A really new New Year

I suspect that staggering numbers of people are, like me, counting the nanoseconds until 2009 is over. It’s been a curse – and perhaps odd good luck, too – that we’ve all had to live through an unusually difficult and interesting year.

For even though an awful lot has fallen apart or exploded and made us suffer, sometimes terribly, we are beginning to see one another decide to change. And that’s the first, most important step in creatively improving ourselves and our world.

The next is to invent ways of making that change positive and effective. The processes of creativity can be painful and frustrating, as in health-care reform, or astounding and exhilarating, as in the overflow of communications-technology miracles that seems to pour endlessly from the brains of Google and Apple staffers. It almost doesn’t matter which – the prospect of movement is ecstasy after so much stagnation in so many areas of life and society. Better systems and better results will eventually roll out  in a slow, but lasting and satisfying evolution.

Franklin Roosevelt was talking about the Great Depression when he said that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,”  but his words speak just resonantly to imagination, self-expression and progress.  It takes courage to change what doesn’t work, equal courage to envision and adopt what does.

People of great brain and heart are always quietly at work on the future, even during humanity’s darkest times, but when the rest of us join with them to embrace new ideas and possibilities, our accomplishments become exponential: We bring forth a Renaissance, an Enlightenment,  an Industrial Revolution, a Modern Times.  

We’re standing right now on the upward slope of a vast Creative Age in which instantaneous access to the whole of human knowledge and ideas will produce ingenious creations of deep thought, feeling and useful application in an abundance the Earth has never before witnessed. It won’t  be a breeze, but it will be amazing and stimulating. And, if we aren’t afraid to face the hard work of thinking, of not depending on the familiar and the easy, it will make us and our planet wiser, healthier, more skilled, compassionate, tolerant and prosperous. 

And if those aren’t the ingredients of happiness and love, I don’t know what are. I hope 2010  is the start of it all for everyone.

Creatively serving up access to capital

If you’re born smart, you’ll probably find a way to educate yourself whether you have access to classes or not – but a scholarship sure does help.  Same thing with creativity:  A person with the deep desire to concoct something will try to bring that thing about with or without personal wealth.

It’s just that money makes the whole process so much easier. And so much more likely to succeed.  And there’s so frighteningly little of it right now – especially for artists, inventors and entrepreneurs, most of whom have a wretchedly hard time persuading people to back them even in a prosperous economy. 

So it’s all the more satisfying to find that human imagination has started finding ways around the brick walls and barbed wire that so often separate creative people from the funding they need. As Will Limkemann explained  not long ago in his Geniocity.com blog, peer-to-peer lending now offers entrepreneurs an easier, online path to low-cost business loans than through a gantlet of interviews and paper chases with bank  or federal-agency officers.  That took inspiration. So did Kickstarter, an online service that invites people  to raise money for their creative projects in sort of the same way that American Idol performers win their competitions - by public vote. Except that Kickstarter allows many people to succeed.

Now there’s something new arising across America that not only provides creative people with a simpler and shorter path to money, but also pulls down the barriers between art, food and entrepreneurship  in a way that  gives us at Geniocity.com little frissons of joy. It’s called A Moveable FEAST and it should appeal to a lot of communities, including my home city of Cleveland, where local hero-slash-nationally-acclaimed-Iron-Chef Michael Symon was recently awarded a Cleveland Arts Prize and another artful chef, Ben Bebenroth, won a 2009 COSE  Ten Under 10 small-business award for his organic/local food enterprise, Spice of Life Catering Co.

Local chapters of the FEAST – Minneapolis’ is one of the latest –  present big vegetarian dinners carried out with the help of a local farm. Several hundred people are invited to attend a dinner for a reasonable price – $10 or $20 -  and view a number of art projects displayed around the room. The artist whose project gets the most votes gets the collected dinner money and the chance to come back the next time to update everyone on his or her current work.

Cool, no? I don’t know about you, but I’m getting pretty tired of  having so much of the world’s usable capital locked up inside so many armed and moated fortresses and spending all my time trying to figure out the secret handshake  to the money club. Like sisters, maybe creative people can do it for themselves by helping each other succeed.

Creativity strikes (the right keys) again

Here’s a great example of creative people coming up with an entertaining and effective solution to a stubborn human problem. What’s next? Cars designed to exercise your arms, legs and core while you drive?