The Bluegrass and Beyond

Lexington sculptor John Tuska had a sign on his studio wall: Non basta una vita. In Italian it means, One life is not enough.

“It isn’t enough for all the things I want to do,” he once told an interviewer. “Work generates work.”

Fortunately for Tuska, who died in 1998 at age 67, there was someone to give his artistic vision another life.

In the past dozen years, Seth Tuska, 50, has been collecting, organizing and cataloging his father’s prolific work: more than 25,000 documents now housed at the University of Kentucky and more than 4,000 pieces of sculpture, drawing, ceramics and mixed media.

He has worked with a curator to create a 60-piece traveling exhibition that is being marketed to museums around the world. He has turned his childhood home into a museum of his father’s work, which had its “grand reopening” on Friday. And he has started a studio, gallery and reproductions business that he hopes will give the museum financial security.

He has worked with filmmakers Arthur Rouse and Kiley Lane on a documentary about his father that premiered in July on Kentucky Educational Television. And he is working with Lexington historian and author David F. Burg on a biography.

On one level, Seth Tuska has spent the past dozen years coming to terms with the most complex relationship of his life. On another, he has laid the groundwork for securing his father’s legacy — and for helping other Kentucky artists create theirs.

John Regis Tuska was born in Yukon, Pa., in 1931, the eighth of 10 children and the only son of a coal miner. The Great Depression was on, and when the mines shut down the family moved to New York City when Tuska was 6.

Tuska’s father, a Slovakian immigrant, never understood his artistic son, who would skip school and roam the stacks of the Brooklyn Public Library. Tuska graduated from an alternative high school for the arts and worked proofreading Collier’s Encyclopedia for 25 cents a day. It was the perfect job for a teenager with an insatiable appetite for knowledge.

After a hitch in the Navy, where he went to Japan and became fascinated with pottery, Tuska graduated from the prestigious New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. He came to Kentucky for a teaching job at Murray State University. Within three years, he moved to UK, where he was teacher and mentor to hundreds of students over three decades. The university is now home to the Tuska Center for Contemporary Art, a gallery in the Fine Arts Building.

Tuska’s wife and muse, Miriam, was a Jewish girl from New Jersey whose family disowned her for marrying Tuska, a Roman Catholic. She also was an art student when they met at Alfred, and she worked with textiles all her life. They had two sons, Seth and Stephen.

For years, Miriam Tuska tried to persuade her husband to go back to New York, where she thought his artistry would be more appreciated. Besides, she missed the ocean. But Tuska liked Kentucky, and the closest she ever came to living near the ocean was in 1975, when the family bought a Victorian house at 147 Old Park Avenue in Lexington, which she named “The Breakers.”

Tuska’s first major commission was Genesis, a ceramic interpretation of creation, which hangs on the 18th floor of UK’s Patterson Tower. He focused on ceramics until 1969, when he took a yearlong sabbatical to Rome and became fascinated with bronze sculpture and the human form. It dominated the rest of his life’s work.

“He was never trying to create a photograph,” Seth Tuska said of his father’s sculpture. “He was trying to create an idea that you’re looking at what’s going to happen next. Where is that motion going?”

Tuska’s next major commission, in 1974 for Vanderbilt University in Nashville, was a series of bronze panels depicting the mythological flight of Icarus. In 1985, he did a bust of U.S. Sen. John Sherman Cooper for the state Capitol in Frankfort.

Tuska loved experimenting with materials and technique. He sculpted in bronze, plastic and wire and made his own paper to mold reliefs that looked like bronze.

“The man never stopped; he was always trying something new,” Seth Tuska said. “He didn’t like being in the public eye. He liked the classroom and his studio. That was his environment. But if you came to him, he would talk your ear off.”

Tuska’s constant work left little time for physical fitness — or family, aside from the annual “Christmas tree/ Hanukkah bush,” an elaborate two-week family art project. Triple-bypass heart surgery only seemed to intensify Tuska’s desire to create as much as he could in life.

His last major piece — and the one most visible in Lexington — was Illumine, a series of 56 bronze figures celebrating individual human expression that are mounted on the façade of UK’s Fine Arts Building. He worked on it from 1985 to 1995. By the end, Tuska was too frail to cast the bronze, so his graduate students did. His son hung it.

Seth Tuska had spent 20 years as a structural engineer, designing bridges and homes. But when his mother fell ill, he became his parents’ caregiver. After she died in August 1996 at age 65, the next 18 months were a time of discovery, when Seth Tuska finally began to understand the forces that had driven his father — and kept them apart.

“Mom raised us,” he said. “My father worked all the time. He was a loving, giving person … but if you wanted to be in Dad’s world, you had to be in Dad’s world. That’s why I’m an artist. I spent a lot of time with him in his studio. He rarely included himself in our lives. I understand that now, but as a child it was a bit difficult.”

John Tuska got a second wind in the summer of 1997, when he returned to Japan to represent the arts in Kentucky. When he returned, father and son began converting the family home into a gallery and studio. Then, just before Christmas, John Tuska fell and shattered his right arm and drawing hand. It never healed properly.

“In those last few weeks, our conversations were very reflective,” Seth Tuska said. “For the first time in his life, his body would not let him do anything that he needed to do. One life was not enough for all the things he wanted to do.”

John Tuska died April 30, 1998. He apparently saw it coming: In 1964, he made three drawings depicting the stages of his artistic life. The final one showed him much as he would be 34 years later — broken right arm and all.

Working with Rachel Sadinsky, a Lexington-based independent art appraiser and curator, Seth Tuska organized his father’s papers and sorted through his studios at home and at UK’s Reynolds Building.

“The man never threw anything away,” he said. “My journey has been, how do I share this?”

