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Here’s my measure of creativity. Try it before reading on. Time yourself. Let’s say 30 seconds. You are going to think of 5 words. Your goal is to come up with 5 words that are as unrelated to one another as possible. Go.
Via Jonah Lehrer, I found this article that would give some backstory to my test. I will paraphrase, but it’s worth reading the article. First of all, our memory is understood to work by passive association (as opposed to conscious recollection.) You have a thought or an experience, and memory conjures up a bunch of potentially relevant stuff. Then, subconsciously, a filter is applied which sorts through these passive recollections and finds the ones that are most relevant and allows only these to bubble up into conscious processing.
Now, there are patients with damage to areas of their brain that effectively shuts off this filter. When you ask these patients a question, they will respond with information that is no more likely to be true as it is to be completely fabricated from related memories, or even previously imagined scenarios. These people are called confabulators.
The article discusses how especially creative people with perfectly healthy brains achieve their heights of creativity by reducing activity in that area of the brain associated with the filter. The suggestion is that creativity is the result of allowing into consciousness those ideas that less creative people would inhibit on the grounds of irrelevance. And this makes sense when you realize that thought does not “create” anything that wasn’t already buried in there somewhere. Observationally, what distinguishes a creative person from the rest of us is that the creative person says and does the unexpected, “outside the box,” “out of left-field” etc.
It reinforces the view that creative work doesn’t come from active “research.” At best you can facilitate its arrival.
The full title of the Dylan tune is “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again.” When you have listened to that song as much as I have you start to notice the patterns. Check out the lyrics.
- Two four-line verses with xAyA rhyme scheme, followed by the chorus “Oh Mama, can this really be the end?…”
- The first verse in the pair introduces a character and a scene and there is some hint of strangeness about it. As with a lot of Dylan tunes the character is often a vague literary reference or some generic symbol of authority. Sometimes both.
- The narrator usually first appears in the second verse of the pair, possibly alongside a new character.
- In the second half the narrator has some sense of disconnection with the scene/character and
- It resolves in the last line with the narrator being tricked and we are left with a feeling of hopelessness or isolation. (the notable exception to this is the 6th verse were the narrator turns the tables on the character, the preacher. still this somehow makes for even more hopelessness.)
For example, the last verse in the song:
Now the bricks lay on Grand Street
Where the neon madmen climb. (#2a)
They all fall there so perfectly,
It all seems so well timed. (#2b)
An’ here I sit so patiently (#3) (#4)
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice. (#5)
You can almost use this as a recipe and write verse after verse of your own. I have some kind of strange disease that makes me like to do stuff like that, so here goes. My very own Memphis Blues verse:
Well the barrister wrote to Ahab
Pleading for his vote
And offering to serenade
At the launching of his boatAnd the rickshaw driver said to me
Speeding to the dock
“They’ll tempt you with blue oysters
But serve you Brighton Rock.”
Oh, Mama…
That’s the question taken up at Wired’s GeekDad blog. My third-grader gets weekly “homework” which is supposed to teach her cursive writing. I am sure that a lot of time is being wasted. But I am not sure that it’s cursive that should go. Handwritten text is losing its practical purpose, so if we are going to retire something, perhaps the fancy stuff should surive.
R. Crumb is illustrating The Book of Genesis. An excerpt appears in this week’s New Yorker. Here is a copyright-violating scan. (via BoingBoing)
By the time he came to the story of Noah, though, he was annoyed. He had begun to realize, he says, that “the whole thing is a piece of patriarchal propoganda, engineered to consciously and deliberately suppress matriarchy.”
One of the best movies I have ever seen is Crumb, a documentary about R. Crumb and his two brothers. If you have seen that film you have some context for the quote above. I am pre-ordering my Book of Genesis now.
