Category Archives: Creative Life

Obsessing well: Book review of Brainstorm by Eric Maisel & Ann Maisel

Eric Maisel is a humble, brilliant writer on creativity, a guru (though he would argue against the very term) to the stumblers like me. Brainstorm: Harnessing the Power of Productive Obsessions breaks no new ground but instead takes Maisel’s notions of ‘making meaning’ and living through creativity to prod us towards obsession. Not the destructive [...]

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Book reviews: Evie Wyld’s debut & Michael Greenberg’s Beg, Borrow, Steal

Strong writers’ voices make all the difference: The debut novel by Australian-born Evie Wyld, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, tackles the cascading effect of violence, the violence of men at war, through generations. Wyld is an evocative, sure-footed stylist, and her portrait of two Australians, one a Vietnam war soldier, the other an [...]

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Writing pointers from 28 novelists

The February 20 issue of the Guardian contained something remarkable, 28 authors offering advice on how to write fiction (see here and here). It’s a hugely varied recipe book, ranging from terse to wordy, from flippant to earnest, but it’s definitely worth scanning. I noted the following snippets that chimed with me: Diana Athill: ‘Read [...]

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Matisse innovating

I’m still savouring Hilary Spurling’s Matisse biography (I’m a third of the way through her second volume Matisse the Master). One aspect of Matisse that captivates and astounds me is how he is driven by some volcanic impetus, again and again, to innovate, at huge cost to his psyche and his family. In June 1914, [...]

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Should we store on the cloud?

Does anyone else feel fear at the news I first got from the wonderful Andrew Leonard at How the World Works? I put stuff on the cloud – now I wonder whether I should. Here’s Leonard’s intro: The news that Microsoft has somehow managed to permanentlylose the data stored online by tens of thousands of [...]

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Existential artistic courage

In Matisse the Master, biographer Hilary Spurling writes that Matisse’s friend Henri Cross was one of the few – possibly the only person apart from Amélie Matisse [Matisse's wife] – who fully understood the state of barely suppressed panic that underlay Matisse’s own unremitting experimentation. How exciting to read about artistic courage, to find confirmation [...]

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Film festival: Burma repression, an architect, murder of a Russian journalist

The closing day was docos galore: Anders Østergaard’s Burma VJ captures, courtesy of anonymous citizens with handy cams, the 2007 uprising in totalitarian Myanmar. It’s spellbinding, well structured, and a tribute to the spirit of mankind. 4 stars. Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of Architect, made by Markus Heidingsfelder, is a doco about a controversial architect. [...]

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Film festival: Business gambler, Corbijn, a new life

Mainly docos on a busy Saturday: The Entrepreneur, made by Jonathan Bricklin, is a doco about Bricklin’s father, an irrepressible businessman in the car industry over decades. It proves to be a fascinating look at the unstoppable force of business, as the father chases investors and car manufacturing partners in China. 4 stars. Josh Whiteman’s Shadow [...]

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Film festival: 3rd Red Riding, Van Gogh in the large

Viewed a few days ago: The third one in the series, Red Riding: 1983, is a corker, coming with a virtuoso plot knitting together the first two. In some ways darker than the first two, with its main protagonist one of the corrupt West Yorkshire policemen, it nonetheless offers a ray of sunshine at the [...]

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A Melbourne rock soul: Review of Stephen Cumming’s Will It Be Funny Tomorrow, Billy?

Will It Be Funny Tomorrow, Billy?: Misadventures in Music is a memoir by Stephen Cummings, a sometimes brilliant songwriter and always impressive vocalist who achieved brief, incandescent fame as frontman for The Sports in the early 1970s. Since then Cummings has relaeased a couple of dozen solo albums and written three novels. A Melburnite through and [...]

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