There are the museum and gallery, the papers at UK, the documentary film, the biography, the exhibition and catalog. And then there is the business, selling Tuska reproductions to support the museum and related education efforts.

Because much of Tuska’s work depicted human figures in motion, his son is marketing limited-edition pieces to health and wellness companies. It doesn’t hurt that the International Spa Association is based in Lexington.

“I might get accused of re-creating my father’s work,” he said. “But these are all things we talked about doing and were directed by him.”

Seth Tuska said he wants his father to be remembered as a great artist.

“I’m the son promoting my father, so that’s a tough sell to begin with,” he said. But Alfred University is providing help and encouragement, and initial response from museums to the exhibit has been good.

Perhaps the most significant legacy project has been the creation of Tuska Studio and Foundry in the former 9,000-square-foot Perry Lumber Co. building on Walton Avenue.

Bronze artists usually sculpt in clay, but it is a time-consuming and expensive process to turn those sculptures into bronze pieces.

Three years in the making, the studio includes a wood shop, metal shop, ceramics studio, silversmith’s studio and a bronze foundry run by artist and teacher Brad Connell.

Tuska and Connell are expanding the foundry to give it the capability to do life-size sculptures. They hope it will fill a need for Kentucky artists and become a place where the public can learn about bronze sculpture.

Lexington not only has a lot of horses; it has a lot of equine artists, including top horse sculptors Gwen Reardon of Thoroughbred Park fame, Shelley Hunter, Karen Kasper and Alexa King.

Earlier this month, there was a “pour party” at the studio for the casting of the final pieces of Hunter’s half-life-size statue of John Henry, which will mark the beloved race horse’s grave at the Kentucky Horse Park.

“I was going to go to a foundry in Michigan, but that would have been a lot of trouble and expense,” said Hunter, executive director of the Lexington-based American Academy of Equine Art. “This is a wonderful resource for Lexington. We’re the horse capital of the world and do all these sculptures, and now we can make them here. The money doesn’t leave town.”

This was her first experience working with the Tuska Studio, Hunter said, “but it won’t be the last time. These guys have been wonderful.”

As she spoke, Hunter stood beside a wall that displayed artifacts from John Tuska’s career. his leather casting apron, images of his work, a copy of his studio sign, Non basta una vita.

Bronze was John Tuska’s favorite medium, and the son says his father had dreamed of having his own foundry.

In this life, he has one.

Click each frame to see the full photo and caption information….

There were so many good speakers and programs at the Idea Festival in Louisville this week, it was hard to attend them all, much less write about them all.

To read, see and hear more, go to the Idea Festival Web site, which includes Podcasts and videos. There’s also the festival’s official blog. Nicholasville blogger Wayne Hall and his helpers did a good job of covering the event.

For more information on the Idea Kentucky event I wrote about Wednesday, go to the Idea Kentucky Web site and another site, iMedia Kentucky Web site, a resource created by the Kentucky Science and Technology Corp. and two state agencies.

If you’re an architecture buff, the University of Kentucky College of Design’s Web site includes information about its fall lecture series and has videos of lectures that have already taken place.

Don’t you feel smarter already?

Immaculee Ilibagiza. Photo by Tom Eblen

Immaculee Ilibagiza lost most of her family in the tribal genocide that gripped her native Rwanda in the 1994. She would have been killed had not she and seven other women hidden silently in the cramped bathroom of a pastor’s home for 91 days until the danger passed. When she emerged from that room, she weighed only 65 pounds.

She came out of the experience and became a United Nations employee, a human rights activist and author of the best-selling book, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust. What allowed her to survive, and to thrive in the years since, she said, has been her faith in God and the ability to forgive.

“Forgiveness came to me as a gift,” from her horrible trauma, she said.

Ilibagiza said people can’t do anything about the past, but through love, faith and forgiveness can make a better future. “If there is no forgiveness in our heart, no business will go on,” she said.

She also learned to judge people as individuals, rather than groups. And she takes pleasure in the simplest things in life. “Hold on to hope,” she told an enthusiastic audience at one of the Idea Festival’s most well-attended sessions. “Don’t give up.”

Bjarke Ingels of Denmark, considered one of the world’s best young architects, gave a dazzling presentation at the Idea Festival.

In discussing project after project that his Copenhagen-based firm has done, he impressed the audience with not only his creativity and artistry, but with how he used architecture to solve each project’s “problems” and make it something special.

That isn’t easy, because many developers “are more interested in the bottom line than the skyline,” he said Friday.

“Functionalism liberated architecture from style” in the 20th century,” he said dryly. The result “was a lot of big boring boxes.”

Ingels works all over the world, and some of his most stunning projects are under way in China and the Middle East. But one of my favorites was the Mountain Dwellings apartment complex, which now dominates the view out Ingels’ own apartment window in Copenhagen.

The developer started out wanting to build two big boxes on the property: One for apartments, one for parking. Instead, Ingels’ and his co-workers created a stunning — and stunningly practical — solution to the developer’s needs that has become a design landmark. The interior parking garage is no less impressive than the living space.

The inspiration for some of Ingels’ ideas comes from the place-specific architecture of the past. There are reasons, he noted, that certain styles evolved in certain places hundreds and thousands of years before there were professional architects. Climate — and social climate — play important roles in a building’s design.  A glass tower might work fine for New York, but it makes no sense in an Arabian desert, he noted.

“We end up reinventing traditional forms and shapes, not as style, but as a new vernacular,” he said.

Ingels urged architects to become more pro-active in suggesting urban development, rather than waiting for politicians, developers and financiers to bring ideas forward.

Environmental sustainability is an important consideration in Ingels’ work. But, looking at it from the perspective of an Idea Festival, it was remarkable to see how he recycles and refines his ideas. An idea he pitched as a project in Sweden was rejected, but after much refinement, it turned out to be a perfect fit for a building for Shanghai.