One theory: Broadway is vulnerable to boors because it is under pressure. More new shows opened this past season than at any point in the past 25 years, which means more seats to fill in a recession. In response, shows have been offering steep discounts on tickets, which can normally cost upwards of $100 apiece. BroadwayWorld.com, an entertainment site, is promoting a “Lucky Sevens” discount that offers a “Guys and Dolls” ticket for $7.77 with the purchase of a full-price seat.
That’s the theory. Here are the data:
The litany of misdemeanors is long. During a Saturday matinee of the Holocaust drama “Irena’s Vow,” a man walked in late and called up to actress Tovah Feldshuh to halt her monologue until he got settled. “He shouted, ‘Can you please wait a second?’ and then continued on toward his seat,” recalls Nick Ahlers, a science teacher from Newark, N.J., who was in the audience. He says the actress complied.
During a recent matinee of “God of Carnage,” which explores the lives of two couples, a woman in the mezzanine screamed, “How ’bout those Yankees!” — filling one of the play’s intense silences. At “The Norman Conquests,” an elderly man familiar with the British comedy script recited his favorite lines as the actors read them, prompting audience members to confront him at intermission. Steve Loucks, a theater blogger from Minneapolis who was sitting near the man, was stunned. “What is with people who think they’re in their own living rooms?”
Via kottke.org, here is the first installment of an Errol Morris essay on Han van Meegeren, the Dutch artist who duped the art world into thinking that his paintings were the work of Vermeer. Morris concludes with the following
To be sure, the Van Meegeren story raises many, many questions. Among them: what makes a work of art great? Is it the signature of (or attribution to) an acknowledged master? Is it just a name? Or is it a name implying a provenance? With a photograph we may be interested in the photographer but also in what the photograph is of. With a painting this is often turned around, we may be interested in what the painting is of, but we are primarily interested in the question: who made it? Who held a brush to canvas and painted it? Whether it is the work of an acclaimed master like Vermeer or a duplicitous forger like Van Meegeren — we want to know more.
The economics version of this question is why the price of a painting would fall just because it has been discovered to be a forgery by technical means and not because the painting was considered of lesser quality. And a corollary question. If you own a painting which is thought by all to be a genuine Vermeer, why would you or anyone invest to find out whether it was a forgery. There is probably a good answer to this that doesn’t require resorting to the assumption that buyers value the name more than the painting.
The value of a painting is the flow value of having it hang on your wall plus the eventual resale value. For the truly immortal works of art the flow value is negligible relative to the resale value. The resale value is linked to the flow value to the person to whom it will be sold to, the person she will sell it to, etc. Ultimately this means that the price is determined by the sequence of people who have the greatest appreciation for art, since they will be willing to pay the most for the flow value. The existence of just one person in that sequence who is sensitive enough to distinguish a true Vermeer from a Van Meegeren implies a large difference in the prices, even if that person is not alive today and will not be for many generations.
What do you get when you combine GPS and GSR (Galvanic Skin Response: a measure of emotional arousal) and an artist’s inspiration? You get emotional maps, that’s what. Think of a topographical map where the vertical dimension at a location measures the emotional excitement of the people passing through there. Here’s San Francisco. Here’s more information. (via MindHacks)
This video would be identical if played backwards. That by itself is not so impressive (just make a video and play it first forwards and then backwards) but the way it was done here is clever and funny (via BoingBoing.)
That’s a line from a crucial moment in the play Art by Yazmina Reza. I saw the play at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago last week. This was one of the best plays I have seen there in my 10 years as a subscriber (putting aside August: Osage County which is in another category altogether.) Highly recommended.
But it is not for everybody. Sandeep wouldn’t like it for example (then again as documented previously on this blog Sandeep has bad taste.) I wanted to write a review to give a sense of who might like the play and I spent some time thinking about how to convey that, but a conventional review failed to materialize. After a while I realized that the right way to review it is in the form of a dialog between the characters in the play.
There are three characters: Serge, a dilettante who has created some buzz with a painting he just bought, Marc, a friend who is having a difficult time articulating his reaction to said painting, and Yvan who is helplessly caught in the middle. Hit the link below for the review.
