All we need to be creative is … grass?

And not even the kind you smoke.

The Crown Plaza hotel chain is installing real, living, grass lawns as flooring in some of its conference rooms  across the United Kingdom with the intent of freeing up the imaginations of business people who sit – or maybe even walk barefoot — on the turf.

Want to bet who’ll end up getting creative? My guess is the hotel laundry staff , about grass-stain removal.

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?

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.

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?

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.

Creative but chicken?

Interesting back-to-back editorial pieces in The Plain Dealer yesterday: Brent Larkin ’s story about the growing  panic among Cleveland City Council members over the fact that that their city is declining more and more rapidly, they know radical change is needed, but no one’s stepping up to make it happen;  and Harold L. Sirkin’s commentary (apparently as yet unavailable on Cleveland.com) about the political and bureaucratic cement shoes our nation has strapped to its efforts to get anything done. 

Both are about political will and courage. But what they really address is the fear of change.

 No matter how creative we are, we’ll never move forward unless we have the guts to act on our ideas.  What is everyone so afraid of? And why is this fear part of our biology?

Got MLK? For some, that glass still isn’t full

My husband and I marked our 23rd anniversary this weekend. Before going out to dinner, we went to the art museum in hopes of catching the big touring Gauguin exhibit before it closed. It was sold out for the day, but that was ok – we stayed to revisit the fabulous permanent collection.

While we were wandering through the Winslow Homers and Thomas Eakinses,  I heard someone call my name and turned to discover a friend of mine named Tracey coming into the gallery with her partner. I hadn’t seen either of them in a long time and, in the course of chatting, I mentioned that we were celebrating our anniversary. Tracey said, “It’s our anniversary, too!” and asked how long we’d been together. When we asked the two of them the same thing, Tracey said nine years and her partner said 10. We all laughed a little about that, and then Tracey said, “Well, our date isn’t is as exact as yours.” 

Tracey and her partner are gay.  They love each other, have made a home together over many years and have the same deep bonds of affection, life experience and mutual reliance as any long-wedded couple. But in our state, they are not allowed to marry.

On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we can be astonished at how far our nation has come in the struggle for civil rights for all people. But as long as we deny some of our fellow citizens their freedom from prejudice, deny them equal treatment and opportunity, our work is not done and our  society is not a success.

In this, as in so many things, creativity is an answer – a path to tolerance. At Geniocity.com, we talk about the many benefits of  creativity and innovation, from scientific advances and wiser laws to more adventurous art and better-educated children. But the greatest result of creativity is open minds.

That should be reason enough to encourage it. And yet, I know it won’t be sufficient for those who like their progress to be lucrative. If you’re among them, you may be interested to hear that the reverse is also true: Tolerance is a path to creativity. The more accepted and encouraged people feel, the more imaginative and productive they are. The freer they feel to live, think, speak and experiment, the more great inventions, discoveries and artistic expressions they create. And the more creations people bring forth, the more we all prosper - materially, intellectually and spiritually.

Equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people will be our nation’s next big breakthrough - a throwing open of doors in our brains and hearts that have long locked in fear and locked out sense. It’s going to happen eventually, so let’s speed it up and stop wasting the talents of Americans who’ve been repressed, threatened and cheated out of the peaceful open life that could allow them – and us as a nation – to flourish.

I’d like to live in a country where fine human beings such as Tracey and her partner can have a wedding anniversary as other couples do. I’d like them to have the freedom to imagine and dare that comes, paradoxically, when you feel that you truly belong. I’d like the word American to mean a people and a culture that value, yes, the content of each individual’s character, but also the vision, the originality of thought and the skill that fill our individual heads - and that don’t care which consenting adults our sexual organs attract us to.

What about you?

Feed thy soul … and stomach?

So is cooking art?

The idea that it is seems to be gaining traction, and not just among foodies. Dinner comes out of contemporary restaurant kitchens these days looking like architecture (or at least a vertical section of sedimentary strata) and featuring exotic combinations of ingredients that turn ordinary menus into what read like excerpts from Dune (and, maybe someday, seafood into winged codpieces….). Cooking shows make the poaching of eggs and the chopping of jicama a drama a la Rambo. The raspberry sauce drizzled around molten chocolate cake resembles an unsigned Pollock.

Iron Chef Michael Symon even shared a 2008 Cleveland Arts Prize for bringing national attention to the city’s culinary creativity.  

 But the question has continued to drift through my head like the dubious aroma of mystery meat as I’ve watched Julie & Julia - the recent movie about famed chef Julia Child and the disciple who tries to make every one of the recipes in Child’s book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking – and subsequently read Child’s memoir, My Life in France.

