#yesterday was nothing short of a nightmare and its unlikely i will be on regularly

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Notes On A Conditional Form

I need a break from games writing, and I guess playing video games I’m not entirely enjoying. To be fair to the Uncharted series, I was also briefly dipping in and out of Battlefield V and that’s just not been going well for a long time. I’ll just sit quietly and wait for the new maps.

Today’s title is the most obvious and terrible of puns, for which I should be fired. You’re fired from your own journal - pack your shit and get the fuck out, Vee. Fine, I never liked this job anyway. Who am I kidding, I love this job - I’ve been writing consistently again since the 16th of February this year and really enjoying it.

For once I’m going to use something topical as a springboard for today’s discussion, so as I say on Twitter - Saturday is writing day.

The 1975′s new album Notes On A Conditional Form is out now, available on all the usual distribution platforms except for the good one that counts (Bandcamp) so go get it.

I’m just finishing up my first full listen-thru in the studio where I do my writing as I begin typing out this piece - actually Guys has just started up so it’s the final song. It’s the second time I’ve heard this track, the first time was last night when my week ended and I finally got a chance to sit down on the couch in-front of YouTube and the promo was in my recommendations. What an adorable video.

For the duration of this writing session, I’ve queued-up Telefon Tel Aviv because it suits my mood better - NOACF will play after Dreams Are Not Enough and it’ll probably play if I write for long enough.

I joked around on Instagram yesterday that I bought NOACF Friday morning but wouldn’t get a chance to listen to it until today. I could have listened to it during my work day but there’s no way I’d have had my first listen on the shitty UE Booms that have transducers made of stale bread I have at my work-from-home desk, plus I don’t want to have distractions for my first listen - be talking over it while I work and have to stop-start music during teleconferences and video-meetings etc. Friday was a particularly hectic day for me, but even if it wasn’t, the speakers alone are enough of a reason for me to not want to engage in critical listening in my work-space. I can’t use the 535s or 555s even, because constantly swapping from music to teleconference headphones would be a nightmare.

It’s fine - I just have to be patient. At some point you just stop having to listen to everything the minute you get it. Years ago, I absolutely would be slamming tunes as soon as I would download them - or back when we bought CDs from stores, R and I would be in the car, peeling plastic wrap and jamming them into the slot and cruising around having a listen. Even then, tho, I made it a practice of setting aside time for dedicated listening. Music has always been important to me, I don’t know if it’s tied intrinsically to being a musician, I don’t think it is but it could be, hard to tell. For as long as I’ve been recording things onto cassette from the radio and then buying CDs with my own money, I’ve spent time just listening to music - not while reading, not while doing chores or homework or recreational things like building Gundam kits and Lego, play board games or entertaining guests with other people altho it has its place backing all of these things.

I’ve always wanted to spend time having music as the main focus - the specific activity I engaged in.

When I studied Audio Production and Engineering, it was taught as a subject called Active Listening, albeit as a pragmatic subject of analysis both sonically and musically and I still appreciate it being taught this way. It engages students to perceive musical listening as something you should do as a verb the same way that it’s taught in psychology and social studies. While there are some specifics you can probably educate yourself with regards to the physics of audio and music theory, at some point it begins to become about what’s subjectively pleasing to your ear - this much is absolutely also taught - that much about sound is about perception and is subjective, and the industry of music (the actual course is literally called Music Industry: Technical Production) is about honing technical skills and combining them with understanding your own subjective perception and successfully marketing them.

The real art of active listening is simply paying attention - it’s rudimentary - it’s just not being passive. Most folks aren’t participants in their appreciation of music and that’s not a facetious statement - there’s nothing wrong with people who don’t take a greater role in their digest of music in general, it’s perfectly OK because it’s probably not that important to them. The point at which they feel they want more from what they hear is when they need to do something about it, but they don’t owe it to anyone else to do anything before that. You’ll get no soapbox ranting about pop-music from me.

