One of my probably unhealthy obsessions is with obituaries (it is more healthy, however, than my obsession with calzones). I tend to notice who has passed - from the superstars to the lesser known folks. Every so often I will write some notes about creative folks we have lost recently.
I will start off this blog by remembering Larry Gelbart. As my dear friend and collaborator Scott Barry Kaufman wrote in his recent blog for PT, Larry Gelbart was going to contribute to one of our edited volumes that has not (yet) taken off. He was an early celebrity to be visible on the web; I saw him posting in a MASH newsgroup and wrote just to say how much I loved his work. I was pleasantly surprised he wrote back. I wrote him a few more times, including to invite him to contribute to our book. Gelbart is better known for his television and movie work (in addition to MASH, he also worked on Your Show of Shows, Tootsie, and Blame it on Rio), but I love him for his contributions to musical theatre. He wrote several lesser-known shows, such as The Conquering Hero and One Two Three Four Five (which spawned a gorgeous song by Maury Yeston called "New Words"). But his more lasting creations were the books (i.e., the parts of the musical that aren't sung) to City of Angels and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. If it's hard to write a musical and harder to write a good musical, then it is triply hard a good musical that is funny. But Gelbart did it twice. City of Angels is noir-meets-neurosis, as 40's mystery writer Stine creates a hardboiled, Bogart-like alter ego (Stone). We see the story he is writing, with a hero who is tough and gutsy, and then we see the life he is living, which is a bit more humdrum and embarrassing. Forum is better known; it tells the story of the ancient Greek slave Pseudolus (but City of Angels is my favorite).
We also lost Jim Carroll, best known as the author of the memoir Basketball Diaries. He was also a punk rock singer (his biggest hit was People Who Died, a litany of all of his friends he has lost) and a spoken word poet. Much of his work focused on his struggles with heroin addiction. One topic that has always fascinated me is creative polymathy - people who are creative in more than one domain. It's quite hard to make that distinction, sometimes - what constitutes a domain? Carroll was a memoirist, singer, and poet. Is that one domain (verbal creativity, let's say) or three? How about with Larry Gelbart -he was a screenwriter, memoirist, librettist, playwright....but all of his creative contributions revolve around "funny."
Finally, creativity in unexpected areas has always been one of my passions, and we lost someone who was a creative genius in the field of agricultural science. Norman Borlaug was concerned about the rising prospect of global famine. He dedicated his life to working on such creations as high-yield crops. He then took his knowledge, hard work, and creativity to Asia and Africa, where he worked in the fields and the in the labs to vastly increase both the quantity and quality of such crops as wheat and rice. He is credited for saving as many as one billion lives from his life's work, and is often cited as the father of the green movement. Although he has been recognized (he won the Nobel Peace Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom), Borlaug is largely unknown to the public. He would be in my top ten of the greatest people of the twentieth century.
Creativity takes on all shapes and forms. Sometimes creativity can be used to make the world a happier place; think of how Larry Gelbart made us laugh. Sometimes creativity can channel genuine pain and struggles, as with Jim Carroll. And sometimes, creativity can transform the lives of millions of people in simple yet powerful ways, as Norman Borlaug.
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