Friday's A to Z

Building on yesterday's post, here are some things I ♥ right now:


A - APA Compass. We did a show this morning. We'll have archives up in the next couple of days.
B - Boots.
C - Community. One of my favorite TV shows right now with one of my favorite characters on TV right now Abed. One of the best episodes of TV ever is Modern Warfare from Season 1, Episode 23, directed by Justin Lin.
D - Danny's Auto on Halsey and 60th.
E - Energy.
F - Farmers Market. Only 2 more weeks!
G - Gabriel's Bakery's herb cheese bagels.
H - Harry Potter. I know, I'm a late bloomer.
I - Improv Theater. Shameless promo: We're doing a show next week Small Space, Big Stories.
J - Jackets.
K - Kissing hubby.
L - The Library.
M - Milani Nail Lacquer "Cappucino" - described "Light Coffee with Gold Shimmer"
N - The Great Northwest.
O - Owls.
P - Piano. I feel very blessed to have one of my very own. I recently learned how to play "Don't Stop Believing" and "Here Comes the Sun" on YouTube. Amazing.
Q - Maggie Q, star of Nikita. I watched the show as homework for our APA Compass radio discussion about APAs on TV, and now am fully sucked in.
R - Rest.
S - Slings and Arrows. More on this next week.
T - Time Traveler's Wife.
U - Upper Horsetail and Triple Falls at the Columbia River Gorge.
V - Vodka Martini. A little dirty.
W - White Tea. Specifically Vanilla Apricot White Tea by Tazo.
X - Extracurriculars. (Close enough to X!) My life is all extracurricular it seems right now.
Y - Soft Yolks. I had my eggs over easy this morning and it was yum.
Z - Portland Zombie Walk.

"A" image is by me.
"Z" image found on Wikimedia Commons: Route sign for Missouri Supplemental Route Z. Based on Image:MO-supp-K.svg by User:PHenry.

Slings and Arrows, for the arts administrator

To ring in the new Gregorian year, I'd like to recommend this series...


I stumbled across Slings and Arrows somehow. Someone along the way recommended it to me (thank you, whoever you are!!) and I've finally finished the three seasons on DVD. A perfect show for those arts administrators amongst us, the delightful comedy extolls the foibles, earnestness, absurdity and glory of bringing arts to the people.

It follows the creative and administrative teams at the fictional "New Burbage Festival," a Shakespeare festival, not unlike our fine state's Oregon Shakespeare Festival (though I believe it's really modeled after the Stratford Festival.) Complete with lots of great Shakespeare, star-crossed lovers, intrigue, ghosts and great accents - thank you Canadians for your most excellent comedy!

on creativity

Here's a fascinating article by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman from Newsweek about the decline of creativity in the US:

The Creativity Crisis

The article uses reports from professor E. Paul Torrance's creativity tests as a jumping off point about measuring creativity, how creativity manifests and why it's important. Early on the author's define creativity (not sure who has "accepted" the definition, as I might wordsmith it some myself):

"The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful, and that’s what’s reflected in the tests. There is never one right answer. To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result)."

On the one hand, the authors posit that "creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom."

"The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly."

On the flip side, it does seem that artists do have a leg up in the creativity category. Using an example of a study done at University of Western Ontario neuroscientist Daniel Ansari and Harvard’s Aaron Berkowitz, the article highlights the value of right-brain/left-brain process in creativity:

"They put Dartmouth music majors and nonmusicians in an fMRI scanner, giving participants a one-handed fiber-optic keyboard to play melodies on. Sometimes melodies were rehearsed; other times they were creatively improvised. During improvisation, the highly trained music majors used their brains in a way the nonmusicians could not: they deactivated their right-temporoparietal junction. Normally, the r-TPJ reads incoming stimuli, sorting the stream for relevance. By turning that off, the musicians blocked out all distraction. They hit an extra gear of concentration, allowing them to work with the notes and create music spontaneously."

The whole article left me pondering creativity vs. arts and really how we can provide opportunities for more, more, more. This means rethinking everything: arts education, education reform, community development - all of it. To me empowering creativity is empowering individuals to be critically engaged in our world and our environment.