It’s a thin line between rave and create

Update in the research on similarities between creative people and schizophrenic people: Their dopamine systems look alike.

For centuries, people have equated extreme creativity and artistry with madness – or at least weirdness – in ways that have allowed societies to stigmatize and marginalize those whose powerful imaginations gave them conceptual ability and vision very different from others’.

So I have to wonder if this research will reinforce that prejudice or eventually show us that the difference between mental illness and the capacity for great creativity is one of some slight but detectable physiological quirk, like being born with synesthesia because the nerves of your color-perception and mathematical-understanding regions of the brain happened to cross. 

And could doctors undo it? Would the “sufferers” want them to?

Will Cleveland step up to this creativity summit?

 If Cleveland held a creativity summit, would we hear any really new ideas? And if we did, would we be brave enough to try some of them?

That’s become the big question here in Geniocity.com’s home city: Not just whether or not we’re capable of thinking big, but whether or not we’re capable of actually taking the risks necessary to bring about change.

That’s an issue shared by other places around the globe where people who glorify the long-dead past have turned their minds and spirits into museums of outmoded thinking. But it seems especially bad in Beaver Cleaverland, where an apathetic and insecure/defensive population has led to an entrenched, clubby, self-protecting, unimaginative and largely ineffective leadership, turning the city and its sphere of influence into a perpetual 1957.

In spite of all the energetic  individuals working hard to reinvent the place, Cleveland is timid. Stodgy. We won’t try anything unless everyone else has already tried it first and proved it’s safe, which means that by the time we get around to adopting something “new,”that thing is often already as passe as … 1957. That goes not only for big civic change, but also for small changes of all kinds in schools, businesses and neighborhoods.

And still, those energetic individuals don’t give up. Kay Shames is one of them. She’s head of the Center for Arts and Innovation at Cleveland State University, which is co-hosting an actual Cleveland creativity summit 9:30-11:30 a.m. Monday, June 7, downtown at the Idea Center, 1375 Euclid Ave.

Called the 2010 Creative Voices Summit, the gathering is free and open to the public, which will be invited to participate in the discussion moderated by Edward Hill, dean of CSU’s Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs, and including a panel made up of Ronald M. Berkman, CSU president; Carol Colletta, president of CEOs for Cities and host of National Public Radio’s Smart Cities program; Terry Schwarz, interim director of Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative; and Joseph P. Riley Jr., mayor of Charleston, S.C.   

Shames says she’s “hopeful” that the summit will result in real debate about real emerging ideas. “We’re not using a sort of Richard Florida build-it-and-they-will-come creativity” as the summit’s basis, she says. Instead, the event will emphasize education and the arts as agents of the city’s future and explore basic issues such as whether or not Cleveland is really plugged into the creative frontier, what we should invest in, what should we build in order to grow and diversify. 

Those are good questions. Let’s hope, along with Shames, that the answers we get from our creative leaders and ourselves aren’t warmed-over ideas from other cities or versions of the same old Cleveland reliance on foundations, political-machine operatives, a handful of big-biz types and a few wealthy families to do our “thinking” and “daring” for us.

Florida resetting our economic default status

Economic-development guru Richard Florida has a new book out. Called The Great Reset – with a nod, I hope , to Kurt Andersen’s 2009 work about the current economic crash, Reset — it’s Florida’s look at what this enormous change in our national financial circumstances  could bring about in our terms of economic-development trends such as home-ownership and geographic fluctuations in population. To get a taste, take a look at this interview of Florida by Conor Clarke in the Atlantic.

The answer is, somewhere really and bravely creative

Where would you rather be?

No matter who you are or where you live, you probably wish you had a somewhat different life or home. Or at least a vacation house. But the sad and unavoidable fact is that everybody and every place has problems, including the most glamorous.  You know? Even California’s broke — and the Riviera’s polluted and the wealthier-than-the-queen J.K. Rowling pays insanely high taxes. (And what a wo-mensch she is for doing so).

What makes one person or place happier than another is not  a lack of problems, but how imaginatively and effectively he, she or it solves those problems. And since even the most creative among us need a little coaching now and then, people keep finding the annual Creative Problem Solving Institute to be helpful.

The institute, a program of the Creative Education Foundation, presents a hands-on learning experience based on a system of thought that helps you come up with creative solutions even when you think you don’t have any.  It will be held  June 21-25 this year, in Buffalo, N.Y., and one of the speakers will be Disney Imagineer Tony Baxter, who’s worked on the Mouse Company’s entertainment projects for 40 years.

So if you’d like your drab, economically depressed town to be more like Paris  and your humble life to be more like Bono’s or Christiane Amanpour’s or Shen Wei’s, don’t get bummed — fame, wealth, achievement , or just a good way to lose 20 lbs. and get a  job may be only one inspiring idea away. Just unlock your brain.

Next-gen news professionals have guts – and imagination

You might think, with the news industry as financially beset as it is, that none of the current crop of  college kids would want to major in journalism. But as I was happy to discover Saturday at the Society for Professional Journalists Cleveland Chapter spring conference, titled Rise Up in Cleveland, a lot of young people out there find journalism both interesting and promising.

A number of them attended a panel I was on called The Journalist as Entrepreneur, giving me hope that the industry’s next generation is already thinking about how to re-imagine journalism in effective, profitable and highly creative ways. As panel leader Chris Seper, co-founder and president of  the online start-up MedCity News, pointed out, what looks like an era of disaster for the news business is actually a time of unsurpassed opportunity for media entrepreneurs.

