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Post-industrial small communities & technology & food

Saturday, September 4th, 2010

That is what I have been thinking a lot about recently: post-industrial small communities and technology (and, to a lesser extent, food). What do I think of when I mean small? I think of former one-trick factory or natural resource towns like those in McDowell County, West Virginia (note that in 1950, there were a 100,000 people counted there in the Census– bigger than Charleston, WV, the capitol) or in former East Germany or those empty factories dotting the countryside in the Republic of Georgia. Is it for the best to let them shrivel up and their contents be scattered to cities, to the dirt, and to the wind? There is a lot of focus on the revitalization of former big cities, like Detroit. Most models of community revitalization, or, for that matter, developing for the first place, rely on outside capital. I have been thinking about the futility of relying on outside capital: it just won’t reach everywhere, and, when it does, what price beyond money comes with it?

So if the term “technology” can refer not only to fancy gadgets and computers, but also to crafts and systems of organization, then somewhere the fate of small communities seems to lie in its hands. How should post-industrial communities reorganize now that the money flow is gone? Should they? Is  it better to maintain an H. L. Mencken-like disdain for the backwater town? Better to celebrate that most Americans now live in urban areas? I, myself, have lived mostly in urban areas since high school. Where do I get off suddenly being worried about the places no one else is worried about?

If science requires empirical and rational knowledge, then what am I basing my intuition on that small communities and how they function are going to become a lot more important sometime in the not-too-distant future? This week I have read data that suggests, or rather, proves, that as compared to the current small community model in the US of driving everywhere, city living in the US actually leads to a smaller carbon footprint. I was also reading this week about how when cheap oil from Russia stopped flowing to Cuba, the formerly “outside-the-mainstream” Cuban agriculture specialists proposing city rooftop gardens for providing most of Cuba with vegetables– those folks suddenly got to have their say. While getting this all going, seems that the average Cuban lost 20 pounds, and apparently the place is still not teeming with food, and now though it gets cheap oil from Venezuela, Cuban agricultural policy remains that most food is produced local and in the town where it will be sold. Maybe also not so difficult when you have four-season gardens.

My husband is always pointing out to me where lawns could be used to grow so much food. When we were in Eleanor, WV he pointed out to me that the lawn for the middle school could easily produce enough food to feed everyone in the town for a year (obviously with some canning, drying, curing, and freezing involved– the first three being technologies most everyone knew something about till the 1950s). I also have been thinking about what it would take to get communities to do that. Whom would you fight? How crazy would people think you were to suggest it? I have been thinking a lot about communities or cities and their “Plan B”? These little dead post-industrial towns certainly had no Plan B for when the factory stopped working. What would happen if my home town suddenly had to pull an agricultural stunt like Cuba had to pull? Who would you have to convince now to start Plan B as a way of life now?

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What if the goals of education K – college were self-sufficiency, entrepreneurship, and sustainability?

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

Until recently, I used to think of education in terms of how to participate in it or improve upon it. Finally, with this year, I can say I have taught every grade something K – 10, the first year of college, adults, adult ed., and graduate school, that is, I have taught every grade K – graduate school, except grades 11/12 and the upper two years of undergraduates.

About seven years ago, I gave an eighth grade class of mine an assignment to create another shape for government–something not in a pyramid that mimicked, in its way, the top down power of kings or the Catholic Church.  One kid had a government model shaped like a skateboard. I sort of feel like doing that with how we are educated, how we learn:– a total reshaping; a lot is researched in terms of working within the model we have; I am not sure that the future of our country, and, maybe the world, doesn’t depend on our coming up with another model than our current model/s for schools.  I mean, have you, ever, really stopped to think about:

How until just about a hundred years ago, kids were rarely segregated out by age rather than by aptitude and skill-set?

What if kids could move on to higher ed. simply when they reach a certain aptitude rather than a certain age?

How, until maybe thirty years ago, if you were fine person, smart in your own way, adept at talk or with your hands, you could still make a decent living?  How, more than ever, high-level reading is an essential skill now? I say this not to make anyone anxious, but, more to suggest, and, if that weren’t so?  What would you do instead?  I think of a few students I have now (first graders) for whom reading may never end up being their “thing,” and how they are fine people, but through no fault of their own, they may be even more up the creek by the time they hit the job market than someone even hitting the market today.

