the effective growth of renewable energy: the GEA and a true leader. Smitherman is “really willing to listen,” Stevens said;  Doncaster calls the minister “ambitious as hell” and “well-informed.”  

Doncaster also thinks Smitherman’s own internal fuel supplies will have as much to do with the GEA’s success as Ontario’s wind and solar resources. “How much energy does this guy have left to see this thing through?”  she wondered, adding that Ontario needs a “green” foundation to fight political battles, conduct studies and enhance Ontario’s profile when Smitherman has moved on.

But with Smitherman still steering Ontario’s energy policy and the costly new-nukes plan put aside for now, the time is right  to move Ontario to a 100-percent-renewable grid, said Jack Gibbons, chair of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance and an opponent of nuclear power.

Though he noted that the feed-in tariff doesn’t include a law banning nuclear-power companies from passing cost overruns on to  the consumer, nor does the tariff apply to combined heat and power or the natural gas used by nearly every Canadian household, Gibbons called the GEA “a great act … an important step forward” that creates huge incentives for wind and solar projects.

 He also has hope that Ontario is turning away from its longtime pro-nuke position because building reactors has become too expensive.

The attraction of nuclear power has always been its cheapness – but no longer, Gibbons said. ”Now the market has proven that we are correct. It’s a technology whose time has passed.”

Creativity Dance Party!

Happy Friday.

Harry Potter and the Spell of Creative Power

I went to a midnight screening Tuesday night (Wednesday morning?) of the new “Harry Potter” movie along with a couple of hundred excited teenagers, many of them decked out for the occasion in lightning-bolt scars, Potter glasses and makeshift robes. 

Like the J.K. Rowling books on which they’re based, these movies – six of them now - have been coming out every couple of years or so since most of the kids in the audience were seven or less, and each debut has long since taken on the significance and thrill of a ritual celebration much like Christmas morning, with family and onscreen friends convening once again to unwrap the glittering present that is the new flick.

Rapturously anticipated as each successive Potter book or film has been by all ages, I still expected – with advance irritation  – that the hordes of glowingly young, extravagantly gabbing revelers around me would utterly fail to shut up when the  movie finally started, and would spend the next 150 or minutes shrieking and texting and capturing illicit Harry pix on their cell phones until I was ready to jab them with their own fake wands.  The whole event seemed more like a social scene they were making in order to see each other, rather than the movie. I mean … they were teenagers.  

Then the show started.

And the instant the Warner Brothers logo gave way to the movie’s first musical notes and ominous cloud images, the crowd of what seemed to be too-cool, self-involved adolescents became as silent and wide-eyed as babies looking at their first lighted candle.

It takes power to do that. And the power the Potter films and books have over people young and old is as magical as the stories they tell. It’s a very old magic and, like Lily Evans Potter’s, it’s a kind of love. It’s called imagination.

We all have it and should be encouraged to use it a lot more often than we are. Most of us have it squelched out of us by rigid, humorless school administrations and fearfully dull jobs made duller and more fearful by narrow-minded, autocratic leaders.

Some people – probably those same humorless and narrow-minded ones mentioned above – have declared the Potter stories childish, shallow … Not Good Literature. They are so hopelessly wrong. And here’s why – because anyone can (and should) think up a lot of wild stuff, and quite a few people can write a dry, factual study of human behavior, but almost no one can integrate witty, inspired imagination with human truth that’s convincing both emotionally and psychologically, especially about children.

Rowling has what may be a unique gift: the ability to remember, observe, understand and describe, with fond amusement and serious compassion, exactly what it is like to grow up, and to illuminate through a world of mysterious delights and terrors the heady magic of intense young feelings. Unlike so many children’s books, her work is not earnest,  pious, cloying, fatuously wholesome, pompously didactic or grimly instructive. It’s subversive and mischievous – just like kids.

It’s also ironic, whimsical, clever and sometimes startling in its fantastical vision, but it’s never weird just to be weird. Everything Rowling invents, from character to circumstance, issues from the deep roots of natural human experience and so has meaning. It’s an imagination that explores freely, but never randomly – and that’s the best definition of creativity I can think of.

The movies can’t replicate all the richness of her storytelling, but they add dazzle to it. The effect is so strong, it works like a charm – even on teens.

How to bring about creative change

Perhaps the greatest problem in making imaginative and effective change of any kind is getting any two people to agree on a goal and a strategy for achieving it – and then seeing the plan through to success.  

Americans, with their deep-dyed romantic traditions of rugged individualism, always seem to be starting their own little solo things instead of working together on projects that could have more impact because of their larger size and numbers of participants. I’d be entertained to see, for instance, a comprehensive list of all the foundations my countrymen and -women have started over the last 50 years to help stamp out diseases, problems or moral wrongs that hurt their loved ones. I’d also like – maybe less – to see a list of all the redundant little businesses Americans have set up and seen fail. 

Being American myself, I think individualism matters for many reasons, one of which is that encourages every person to have confidence in the power of his or her own initiative. You don’t get anywhere if everyone waits around to be led.

But the truth is, you also don’t get far enough if everyone is charging off in 300 million different directions. We tend to do that here.

Maybe we should try something else – like identifying our most important creative goals, pooling resources and working together to get results instead of each one of us closeting himself with his ambition and reinventing the wheel by the light of his own ego? 

Europeans seem to be doing just that kind of collaborating. At a major conference of the European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009 (a project of the European Commission) this month, thinkers and doers from all over the continent got together, determined what the three main focuses of their creative efforts should be – employment, well-being and education – and made a list of things to do. A lot of it involves reaching across barriers, sharing resources and being regional in attitude.

