Some people talk about their creative journeys, while over the last almost 30+ years I’ve had more of a random creative meander. Sometimes it can be hard to make sense of it all, even if you’re me.
So big thanks to my old mate Paul Balsillie who seems to have done it for me. He’s the founder of a new website, Milestones Page, that acts as a kind of online CV for creative types. And he wanted me to be one of his guinea pigs, handily using my life as test data.
The site’s just gone live. At first it felt a little bit like a LinkedIn or IMDB profile, but it’s actually something that’s far more flexible, for me at least. For creatives, it’s more like a structure to catalogue your life’s work. For everyone, it’s somewhere to explore a person’s output, across genres and artforms. There are some folks I know there and it’s cool to be able to check out their entire career, laid out with links and videos and audios and articles and photos – whatever media is out there.
Paul’s taken his time setting it up and I reckon the result is pretty schmick and is an excellent template to showcase your work. This is not an ad and I am generally ambivalent at best about new platforms, so I’ll just say I think it’s worth checking out.
Paul set up my profile by diving deep, and including things I would never dream of including on a CV. It’s a mix of my professional writing and a lot of amateur all kinds of stuff: web series, short films, albums… he even included a nerdy Monty Python discography I wrote in 1991. And my Milestones page has similar levels of nerdy discography but about little old me.
So there’s things Paul included that I thought I’d take out, and I was thinking of setting to Private (something which you can do, for those moments you’d rather keep to yourself).
But then last Friday, I got the latest installment of Glenn Peters’ always enjoyable Substack, The Nightwatchman, in which he published excerpts of his year 12 diary: snatches of lyrics, gig flyers, the random scrawls of a 17-year-old. And this page:
The Parable of the Wise Man and the Fool. That was something I wrote for the FOUL1 Manifesto when I was just 17 myself.
I was shocked, delighted and humbled. I got to know Glenn in later life, working together at Shock Records, he’s a great guy. And teenage Glenn thought my anonymous writing (as quoted as a space-filler in FOUL’s newsletter, The Amiable Quadruped) was worth cutting out and sticking in his diary, beneath quotes from Lou Reed, TISM and The Young Ones.
So I figure, what the hell, I should celebrate my storied past, all the way back. So I’ve fleshed out my profile a bit more, and it’s pretty amazing to see the complete history of Wok gathered together on one page. Almost like a whole Media Empire.
But of course it’s the future Milestones that are the most exciting…
- FOUL = Friends Of Unnatural Llamas, a Melbourne Uni club devoted to “silliness, absurdity, insanity and nonsense in all places, at all levels, at all times”. But that’s another story. ↩︎