It reinforced the notion that many Idea Festival many speakers stressed. They said ideas and creativity don’t come so much as flashes of genius, but from kernels of inspiration and a lot of hard work and persistence.

You can see more of Ingels’ work at his firm’s Web site.

Beligan artist and designer Arne Quinze is known for his large public art installations, many of which involve fluid masses of colorful wooden planks.

Quinze spoke at the Idea Festival on Friday, and he had a fascinating slide show of his work in cities around the world. Then, at the end, he had a surprise: A series of renderings and models of the old Ohio River railroad bridge turned into one of his art installations.

As it happens, Quinze met Louisville art collectors Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson in Europe last year. They invited him to Louisville to see their 21C Museum Hotel. When Quinze was here in March, he walked along Louisville’s emerging Waterfront Park.

“Within an hour of walking downtown, he saw the bridge and said, ‘I have an idea,’” said Alice Gray Stites, managing director of The Center for Contemporary Art at Louisville’s proposed Museum Plaza.

Quinze’s vision calls for turning what is to become a pedestrian bridge into one that would be a timeline of local history, with markers along the way. It would have music and lights powered by solar cells embedded in a mass of red and white wooden planks that would wind through the six arched steel spans atop the bridge. You can see some of Quinze’s renderings below.

“It’s a huge project, but I believe in it,” Quinze said. “We can do it and it would work.”

Stites said the Idea Festival presentation was the first time anyone in Louisville had seen Quinze’s proposal, so she doesn’t know what the reaction will be once it is shown to Mayor Jerry Abramson and officials developing public art projects for Waterfront Park. In addition to city approval, city funding also would be required to pull it off, Stites said.

Photo credit: copyright Arne Quinze

Photo credit: copyright Arne Quinze

Teller, the quiet half of the famous magic team Penn & Teller, started his speech at the Idea Festival by pulling a carpenter’s hammer from his coat pocket and placing it at the edge of the stage.

Teller said he planned to reveal some secrets of his magic, but he didn’t want videos of it showing up on YouTube. So he asked audience members to use the hammer to smash any video cameras they saw among them.

That introduction drew laughs. Many others were simply surprised to hear Teller, who is usually silent on stage, actually speak.

As it turned out, Teller was a terrific speaker, and he explained how he performs one of his most difficult illusions — making a red ball dance around in thin air. Let’s just say it has to do with thread, skill and lots and lots of practice.

Some magicians want to keep their secrets secret.  But Teller said his theory is this: “If you know how a trick is done, you’ll like it more, not less.”

During the explanation, he offered several insights into magic tricks and illusions and why they work, such as:

“Magic’s cause and effect are linked by poetry instead than physics.”

“Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself.”

Teller may be one of the world’s most famous illusionists, but that doesn’t mean he no longer needs to practice.  In fact, he said he spends much of his time practicing tricks over and over to improve his skill and make them look effortless.

“The muses don’t drop by unless you keep regular office hours,” he said.

Sometimes, it’s best to ignore conventional wisdom and look to the past for guidance.

The past week’s financial uncertainty set the stage for Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the controversial book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable at the Idea Festival on Friday.  Taleb describes “black swans” as the hard-to-predict events or developments that have profound impact.

Randomness plays an increasing role in society, and many people suffer from “an illusion of control.”  He criticized economists for long-term forecasts, most of which turn out to be wrong. Success often involves avoiding mistakes, and paying attention to what has happened in the past rather than experts’ theories of what might happen in the future.

He said people need to figure out ways they can gain from uncertainty, but protect themselves from risk. And, he said, “We need to teach people to have the guts to say ‘I don’t know.’”

Amy Chua speaks at the Idea Festival. Photo by Tom Eblen

Yale Law School professor Amy Chua looks at lessons America can learn from the past in her book,  Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance — and Why They Fail.

Chua’s thesis, which she outlined at the Idea Festival, is that nations that have dominated the world during different periods of history prospered by using strategic religious tolerance, ethnic diversity and inclusion. They fell from power and sometimes collapsed when they became less tolerant, more ethnically exclusive or lost their social “glue.”

Success throughout history has relied on a hyperpower’s ability to attract and take advantage of the world’s best and brightest talent. Rome dominated the world by making people it conquered Roman citizens. The Mongol empire was smart enough to incorporate the skills of other ethnic groups it conquered, especially Chinese engineers. America has prospered largely because of religious tolerance, immigration, opportunity and ethnic diversity, she said.

So, what could this theory portend for America’s future?  Chua said America must protect religious freedom and diversity and, while controlling immigration, must make sure that the world’s best and brightest can continue to find opportunity here.

But Chua also worries that if recent U.S. immigrants don’t assimilate as previous generations have, the U.S. could lose much of its social glue. “We really do have to take seriously the issue of national cohesion,” she said.

As long as the United States remains a nation of immigrants, it will have an advantage over countries such as China that are far less diverse.

American culture may rule the planet. But the exclusivity of U.S. citizenship makes it harder for America to maintain clout worldwide as other nations become more wealthy and powerful. “Wearing a Yankees baseball cap and drinking Coca-Cola will not make a Palestinian feel like an American,” she said.

One future challenge will be figuring out how to give people in other countries “more of a stake in America’s success and leadership,” Chua said. “You can really learn a lot from Rome.”

There is no shortage of international  prizes honoring flashy, provocative, beautiful or breathtaking architecture and design.

The new $100,000 Curry Stone Design Prize, administered by the University of Kentucky’s College of Design, is different.

The first Curry Stone Design Prize was awarded Thursday at the Idea Festival in Louisville to a South African architecture firm that, working without pay, designed and is building 10 houses for poor people in Capetown. The houses are made of timbers of wood and steel and bags filled with sand. They cost less than $7,000 each and can be built by their owners.