If they can make this plan work – with over a  thousand more years of tribal, national, ethnic and class strife to overcome than does the U.S. – we Americans won’t have any excuses left for our own fractious, short-sighted and self-involved approach to the future.

In the game of creative survival, Met’s up by a lot

Getting back to DVDs and CDs of stage performances and why the heck the professional-theater industry can’t help itself financially by allowing its work to be recorded and sold … I ran across this release about Peter Gelb, general manager of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, last night. It credits Gelb with doing for the Met what the rest of the performing-arts community has been desperate to do for about, oh, 50 years, namely earn more income and attract younger audiences:

“Peter Gelb has been in charge at the Met since 2006, and has succeeded in reinventing opera by making it accessible to everyone through multiple distribution modes such as live HD broadcasts in cinemas, the Internet, satellite radio and mobile platforms.

“Under Peter Gelb’s management, the Met, which just celebrated its 125th anniversary, has managed to develop an audacious policy to reach out to a wider and younger audience. The introduction of public rehearsals, “last minute” tickets at $20, and the launch of the collection The Met: Live in HD – winner of the prestigious Peabody and Emmy Awards – have all contributed to attracting a new, broader, younger audience.”

Gelb will be the keynote speaker for the 2010 international MidemNet event, a forum for music professionals about the music business in the digital age. Maybe he should be talking to Actors Equity Association and the legitimate theater community, instead.

Franken: Art, or just what you like?

Ooooh, interesting. The commentary on yesterday’s Al Franken post (see below) has focused, not on the question of Franken’s Senate win helping or not helping to open the doors of America’s power enclaves to more artists, but on whether or not Franken is, in fact, an artist.

I was actually trying to avoid making that judgment, although I probably tipped my hand by referring to those few performer-types who had so far won elective office as “entertainers.”

But as far as I’m concerned, Franken’s relative artistry is pertinent only in consideration of  the degree to which the public sees entertainers as normal-ish (despite the bunny ears), fairly simple people and artists as strange and rarified beings who think too much and avoid sports. I sense that, so far, America generally finds entertainers less threatening and more vote-worthy and artists as more, well, icky and not like themselves. 

So much for my scientific evaluation. The important point here, to me, is that the more familiar Americans get with the presence of performers, writers and visual artists in positions of civic responsibility, the less likely they’ll be to regard all artists as discomfitingly different and the likelier they’ll be to just accept the idea that artists are citizens entitled to run for public office like the rest of us.

A Portrait of the Artist as an Elected Official

Al Franken is only the latest to make the leap.

Not there have been many. And so far, they’ve all been white males and pop-culture entertainers: Sonny Bono. Jesse Ventura. Fred “Gopher” Grandy. Ronald Reagan.

But whether or not voters thought they had brains and depth and governing ability – whether or not voters even thought they had genuine performance skills - these show-biz celebs managed to convince fellow Americans of at least one important thing: That being some (or any) kind of artist shouldn’t exclude a person from civic responsibility and leadership.   

Their success in this may not have the same stirring significance as electing a black man president, but it still marks progress in the struggle to rid Western culture of its self-cheating prejudices. 

For many centuries, artists in the Western world were outcasts. ”Respectable” people lumped actors and dancers with vagrants and prostitutes; painters and composers and jesters toiled as mere servants in the courts of the ruling class. Writers  may have had more luck exerting political influence, but only indirectly - and probably not with poetry and novels.

One artist did rise to absolute power: the Roman emperor Nero. The result? He committed suicide just before he was to be executed. Europe probably didn’t see another artist become head of state until dissident playwright Vaclav Havel was chosen president of Czechoslovakia in 1989 and then of the Czech Republic in 1993.

And in the U.S.? A lot of leaders have had some artistic talent – there was  Thomas Jefferson and, um, Thomas Jefferson – but none were professionals until Reagan. And however you want to compare them as political leaders, artistically, Ronald Reagan was no Vaclav Havel.

That’s because Western societies still regard serious artists not just as lowly, but also as weird and unwholesome - creepy intellectuals or (just as bad) head-cases, flakes, limp-wristed idlers, spendthrifts, dipsos, druggies, wastrels and general losers. To get elected in this country, artistic people have had to closely resemble regular guys (and I mean guys literally) who enjoy a laugh and a beer, the kind of people we always seemed to elect until very recently.      

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Franken, a former Saturday Night Live comedian, seems more of an amusement than an artist. But his making it to the Senate has pushed the door open a little wider for less mainstream creative people whose brains, inventiveness, determination and understanding of human nature  America can ill afford to discard. The more citizens of great imagination we have among the powerful, the faster we’ll find fresh ways of handling our problems – and the sooner our society will stop thinking that an artist’s place is in the garret.

If we change venture capital, can we create a better economy?

I’ve been saying for a year or more now that venture capitalists and other funders of start-up companies have developed such extreme tunnel vision about what kinds of enterprises are good to invest in that, these days, they’re looking at the future through a  pinhole. 

In my post of June 16, I focused on the me-too narrow-mindedness of Ohio and particularly Northeast Ohio, where government money, venture capital and incubator services are available only to entrepreneurs who want to develop and manufacture biomedical and computer technologies – and mostly in large amounts that funders hope will beget enormous returns in very short order.

So I was pretty elated to read yesterday’s New York Times story about venture-capital investments being way too big and too often going to the same kinds of companies. Maybe if the money-people start realizing that many worthwhile start-ups of all kinds can be successfully and profitably nurtured with smaller investments and longer, more organic development processes, they’ll get more creative and we’ll start seeing communities gain the business diversification and full use of human capital that are the keys to sustainable economies of all sizes.

After all, farmers know it’s vital to diversify their crops. Why don’t venture capitalists get it?