That’s true of many fields these days, and the more total the industry implosion (banking? real estate?), the bigger the opportunities are. I know that money people by definition are cautious people, but what everybody needs right now — from the humblest job seekers to the entire U.S. economy – is investors with daring, people who understand that the future is going to have to look a whole lot different from the past and who ardently want to make that future happen now.

It’s no time to be timid. And I’m excited to see that, in the news industry at least, some of our youngest adults are also our bravest. I’m betting they’ll be among the most innovative, too. You can find out what some of them are thinking and doing by checking out the RJI News Collaboratory.

Social networking: Progress or evil genius?

You may be able to answer that question a lot more easily once you start reading our latest Geniocity.com blog: The Skeptic’s Guide to Social Media  by communications expert James Krouse.

Whether you’re seeking old classmates, creating an I-Love-Pomeranians group  or marketing your new film/political org/stainless-steel scone mold, you’re probably watching whole days disappear down the bottomless time pit that is online networking … and either loving it or about ready to hang yourself from the nearest espresso-maker. James feels your pain and can argue for the gain of having a globeful of contacts within instantaneous reach  - as the author of  literary works and a marketing/publicity guru, he lives on both sides of the digital divide and bridges that chasm with a dry humor that offers all of us a sound footing.

The Skeptic’s Guide debuts today. I’m proud to welcome James to Geniocity.com’s growing blog roll of field experts, whose insights about the creative frontiers of everything from art and learning to business, politics and the law will keep you entertained, informed and poised on the cutting edge of innovation, with a fascinating view of what’s coming next. 

Thanks for reading.

Is technology innovating art or is it the other way around?

Creativity: One more natural resource we’re destroying?

If you can read, you must read this by the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani. Is creative cannibalism really where we want to go? And if the answer actually is yes, how long before we eat ourselves into an extinction of imagination?

What do you need to be creative?

In his Geniocity.com blog, Arts-Entrepreneur Resources,  Matt Charboneau takes a look this week at the steadily rising pool of resources for Northeast Ohio artists. The latest wave in that pool is something unique, but not just to the Cleveland area: The arts-project loan program launched last week by NoteWorthy Federal Credit Union may be the only one of its kind in the United States.

Matt and I are both volunteer directors on the board of NoteWorthy FCU, a nonprofit financial institution that began 50 years ago as the credit union for the Local 4 Musicians Union. It has since become independent and is in the process of broadening its mission, aiming to become the credit union for the whole arts community – local, regional and national.

NoteWorthy’s first step in that direction is the Creative Arts Project (CAP) Loan program, which offers loans of up t0 $50,000  to artists of all kinds who need capital for the tools and materials of their particular disciplines, from documentary filmmaking and ballet to death metal and graphic novels. NoteWorthy believes that many American artists need access to loans of this kind and encourages arts organizations around the U.S. to join the credit union (call 216-263-7034 to find out how), so making their employees, members, students and affilated artists eligible for NoteWorthy membership and special artist services.

The CAP loans are just NoteWorthy’s most recent service innovation for artists - the credit union plans to keep adding  new artist-oriented financial products and programs to the checking and savings accounts, credit cards and vehicle and musical-instrument loans that it already offers. All of us on the board hope that arts organizations including performing groups and companies, recording outfits, professional associations, support and advocacy institutions, schools, museums, galleries and more will find in NoteWorthy the helpful, artist-friendly and easy-to-use financial home base that they’ve always wanted. 

NoteWorthy’s getting creative so you can, too. Now: What do you need?

Creativity is political

Every once in a while, I hear this from an artist or scientist or tech whiz: ”I don’t pay any attention to politics. I just want to make my art/ do my experiments/ invent cool new stuff.”

(Actually, something similar emanates from about 92 percent of everybody in the U.S., who just want to watch their fake reality shows, pound beers and buy $300 athletic shoes that they wear to cruise the aisles at WalMart, but that’s another case of willful ignorance altogether.)

My eyes tend to get stuck in the upward-roll position when I hear the oh-politics  statement from anyone who’s trying to produce something new. I guess it seems preposterous to me that a person clever enough to compose opera,  genetically modify food crops or devise digital dancing hamsters could be that clueless but, apparently, creative ability doesn’t always make humans self-aware.  

The fact is, every single creative act is political, because creativity is about changing things. Anytime you mess with what people are used to, you affect how they feel, think, act – toward you and your work, toward life and the world.  And what is politics?  The art of manipulating how people think and feel so they’ll act and react in particular ways.  

Notice how I said art.

But what I’m getting at is mathematical, too, in the rudimentary way that I am so much the master of. So here’s the super-associative property of human invention: creativity = relationships = politics. All you need for proof is to read Geniocity.com’s blog pages today and see how imaginative change creates customer satisfaction (Will Limkemann’s “The Constant Entrepreneur“), legal turmoil  (Peter Friedman’s “Ruling Imagination“), commercial warfare (Charlie Eby’s “Media Man“), and outright fiction in the struggle over the federal budget (Seth Rosenberg’s  ”Inexact Possibilities“).

Still don’t believe me? Make some creative change of your own today – anything, fix the coffee a new way – and watch how fast your inspiration gives a wedgie to someone else’s expectation.

Just try to handle it better than our elected representatives.