Tag Archives: innovation

Apr 16 2012
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High-Speed Rail or Where We Would be Today if They’d Only Seen My Ten-Year-Old Drafts

Did you know that Japan has had a bullet train since 1961? I kid you not. Eight years before America sent a man to the moon. Two years before the British Invasion. In Europe, high-speed rail started during the International Transport Fair in Munich in June 1965, when DB Class 103 hauled a total of 347 demonstration trains at 200 km/h (124 mph) between Munich and Augsburg.

Exactly three years ago to the day (April 16, 2009), President Obama proposed a plan to fight the economic crisis with a focus on infrastructure. He proposed high-speed rail. It would create jobs, fight gridlock, save lives on the highway, oh, and cut down on our oil dependency. So, what’s happened since then? Good question.

What does high-speed rail have to do with Hanging Chad subject matter? Well, doesn’t high-speed rail relate to creativity and innovation? I was ten and I lived in California when I conceived the idea: a capsule that travels at high speeds and takes you anywhere. Sure, I had a lot of space-age ideas, too, but this was grounded in real possibility. Or so it seemed. (And apparently it wasn’t really as innovative as I thought way back in 1982.) Because here we stand–the U.S. of A. in 2012 (some 30 years later), without a single high-speed rail line.

What are we missing? Where does one begin? Maximum commercial speed is about 300 km/h (186 mph) for the majority of national high speed railways (Japan, China, Taiwan, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, UK). The Shanghai Maglev Train reaches 431 km/h (268 mph). What would it be like to travel from Chattanooga to Atlanta in thirty minutes, all while sipping a cup of joe and composing a blog post? Pick your cities. Cut your travel time by 25-75%. Relax and thank your lucky stars that you’re alive and traveling in the 21st century.

Currently, California is attempting to resurrect this transformative idea but for some reason it continues to meet with a surprising amount of resistance and political footballing. You can believe the hype that the project is a bag of “lemons,” and that the costs have been wildly overestimated. However, it seems, as so many other issues related to the American economy, that we’re stuck by the powerful vested interest of the oil companies who have created a “think tank” to spread the word that high-speed rail would lead to “bigger government” and mismanagement and who knows what other obfuscation. I’m sorry, but Hanging Chad has had enough. Let’s get some high-speed rail in the land of freedom and innovation before I die a bitter and resigned old man!

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Mar 30 2012
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Community

Start with Why: A Great Idea Applied to C&R Press

Ryan Van Cleave and I founded C&R Press in late 2006, which brings up to a little over five full years of operation. We had more good ideas than we could possibly generate–and far more energy and expertise than funds–and while we’ve built a solid base of support and backlist of books and authors we’re proud of, we still haven’t approximated the tipping point we still strive for.

Fundraising has been our biggest challenge. As the press has grown, it’s been all we can do to manage the production of our titles and keep things moving for our authors. We’ve literally not once taken advantage of our 501(c)3 nonprofit status in order to write a grant. Neither have we put together a fundraiser, or even initiated a pledge drive. Somehow, we’ve survived from the modest sales of many of our authors, and a few generous donations. A little over a month ago, however, at the AWP National Writers’ Conference in Chicago, we began to reaffirm our belief and commitment that our press (that began “ex nihilo”) can still fulfill the mission and vision that we originally conceived several years ago.

There is far too much going on behind the scenes for C&R right now for any single post, but one thing that sent us spinning into overdrive when we came back from our exhilarating conference was the need to more clearly define who we already are. We met with Christa Payne, the Director of Development and External Relations for the Public Education Foundation, an expert in fundraising. Among other things, we asked:

Why can’t we, as a nonprofit literary press, have a fundraiser? And what’s keeping us from writing and landing local, regional and national grants?

So many grants have such specific guidelines that it’s easy to lose the forest for the trees. For instance, while community development and enhancing the arts is a great intersection between what a grant seeks to fund and what we CAN do, above and beyond we need operational funds to sign and promote the many wonderful authors that come our way, to be solvent. We believe in literature as a transformative and crucial cultural dimension of human experience in and of itself, not necessarily tied to other nonprofit campaigns. How do we communicate that, and how do we find others to join our cause?

The long and short of it is this: Our conversation with Christa and others over the past several weeks led us to confirming a stronger case of not only who we are, or what we do, but most importantly, why we are. When I saw this Ted Talk, it hit me that everything we already are is not being stated clearly enough. Ryan and I went to work. The results can be found on our website. We’re still “in process” on some our aesthetics and design, but the statements are there now. Why (we are), How (we do it), and What (we do).

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Feb 24 2012
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Community, Publishing and Writing Forum

Does Brainstorming Really Work?

I’ve always loved it. This whole idea of team everything and working together creatively in a non-judgmental way. But what if the evidence proved that collective brainstorming really doesn’t work? The idea of brainstorming, which actually began with the publication of  in 1948, Your Creative Power by Alex Osborn, is like religion in a lot of work places. And you can see why. When the idea is to go for as many ideas as possible, for quantity over quality, for not critiquing or censoring anything so that everyone will talk and feel like they’re contributing, you’ll naturally have a more engaged and happier work force.

In a recent New Yorker article, Jonah Lehrer, argues that brainstorming is a myth, and quotes Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, who summarizes the science:

“Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.”

Is it true, then, that we really work better on our own as compared to those who gather to brainstorm? Not exactly. It’s just that not all brainstorms are created equal.

