Living a creative life
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. I watched a delightful documentary recently (as I write this, it's currently streaming on Netflix). Bathtubs Over Broadway introduces us to the world of corporate musicals from the perspective of former Late Show With David Letterman writer Steve Young. First, Young discovered the likes of The Bathrooms are…
You are young and you are the future So suck it up and tough it out And be the best you can John Mellencamp, Minutes to Memories Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. When I was in 6th grade, our class was given a weekly syllabus of assignments. If we finished those before the…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. Currently I'm reading The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found by scholar and classicist Mary Beard. Pompeii is briefly referenced in my current writing-project-in-progress, so I'm reading about the city primarily for research. Fundamentally, however, I'm reading a well-researched book by a respected historian about life in…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. My wife and I both needed dental work recently beyond a routine cleaning or filling. Faced with the prospect of dental bills sufficient to make a down payment on a house, we struggled with what to do. Finally it dawned on us that we were not constrained by…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. As a lifelong insomniac, I looked forward to reading Benjamin Reiss' 2017 book Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World. I wasn't disappointed. Wild Nights is not a book about how to get a better night's sleep. Instead, it's a cultural study of the history of…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure We've all heard the phrase “Dance like nobody's watching.” It shows up in Facebook memes and on motivational posters. It has been credited to a variety of sources, including Mark Twain (it doesn't sound to me like something Twain would have said). The website Quote Investigator has an…
I'll be the first to admit I'm not a people person.
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. I never get to travel as often I'd like, but I have had the opportunity to travel a little this summer. It reminds me how beneficial travel is to creative ventures and to life in general. Examples of creative travelers are well known. Van Gogh did some of…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. I've been reading a history of western classical music recently. In a chapter on Johannes Brahms, I found this passage very interesting. It's from an 1859 letter Brahms wrote to his friend, violinist Joseph Joachim, following one of the early performances of Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 1 in…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. Earlier this year, I made a decision that involved what I call "jumping off a cliff." I left my conventional day job for a life of free-lance writing and photography. There was (and still is) a lot of risk involved, but my personal risk isn't the subject of…
