Where have I been? Sick is where I've been. So sick that I had to take an entire week off work, and I didn't even enjoy it. Imagine that. Tuesday I wished I were dead. Wednesday night I wished I were dead. I still feel considerably below par. These are some of the things I thought about:
Music downloading, for me, has devalued the currency. The more I have available to listen to, the less I actually want to listen to.
I know practically nothing about parenting.
I have lived in Canberra for almost ten years now, most of which I have spent missing (a) Melbourne and (b) the farm I grew up on. As to the latter, it has long gone, and anyway what I need to remind myself is how things would have turned out if I had stayed there. And the answer to that is, it would have been very bad for me. And yet the haunting goes on. What I need to do, to put it bluntly, is Get Over It.
There are record covers that only really work at the size of a vinyl LP. Think of the first Ramones album; "Marquee Moon"; and "Horses". (All of which I have on vinyl.) If they had been released in the CD era I can't imagine them having become as iconic as they are. And there are covers that I wish I could have had on vinyl, but don't: Gerhard Richter's "Candle" paintings on "Daydream Nation"; Gregory Crewdson's photography on Yo La Tengo's "And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out"; also the Gary Panter cover of the most recent YLT album, also notable for the Jim Woodring artifacts amongst the back cover detritus. I actually believe that in each of these cases the covers have a positive effect on the music inside. But I don't know how that would work.
I need to think less and do more. But that will never happen.
I need to listen to less and listen deeper. That might happen. But I will need to learn self-control first.
And finally:
The last time Geelong and Hawthorn met in a grand final it was one of the great grand finals and yet we missed the entirety of it on account of being at our friends' wedding in Ballarat. We have no intention of missing it this year.
Thanks for listening.
