We spent some time around Albury over the weekend. It was fascinating to see so much water. It was a contrast to the river I experienced while living in Swan Hill a few years ago when it was quite low.
Month: September 2022
Can’t help but hear Orwell while listening to Jones. “All voices are equal, but some voices are more equal than others.”
Tom Breihan (stereogum.com)In an acceptance speech for the Nashville Songwriters Association International award for Songwriter-Artist Of The Decade, Taylor Swift shares her three genres associated with her lyrics.
I categorize certain songs of mine in the “Quill” style if the words and phrasings are antiquated, if I was inspired to write it after reading Charlotte Brontë or after watching a movie where everyone is wearing poet shirts and corsets.
…
Fountain pen style means a modern storyline or references, with a poetic twist.
…
Frivolous, carefree, bouncy, syncopated perfectly to the beat. Glitter Gel Pen lyrics don’t care if you don’t take them seriously because they don’t take themselves seriously.
📅 Albury 22
Prior to COVID, we had a tradition as a family to go on a big holiday each September. We had not really planned to go away this year. However, with the passing of the queen and the additional public holiday we decided to make the most of the situation and go on a driving holiday to Albury.
It is always funny how you assume certain things based on past experiences. When we arrived after driving all day we assumed we would easily be able to get into somewhere to celebrate our anniversary, but we quickly realised that even mid-week a walk-up was not a guarantee. After wandering the streets for a while we stumbled upon the Public House. It is funny how with all the searching online, serendipity still has a place. The place pleased all, with my wife and I sharing a mini cocktail or two, while our children loved colouring in the children’s menus and completing the various activities provided. Oh, and the food was great.
We chose to stay in Albury as it not only provided a range of activities, but a great launching spot for the wider area. One place we were keen to visit was Beechworth. I always find it interesting to visit a place twice. Sometimes the memory does not necessarily match with how it actually is. I have some history with the area, with my wife and I having in Beechworth in 2009, while I also went on school camp there many years ago.
Visiting with our children, we went to Beechworth Honey, where the girls got to taste different types of honey and learn about the process involved in producing them. We then went to the original Beechworth Bakery and had a pie and a bee sting. After that we walked across town to Billson Brewery. Not sure I remember visiting this space in the past. It was a good place to visit with the children as they got to try the various flavours of cordial, while my wife and I were able to try the various gins and liqueurs. It was also nice to buy some bottles of Chilli Punch Cordial, although I now realise that I could have ordered them from Billson online, it just never occurred to me. On our way back to Albury we took a detour and climbed to the top of Mt Pilot. A reminder I should do more bush walks with my children.
For diner we went back to Public House for 2 for 1 pizzas. Funny thing was that we got rained on as the retractable roof was left open.
On Friday, we explored Albury. This included spending time at the children’s garden in the Albury Botanical Garden. We then visited the Murray Art Museum Albury. A couple of highlights were Stephen Bush’s Babar inspired The Lure of Paris #35, Kevin Gilbert’s Colonising Species and the kids space.
Sadly the night ended on a sour note as we were evacuated from our hotel at 3am in the morning. Thankfully it was not raining outside as we wait to be told we could return to our rooms. I guess it could have been worse, we could have been evacuated due to flooding or worse, because we were under attack. Not sure our children saw it.
For our last full day away, we decided to go driving to Corowa / Rutherglen region. It was fascinating to see the Murray in flood. When I lived in Swan Hill for a few years, the river was relatively low, but there were always remnants and markers to remind you that it was and is not always that way.
In our travels, we visited Corowa Distilery (and Chocolate), Campbells Winery, All Saints Winery, Gooramadda Olives, and Earthcare Farm. We visited the area in the past, however having children with us definitely provided a different perspective. It was a good time to do it as it seemed that many were off watching the grand final.
One of the interesting things to come up through the conversations was the experience of living on the state border during the COVID lockdowns. One person explained to us how different teams were cycled through the various border crossings with little to no knowledge of the area. It was eye-opening and really provided a different perspective.
On our way home on Sunday, we detoured via Milawa Cheese and the Ned Kelly show in Glenrowan. It was fascinating to see the investment into Glenrowan, I was expecting it to be dead, but there had clearly been investment in the town and its history. Only a few minutes off the freeway, I think that I would stop there in the future, especially after purchasing the biggest bee sting in my life from the bakery.