Clearly, kitchen geniuses such as Symon and Child have many things in common with artists. Their creativity leads them to experiment with new and surprising combinations of elements. They possess an eye for presentation that’s pleasing in color, form, texture and composition. Their rigorous attention to craft ensures the highest and most consistent quality of execution and result. And on top of all that, they’ve worked hard to gain a thorough knowledge of, and expertise with, all the tools of their discipline, from foodstuffs to pastry bags. I suspect that Rembrandt did not know more about light and paint and canvas than Child knew about heat and meats and pans.

And if someone argued that food can’t be art because it disappears by the end of dinner, I’d have to point out that many works, such as avant-garde performance pieces, are intentionally ephemeral and are no less art because of it.  

But I would agree that food – and cooking – are not art. And here’s why: Art is about content, about an emotional or intellectual message of some sort that the artist is trying to impart to his audience. And food and cooking don’t have any.

Food can create a mood. Heavy and dark? Light and frothy? Comforting? Challenging? Yes. But you won’t find what’s on your plate deliberately leading you to evaluate human relationships, feel loss, ponder the effects of technology or consider death. (I mean, if it did, would you want to eat that?) Like most art, well-prepared food does delight the senses, but it doesn’t inform and enrich the mind. Instead it nourishes the body.

That’s not art. But I think you could call it love.

(Photo, top, from Sweet Mary)

Journalists need Creativity 101

Peter Friedman’s blog post yesterday on this site  about how well law school prepares people to be lawyers got me thinking about how well journalism school  - and journalism itself – prepares and encourages people to be good reporters, opinion-writers and editors. 

My own experience of journalism school was perhaps unusual – the curriculum was designed to cover the basics of news-gathering and -writing, media law and analyzing statistical surveys, along with photography and layout for those interested, but because I was preparing to be a theater critic, I found I had to essentially construct my own course of study. There were no classes that really delved into the evaluation of creative work or that examined the purpose, ethics and goals of  criticism, much less any that offered regular opportunities to practice the craft of reviewing.

Perhaps because I took an unusual path within  my profession, it seemed to me that the standard curriculum did little more than indoctrinate students in a rote style of newswriting and narrow categories of  news coverage that the business had adopted generations ago and that had slowly hardened into a kind of industry-wide arteriosclerosis that kept journalism from significantly changing and adapting along with the times. There were, to quote a Paul Simon song, “no times at all – just the New York Times.”    

Like law schools, apparently, J-schools also seem to attract people as professors who have very little real experience of the trade. Many of my own teachers were either theorists who examined the media’s effects on society rather than how to put out a great newspaper or nuts-and-bolts newscraft instructors who had left the profession years earlier because, apparently, they weren’t much good at it.  

And like the law, the journalism industry itself has been run largely by people rewarded for sticking with business as usual, rather than being notable innovators or even just good managers.

Journalism doesn’t prepare its practitioners to be managers; it simply moves reporters or ad salesmen or production folks into higher positions, to deal with people and administrative tasks when their skills lie in digging up information, scribbling, hustling ad space or designing pages. Lacking any real training in their new power jobs, they often resort to copying the older editors or managers around them, perpetuating bad leadership habits and old, entrenched ideas of what a news publication should be. That some good managers emerge is evidence of natural individual talent rather than an astutely planned and run system.

I suppose the status quo becomes gospel in any industry, but it’s particularly inexcusable in a business that’s supposed to be all about what’s new. In medicine, they say “Physician, heal thyself.”  In journalism, it ought to be, “Editor, broaden your own darned mind – or you’ll never get your readers to broaden theirs.”

Imagination and creativity have to be encouraged in both the newsroom and the  J-school classroom. Students must be shown how to think differently, to try new approaches with every story and every photograph or video; editors must stop copying other publications’ tiny steps forward and boldly experiment, not just with the individual elements of news publishing ,but with the concept of news itself, and let their staffs come up with fresh ways of communicating information.

My guess is that, right now, the J-schools are actually ahead of the industry on this.  With young, electronics-savvy students  flowing into their programs, many schools have embraced the Internet as the primary medium of the news and are investing in the state-of-the-art equipment and spirit of re-invention with which they need to explore this new frontier, while the economically ravaged professional news industry struggles to overcome its own ossification and get up to speed before it truly and finally dies of shortsightedness, cowardice and a dangerously low idea count.  

Someone – I think it was a character in the Steve Carell movie, Dan in Real Life - once said, “Love isn’t a feeling – it’s an ability.” I would say the same thing about creativity - and journalism needs to develop it.