High/Low Brow

Tip of the hat to Penelope Trunk over at Brazen Careerist (one of my current favorites) for producing the most gripping mini paragraph of the day.

"I am obsessed with the meshing of lowbrow and highbrow. I’m convinced that if you understand high brow well, then you are also a great judge of low brow, and you can get even more pleasure out of that."

More here.

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How to Get More Swedes to Use More Stairs

Brilliance can be healthy and entertaining.

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tip of the hat to MR for the pointer

Thought on Minimalism

Two women whose faces and bare backs suggested that they were in their 50's but whose clothing items seemed to have been co-opted from a spoiled teenager's closet, were sitting in the same area I was also occupying during one of my very recent travels.

The area, as I describe it to my person over text, was an almost too balanced a fusion of a somewhat-anxious, post-Wall-Street-crisis-informed, nouveau riche-pretending space and affected Bohemia.

I found myself sporting a smug smirk which, had I actually seen it in a mirror, I would have detested it. But that day I didn't seem to be bothered by the fact that I was looking smug for it seemed to be an appropriate reaction.

To my left I see another woman in her late 50's or so whose shoulders were evidence of a rather disciplined regimen of yoga and pilates and her darker skin color suggested that her visits to her local tan salon were at least bi-weekly. The hair seemed to say, 'Hey, look at me. A French-speaking stylist named Robert (who leaves the 't' out when pronouncing his name) with genius hands and out-of-this-world-smelling shampoos was frolicking with my locks for well over an hour. The result: absolute lusciousness.

And, as these thoughts were swimming in my head, I could feel the smug smirk approaching the enclaves of my face again.
How's this for minimalistic? I ask.
Yeah, B.R., how do you like them apples?

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Great Piece on Ben Franklin and Creativity

I was just informed of this. A most delightful piece to read.
Ben Franklin, one of my heroes.

View/read it here.

And I love his "to-do" list.

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Jack White's Dead Weather

Jack White is a man about town (Nashville that is) who has his hands in a lot of promising pies. Two of them being the White Stripes and the Raconteurs. His appetite has gotten healthier, however, and he is now the frontman of a new act, Dead Weather.

I started developing an active interest in Detroit-based artists back in 2001 after living there for a good part of the year. White Stripes was one of the bands I started paying active attention to and the interest has taken good root. Especially, White Stripes who have delivered over and over again mostly on account of Jack White's idiosyncratic drumming. Jack White has now settled in Nashville and his new projects are coming out of there.

Something very interesting is happening here with respect to location and the actual value of geography-specific creativity. Jack White has been positively vocal about living in Nashville and why he has chosen to make the city his home. The music scene is rich and artistic networking inimitable. Another point of interest when discussing the validity of the creative class and how it desperately needs live feedback. For where the creatives roll together, new acts are born. I look forward to Dead Weather's debut in June.

"Dead Weather’s debut LP, Horehound — which White produced — [will be released] in June.... The tracks — a sludgy, bluesy blend of psych-rock guitar, alternately stark and explosive rhythms and Mosshart’s sultry-to-siren vocal — take relatively logical leaps from the members’ other bands, White’s groove-heavy drumming elevating the Dead Weather’s Stripes-esque blues-rock moods and Fertita and Mosshart pulling in atmosphere and disaffected cool, respectively."

Read more here.

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Sorry, Your Art Is Lacking...?

Members of the creative class rely on a fundamental support they get by virtue of being close to one another. Location, in this context, is everything. Or much of everything. The main reason behind clustering, after all, is the creative support and feedback that the creatives generate for themselves and their community.

Inspiration is key to productivity and without the clustering effect and some key external motivation it would be rather difficult to create.

-"So, what inspires you?"
This is a question I get often. I gave it some thought the other day and what's actually served as a true inspiration in the recent past is photography by the artists around me. And I don't just support them because they contribute actively to my own creativity. The more I live the more I think that we attract the kind of art that is, in nuce, congruent with our basic understanding of life, the arts, and the general human experience.

Now I'm pretty fortunate to have plenty of creative input and the work of the dear ones is inspiring. And what's inspired me the most in the recent past is photography, more specifically, literature as represented in photography.

But what can one say when confronted with a piece of art that doesn't necessarily ooze high quality? One needs to give an answer especially when actively encouraged to do so. So, what could be said?

Consider this as I thought it was worthy of reaction.