I am also back to– what would it take, really, for a community to be semi-self-sustaining?  I mean, really, do people think you are going to be able to attract high tech into the former industrial mountain areas of West Virginia? Rust-belt Michigan or Indiana? And, if local folks are bright, and go to college, they almost never return to their communities. Is that really what we want out of life?  To be dependent on outsiders and outside sources and other economic factors to dictate the terms and whereabouts of our lives?  I think again:

What skills do we need in a community to be semi-self-sustaining?  What would it take, for example, for a town like:

Bluefield, WV to be semi-self-sustaining in food, shelter, energy, and also have enough goods produced to contribute to a wider money economy and to pay state and federal taxes?

Or, Detroit?

Or, Gary, Indiana?

Or?  Or?  Or?

What if some foundation were to come in and fund a pilot project that would make a local community as self-sufficient as possible?

What would the folks in the community need to know? How would education change if self-sufficiency, entrepreneurship, and sustainability were its goals? If there were a blend of skills from food production to high tech communication within the same small community, or, maybe, even within the same people?

I often paraphrase Jung that if you want to know a culture’s psychology, know a people, then look at what they create. Our culture is becoming more and more disembodied, more and more cerebral in the skills we need.  What if a community responded to the needs of industry, second, and its needs as a community, first?  Not as in communism, which has in common with capitalism that the first concern is material. But, if the community sets its own priorities with a concrete plan for revamping whatever would need to be revamped to get there?

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What Do We Have to Know?

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

The C (creative, Crystal, calibrated, compiled) Week in Review #3

At first this didn’t seem like a very creative week, mostly a skill-building kind of week. Spending some of my days now with kids under the age of ten has actually made me more hopeful about the future. If you haven’t been in an elementary school since you last attended one, the one I currently am spending my days in could come as quite a shock: bright classrooms, kids out of their seats now and again, tech labs, music rooms, art rooms, an array of interventionists to help kids along, teacher’s aides, etc… and this is in a public school in West Virginia. Seems like there certainly has been a shift from my days years ago in the same state, silent, in rows, where speaking out of turn got your knuckles cracked with a ruler.

But all of this change also leaves me thinking, and, I have been thinking about this for a while: what are the actual useful things to know?

This is a long and hard debate, and I think of the debate between Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglas about learning skills that would get you a job or learning for learning’s sake. My guess is that the truth is somewhere in between. If I could roll back the clock and have time to learn everything I really need to know… or, if I think of my husband’s kids or these kids I have in school now, if I could design a curriculum that would address life as we know it, I would include the following skills. Now, of course, not ONLY these skills, but as I approach the age of two score, these seem to be the essential skills for survival as a person in almost any situation and as a person that probably has to do something to earn money, or at the least, save money. These skills are not in order of relevance…yet, imagine how interesting and useful school would be if these skills were included, and, imagine what a different society this would be, too.

Essential Skills

Web authoring and web design

You can’t have a business, get the word out, or do almost anything without involving this know-how.

Photoshop

Ditto. It is essential for life on the web as we know it.

Farming, nutrition, and cooking

Everyone should be growing part of their own food. Period. If you can grow it, and grow the right things, you then need to know what to do with it.

A martial art

As I approach two score, almost no one I know that knows a martial art really well is a major screw-up. They seem to have some self-reliance, and they certainly have some discipline. Also,  most martial arts seem to be lifelong pursuits, unlike football or baseball or gymnastics.

Self-defense

If everyone knew that everyone knew the basics, well,what a different homelife many people might have.

Auto mechanics and bicycle repair

You have to get from here to there somehow. You should be able to do a lot yourself. Gun safety is also important (see below).

Psychology, interpersonal relationships, conflict resolution

‘Nuff said. Know the nuts and bolts of yourself and others and how to deal with nuts. You are going to be working in teams and maybe “managing up” a lot, so learn maybe the reasons behind the why. Learn how to get along with almost (and almost, but not all) anyone: bosses, co-workers, partners, spouses, exes, children, neighbors…. In short, it’s not all about you…and the converse, no, they can’t do that/say that to you, either.

Childcare, teen care, elder care

At some point in your life you will most likely take care of a child, a teen, or an elder. Learn now what you need to know later.

Animal care, animal slaughter, food (or wool or leather) from animals

Don’t get a pet unless you know how to and can care for it. Ew, animal slaughter grosses you out? Then don’t eat or wear animals anymore–then learn how to make yourself a grass skirt when or if you may need it. If you can handle learning to prepare from step one on up the meat that you eat, then learn it. You never know when it may be essential.