What’s perhaps less OK is if an individual regularly expresses discontent at a generalised lack of quality or availability of good art but does nothing to seek it out. Good art has never been more accessible. “Oh Vee,” I hear you cluck, “Are you here fixin’ to tell me The 1975 is good art? Cos we gonna throw down.” If you disagree then firstly that’s fantastic. I mean, you’re wrong, but I’m happy for you. But also you’re already in a good space to know what you do and don’t like and should already be good and finding good art.

I’m getting distracted again.

As meandering as my writing seems to get, hopefully some of it is still healthily circular in some ways - and coming back to the reasons I’ve stepped back from other platforms and am finding it comforting to write regularly here on tumblr is that observation of the longer form. Here I get to set aside more time and give myself more consideration to a topic. I sit in the studio and get my thoughts out over a few hours, then over the next few days, I revisit and re-read snippets or all of what I’ve read, in part to proof-read and correct it but also to go over the subjects I’ve written about in review. Sometimes reviewing inspires further notes in my phone that may or may not turn into journals in the future, but that doesn’t have to be a thing, I’ve not decided yet, but I’ve long ago abandoned the need for every action to bear fruit; it’s a very capitalist way of thinking, this framing of return on investment, that a thing is only worth doing if it’s profitable in the future. The action often has value then and there, it’s the act of doing it, but there has to be an action beyond just the thought, because if I don’t write it down, I know a day later when I want to summon the thought again because I liked it, it’ll be gone from my brain and I’ll hate myself for not noting it. This is how the brain works - it’s immensely capable and sometimes, when everything is important but there are a lot of things, it can’t keep track of them all so at some point it starts discarding them, especially in the short-term.

I watch a lot of YouTube. I really enjoy Rooster Teeth videos and I’ve had a First subscription for almost two years now. Oddly I still watch almost all their content on YouTube simply because it’s more convenient to do so across all devices,  but the point of having a premium subscription for me is to support them as content creators, not to access content earlier or really to access anything exclusive - I’ll be honest, I’m not watching any exclusives at all and couldn’t tell you what that content is. I’m also super glad that they opened up First access free during Covid, so right now you can sign up for First and watch everything thru their web portal and see all that exclusive stuff plus watch everything early and it won’t cost you anything. Yes - part of the point is the marketing benefit that after Covid, they hope you’ll see that First has economic value for you and that you’ll pay for it afterwards, but they transparently, plainly and frequently acknowledge this in their shows which I suspect is more than other companies are doing.

Outside of Rooster Teeth - which do create a lot of content at 30 minutes and above, often 1 hour shows but often 10 to 15 minute episodes, I still do watch a lot of typical 10 to 20 minute YouTube clips, especially after work. My reasons for watching these are probably similar to a lot of people - after an arduous day of office admin, often it’s easier to watch smaller, more easily digested pieces of media instead of material that takes potentially more psychological commitment. How that commitment takes shape is different for everyone - for some people, heavy narrative is more demanding. For me, if you’ve taken any cues about my tastes, you’ve probably figured it’s a little different.

Some of the short clips I watch are video gamers arsing about being funny; a lot of Funhaus (under Rooster Teeth) falls into this category, but a lot of my watching is comprised of Synth Tubers and musicians. There’s some stuff in the periphery - because of Gavin Free’s adjacency in Rooster Teeth, I might watch the occasional SloMo Guys clip that might appear in my recs, as well as the odd 1975 promo because I’m subbed so their single releases appear in my feed and Dirty Hit and adjacent artists will hit my recs too, so again once in a while I might try them to varying success - I bought half of Wolf Alice’s Visions Of A Life but couldn’t bring myself to pay for the full album. Maybe next time.

