It is the winter solstice here in Australia as I write this, which means short, cold days and a lot less sunshine than one might like. Cold weather often leads to contemplation, and having moved into a new home earlier this year, we are now assessing how to balance heating levels, taking into account comfort on one hand and the cost of energy on the other. With modern electricity providers able to provide hour by hour readings, a logging thermometer has given us the chance to experiment with how we set the controls.
The questions raised are both economic and philosophical. How much is it worth to be comfortable? Is it better to rug up, or to shell out? And just how do you decide where to draw the line? Hopefully a new programmable thermostat will help us zero in on a reasonable balance between comfort and cost.
I have many fond memories of road trips over the years. Some were with family, some were with friends, and some by myself. Whether flying solo or with a copilot alongside, a journey by road can be a transformative experience.
For every road trip I can remember, music was a big part of the experience. There is nothing like a big chunk of seat time with good tunes and good scenery to stimulate conversation, introspection, perspective and reflection. The nature of road trips is that they often represent (or in hindsight end up as) turning points in the broader journey of life. As such, the car stereo ends up providing the soundtrack to an important period of change and growth.
We have been spending the past few weeks planning a road trip in the mountains in the coming months, and it feels like it is coming together well. Maybe that is what has me all nostalgic. Either way, this mix was recorded with mileage in mind. It starts slow, covers a fair bit of ground, picks up speed towards the end, and ultimately ends up far from where it started. It was recorded live in South Yarra in early April 2019.
Funny how the future keeps showing up. There are a handful of books I buy and shove into the hands of anyone who will take a copy. One of these is by Daniel Gilbert, and it is called Stumbling On Happiness. One of the key themes throughout the book is how we imperfectly perceive the future, and by extension how we imperfectly relate to our future selves. As Gilbert sees it, we tend to believe that who we are at the moment is the final destination of our becoming. As such, present day us sets goals for future us, without really understanding who future us will be. Working through this realisation may not be a blueprint for living, but it at least helps shine a light on how we see the future, and what we might best do in the present to balance the here and now with the coming soon.
On a personal level, at least in terms of living arrangements the future has finally arrived, and looking at it in detail it is for the moment pretty alright. This is Episode 072 of Music For Small Audiences, and it was the first mix recorded in the living room of our new home in South Yarra.
The weather can change quickly in Melbourne, particularly when a cool change comes through. So it was on the day this mix was recorded. It was a Friday evening in early January 2019, after a day spent at the beach (Jan Juc). The mix itself was recorded live in the hours after an obscenely hot summer day quickly transposed into a mild evening, thanks to a typically Melburnian temperature drop of fifteen degrees in thirty minutes.
This mix also came hot on the heels of a fantastic New Years Eve party, and a bit of a send off of our current place of residence in Richmond. After four years we are packing up and moving out, and we were chuffed to have had a group of beautiful people come help us say goodbye to our lovely little yellow house on the hill. For one last night the crew came together, talking old times and planning further adventures for the months to come. This mix accordingly contains a few unique tunes, some inspired by the 90s theme of the evening, and some brought around as special treats from those in the know.
Last weekend I was lucky enough to be invited to play some house music for a housewarming party celebrating the newly expanded home of two very good friends. Located in the inner west, this groovy pad was once two separate residences, which through some creative design work now works as a beautiful single home.
The party was fantastic, and the setup superlative, from the lamb on a spit through to the top range Pioneer hardware set up in the DJ booth. As a get together it was one we had been looking forward to, and it did not disappoint. From a musical perspective I had a chance to play exactly the set I wanted, from early afternoon trip hop through to some rather large late evening tunes. It was also a chance to make new friends, and to share a booth with two solid blokes across ten plus hours.
In DJing as in life, good preparation is key. This mix was recorded the weekend previously, as a test run through many of the songs I hoped I would be playing at the housewarming. It represents a fairly accurate snapshot of the set I played once the sun went down, the crowd moved indoors, and the lighting rig came out.
Finding a place to call home is never easy. Putting roots down means taking a chance, joining a community, and committing to the transition from transient to resident.
With that in mind, I am exceptionally excited to be moving back to South Yarra in 2019, to call our new house our new home. As a suburb South Yarra has a bit of everything, close to the city but with plenty of parks and quiet pockets, while our new home has everything we need for the years to come. While Richmond has been good to us, the timing is right for us to move on, to settle down, to settle in and to set ourselves up on the south side of the river.
This mix was recorded live on the Friday night before the auction that found us our new home. Feeling vaguely guilty for not making it to Sasha on the night, we settled for revisiting a couple of classic tunes, presented here alongside some of the newer material that has risen its way to the top of my record collection in recent weeks.
We measure progress in increments. Major life events stand as demarcations, with time able to be divided into before and after. As a recreational long distance runner, I know that it sometimes takes everything we have to make it around the next bend. Other times, the distance seems to fly by in the background, while mind and body are at peace and at ease. Either way, a kilometre is a kilometre, and the distance must be covered one step at a time by putting one foot in front of the other, for better or for worse. However the distance goes, it can be quite rewarding to then look back from a vantage point and realise just how much distance has been covered.
So too it is with relationships. What starts as a single moment can grow over time into something special and significant. It certainly has in my case. We returned to Castlemaine in recent weeks, and on a very special day made a very special commitment to one another, marking a milestone for us both and sparking cause for significant celebration.
