Comtemplating creativity

It was by a circuitous route that I came accross Malcolm Gladwell's website and his article that I'm about to discuss. I used to work some for Billboard. A fellow writer there, a Canadian music journalist who I'd never met or corresponded with, after leaving the publication sent off what seemed to me a vitriolic email - to EVERYONE on the masthead. Since then, I have continued to receive from him a very prolific newsletter with all of his latest articles, other people's articles he liked, and sometimes rants on US politics and Canadian music industry obscura.

I don't mind it, I skim it for any useful education on the "Western" music industry, which admittedly I know too little about from here in my Chinese/Asian bubble. But - it makes me contemplate to do - or not do - an email newsletter. From the first missive - which admittely was entertaining, Billboard is not an easy place to work for - it seemed disorganized and personal to the point of being unprofessional, and frequent to the point of being spam.

I digress on this because I want to start doing an email newsletter as shameless self-promotion, as with this blog, but I want to tread carefully on the territory of professional internet etiquette. For friends, I have my very personal Lisaland Dispatches - which I have been remiss about the past few years; for sharing articles and opinions there are more suitable tools like Facebook and this blog. But I would like to do perhaps a monthly, conservatively edited send-out to my tens of thousands of professional contacts with links to my recent articles and any interesting news about my work and the Shanghai cultural beat. I have a good example from my California composer friend Christopher Tin, who is very sparse in his mass-email updates about his work and forthcoming album, complete with preemptive (and unnecessary) apologies about the spam.

So, if anyone has thoughts and suggestions for what they would like (or hate) in a Lisa Movius newsletter - please, I'd love to hear them. Even blogging I face the dilemma of how casual, personal, opinionated to be in a public domain. For example, and ironically, my initial wording of this post and naming of said colleague was a bad call, and I apologize to him. I'm a believer in shout-outs, I try to publicize people I know and hope they return the favor, but want to keep it positive. Unless there's a damn good reason to be critical.

Anyhow. My ex-colleague's last dispatch was an interview he'd done with Bob Lefsetz, who apparently is a well-known US music journalist and who has a blog and newsletter that apparently are quite popular. I checked it out, and it is a useful resource for anyone like myself interested in the US music industry. The writing is that 1970s Rolling Stone stream of consciousness rant that I am no fan of, but the information is interesting. Lefsetz is a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell, and writes about everything Gladwell writes, which sent me to reading some of the latter's recent articles.

One was on whether adversity makes people stronger, whether those of us from disadvantaged backgrounds actually end up better able to rise above our colleagues/competitors who started out higher on the ladder by privilege of birth. That is something I have always liked to believe, call it the scrappiness factor, but it might just be my resentment of the soft, entitled trust fund babies showing.

The other was an excerpted from or synopsizing Gladwell's newest book "Outliers", about how creative genius is as much if not more the territory of the long-slogging late-bloomers as the wunderkinds. I highly recommend it. I'm still digesting it, and contemplating how it applies to my own creative and internal struggles. And, on that note, now I must get back to the mundane and practical stuff that I get paid to write.