Management

At some point either you will be put into a position managing other people and you will have no business doing that or you will work for someone who is responsible for managing you and has no business doing it. Lots of people managing others have never taken one class in interpersonal skills, conflict resolution, or psych much less management. And no, having an MD, a JD, or a PhD does not make you a people person or endow you with one shred of sense when it comes to business plans, business orchestration, teamwork, etc… Also, you may have an MBA and find yourself managing up, which I hear about all the time from almost everyone I know dealing with Boomer bosses that can’t even log into their own email accounts (yes, still, in 2010) or who don’t like to learn anything technical (which includes anything about the web).

Meditation

Stress, anyone? It’s the #1 killer, really. We should all probably know how to chill.

Household repairs, wood carving, and construction

Landlords or slumlords don’t show. Your McMansion is a McDisaster. The starter got up and left. Fix it so you can live in peace. Build it so you don’t have to pay to have it built.

Simple electronics and computer repair

Ditto. We should all not be afraid of opening up the back of a PC or Mac and installing the extra memory.

Accounting, Excel, personal accounting, and tax preparation

For your own finances, for where you work, so you don’t screw others or don’t get screwed in the spreadsheets.

Swimming

It’s good for you and you should know how in case you need to.

Emergency preparedness, basic medical care, and CPR

Again, it’s good for you and you should know how in case you need to.

Basic video and audio production

Want it on the web? Need to show it? Learn how to make it.

Ethics, Philosophy, and World Religions
The first two are intertwined with the last one. In order to make sense of what to do and how to behave, and, how to make sense of the news, these seem more essential than ever.

Entrepreneurship, starting a business, making a business plan
Even if you don’t start your own, this is useful stuff to understand the ones you are working for.

Geography

Not just part of a World History class… but it’s own class that also discusses topography, climate, peoples, etc…

Principles of democracy, social movements, and organizing

I’ve needed these skills at any number of jobs–how to get people together, how to form groups that are fair, how to get the word out in a community. It’s something everyone should know how to do.

Piano or guitar

You can also write a song or make friends if you know one of these. I’ve seen this happen dozens of times in my adult life.

Ballroom dance

This may seem silly, but, at higher level social functions, many folks know how to swing, jitterbug, foxtrot, or cha-cha and this is true around the world. If you are suddenly in a room with diplomats and there is live dance music, this is a needed skill to have.

Marketing, PR, advertising & media literacy

Not only should you know the man behind the mirror, you should know how to make a mirror if you need to. Most business or most of life takes some kind of marketing know-how these days…

Driving a car, truck, or motorcycle, boat, or semi-

You never know when one or the other of these may be the thing you need to know how to work.

Gun safety and use

Same here–you never know when one or the other of these may be the thing you need to know how to work.

Tying knots

I am not so sure about this one, except that my husband laments he doesn’t know more about it. Seems like a natural to learn maybe in geometry class or something and could be useful in a bind (all puns intended).

This is my list, and, of course I don’t know everything on this list–or even a lot of it–but it now seems like a good list to use to start with. It seems that if you know these things, you’d be ready for most anything life could send your way. I could and maybe intend to build a school curriculum that builds these in. This list seems to have a good mix of “hard” technical and physical survival skills and “softer” skills like getting along with people and getting people together to accomplish things.

Hey, you out there, if you are listening, anything I’ve missed that should be on the list?

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Valentine’s Love Letter to Some of the Most Creative People I Know that I Could Share a Pot of Caffeinated Beverage With

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

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?

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Post 1 of the Twyla Tharp Creative DNA questions…

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

So, Tharp talks about finding one’s creative DNA. She discusses her own as being quite rooted in dichotomy: bio & zoe. Bio “accommodates the notion of death, that each life has a beginning, middle, and end” and zoe means “life in general, without characterization.” This made me think somewhat of Jung’s characterizations of the life of the mind and the life lived out in society. I read his autobiography a few years ago and it made a deep impression on me. He battled heavily with exploring the subconscious, a life of the interior, of dreams, and then with coming back into the world to live a life as Western society requires: extrovert and making things happen in the physical world. I’ve since searched for a quote that I attribute to him, but actually, I think it may be something I extrapolated from reading his work. I thought I read him saying that if you wanted to know someone, know a person’s psychology, look at what that person has built. The same could be said of a culture–look at what the culture has created and you will know what is important to that culture.

This brings me back to Tharp’s idea of creative identity and creative DNA. She says ‘if you understand the strands of your creative DNA, you begin to see how they mutate into common threads in your work. You begin to see the “story” that you’re trying to tell; why you do the things you do (both positive and self-destructive); where you are strong and where you are weak (which prevents a lot of false starts), and how you see the world and function in it.’

Wow.

