Living a creative life
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. Talk about creativity. Lately there seems to be a tidal wave of people changing their minds. Some of the same people who compared President Barack Obama to Hitler by way of opposition are now of the opinion that maybe Hitler wasn't such a bad guy, after all. People…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. In a previous post I mentioned the book Conversations with Charlie Haden, a series of interviews with the great musician conducted by Josef Woodard. Haden had a long working relationship with another legendary musician, Pat Metheny, and Metheny participates in one of the interviews in the book. In…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. If you're not familiar with the inspiration for the title of this blog post, please enjoy Charlton Heston's reaction when he learned that people are an essential part of the diet of the future: Clearly, I'm not here to advocate cannibalism. But I am here with a reminder…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. I recently came across a compact disc recording of Elvis Presley's comeback special (officially titled "Singer Presents...Elvis!") that aired on NBC in December, 1968. Presley hadn't performed before a live audience in years. It was a dramatic example of a career comeback that, for a few years at…
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…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. I've been reading Dr. Maxwell Maltz's 1960 book Psycho-Cybernetics. While the book occasionally strays into the neighborhood I call "crackpottery," there is a lot of useful information. I'm not a fan of the term "self-help," but it's the term that's commonly accepted, so we'll go with that. If…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. I've been on a brief summer hiatus. My wife and I were fortunate enough to spend a little time in the beautiful city of Montreal. While I get back in the swing of things, I wanted to share something we encountered while climbing two long flights of stairs…