It’s not that group work is all bad and the new turn should be to send everyone back to their rooms until further notice. It’s that there is a fundamental fallacy behind the notion that even the merest hint of criticism kills the “delicate flower” (as Osborn once called it) of the creative impulse. In fact, recent research demonstrates that while it is good for a group to feel free to be wide open to all ideas, the best work comes from those who also debate and even criticize others’ ideas. Dissent stimulates ideas.

You know what this makes me think of? Writing and reading book reviews. After graduate school and years of workshops I had a deep aversion, a kind of pendulum swing over-reaction to anything that smacked of the “critical” or the chin-thrusting fastidiousness of an elitist snob or judge. Then, Gerry LaFemina asked me to write an in-depth review for Review Revue, a newspaper-styled format which evaluated and discussed contemporary poetry. For some reason, the timing was right I guess, by virtue of reading analysis of other poetry I felt an intellectual hunger and an emotional creative drive. In other words, I was creatively stimulated doing what is considered a non-creative task, the reading and evaluation of others’ work. I realized the act of reviewing is a kind of collective communal act in which one puts one’s own (hopefully informed) opinions in the public sphere for the mutual benefit of driving the art.

It’s not like all creative brainstorming doesn’t come back and evaluate the effectiveness of what the open-ended creative sessions yielded, but studies indicate by a wide margin that when the creativity is developed within the context of specific, controlled measures of creativity and debate, that the time is used more effectively. Criticism can wake us up to new ideas because it forces us to move below the surface of predictability and consider alternative perspectives. Essentially, it wakes up our minds.

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Feb 04 2012
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The New Zoo Music Review

Is Wilco’s The Whole Love Boundary Pushing or Endearing?

In some ways–a lot of ways–rock is the very genre of boundary pushing, so what does it mean when album review after album review of an artist’s work is analyzed and assessed by the degree to which it’s “pushed boundaries”?

Take, for instance, the latest (eighth) Wilco CD, The Whole Love. I love Wilco. I mean, I might get a panic attack just talking about them.

The Whole Love certainly is getting a whole lot of attention, and most of it is pretty positive, some of it ecstatic. But I’ve really been trying to get my mind around the idea of how they’re developing this reputation for being so experimental in the very eyes of rock n’ roll history.

Rolling Stone found a place for The Whole Love in its top 10 albums of 2011, “with the band at its original endearing best.” Randall Roberts, writing for “Pop and Hiss” of the L.A. Times Review, says that all six members of Wilco are still reaching out in new directions. So, which is it?

Greg Kot, writing for the Chicago Tribune, writes, “On most of the songs, Tweedy indulges in lyrics that blur the line between nonsense and poetry, revelation and obfuscation.” A good characterization, I think. Kitty Empire, writing for The Observer, says of the much-discussed first song, “Art of Love” , “It’s a restless seven-minute opener, pregnant with possibility, mustering uneasy beats, strings, and a Krautrock work-out in which gifted guitarist Nels Cline scrawls outside the lines with glee.” What a wonderful sentence! Paul Thompson, writing for Pitchfork, calls Wilco “one of the most forward-thinking American bands of the last decade and change.” But does pushing musical boundaries simply mean that a band continues to “experiment” while maintaining and growing a fan base, as John Dolan for Rolling Stone writes?

Or is it about expectations?

It’s generally accepted that the band’s sixth and seventh projects seemed less spirited in an experimental sense than mid-period efforts such as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost is Born, which came out of left compared with their earlier Americana-based efforts. For a long period, Wilco was largely ignored by the mainstream music establishment. Now everyone is writing about their latest like they’re the leaders of rock creativity? What’s the criteria? Extended “wig outs”? Space jams? Innovative marketing approaches? Re-inventing yourself with each album? Can we know it as it’s happening, or is it always something in retrospect?

As far as I understand innovation, the small sub-genre of rock, “post rock” or “space rock,” continues to produce what seems to me as authentic, boundary-expanding music. Bands like Explosions in the Sky, The American Dollar, Mogwai, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Do Make Say Think, Sigur Ros, and the many bands you might have seen on a given Friday or Saturday night for the past twenty years at The Empty Bottle in Chicago. The music is orchestral, complex, often incorporating a plenitude of instruments not ordinarily associated with rock. Oh, and they rarely sing.

I get why these styles are never going to be popular. They don’t have the melodic hooks, and for as innovative as the sonic textures and dynamics may be, there’s an inherent anonymity when one has no lyrics/singing (although one might say that there are an awful lot of bands who might have strongly considered this approach…How many times have you been hooked momentarily by a few measures or riffs, only to lose interest when the singing began?).

Interestingly enough, Jeff Tweedy’s limited singing range (often described as a “rasp”) has always been a limitation. Let’s face it, some of this comes down to Tweedy’s charismatic personality, and the work he’s done as a producer, founding the band and seeing it through its long-and-winding permutations. For me, one of the best all-time lyrical examples of Tweedy’s gift for pushing the boundaries of “obfuscation” but still suggesting all sorts of possible meanings, is “Company in My Back.”

I fell in love with ‘Foxtrot,’ ‘Ghost,’ and ‘Sky Blue Sky’ immediately. I felt like I’ve had to explore more with the last two (The Album), and now The Whole Love. They’re filled with wonderful detail but are maybe a little harder to hold right at first.

“California Stars” by Woody Guthrie, and recorded on Mermaid Avenue, Vol. 1.

The most trend-setting song from “The Whole Love”

Love this:

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