Some of the crankingest creatin’ people that would share a beverage with me–not that I don’t know a lot of talented people beyond these, tons, but, well, these folks are special as I think of the few I am starting out with here as “non-stop engines of ‘Creative I Think I Can’”–always coming up with new and interesting projects… and never wearing out and doing it again year after bloody year, and I do mean getting bruised and broken and not stoppin’…
Oh! And l let me say one more thing about these people. They all inspire me. They are also personable. These are all people you’d like to be around. They make you feel creative and alive being around them.
NOT in alphabetical order or order of preference, starting with…
the creative females ’cause creative females also usually get the sxxt-stick when it comes to recognition.
Ann Pancake, http://annpancake.blogspot.com/
A WV native like me… a master fiction writer and just an all around good soul. Her words and themes are real… that is, she is not shucking and jiving you. She knows of which she writes and she renders the prose with atmosphere, glimpses of light and shadow.
Nancy Agabian, http://nancyagabian.com/
I right out super way loved reading Nancy’s autobiography Me As Her Again. She always has something cooking, whether it’s running off to Yerevan, Armenia to blow people’s minds there with performance art or doing a reading of her work in the States. She does it her way. Period. So there. Her work can also be unbelievably funny, like the piece she read at Beyond Baroque about her being hazed while working on a children’s show in LA.
Sandra Sievert (and Dirk Berger), http://www.s-wert-design.de/
I have known these two folks for years. Sandra is the ’s’ in S-wert Design and the picture here is worth a thousand words. She opened her own business in Berlin focusing first on the city itself as inspiration for her work. Trained as an architect, Sandra has made a creative life that works, and she gets paid for it….
Tina Kim, http://www.tinakim.com/
I met Tina at a show she was performing. Just one of the funniest people there is and she is also nonstop. You never know what she is going to say, and I say this with the utmost respect, she don’t give a hoot… I mean, she will just say it, you better believe it. She is hilarious in a world where out-of-touch effetes like Christopher Hitchins can get away with writing in Vanity Fair a few years back that women are not funny.
Sonya Gay Bourn, http://www.sonyagaybourn.com/
A Renaissance woman: Sonya writes for entertainment media (TV and film); she directs; she is co-head of the Women’s Committee at WGAwest, and, if that ain’t enough–she is an awesome stand-up comic. She also happens to be from North Carolina and her dad was born in the same county in West Virginia as mine. She always has something cooking and I am always excited to see what she is up to. She is also a mean clogger. Just throw on Rocky Top somewhere around her and you’ll see.
Carmen Elena Mitchell, http://therealgirlsguide.wordpress.com/meet-the-real-girls/
I couldn’t stop watching the promos for Carmen’s webseries The Real Girls Guide to Everything Else. We took a writer’s workshop together almost eight years ago and she has super come into her own. She writes and acts in this web series, and, it’s just one of the smartest things out on the web in terms of entertainment. She also pulled all this together herself. Go, Carmen!
Jacqui Barcos, http://www.jacquibarcos.com/
Jacqui Barcos is a force of nature. She really is. A writer/director, you know, an auteur, she really just does have what it takes. Beyond being super talented and exciting to be around, I truly envy her ability to catalyze situations and engage people. She does nothing half-assed. She is also real and on the level, but smooth. She is the person you want on your side when you have to move mountains, in the good sense of the phrase.
Joanna Warsza, http://www.laura-palmer.pl/
Joanna I met because she was the main organizer of this crazy art exhibit when I was living in Tbilisi, Georgia. The exhibit was throughout the Betlemi neighborhood, which was traditionally the Jewish and Armenian quarter of Old Tbilisi. During the exhibit, you actually walked into people’s home, and maybe, in one, there was performance art. In another, there was a techno cave. In another space, someone was serving absinthe and taking you on a tour of a Zoroastrian temple, that, yes, was actually now part of his home. In a place where it is not easy to get things done, Joanna got everything together, and, she was an extremely warm person to be around. You could see why people would follow her. She made sure you felt you were wanted and she went out of her way to make sure you had a good time.
Dorian Wood, http://www.dorianwood.com/
Dorian. Dorian. Dorian. Dorian. What to say about Dorian Wood that hasn’t already been said? A consummate musician, composer, and performer… I almost feel like a poem about Dorian would be more appropriate. In short, there is nothing about him that isn’t lyrical. His scruffy beard under a sometime mop of curls. His good-humored melancholy. His preferences for donning black blouses like your grandmother would wear. His 20-minute raps wrapped in a white sheet. His on-the-spot improv songs. His ability to channel both Patti LaBelle and Mahler all in the same note, the same instant.
Doug Van Gundy, http://www.dougvangundy.com/
You know that kind of person that just crackles with smarts? That kind of person with such a wide array of references that you are just excited by what all he knows? Then, when those smarts get boiled in the same pot with talent, and not just one talent, but several talents, and this person also happens to have focus and drive? The person gets up and does it? He gets out and shares it? He doesn’t keep it all to himself?