Beautiful? Provocative?  Not in the world of architecture. But for a world where it is estimated that 1 billion people — about 15 percent of the population — live in shanties, projects like this have the ability to reshape the way much of humanity lives.

That was the idea when Clifford Curry and his wife, H. Delight Stone, of Oregon decided to create the prize as part of a $5.5 million gift to UK. Curry had been a successful architect, pioneering the design of housing for elderly people. Curry, a UK architecture graduate, wanted to honor breakthrough design ideas that improve the human spirit, increase awareness of the environment or responde to areas of human need.

Like the famous MacArthur “genius” grants, the Curry Stone Prize comes with no strings attached.

“The concept is they can do whatever they darn well please” with the money, Curry said. “These are motivated people. I want them to figure that out.”

MMA Architects principal Luyanda Mpahlwa, 49, was unable to get a U.S. visa to attend the ceremony because of his anti-Apartheid work in South Africa years ago. But in a telephone interview, Mpahlwa said he expects to use some of the money to continue this sort of work, as well to expand a scholarship program for architects he has started in South Africa.

“There is a lot of need for these projects,” he said. “I am starting to look at what other materials combinations and types we could use. We want to take part in a body of knowledge that contributes to local housing situations.”

MMA was chosen from among five finalists; the others attended the ceremony and received $10,000 cash awards. Thirty anonymous nominators around the world suggested candidates, and a panel of judges met in New York in July to choose four finalists and a winner.

David Mohney, a College of Design faculty member, former dean and secretary of the prize, said MMA was chosen because it is an example of using conventional architecture in an unconventional way to promote social good. But all of the finalists had amazing stories to tell.

Wes Janz, 55, an associate professor of architecture at Ball State University in Indiana, helps people in third-world slums build well-designed housing from scavenged materials. Marjetica Potrc, 55, an artist and architect from Slovenia, works in impoverished communities. One project she discussed was a toilet that doesn’t need water that has been used in shanty communities in Guatemala. Antonio Scarponi, 34, an architect based in Venice, Italy, uses architecture and multimedia arts to illustrate social and political lines that unite and divide people.

The most unconventional finalist was Shawn Frayne, 27, an inventor in Hawaii, who has invented the first non-turbine wind-powered generator. It is small and looks like a violin bow. It uses wind to create very cheap electricity that can replace batteries. It can be used to power lamps, run small refrigerators and charge cell phones.

“Harder problems make for better inventions,” said Frayne, who created the generator after visiting Haiti and thinking that poor people there needed cheaper and safer sources of light than kerosene lanterns. “The problems in emerging countries are no longer isolated, but are showing up everywhere in the world.”

Emiliano Gandolfi, an Italian architect who led a panel discussion of the finalists at the Idea Festival, said the Curry Stone Design Prize recognizes a new sensibility among architects and designers, especially young ones like him, that design is about more than creating beautiful things. It can be about improving the human experience at all levels.

“What we are discovering is a new sensibility,” he said.

Michael Speaks, dean of the UK College of Design, said he’s glad to see the university on the forefront of that movement.

“Many people understand design to be the engine of innovation,” he said. “This prize recognizes social innovation and not just commercial innovation.”

The great thing about the Idea Festival is that you can bounce from session to session, topic to topic, idea to idea.

This morning, I heard neurosurgeon Katrina Firlik, author of Another Day in the Frontal Lobe, talk about brain surgery. “Brain surgery is not exactly rocket science,” she said. Yea, right. In addition to a lot of interesting insights into her work and medical science, she had some good advice for anyone facing a mysterious illness: The most important question to ask a doctor trying to make a diagnosis is, “What else could it be?”

Neurosurgeon Katrina Firlik speaks at the Idea Festival. Photo by Tom Eblen

A little later, crossword puzzle master Will Shortz was talking about the world of puzzles and the people who design and work them. Shortz, by the way, grew up on an Arabian horse farm in Crawfordsville, Ind.  When he isn’t editing crosswords for The New York Times or talking about them on National Public Radio, his passion is table tennis.  Who knew?

But the most challenging sessions may have been the first ones this morning. Festival attendees walked quickly from room to room at the Kentucky International Convention Center in downtown Louisville for a series of 12-minute sessions on everything from opera to time travel to how people form beliefs. The presenters handled the strict time limits with varying degrees of success.  For example, physics professor Suketu Bhavsar, who talked about the concept of time travel, had little concept of time. He went way over limit, creating a crowd in the hallway waiting to get into his next session.

There was a session on how to write a screenplay, presented by Mark Shepherd and Brad Riddell, who teach at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.  It’s a two-year academic program, but they compressed the key concepts into 12 minutes by talking very, very fast.  Don’t have two years to spare?  Here are the basics of writing a screenplay:

It should be able to be read quickly. Have a good story to tell and tell it well. Don’t be boring. Your story needs a “hook” — a simple premise that will appeal to the audience emotionally and have some “extraordinary” element. “Scripts are essentially actor bait,” Riddell said. “Movies don’t get made without strong actors.”  Focus on imagery and action, not fancy dialogue. “You should almost be able to turn off the sound and know what’s going on” in a movie, Shepherd said. Aim for maximum audience engagement and a character the audience will care about. Build suspense. A main character must want something badly and face significant opposition. Conflict must be created. There must be a satisfying ending.

There you have it.

A South African architecture firm that has pioneered simple, affordable housing that poor Capetown families can largely build themselves has won the first $100,000 Curry Stone Design Prize.

The new prize, administered by the University of Kentucky’s College of Design, is intended to recognize breakthrough work being done around the world that uses design to accomplish humanitarian goals.