Why did we decide to do this blog? I’m not really sure. A creative outlet? A way to throw out random ideas? A vague hope that something fun might come out of it? A replacement for endless websurfing?
Well, the “vague hope” rationale has already worked out. Jeff and I had a wonderful time at our appearance on the Interview Show at the Hideout. There are a lot of dimensions to why we enjoyed it and I’m sure we’ll both blog about it. The thing I want to talk about now is the club itself and its owners. It is a little west of the big Home Depot on North Av. There is weird industrial stuff all around and a large filling station for trucks. And slap bang in the middle of all of it is a little house which has been turned into this club. I thought it would be full of truckers and instead it is weirdly middle class. I had a Bell’s Oberon, definitely in the microbrew category. I could have been ironically postmodern and had a Hamm’s but I did not spot it in time. I love the crappy end of American beer!
Jeff and I are too old to know about clubs but the Hideout gets rave reviews among the cognoscenti. The owners, Tim and Katie Tuten, are very interesting. You might expect some ex rockstar to own it. Maybe, Tim and Katie have this history in their deep, dark past. Now, they have regular day jobs – Tim works in the Chicago Public Schools and Katie for a charity. They’re also a little older than you might expect. (I hope they do not mind me saying this! ) They more than make up for it by having the extroversion and energy of twentysomethings. Tim did a little stand-up before Mark Bazer came on. They also have incredible taste in music – that night’s act Anni Rossi was transporting. Tim worked for Arne Duncan in Chicago and will join him in DC doing special events. As we left, Katie ran to the door and said all economist number-crunchers were welcome, except those from the University of Chicago. I’m sure if she met Phil Reny, Roger Myerson etc she would welcome them too.
And I’d never have met them if it weren’t for this blog! I also got to hang out with Jeff on his own, a rare thing as we’re so busy nowadays. I enjoyed his humor while he dealt with my depression with grace.
I should think about some clever econ thing to blog about and see if it leads anywhere.
I have been enjoying reading the blog of Seth Godin. In a recent post he wrote the following.
It’s quite possible that the era of the professional reviewer is over. No longer can a single individual (except maybe Oprah) make a movie, a restaurant or a book into a hit or a dud.
Not only can an influential blogger sell thousands of books, she can spread an idea that reaches others, influencing not just the reader, but the people who read that person’s blog or tweets. And so it spreads.
The post goes in another direction after that, but I started thinking about this conventional view that the web reduces concentration in the market for professional opinions. No doubt blogs, discussion boards, web 2.0 make it easier for people with opinions to express them and people looking for opinions to find those that suit their taste.
But does this necessarily decrease concentration? If everybody had similar tastes in movies, say, the effect of lowering barriers to entry would be to allow the market to coordinate on the one guy in the world who can best judge movies according to that standard and articulate his opinion. Of course people have different tastes and the conventional view is based on the idea that the web allows segmentation according to taste. But what if talent in evaluating movies means the ability to judge how people with different tastes would react to different movies? A review would be a contingent recommendation like “if you like this kind of movie, this is for you. if you like that kind of movie, then stay away from this one but you might like that one instead.”
In fact, a third effect of the web is to make it easy for experts to find out what different tastes there are out there and how they react to movies. This tends to increase centralization because it creates a natural monopoly in cataloging tastes and matching tastes to recommendations. Indeed, Netflix’s marketing strategy is based on this idea and I am lead to hold out Netflix as a counterexample to the conventional view.
Talk about smashing boundaries. Here is video of that de-trendy trio playing backup music to the Isaac Mizrahi fashion show in New York’s fashion week. The tune is apparently the new Dave King-penned “Really Good Attitude” (listen for the hand claps.) See if you can see any effect on the models’ expressions when the improvisation really goes off the rails.
Here is Ethen Iverson’s account of the event from his great blog Do The Math.
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