YouTube is a bit like the thumb, heart and like. It’s the short-term hit, the low-level engagement for my visual and auditory senses. I’m not knocking it, it’s fine. It’s good. It’s not entirely like but not entirely unlike sugar. Does the analogy carry all the way thru to if I consume too much of it, it’ll give my brain virtual brain diabetus? I’m not entirely sure but it could be worth being cautious of. I don’t think that’s a real thing but one thing I certainly have been missing is real cinema, and the other night I finally turned everything off and put on a bluray I’d bought of a film I’d as yet not seen, and was really glad I did;

I don’t often get to watch films that are for me, as egotistical a statement as that might sound. When J is home, I try not to subject her to my film taste, or at least some of the more rigorous sides of it. There’s a decent amount of crossover in our tastes which is plenty fine for us to share, but for some things I’d wait for her to go to bed or be out or away. I’m not sure how she’d take something like The Favourite, there’s a lot to like about the narrative as a whole, but I certainly can understand how people might not like it.

Nevertheless I adored the film, it’s almost perfect for me with the exception of some of the editing - Yorgos Lanthimos edited it himself, it would seem, so that’s ah... a thing. Anyway, alas were I here to discuss the film because it’s an absolute smashing delight.

I really do miss sitting down and just being able to be immersed in good cinema. It isn’t because I don’t want to, either - it really is because I find it so difficult to find film aligned with my tastes. If you want to know what those tastes are, there’s a page full of it, and yes, David Lynch and Terrence Malick are on it so I’m one of thooose people. Whatever, I so don’t fucken care. I’m not a snob, tho - I’ve talked about it before, can’t be arsed digging thru the journals but they only go as far back as Feb so have at it - but I dug the first John Wick, Michael Bay has his place, I mean, he’s a cock, but I respect and admire the cinemacraft - I totally talked about that (maybe I should go find it). I really *really* love action and stunt-craft a lot - there’s a lot of hard work that goes into that - not just sets and props but personnel, stage-craft, lighting, vis-fx and camera. It’s good industry, it looks great and it’s simply fun to watch.

Anyway.

I have action films on bluray, I just don’t talk about them. Instead I keep a list of my weird shit because they get less attention, less money and I feel like they speak more to my experience and there are fewer things in this life that speak to my experience. The list of video games in the journal before this one speak more to my experience, that’s why there’s a list of them. Uncharted speaks infinitely less to my experience, and that’s probably why I hit it with a stick so much, because dear lord jesus fuck look at how much money it gets, and yet look at how poorly the people who made it are being treated and how much fuck-all is being done about it, so fuck that shit, unite and unionise, and support your fucking indies. I’m getting distracted again... it’s not hard to do at the moment...

A dear friend had a birthday recently and they asked for some music - actually let’s roll back. Once our state went into lock-down and we couldn’t go visit one-another, one of my best friends K and I started talking over video-calls instead of our normal phone-calls. We’d normally speak over the phone because we’d see each other when she’d come over and have dinner with J and I, or we’d all have lunch etc. So me being me, there’s no way I’m going to be happy just using my phone - of-course I can run Zoom from my PC and use my webcam, but run all my audio gear thru my interface - meaning a nice condenser mic instead of a shitty phone or hands free, plus all my synths. This is how our video-calls go - I play music for her while we talk. It’s an absolute blast.

On one particular call, she told me the music I was playing at the time would be really great to help her with the work she was doing (also working from home). I was only just playing a Rhodes patch thru the reverb unit with a massive tail but she did have some decent bluetooth headphones on and it sounded great. That weekend, I spent a couple of hours recording a few pieces of simple music, just one instrument and fx direct - no sequencing, straight into audio - lightly normalised - topped and tailed, encoded to mp3 and sent them to her.

I haven’t had a lot of studio time at all over the last two years - J and I have had a really rough year - not with one another, but challenges that we’ve had to face. If you read back thru the journals, you’ll see another one of those which has further flow-on effects for us that we continue to deal with. That’s life. Both she and I have been dealing with these kinds of challenges for most of our lives from a very young age. Sometimes I spend a bit of time noodling, as J calls it, on a piece of gear here and there, and in the past I’ve taken a few bits of gear out of the studio down into the kitchen and recorded videos for Instagram that have been fun - usually for a weekend or week while she’s been out of state with family.

