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. 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'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. I'm in the middle of reading a collection of some of Vincent Van Gogh's letters, primarily letters he wrote to his brother Theo over a period of 18 years. It's a fascinating body of work. Van Gogh wrote so many letters that they end up providing a sort…
When does creative expression cross the line from an intriguing pushing of boundaries into crime?
There may be no more important effort than to contribute a voice to the vital issues of our time.
What are some ways you can disrupt your own life or career?
What's a little humiliation if it makes you a better artist?
Maybe rock and roll was inevitable, with or without Chuck Berry. But the fact remains that he was the one who advanced the state of the art.