"Dear Prudence,
My dear, highly educated husband has written a book. While he has many talents, writing isn't among them. He paid someone to edit the book, which helped it somewhat, but it's still awful. I've gone through it as well and cleaned it up the best I could without completely rewriting it. The problem is my attitude—I don't feel it's my place to crush my husband's dream but find it hard to just sit there with a smile on my face while he goes on and on about how life will change when he's a best-selling author. It's not going to happen. I realize that at one point a publisher (or a stack of rejection letters) will make the point without me doing so, but I'm not quite sure how to act now. I love him and want to be supportive of him following his dreams, but I don't want him to waste his time. Do I stand by and lie, or break the news to him somehow?"

How would you deal with this scenario?

Tip of the hat to MR for the pointer.

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The Creative, the Berry, and Productivity

I had a most enjoyable conversation with my friend Polly tonight. Polly is what I would call a highly successful member of the creative class who is both switched on and tuned it.

We were talking about a cornucopia of things, one of them being the importance of context-decoding and connection-making. A successful 21-st century creative is not just one who has acquired much information of a general and esoteric nature but especially one who can make connections, contextualize things fast and effectively, and make the right linguistic choices.

I agree with both cognitively and experientially.

While talking to Polly, I thought of a Richard Florida article on the creative class and the human capital and I thought I’d include a snippet here. In it, Florida and his collaborator Charlotta Mellander, observe:

‘The role of talent and creativity in economic development has been a subject of growing interest to social scientists. Human capital is observed both to be an important contributor to growth and to be unevenly distributed
geographically.

While there is consensus on the importance of human capital to economic
development, debate takes shape around two central issues. First, there is the question of how best to measure human capital. The conventional measure of human capital is based on educational attainment (share of population with a bachelor’s degree and above). But more recent research suggests that it is more important to measure what people do than what they study, and thus occupationally based measures, associated principally with creative class occupations, have been introduced.’

An interesting study, no doubt. However, it does seem to leave out one important point: the necessity of immediate connection-making as facilitated by technology. A successful creative cannot simply be one who is well-educated, lives in a place where other like-minded creatives live, and has the ability to create in the niche s/he finds her/himself. But as Polly also mentioned, a successful creative is one who can clearly see what the nature of thing is and what connections to make and create accordingly.

Being switched on is a good thing, but being switched on and tuned in is better.
graph per blackberry
text per creative classroom

In Which Space Do You Work?

Richard Florida over at Creative Classroom (one of my favorite blogs) had a most interesting post today about creative spaces. He based some of his reactions on a recent NY Times bit about office spaces.
He writes:
'In Rise, I said the organizational precursors of the creative company
are Edison's laboratory and Andy Warhol's factory. The traditional
office is a place for control and for gossip and small talk. It is
inefficiency and waste taken to a new level. People visit with one
another, chit-chat, and get little actual work done. Just watch any
episode of "The Office" for crying out loud. With the rise of
electronic technology, like the stuff I'm using now, we can get focused
work done more effectively at home, on the road, in a coffee shop and
other venues than at the office. At home I work on the couch - I've
given up my home office.
Right now I'm working on a rattan lounge chair.
The office - or what used to be the office - now becomes a venue for
social interaction, for catching up, for discussing joint projects. The
social function becomes less about killing time and more important as a
way to connect, build relationships and keep up. One trend I've noticed
in my own work-style is that when I meet with colleagues and
collaborators at the office, we spend a lot more time catching up on
each other's lives and bonding so to speak than even talking about our
actual work. We then go home and send e-mail to catch up on that.
Most of my ideas are developed in a space other than the office. I
prefer the coffeeshop atmosphere.'

I would agree with this for the most part. I also have a predilection for choosing to do my creative work in places other than the conventional ones. And I also generally privilege the coffeeshop.
Technology enables the creatives to do their work anywhere. The presence of conventional walls is optional. All one needs are the gadgets that allow one to do the work and one could be at an airport in a foreign land, on a family member's Lazy Boy when visiting for the holidays, or at a coffeeshop. Any coffeeshop anywhere.
Like Richard, the best place for me to accomplish creative work is not necessarily my work or home office. The work office is a good space to deal with the quotidian elements of the work, and the home office area is necessary when dealing with the work I have to bring home if the day was not enough to take care of it.
Just where do I feel I am the most creative? I would say, anywhere. As long as I have all my necessary tech tools which fit nicely in an urban bag. The contents of that bag are what allow me to feel authentic. And as long as I have my urban bag the creative space can be created basically anywhere.
Where do you accomplish your creative work? How much does space actually matter?

graph per open house