If I answer these questions, I will learn all that about my creative DNA? Okay, maybe so. Though, another favorite quote I now find myself mis-attributing: take that about yourself which people complain about most and cultivate it, for that is what about you is truly yours.

Okay, in an earlier post I talked about how much I dislike creative writing assignments from other people… and, I am squirrelly when it comes to answering these kinds of things.

Questions answered: questions by Twyla Tharp

1. What is the first creative moment you remember?

Preparing to sing Jesus Loves Me for preschool Bible school. I was about 3 years-old. The full story goes that I was extraordinarily excited to sing. I loved practicing. I couldn’t wait to be on stage. The evening of the performance, I headed straight to where I thought we would sing–that is, where the choir always sung–in risers behind the pastor. Except, to get to these risers, you had to go out a side door and then enter the choirpit from a hall. Across the bottom of the choirpit ran about a three foot wall. While the other little kids lined up off to the right on the stage, I ran straight for the choirpit. And, I figured, over the wall must be the way to enter. In my haste, I foisted myself up onto the ledge, pulled, and about that time, got stuck halfway between the stage and the choirpit. I heard a huge crowd of laughter, more laughter than I had ever heard live in my short life, and looked back over my three-year old shoulder to see a sea of open mouths laughing at me while I unknowingly bared my ruffled yellow bloomers and my ruffled yellow dress slid down my back toward my neck. I burst into inconsolable tears, slid down, and ran straight for my parents to later be only mildly muffled by being bought a hot fudge cake at Shoney’s in Bluefield, WV.

I think this is not that atypical of creativity: I was so focused on my own excitement and the chance to perform that I sailed on past the rest of the crowd getting into line. My own enthusiasm upstaged the regularly scheduled program. My act of pointing out what was obvious proved to be more creative and daring (yet also humiliating) and more entertaining than the scripted entertainment.

2. Was there anyone to witness or appreciate it?

I was mortified by several things for years: singing (though I loved to). I often wondered if this incident stifled a voice or a performer I could have been…. Though, this provided me with one of my first stories to tell. I could clearly see the setup, and I saw myself in third person that evening; I saw what I had done, I saw what I had wanted, the climax was different than the set-up, and I had unanticipated audience response.

3. What is the best idea you’ve ever had?

The wheel for systemic change on gender in the entertainment industry. I came up with this a couple of years into working as the head of a project/organization for challenging the status quo on gender in the entertainment industry. I had never thought of myself as being great at synthesis, though, later reading Daniel Pink’s book

but as a writer and as a writer very driven by wordplay, and as someone, by the time I had this idea, that had managed to write a whole novel, I saw that synthesis is one of my fortes. I was able to take a lot of input from over the course of two years and synthesize it to this:

The organization I was working for headed up research and worked to cause a shift on gender imbalance in entertainment aimed at kids.  In my thinking, research formed the core of the issues; it defined the problem. The main players for change fit into the four categories around the wheel. These groups and interests would be solicited to come together in a collaborative effort. Last but not least, foundations and philanthropists would be approached to fund the collaborative effort.

After two solid years of doing this work, I came to believe that large-scale change was possible (as I noted in an earlier post of mine), but that only a large-scale collaborative effort would produce much substantive change.  In order to create a paradigm shift, this whole wheel would need to work in concert.

4. What made it great in your mind?

It was a model for collaboration and a model of how to make social change happen in a specific industry. I took what I had learned over the two years of doing a job I had and synthesized what need to be done into a simple graph. The idea was relatively clear and labeled who all the principle players needed to be. As the Japanese apology goes, I am sorry I didn’t have time to write you a shorter letter. This was a “short letter.”  It cut through a lot of the other nonsense about making change and it illustrates really what must happen.

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The Hard Questions

Friday, February 5th, 2010

I said in an earlier post that I would answer some hard questions Twyla Tharp posits in her book on the creative habit. My disclaimer is that I don’t believe in everything Tharp puts forward in the two books of hers I have read. I like hard work, but I certainly don’t think everyone should like what I like, or, that working hard makes one person “better” than another person, neither in art nor production nor as a person. What one person strives to complete, may be play for another. In short, there are all kinds of ways to live; I am not sure the Protestant Work Ethic hasn’t had as much to show its weaknesses as its worths.

It’s also a bit of a red flag that one of the two books I got of Tharp’s (both Christmas gifts) is touted as a great business book. Not that I am against business, but I am not sure about business. I am not sure about many endeavors, and I am not sure why I should (given the current economic climate, the climate climate, etc.) be sure. In the book Tharp gives advice about how to work with people you don’t want to work with, focusing particular advice on how to manage an out-of-touch boss. Again, this is being touted as a great business book. We are being advised often on how to manage out-of-touch bosses. How often this comes up in books and in practice makes me feel like:

How did we get here? What has happened that, by being out of touch, a person gets promoted to “boss”? Or, is it, that the nature of hierarchies is to ensure the boss is out of touch?