There’s that thing again with only doing things in short bursts and hopefully I’m able to illustrate this pattern of shortness, of us having to live our lives in short bursts. I’m not going to hook it into the evils of YouTube (I like YouTube and use it) or Spotify (I hate Spotify and don’t use it) - as always, these things seem to follow people’s patterns of behaviour rather than shape it - but there are probably some other evils that have shaped our patterns of behaviour and the consumer services have simply followed. Are we being over-worked and is the quality of our life out of balance? Probably. Are we losing touch with a better sense of engagement with one another, activity, focus and art? Very likely. Do we point a furiously waggling finger at Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and yell BAD and run to the hills to farm organic vegetables and hide from 5G (couldn’t help it) for the rest of our days? Not at all because that’s clearly stupid.

I like Twitter. I really like Twitter. I really like YouTube. I really like the Wire and the accessibility and ease it’s brought about. Just because we haven’t quite figured out how best to utilise it doesn’t mean we have to set it on fire and huddle in the dark. I don’t get that approach - we are astonishingly intelligent beings, yet our reaction to not being able to fully process complex things always seems to be SHUN AND RUN. Don’t credit me with that, I’m sure I read it somewhere - I wish Mamoru Oshii’s external memory (or wherever he shoplifted it from) was a real thing and I could check it (NB: I did exactly that, but couldn’t find anything culturally remarkable enough as a source).

Dedicating time to recording those pieces of music for K was really amazing. I just listened back to them and I’m really happy with how they came out. If you ask nicely I might post one of them up here but you’ll have to ask really nice and understand they’re super ambient so they might put you to sleep but that’s one of the desired effects, I guess. Watching The Favourite was amazing, and I have to try to dig out more cinema to dig into. I’m really hoping Ghost of Tsushima reviews well for PS4 because I’m pretty much sold on it - I’d like a game I can play for long periods rather than short bursts because I value enduring video game experiences that aren’t frustrating. And writing here every week has been the most positive step I’ve taken this year, super beneficial and I hope at some point I can get around to discussing some of the other artefacts of art I keep mentioning in greater detail, or at least more about my engagement with them. That list of films has a lot going on in it as far as how it’s influenced my life. I say that it’s listed in no particular order, but Ishikawa’s Tokyo.Sora remains to this day my most favourite film by a long way, no other film has come close, but there are a lot of films that are almost as special and that leave everything else a long way behind. Most of Lynch’s films are pretty special to me, so too most of Oshii’s, but I’d love to talk about why films like Polgar’s Exit and Fliefauf’s Womb are there for their tone and feel more than their content.

I think that’s coming. For the moment I’m still writing as a capture of my mental state in time. Barely anyone uses the term microblogging in reference to Twitter any more but that’s exactly what it is - it’s a granular timecode of people’s pragmatic and emotional reactions to their experience of life - usually too granular to be useful without strange barely accessible tools to process. For me a return to traditional writing has been both immensely useful and satisfying. I enjoy both cataloguing and documentation, but I also love the mechanical process of such. Sitting down and spending time writing has given me perspective on how and when to use a granular tool like Twitter - even for shitposting - and Instagram too, tho shuttering Instagram is still on the cards - and it’s amplifying every activity I dedicate time to.

More and more I’m getting down on the floor with our dogs and playing with them - I did this anyway but I do it more, to bond with them and enjoy a sense of play and place at their level in pack harmony. There’s nothing overly spiritual and wanky about that, they’re just our dogs and we love them, it’s just about understanding canine behaviour and enjoying it.

This isn’t a puff piece about the perfect life, far from it. I’m not just trying to be positive either. There’s still an immense amount of shit happening around me, never you mind. It’s hard to contextualise everything all at the same time, so don’t be tempted to believe I’m here doing a HASHTAG BLESSED post because you can fuck right off. Go back and look at my taste in films damnit and tell me a positivity-only person digs those films get fucked. You wouldn’t know what we’ve been thru and I wouldn’t know what you’ve been thru either. Let us talk about shit sometimes and don’t do that whataboutism shit. You should be more mature than that. If there’s anything granular media has done it’s make you a lazy thinker so shake yourself out of it. You know better. You *know* you know better. Come on.

I might draw some art for you to steal, come back and insert it but I’m happy with ending here.