creative

Randall Sullivan’s “Untouchable”: The Business of Music and the Art of Using Sources

Randall Sullivan’s Untouchable: The Strange Life and Tragic Death of Michael Jackson was released in November of last year. It’s an epic piece of work – 776 pages long, including nearly 175 pages of references – and it got some less-than-positive reviews, including the New York Times, which called it “dreary”, “bloated”, and “thoroughly dispensable”. I just finished reading it, and I think it deserves much more credit than that, because it’s a remarkable work on several levels. Sullivan has constructed an extremely complex narrative that is more than a biography – it’s also a very sobering look at how the music business operates. And it’s an excellent case study in how writers can manage challenging or difficult source material.

I get the sense that (more…)

Why It’s Good to Be Bad at Something

A lot of writing about success and achievement encourages you to find your “passion” (a word that is getting extremely overused) or to set a goal, and then to single-mindedly work as hard as you can to achieve as much as possible. I’m going to propose an alternate strategy for improvement: do something you’re terrible at. (more…)

A Musical Interlude

Next to Kate Bush, my favourite musical act is Crowded House. I own pretty much every recording they’ve ever released, and I’ve seen them in concert nine times over 23 years. I’ve seen them play in a very wet outdoor amphitheatre, where I had to huddle from the rain under a black plastic garbage bag, and I’ve seen them play in a convention centre ballroom, where I was so weak from food poisoning that I had to lean against a wall for almost the entire show. (In case you’re wondering why I didn’t just go home, I had used frequent flyer points to travel to that show and wouldn’t have missed it for anything.)

The purpose of this post, other than (more…)

Reflecting on Glass: the Dale Chihuly Exhibition in Montreal

I’ve written before about different types of interactive displays at art museums, and the pros and cons of different ways museums get their visitors to think about and react to what’s on display. This past weekend, at the Dale Chihuly exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, I had the chance to experience yet another type of art museum interaction: a show (more…)

Is Peer Review Truly Unbiased?

During conference season, when you’re rushing from session to session, peer review is something you often hear about in snatches of conversation as you’re running by. “[Professor X] must have reviewed that paper, otherwise it would have been accepted”. Or “I knew getting in at [Journal Y] was a problem because they don’t like [Theory Z]”.

Peer review can have a really big effect on someone’s academic career, because (more…)

The Uncomfortable Truth: The Lack of Creativity in Discussions of Creativity

Earlier this week, I saw a online mention of an article by Thomas Frank in the June 2013  issue of Harper’s Magazine, with the mention indicating that the article took some pretty harsh potshots at the literature on creativity. After my own reading of some of the popular press books about the creative process – including Jonah Lehrer’s now-withdrawn Imagine, one of the biggest sellers on that topic – the idea of a critical look at this literature intrigued me, especially a critical look by someone whose main job isn’t writing about or researching business.

I managed to find a copy of that issue of Harper’s, and when I read Frank’s article, I wasn’t disappointed. (more…)

Hackers and Trackers and Slackers, Oh My!: Adventures at MIT’s “Media in Transition” Conference

New trends now start not from exhibitions or publications but from conferences. It was, after all, the 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’, attended by [Jacques] Derrida and other Parisian savants, that first put the ideas of poststructuralism into circulation in America, where they were developed, institutionalized, and ultimately re-exported to Europe and the rest of the academic world.

(David Lodge, “Through The ‘No Entry’ Sign: Deconstruction and Architecture”)

The start of May is usually the start of my academic conference season, and as my previous post indicated, I recently spent a few days in the Boston area. I went there to attend MiT8, the “Media in Transition” conference that happens every two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The conference is sponsored by MIT’s Communications Forum and the wonderful MIT Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program.

You might wonder how or why someone who works in a school of business administration ended up at a conference that has presentations on topics like slash fiction, snark websites, Farmville, sexting, and reality television. (more…)

My Boston

Boston is one of my absolute favourite cities. And so I was horrified, as we all were, at the bombing at the Boston Marathon and the chaos afterwards. When I’ve visited Boston, I’ve spent a lot of time in Cambridge, where the two alleged bombers grew up and where they escaped to after the bombs went off. It was surreal for me to watch TV and see police in full combat gear running down streets that I know very well and where I always feel very safe.

I’m posting a few pictures that I took in Boston today, to show why I love visiting here. It’s a beautiful and resilient city, (more…)

Kate Bush Receives Her CBE

As a huge Kate Bush fan, it delights me to report that yesterday she was officially appointed as a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) for “services to music”. The appointment was announced this past December in the 2013 New Year Honours List, but the actual ceremony was yesterday.

Kate Bush receives her CBE from Queen Elizabeth at Windsor Castle. (photo credit: msn.uk)

Kate Bush receives her CBE from Queen Elizabeth at Windsor Castle. (photo credit: news.uk.msn.com)

Here is her message on her website about the honour, along with a picture of her medal.

Congratulations, Kate!!!

Hooray! The 10th Anniversary of Canada’s Adult Figure Skating Championships

This weekend, the 10th annual Canadian adult figure skating championships are taking place, in Kamloops, BC. It’s a historic occasion for adult skaters in Canada, and since (sadly) I can’t be there, I’m instead going to write about why this anniversary is so important.

As explained on this blog’s About page, I am an adult skater. (more…)