Also, when you are around someone that believes in what he does enough to find vulnerability still when he comes to the page, enough vulnerability to still tear up at what he has written? If you don’t know anyone like that, then, well, obviously you don’t know WV native Doug Van Gundy…
Rod Cumming, http://www.myspace.com/cathairensemble
Rod, the leader of Cat Hair Ensemble, writes almost the best lyrics you’ll ever read. He prompts you to pursue your creative career on company time. His limbs float about as he mourns the loss of your love. Plus, he friggin’ plays accordion. And he can sing. Oh, and by the way, he has an MFA in screenwriting, like a good one from a hard school. Apparently he’s written some science fiction-y stuff, too. At first glance, you’d never guess he was born and raised in New York City, but, once you hear him play, you see it out before you, a Manhattan Street still haunted, a street jilted, ignored by the chain stores now littering that isle, you see Rod early in the AM, noisebox tucked at his side, making that walk home that the wild ones before him have swaggered. Except, whoops, you forgot he now lives in LA.
Jack Terricloth, http://www.worldinferno.com/
I met Jack before he was Jack or a Jack-in-the-box. The back-then Jack made me spend my rent money on a used tuba. A couple of years ago, after years, we sat in a pink balloon made of cotton candy in a basement bar on St. Mark’s and compared life notes. He’s done exactly what he wanted to do, so thankyouverymuchSin-aeeetra. Including floating in a pink balloon made of cotton candy. There’s really no excuse for not knowing his music. He’s also been doing this for, count ‘em, almost 25 years…. What the hell have you been doin’ for 25 years?
Artsvi Bakhchinyan, http://www.reporter.am/go/article/2009-04-18-artsvi-bakhchinyan-compiles-the-stories-of-armenians-past-and-present-far-and-near
Artsvi is one of those people that leads a creative life. He has made it happen in a country that it’s not so obvious or easy in. Professionally, he is a writer and a film academician. But that is just the start. He juries film competitions. He sings in a professional choir. He writes book after book. He takes ballet lessons for fun. He hangs out with his family and three children. He always has time to make new friends and greet old ones. He does this all with exuberance and joy. His life is very much a model of how to live a happy creative life.
Lado Burduli, http://www.myspace.com/ladoburduli
When’s the last time you listened to some Gothic new wave from the Republic of Georgia? If so, then you listened to Lado Burduli. Talking about recording his latest album with a classical ensemble, we compared notes on how exhausting the full-on creative process can be. People don’t understand why you are so tired… you are putting yourself on the line minute by minute. Lado should, by now, be a sort of world music star. He keeps at it, always wanting to find a way to exalt the modern Georgian performer, the contemporary musician engaged in the music of today, and to gather the contemporary artists and creative people together in community in his country. Bravo, Lado! It makes you think, what’s the last thing you did to bring creative people together?
Leonard Graves Philips, http://www.myspace.com/dickiesband
Could you keep up being cantankerous for almost forty years? Could you? Leonard fronts one of the punk bands that has stayed together the longest. He has the deepest speaking voice you’ve never heard (he should be doing his own radio show). He’ll also argue politics with you until you want to hit him with one of his puppets. Beneath it all, though he wouldn’t want you to know, like so many of the punks, he is a gentle soul.
Joe Tepperman, http://sail.usc.edu/~tepperma/ and http://www.myspace.com/mooeymoobau
Joe recently made his first music video, which I also couldn’t stop watching. The dude is in his 20s, he’s getting a Ph.D. in some kind of thing like audio recognition, he writes mean, lean, long, sound poems and sets them to music. He plays amazing trombone. I wish I had wasted my 20s being him. I can’t imagine how creative he will remain into his 30s. He’s a one man Talking Heads. Move over, the rest of you poseurs and louts.
P.S.
So, reading and thinking about what it means to be creative…. I left a comment on a Daniel Pink interview recently with Seth Godin… I’d really like to believe it, I’d really like to see it where artists get hired to be artists and paid the big payola. I remember learning about the chart by some famous anthropologist (feel free to remind me of who) who noted three main motivators in human behavior, but that we are not all motivated by them in equal amounts nor proportionately:
’security’
‘identity’
and I think the last one was ‘adventure’
Right-brainers, I think, probably mostly fall into the latter two categories. Managers??? Into???
I am unconvinced that the Right-Brainers (the creative types) are really going to rule. Maybe they will rule some parts of industry, I don’t know which parts, or if “artists” and “industry” — ne’er the twain shall meet…other than Apple, and those are hired guns all working for a common business purpose.
Further, I just came back from the Caucasus where I heard the the Finance Minister there give a presentation that sounded like he was propounding an economic agenda from 1970: construction and natural resources. Not to mention that the US remains in several wars: the war for ideology (internally and externally), the lost wars on vice (drugs & our bodies: gay, straight, and prostitutes), and the physical wars over??? What are they really about? I’m just not sure and haven’t been—I am unconvinced mistaken senses of propriety and culture-clashes won’t keep the creative class in its current lowly status…
‘k, as they say…. let’s use the old scientific method. What if the some of the most creative people I know well enough to share a cup o’ joe with actually were put in charge?
A couple of them on this list actually have been in charge of people and things… but, if I compare them to the folks that I know that run organizations or businesses… I see a chasm in need of a major synaptic leap. How do you experiment for that?
If I worked with ANY of these people listed above I’d wake up with a spring in my step and a song in my heart to go to work.
Imagine how different the workplace would be with any of these people in charge or asked for their input and actually having it applied.
Now, then, imagine the folks in charge most places. Then try to imagine those folks and these folks… mmm, ‘m not sure. There is a saying that interviewing for the workplace is like dating… Think of most bosses of companies or organizations you have worked in, now, imagine the experiment of sending them on a date with one or more of these folks. Close on some, but no cigar on others?