MMA Architects of Capetown is headed by Luyanda Mpahlwa, 49, and Mphethi Morojele, 45. It came up with a design for a house made of timber supports and sandbags that a family or community can construct for less than $7,000.  The firm is helping a Capetown neighborhood build 10 of the structures.

MMA Architects was one of five finalists for the award, and the only one not able to attend the announcement today at the Idea Festival in Louisville. Because of post-911 security, Mpahlwa was unable to get a U.S. visa because he had been imprisoned years ago when blacks were resisting white rule in South Africa.

The other finalists, who will receive $10,000 prizes, are Shawn Frayne, inventor of the world’s first non-turbine wind-powered generator; Wes Janz, architect and associate professor of architecture at Ball State University in Indiana; artist and architect Marjetica Potre; and Antonio Scarponi, an Italian architect and multimedia artist.  All have used design to help solve health and housing problems in poor, developing parts of the world.

Click here to view videos of each finalist’s work.

Clifford Curry, co-founder of the prize, said there are no restrictions on how the winners use the prize money.

“The concept is they can do whatever they darn well please,” he said. “These are motivated people. I want them to figure that out.”

I’m sitting here at the Idea Festival this morning thinking that some of the world’s smartest people shouldn’t be in Louisville today, but in Washington helping figure out how to design the Wall Street bailout.

It’s a frightening — and fascinating — story. It almost makes me wish I were still a business editor in Atlanta. Almost.

I’m glad that Congress is insisting that any bailout limit the obscene compensation top executives of failed firms can receive. They should be getting a bill, not a check. But I’m still waiting to see how the government plans to help Main Street as well as Wall Street.

But here’s the main thing I don’t understand about the Bush Administration’s initial bailout proposal: Rather than just buying up bad loans, why isn’t the government taking the Warren Buffett approach and buying equity as well?  That would give taxpayers an ownership stake and some up-side potential in this whole situation, rather than just taking all the garbage off Wall Street’s hands.

I’m sure many readers of this blog know a lot more about high finance and economic policy than I do. So, how would you handle the bailout?  What advice would you give Congressional leaders as they put together a plan to keep our economy from sinking because of Wall Street’s greed and incompetence?  Comment below.

The afternoon session of the Idea Kentucky conference was basically a big brainstorming session.

After hearing from the speakers, the 240 or so attendees passed around microphones and expressed their ideas. The moderators asked for ideas about investments Kentucky could make in developing people and talents that could produce “transformational” change within 10 years. It was a tall order.

The audience was heavy with educators, and there was a class of high school students from Breckinridge County. So many of the ideas had to do with improving education.

Russ Meredith, a University of Louisville senior, addresses the audience during the afternoon brainstorming session.

Larry Hujo, a Jefferson County school board member, suggested more apprenticeship programs to help students learn job skills. At the same time, though, he thought there should be more classes that teach students how to think, rather than commit facts to memory. “We’ve got to have classes in our schools that teach creativity,” Hujo said, remembering how his father once told him, “Son, you don’t know what you don’t know.”

Other education ideas:

• Restore physical fitness programs, and recess time, because students learn many life skills on the playground.
• Move to year-around schools, rather than having long summer breaks.
• Pay teachers much better, but also abolish tenure to weed out lazy, ineffective teachers.
• Require teachers to visit the home of each student for dinner one time during the year, as is done in some places in Japan.
• Create better scholarship programs that help students with the cost of higher education and provide incentives for them to remain in Kentucky after graduation.
• Encourage employers to provide more tuition reimbursement and other continuing education benefits to keep workforce skills sharp and up-to-date. Also encourage employers to be more flexible in helping workers achieve work-life balance.
• Create school-based innovation funds that could finance ideas for solving community problems.

Aside from education, the ideas were all over the map.  One man suggested rebuilding old railroad beds and reopening commuter train service, at least among Lexington, Louisville and Northern Kentucky. It would be good for economic growth, and good for the environment.

Russ Meredith, a University of Louisville senior who also manages a farmer’s market, suggested more promotion of local foods, including using local foods in school cafeterias. A woman suggested more support for community-owned businesses, and urged people to shop less at Wal-mart.  (It wasn’t mentioned, but Wal-mart is now Kentucky’s biggest private employer, with more than 32,000 workers.)

A man suggested requiring public buildings to be meet LEED environmental construction standards. A woman said Kentucky’s forests could be developed more — not just for cutting timber to be shipped elsewhere, but to develop finished wood-products companies.

Another woman suggested that heavy-smoking, tobacco-growing Kentucky should set a goal for becoming a “smoke free” state as an example to the rest of the world.

Several people suggested more development of alternative energy sources, and new ways to use coal that would be more environmentally friendly.

Len Peters, secretary of the state Energy and Environment Cabinet, talked about the potential for more efficient power plants, noting that the average age of Kentucky’s plants is about 35 years old, and 50 years is generally considered maximum life. “There’s a tremendous opportunity for (Kentucky’s energy profile) to look very different than it does today,” he said.

Kris Kimel of the Kentucky Science & Technology Corp., the Idea Festival’s founder, said he was pleased with the conference, and the ideas that came from it, even if they weren’t necessarily bolt-of-lighting revelations. “A transformational strategy involves multiple ideas,” he said.

Which ideas did Kimel think were most promising?  He liked restarting commuter rail service in the Golden Triangle, and requiring teachers to visit students’ homes to help get parents more involved in their children’s education. He also thought that becoming a “smoke-free” state was an intriguing idea, whatever form it might take.

All in all, it was a good warmup for a week devoted to ideas.  What ideas do you have to add to the mix?  Comment below.

Jeffrey Manber is a New York entrepreneur who works around the world helping develop commercial applications for space and space travel.

In his remarks to the Idea Kentucky conference today, he focused on the need to create an innovation economy rather than a commodity economy.  It’s a concept that resonates in Kentucky, which has long had commodities at its economic core: Coal, timber, tobacco, etc.