In any case, what does this have to do with art? To Tharp, lots of art is about leadership, discipline, and collaboration. More or less like getting anything done in most spheres. Collaboration has gotten a bad rap in the past as touchy-feely, and now after almost a decade of the new millenium, it seems to be everywhere–what lots of hierarchical institutions now want their members to do: come together, yeah. Years ago at the New School for Social Research when I was doing my master’s degree in the science of teaching Cynthia Onore, the program’s head, focused our learning on collaboration. We learned in teams and in cohorts. We practiced how we would have our students learn. We threw fits due to not having had a lot of previous practice in collaboration, but under their stead (it’s a damn shame the New School got rid of that program in the 90s) we grew unafraid to work together, and thus, we were unafraid of our students working together when we went into our classrooms. My point? Collaboration took a lot of practice. Huge stakes also were not at stake. We weren’t going to lose millions if we misstepped. And, granted, we were probably a touchy-feely lot to begin with: we’d willingly entered a program to become teachers focused on the needs of urban students.

Oh, I digress. Okay. The questions. Soon. I will post them next post. The questions that concern what one is as an artist. See, my beef, too, with Tharp is that she comes from the school of “well, just pick one!” In one scene she writes of how much she loves color and design and that she also could have been a painter, that maybe she would have been happy being a painter. But she talked herself out of it. Do this, not that.

I can’t say I am not in a struggle over that. My life, my public life and work life, really, rather than my social one, has been a tug between social cause and education work, which, have their expectations, socially and publicly, and creative work–writing, music, performance– which have theirs. The first is a more socially conservative realm with the specter of the Progressive-era school marm and prudish reformer flying above it looking to clean up the working classes and bring everyone to middle class propriety. The second, it’s safe to say its specter is not of a school marm.

To really have a country that is able to focus on innovation, able to compete in the new creative economy, able to break forth and solve the dire, dire, dire problems we face: I ask, are the right people even teachers? The right people involved in solving social issues?

A year or so ago I entered a competition to potentially win a fellowship to start a school in Los Angeles. The people running the competition were excited about me till I turned in my proposal. Albeit I crammed in too much in terms of the local demographics, I also focused on the “what next?” after college. I’ve been that teacher–the one expounding college. But, I also had every junior high school class of mine, after my first full year of teaching, do a career project, in which they researched and presented a project on career of their choice (save being a musician, model, actor, or athlete–they could do a project on an adjacent career, not exactly on those). We traced what it would take to potentially reach those dreams.

Nonetheless, in my proposal, I focused on relationships for our inner-city students. Life had taught me that having the right degree was, by a long shot, not enough. You need to know people. People need to trust that you can do a good job. How do you get to know people that could employ you or trust you if the potential employer you seek is not a member of your own community? I think this did not sit well with the career-educators judging the competition.  My guess is they had been rewarded for being good students, wouldn’t everyone?

Teachers, on the other hand, are involved in a deep bureaucracy. If they take certain classes, pass certain tests, get the right credential, and, then, also know someone, they get a job. They keep this job as long as they do okay, take some more classes, pass some more tests, behave. How many other types of jobs work like that any more?

Many people I know get their jobs through a combination of having the hard skills and also by having the soft skills of networking, by being someone other people want to be around, etc. You can have all the college degrees in the world, but if no one knows you that is in the hiring class, then you may not get the kind of job the teachers back in school promised you.

It’s happening now. A lot of kids coming out of college and having nowhere to go, and that is not just due to the economy–they don’t have access to the people that are hiring. They were told that if they just went to college, they would soon have a middle class life and be doing something fulfilling, more fulfilling than minimum wage work. They were told they could reach their dreams…. like their teachers had? Like their college professors had? If the kids coming out of college do get jobs, they are often lower administrative positions in which they are paid peanuts for also having skills their baby boomer bosses don’t have: social networking, web design, blogging, etc. Ah, the good life.

What would happen if the school marm yokes were lifted from the schools? What would happen if a league of artists were brought in, circumventing the regular hoops, and brought a group of students from ninth to twelfth grades? Maybe add to this group of artists a group of entrepreneurs and mentors out in the community– What if schools taught classes in innovation, design, entrepreurship, collaboration, networking and then students got out into communities to work, thereby making contacts that might hire them once they go to college?

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