We spent a recent weekend in the town of Castlemaine, ninety minutes outside of Melbourne. It was a lovely, rustic weekend with a bit of fresh air and a bit of adventure, and it was a fitting way to cap off the transition from winter to spring.
My mother has long espoused travel as a catalyst for personal growth. While we were not away long and were not especially far from home, the distance and experience was enough to help drive a meaningful shift in perspective. It also served as a helpful reminder of just how much fun a morning at the markets or an afternoon on a bicycle can be.
I read somewhere that our memories change every time we recall them. Each time we remember something it seems we are reassembling the story anew, distorting and reshaping the past through the influence of present day emotions and values.
English philosopher John Locke posited that our identity only persists as far back as we can remember. But basing our idea of who we are on a foundation of distant, intangible, and evolving recollections is hardly a recipe for certain self identity.
Perhaps ambiguity is to be embraced, then, while history gently rewrites itself in each of us.
As an experiment in delayed gratification, the marshmallow test pitted the willpower of young children against the tasty appeal of one or more marshmallows, with a stopwatch in between. Sometimes the children won, and sometimes the marshmallows won. Follow up studies suggested that the kids who were better able to control their desires were more likely to succeed in life. Sounds reasonable enough, if a bit disappointing for the impulsive types among us.
More recent analysis casts a bit of shadow on the marshmallow model, however. As is the case with a lot of famous social science studies, it turns out the key findings are hard to replicate, and that the predictive relationship between self control and success may not actually be measurable in marshmallow minutes.
Do the savers really have the edge over the eaters? Does struggling against desire really build character? Or are we just as well going with the flow, picking up the marshmallows as they come, and letting the chips fall where they may? Hard to say. Depends how much you like marshmallows I guess.
Before I was born, my father was a smoker. Giving up was not easy, and at one point during his effort to quit he was awoken in the middle of the night by a particularly vivid dream. The vision was of a radio plugged into the wall. The radio itself was struggling, trying to break free of the electric cord that both powered it and held it in place.
If the distinction between habit and addiction is the extent to which one can stop at any time, then thinking is a serious addiction for many of us. There are many ways to get the brain to shhhhhh, from yoga to exercise, creative expression, meditation, medication, and my personal favourite, music. For those of us accustomed to an occasionally over caffeinated internal monologue, learning to live with, love, and selectively break free from the dialogue inside is tough, but rewarding too.
There is a certain sense of permanence and seriousness associated with putting things in writing for others to see. An expectation, too, that what we write will be read and understood. But things do not always turn out as we had hoped. From illegible handwriting to errant postal workers to the odd unscheduled rainstorm, what gets put down in writing does not always get picked up by the other side. Sometimes the meaning is lost, and sometimes the whole message is lost too. If the medium is the message, then it seems good advice to choose the right medium for any message we wish to send.
It is nice to have options. Paralysis by analysis is a real thing, and sometimes less is more when it comes to trying to make a decision. The more wide open the future appears, the more fearful we can become about what it all means and what we should do about it. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard suggests that freedom and possibility are the precursors of dread and fear, and in a lot of ways he is not wrong. Is anxiety really just the dizziness of freedom?
The human body is easy enough to understand, at least in the basic mechanical sense. The mind is a bit more difficult to come to terms with, at least partially because of its inherent inability to get out of its own way. The spirit is harder still to understand. An ambiguous power, the spirit links mind and body for better or for worse, in sickness and in health.
Making it worse, thinking, feeling and doing are each very different things. It is not enough to know what to do, even though knowing what to do is hard enough. We must also do. For this reason, a bit of nervous energy as a motivator is a good thing.
It is halfway between the southern summer solstice and Christmas Day as I write this, with just a few days left in 2017. As such it feels natural to reflect on the year that has just passed.
Years are curious units of measure. In some ways they seem to tick by quickly and blur together. Yet in recollection they stand as distinct layers, around which our character, worldview and sense of purpose are built.
On trees, growth rings visibly tell the story of a series of annual atmospheric events. As humans our layers are not so easily visible, but for us too each year adds additional colour and depth.
In some ways the trees live as we do. Some years we face fires, some we suffer drought, and some we just pass. While Nietzsche probably oversimplified in suggesting that the path to growth is through trauma, I do agree that when the going gets hard, those still standing get good. Maybe I am an optimist. Either way, the good news is that we get to give it all another go in 2018.
An awful lot has been said about the power of ideas. The visionaries, the dreamers, the entrepreneurs, the strategy setters, the creatives, and the big picture thinkers, all have brilliant ideas on how to change the world for the better. Ideas can be contagious, seductive, compelling and inspiring. The creation and sharing of ideas can sometimes even give off the feeling of real work being done.
But in the words of Steve Jobs, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. Day after day, early morning after early morning, meal after meal, meeting after meeting and phone call after phone call, whatever the domain the path from idea to reality points in the same direction, and is laid through a mixture of grit, resilience, focus and determination. This has been a hard lesson to learn for those of us who are quite content with our head in the clouds and our feet up on the couch. For while it may be nice to slack off or space out every now and then, there is no denying that ultimately the world is run by those who show up. The only way to make things be is to make things happen.
It is the winter solstice here in Australia as I write this, which means short, cold days and a lot less sunshine than one might like. Cold weather often leads to contemplation, and having moved into a new home earlier this year, we are now assessing how to balance heating levels, taking into account comfort on one hand and the cost of energy on the other. With modern electricity providers able to provide hour by hour readings, a logging thermometer has given us the chance to experiment with how we set the controls.