Manber said Iceland presents an interesting example. In the early 1980s, it had high unemployment and an old-world economy based on commodity — fishing. Iceland’s leaders decided then to focus on creating an economy for the modern age, so they invested heavily in education, technology and creativity. And they weren’t afraid to take risks.

Now Iceland, with a population a little smaller than metro Lexington’s, has full employment, an exploding consumer market, a hip culture, growing eco-tourism and geothermal energy industries and big technology companies.

“We’re going to have to train our young people to focus on the new economy,” Manber said.

Manber said the United States has a key strength: The freedom of individual decision-making. People succeed in this country based on their ideas and their work ethic, rather than their pedigree or social standing. “They don’t do that in most places in the world,” he said. “We have this flexibility that no one else has.”

However, a key weakness is that Americans are reluctant to travel elsewhere in the world and learn from others. “We don’t mind people coming here, but we don’t think we can go learn from others,” he said.

Manber said the biggest immigration problem facing the United States isn’t what most people think it is — illegal workers coming to take low-wage jobs.  The real problem is that it’s difficult for talented people from other countries to come work legally for high-tech, top-performing American countries.

“The free flow of talent is as important as the free flow of currency has been for the past 20 years,” he said.

Manber said the United States also must get used to the notion that it must be more creative and innovative, because we’re no longer the world’s only superpower.  To keep its economic edge, the United States and Kentucky must invest more in education and innovation.

He noted that India’s focus on education is not only transforming that country, but India is sending talented, well-educated professionals throughout the world. He cited figures that 38 percent of U.S. physicians and 12 percent of U.S. scientists are from India, as are the CEOs of several of this nation’s top companies.

Here at the Idea Kentucky conference, people are taking notes, taking photos and recording audio and video. And then there’s Keith Bendis, a graphic artist and cartoonist from New York state, who has been brought in to capture the conference’s main themes in drawings.

Bendis is working along one side of the big conference room at the Muhammad Ali Center, on three big white boards with a fist full of magic markers. As speakers speak, he draws.

“It’s called graphic recording,” said Bendis, who has been in this business a little more than three years after a three-decade career in cartooning and graphic arts in New York City. “I capture the main themes of the presentations graphically. People remember things more visually than just listening to them. People really respond to these.”

Bendis will keep his board up all day, then take it home, photograph it and turn it into a PowerPoint presentation for Idea Kentucky organizers.

Photos by Tom Eblen.  Click photos to enlarge them.

Before Gov. Steve Beshear spoke at the first Idea Kentucky conference today in Louisville, the stage for discussion was set by organizer Kris Kimel of the Kentucky Science & Technology Corp. and Michael Childress of the Kentucky Long Term Policy Research Center.

“I think there’s a palpable sense in Kentucky that we need a different path for this state,” said Kimel, who also is the force behind the international Idea Festival that will follow this conference, Thursday through Friday in downtown Louisville.

“It’s not about the sky falling,” he said. “It’s about finding ways to change the trajectory for the Commonwealth in a lot of different issues. We’re not going anywhere unless we do some things dramatically different. In today’s world, it’s about breakthrough innovation.”

Childress outlined four areas he hoped the afternoon discussions would focus on: Economy, education, healthcare and energy. “We know it’s possible to do better” in all of those areas, he said.

He showed statistics that told how Kentucky’s per-capita income was 65 percent of the national average in 1950. That had grown to 81 percent by 2006. Funny thing is, we were still 46th among the states. In other words, we were not making progress compared to the rest of the country.

Childress noted that because Kentucky’s economy is so tied to manufacturing, the state uses twice as much energy as the national average in overall economic production. And only 3 percent of the energy used in Kentucky is from renewable sources. That could be a liability as energy prices increase and environmental concerns grow more acute.

Kimel noted that incremental improvement is no longer good enough for Kentucky, if, indeed, it ever was. At the current rate of income growth, it would take 154 years for Kentucky to reach the national average, he said.

Technology now allows work to move to people, rather than forcing people to move to where work is. That could be a big advantage to Kentucky if the state can create a more innovative culture and invest more in developing and attracting talented, creative people, Kimel said.

“In today’s world, it’s all about people and talent and creative capacity,” Kimel said. “There is a perception of this state that while we have a lot of things gong for us, we’re not a place of innovation.”

Gov. Steve Beshear kicked off the first Idea Kentucky conference in Louisville this morning by calling for more innovation and action in Kentucky.

“This is no time to be wishy-washy,” Beshear told about 200 leaders from across the state who came to the conference at the Muhammad Ali Center. “We keep doing things the same way and expecting different results. If we don’t watch out, we’re going to fall further and further behind.

“We have to be bolder. We have to be more aggressive. And we have to take action now.” Beshear said, adding that he hoped the conference would be a “Pep rally for boldness.”

Beshear outlined several areas where he thought bold action was needed:

Citizens in Kentucky, which has the nation’s highest adult smoking rate and one of the highest obesity rates, must take more individual responsibility for improving their health. A more healthy population would save millions, if not billions, in future healthcare costs that could be invested more productively, he said.

Kentucky must stop living in the past, using outdated and often failed economic development strategies that produce only incremental improvement. Instead, he said, the state must invest aggressively in innovation, education and technology.

“We must invest in modernizing our economy,” he said. “Ideas without resources are just clever ideas.”

Beshear urged more investment in early childhood education and healthcare. Many Kentucky children don’t get any formal education until age 4, when 90 percent of brain development has already occurred, he said.  And in order to develop mentally, a child must be physically well.

Beshear said food and energy could be important areas for innovation in Kentucky, noting the state’s rich agriculture history and coal reserves. “Coal isn’t going away,” he said. “Our challenge is to make it cleaner and greener.”  He also called for more investment in alternative energy sources such as solar energy.

