Joan K. Smith

Those of us living in what we consider free societies often feel secure that if we comply by laws, pay our taxes, and maintain other civic duties we should not live in fear of government officials entering our homes and disrupting our families.

How far would you travel for a concert? How about across the country? Or across the world? It was still September when a gaggle of particularly obsessive music fans descended on New York City from near and far for a singular purpose: The ten-day run of seven Steely Dan concerts...

This weekend, Steely Dan, that indefinable and technically sophisticated bundle of rock, jazz, and whatever else strikes the fancy of principals Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, kicked off the "Shuffle Diplomacy" tour, their seventh U.S. tour since 2000, with a group of band veterans who are as well...

Here's the thing about great ideas: sometimes the most brilliant ones are those that seem, in proposal form, to be the most ludicrous, counterintuitive, and totally harebrained.

Take one of the world's greatest works of literature, James Joyce's Ulysses, a weighty work of intricate depth that displays language at...

In art and myth, the journey is usually a heroic quest, dripping with metaphor. But what if a journey involves, instead of a highly-sought destination and revelation, simply bouncing between ports in the most banal way possible, like on the cross-channel ferry between Dover and Calais?

Anger can be a powerful motivator.

In artist Amy Scheidegger's case, it was a group of obnoxious undergrads on the subway in West Philadelphia who spurred her to action. They were discussing college majors, and one made the highly educated observation "Art is, like, the most...

The reality of being an artist, with few exceptions, involves having a day job, something that pays the rent and, most importantly, buys the stuff -- paint, guitar strings, reeds, canvas, whatever -- that makes the self-expression you live for possible. For too many, the day job is a generally...

Last month, in the midst of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival when I was reporting on the Startup Bus here on Huffington Post, Michael Taylor of the New York Observer wrote a piece called "Abolish South by Southwest!" in which he cast smart-aleck barbs at...

Creative expression does not come cheap. But in spite of surges in public appreciation for art, tangible economic support for creativity -- particularly the most innovative forms -- is still on the back burner.

Since the late eighties and the disembowelment of the National Endowment for the Arts, support...

The road trip itself was around 56 hours, but for the "buspreneurs" aboard the Startup Bus the work was far from done when they converged on Austin, TX Wednesday evening for the South by Southwest Interactive Festival.

In the flurry of a mass orchestrated adrenaline...

From Odysseus to the Merry Pranksters, the road trip is the ultimate rite of discovery. This classic rite is taking a new twist on highways across the country from March 8 through 10: As I write, six buses filled with teams of sleep-deprived innovators -- hackers, designers, marketers, dreamers --...