“We are moving,” Beshear said. “We are doing things that will get us where we want to go. But we aren’t moving fast enough. And we’re not investing enough.”

Beshear received loud applause from the audience when he called for a “significant increase” in the state’s cigarette tax, a proposal he made earlier this year but which the General Assembly rejected. “It’s a no-brainer,” he said, because it would both raise state revenue and promote a healthier lifestyle that would save healthcare costs.

Beshear wrapped up by quoting the pioneering scientist Charles Darwin, who noted that survival doesn’t go to the strongest or smartest creatures, but those most able to adapt to change.

If you go to the Web site for Idea Kentucky, a big gathering Wednesday in Louisville, there’s a link that takes you to the conference’s ground rules.

Click on the link, and this is what you see:

Statements not allowed during discussions

■ That’s a crazy idea.

■ That will cost too much.

■ That won’t work in Kentucky

Those rules set a perfect tone for the six-hour conference at the Muhammad Ali Center. And they work equally well for the bigger event taking place in downtown Louisville from Thursday through Saturday: The 2008 Idea Festival.

This is the sixth Idea Festival, a now-annual gathering that was started in Lexington in 2000 by Kris Kimel of the Kentucky Science & Technology Corp. The festival moved to Louisville in 2006 because it needed bigger venues and corporate sponsors.

I’ll be attending both events and blogging throughout the day, each day, at The Bluegrass & Beyond on www.kentucky.com.

There should be a lot of interesting things to write about, because the Idea Festival each year brings some of the world’s smartest and most creative people to Kentucky to explain their big ideas and expand the minds of those in the audience.

I love it that the festival links Kentucky with brainpower, creativity and innovation. Kentucky isn’t often on the cutting edge, but considering our state’s problems and opportunities, now would be a good time to get sharper.

A quarter of Kentuckians smoke. A third are obese. At the current rate of per capita income growth, it would take Kentucky 150 years to reach the national average. And when it comes to educational performance, we’re just ahead of the bottom third of states.

Those are some of the issues that will be discussed at Idea Kentucky. Speakers include Gov. Steve Beshear, Kimel and Michael Childress of the Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center. But much of the conference will be about audience participation and group discussion. Maybe some new ideas will emerge.

It should be a good warm-up for the Idea Festival, whose speakers range from off the charts to off the wall. Unlike Idea Kentucky’s agenda, which seems focused on practical ideas for problem-solving, the Idea Festival simply tries to expand your mind. What happens after that is up to you.

Speakers include scientific types, such as neurosurgeon Katrina Firlik, author of the book Another Day in the Frontal Lobe; Richard Gott, a Princeton University astrophysicist who’s originally from Louisville; and Richard Kogan, a distinguished New York psychiatrist and award-winning concert pianist.

There are business types, such as pioneering marketers Bridget Brennan and John Gauntt. Artistic types such as filmmaker Soozie Eastman, chef Howard Dubrovsky and dance artistic director Jacques Heim. And top international architects such as Emiliano Gandolfi of Italy and Bjarke Ingels of Denmark.

The University of Kentucky’s College of Design will award the first $100,000 Curry Stone Design Prize to someone whose breakthrough design solutions have improved our lives and our world.

And then there are speakers from all walks of life and disciplines: Rwanda genocide survivor and peace activist Immaculée Ilibagiza; ninjutsu martial-arts master Peter King; crossword puzzle master Will Shortz; and Vova Galchenko of Russia, who is perhaps the world’s best juggler.

And many more. See the festival’s Web site for more details. And read my blog for reports several times each day.

Can’t get to Louisville? There also should be some good ideas bouncing around Bluegrass Tomorrow’s “Inno Vision 2018″ breakfast Thursday at the Marriott Griffin Gate. Speakers include Beshear, Lexington Mayor Jim Newberry and Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson.

The morning-long conference will discuss a comparative analysis of innovation in 22 metropolitan regions around the country similar to Central Kentucky. For more information, call (859) 277-9614 or go to Bluegrass Tomorrow’s Web site.

I’m sure it’s because I’ve heard too much of the slop that has replaced intelligent discourse in our presidential campaign. But as I listened Thursday night to Urban County Council members and others discuss whether to go forward with a tax-increment financing project tied to the CentrePointe development, one phrase kept running through my mind: Lipstick on a pig.

Granted, some good lipstick was offered up:

Developer Dudley Webb agreed to pay the estimated $50,000 cost of a state-required TIF feasibility study for his proposed 35-story CentrePointe tower, which would house a four-star hotel, luxury condos, offices, restaurants and shops.

Mayor Jim Newberry indicated, and Webb’s attorney seemed to agree, that any decision about building a $10 million parking garage under Phoenix Park could wait a couple of years until we see if CentrePointe is built and the garage is needed.

Those two moves made it more attractive, and less risky, for council members to let the CentrePointe TIF process play out, and they voted 10-5 to do just that.

It won’t hurt to further scrutinize the downtown redevelopment projects city officials want to pay for with TIF money. And it certainly would be good to have a public hearing, so citizens could have their say. That hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, Oct. 14, at 6 p.m. in the council’s chambers.

I’m skeptical of asking the state to approve a CentrePointe TIF project, for several reasons, not the least of which is that state law must be bent like a pretzel for this project to qualify.

Plus, as Vice Mayor Jim Gray keeps pointing out, a TIF project makes sense only if the development it is tied to makes sense. That’s because CentrePointe must be a long-term financial success to provide the tax money needed to fund TIF public improvement projects.

CentrePointe makes no economic sense to a lot of people. The mystery surrounding its financing — whether it is real, and where the money is coming from — deepens public skepticism. Last week’s turmoil in the financial markets offered further reason for caution.

When Webb unveiled CentrePointe on March 4, he said he needed TIF financing to make it work. Faced with public opposition, he then said he didn’t need it. Now, while claiming he doesn’t need it, Webb and his brother, Don, and nephew, Woodford, are working hard to get it.

Some council members speculate that the Webbs need the city’s TIF stamp of approval to secure financing for CentrePointe. Or that they need the $10 million city-owned parking garage. Or that they need the city on board so they can seek loan guarantees or other support if CentrePointe runs into trouble.

Some council members who support the TIF project argue that if Lexington doesn’t partner with CentrePointe, it could lose an opportunity to fund some much-needed downtown improvements, such as renovation of the old Fayette County Courthouse that now houses the Lexington History Museum.

They think powerful rural legislators will gut the TIF law next year, so Lexington had better grab what it can now. They may be right, but a flawed CentrePointe TIF application would only give those legislators a fat target.

And who could blame them? Is it in Kentucky’s best interest to build Lexington a downtown parking garage that’s twice as expensive as it could be? Or to spend $3 million on pedways between CentrePointe and two public parking garages?

It would be short-sighted for the General Assembly to abolish TIF financing. Despite Kentucky’s historic urban-rural jealousy, it’s more true than ever that cities are the economic engines that drive the state. TIF is a great tool for keeping those engines chugging along.

The General Assembly must move beyond the old notion that investing in the Golden Triangle is bad for the rest of Kentucky. Burkesville or Grayson aren’t competing with Lexington — Kentucky is competing with Illinois, and they’re both competing with the rest of the world.

The old Kentucky way of thinking focuses on whether UK can compete with U of L on the football field and basketball court, rather than on whether they both can compete with North Carolina and MIT in the classroom and laboratory.

The game should no longer be about how to divide Kentucky’s pie, but how to make the pie bigger. Sound urban TIF projects that conform to the law will do that. Flawed ones like CentrePointe probably won’t.

If Lexington does send a CentrePointe TIF application to Frankfort, I think state officials will view it as pork. And rural legislators know how to butcher a hog.

Journalists tell people things they don’t know. They provide a forum for public discussion. They hold up a mirror to society. And they chronicle the present so that, years later, people can know the past and perhaps learn something from it.

A fine example of that last role can be seen in a powerful multimedia presentation put together by Herald-Leader photojournalist David Stephenson.  Click here to watch it.

The presentation is a collection of photographs, time-lapse images, videos and audio man-on-the-street interviews.  It chronicles this summer’s demolition of the block where developer Dudley Webb plans to build the 35-story CentrePointe complex, which is to include a four-star hotel, luxury condos, offices and restaurants.

Most of the 15 buildlings on the block were more than 100 years old. The most notable among them was called Morton’s Row. It dated to 1826 and was one of the oldest commercial buildings left in downtown Lexington. You can read more about the block’s history by clicking here.

I’ve written a lot about CentrePointe.  If you’ve followed the debate, you know I think the block needed redeveloping, but that Webb missed a great opportunity to give Lexington a more valuable and more exciting project than the gigantic, generic CentrePointe tower. Looking at the renderings, it could just as easily be in suburban New Jersey as downtown Lexington.

A development with good, contemporary architecture could have woven in some of the historic fabric from Morton’s Row, the Dame building and perhaps a few more of the old structures to create a place that skillfully used Lexington’s rich past to point toward the future.  That sort of development is being done by innovative cities all over the country — and all around the world. If you do much traveling, you’ve seen them for yourself.

When people ask me now what I think about CentrePointe — and I think they’re looking for a short answer — I quote this comment Urban County Councilman Don Blevins Jr. made during a council meeting July 2:

“My fear is that a large four-star hotel with huge condominums on top of it is going to fail. I hope I’m wrong. I hope they’re wildly successful and the downtown is vibrant and we sell all those condos and the hotel is full from here to eternity. But what if I’m right? What we’d have is essentially a vertical Lexington Mall right in the heart of downtown.”

But even if CentrePointe is successful, the gain will have come with a loss that was so unnecessary.

CentrePointe illustrates one of Lexington’s biggest failings in the past few decades. At mid-20th Century, Lexington had one of the nation’s best collections of antebellum architecture and some of the prettiest countryside God has created. We let too many of those buildings be torn down, and we were too careless in paving over a lot of bluegrass countryside to create suburban Anywhere, USA.

Growth is good. But the once-popular Lexington bumper sticker is only partially correct. Some growth is good; some growth is cancer.

I can’t help but think that if journalists in previous decades had had the technology and skill that David Stephenson and his colleagues have today, we would never have allowed this summer’s complete demolition of the block bounded by Main, Upper, Limestone and Vine streets.

Can you imagine being able to watch a wrecking machine destroy such former Lexington landmarks as Union Station?  The Post Office that stood across from it on Main Street? Ingelside manor?  At the time each of them was demolished, some people thought it was a good idea.

Click on the link above and watch 182 years of Lexington history disappear on the screen in five minutes and 10 seconds. Maybe whatever comes next on that block will be good for Lexington. But however good it may turn out to be, it will have come with a price worth remembering.

I’ve always thought that fall didn’t officially begin in Kentucky until Keeneland opened its racing meet on the first Friday of October. But I know fall is coming. In my front yard this morning, I noticed the first leaves on my maple tree had turned red.

Fall is a great time to travel around Kentucky, enjoy activities, do things outdoors and see the colorful leaves.The Herald-Leader today published its annual Fall Festival Guide in the Weekender section. You also can see it, and keep up with updated information, on Lexgo.com.

The Kentucky Department of Travel will soon be relaunching its fall colors Web site, which tracks the fall colors and highlights activites around the state you can enjoy.