We aren’t supposed to talk about these things this week. We aren’t supposed to talk about colonisation, empire, violence about Aboriginal sovereignty, not even about the republic, writes Stan Grant.
Stan Grant reflects on the passing of Queen Elizabeth and the legacy of colonisation for indigenous people around the world.
At times like these I wonder what it would be to not know apocalypse. To not know what it is to come from a people who face an existential threat. Who have clung on to their very place on this earth.
I wonder what it would be like for me to be like my colleagues for whom this is one of the defining stories of their lifetimes.
Sometimes, I wonder what it must be like to be white.
But then I would not be my mother’s son.
What a privilege it has been to be the Foundation Principal of St Luke’s! I have appreciated playing a small part in a big team. I will be forever thankful for the staff who trusted me and I leave being in awe of their work.
Congratulations Greg. I have really enjoyed following your journey. Thank you for openly sharing. Good luck with whatever the future has to bring.
📓 On Culture
Doug Belshaw explains that culture is continually remade:
As Kojo Koram from the School of Law at Birkbeck, University of London, writes, however, culture is something that is continually remade by the people living it. These different conceptions mark the boundaries of the culture wars currently being played out in British politics and society.
Raymond Williams suggests that culture fluctuates between dominant, residual and emergent:
By ’emergent’ I mean, first, that new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship are continually being created. But it is exceptionally difficult to distinguish between those which are really elements of some new phase of the dominant culture (and in this sense ‘species-specific’) and those which are substantially alternative or oppositional to it: emergent in the strict sense, rather than merely novel.
Julian Stodd suggests the one word to describe ‘culture’ is violence:
If we had to choose a single word to describe culture, it would possibly be ‘violence’, not because the behaviours of culture are violent (although they may be), but rather because culture is held as a struggle at the intersection of systems. Tribal systems, formal systems, belief systems, knowledge systems, and specifically systems of power.
At the heart of today’s tip is the fantastic SEQUENCE function.
In a blank Google Sheet, enter this formula into cell A2:
=SEQUENCE(53,7,DATE(2022,1,1),1)
It outputs a year of dates across 7 columns!
Add the days of the week as a header row and you’re set.
Ben Collins shares a means of creating a year calendar:
=SEQUENCE(53,7,DATE(2022,1,1),1)
Cameron Paterson (gettingsmart.com)In a century that is being defined by flexibility in time, we no longer need to be held hostage by sacred school timetables.
If we value deep learning and human connection, then this should be explicitly built into the school schedule.
Cameron Paterson reflects upon the way in which schools are still held hostage by the timetable.
While flexibility in time and space will define the workplace in this century, students get little experience deciding how to learn, where to learn, and when to learn, because schools account for every minute. Schooling is predicated on the perception that busyness is good. Treadmill schedules leave little time for deep learning, quietude, or human connections.
- What does our allocation of time say about what we value in the teaching and learning process?
- How can we provide time to enable young people to take more personal responsibility for their own learning, in line with the adolescent predisposition to begin taking charge of their lives?
- If flexibility in time and space will define living and working this century, how can school best prepare young people for this?
He shares examples of schools that have more fluid arrangements that allow students to engage in deeper learning.
I am reminded of a piece from a few years ago from Michael Bond Clegg:
The good news about timetables? We’ve created them, so we can destroy them.
As I have said before, what intrigues me is how the technology helps and/or hinders any sort of change to timetables. I feel that the flip side of flexibility is accountability. For some the answer is things like RFID chips or AI driven facial recognition. I wonder what is done in some of the settings that are mentioned in this piece? I imagine that open spaces like those discussed by people like Steve Collis remove some of that stress. Like removing the weeping willows from cluttered waterways, I imagine that it is important that we place some other alternative in place for fear of erosion.
I would say that floppy disks have a future, but it won’t see a revival like Vinyl. People like the idea of the record player and it will be around for a long time as a very niche or cool kind of thing. Floppy disks are going to be a little bit more like buggy whips or typewriters. They’re going to be a collectible marvel of their time. Imagine how hard it would be to manufacture a new typewriter today. There are a number of American authors who talk about the fact that they can only write on a typewriter. It’s something very important to them that is tied into their artistic genius. I think that floppy disks are going to be a little bit like that.
In an extract from Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium, Niek Hilkmann and Thomas Walskaar interview Tom Persky about the dying art of maintaining floppy disks. Persky discusses how he came to be in the busy and where he gets his stock from. He also explains how there are still various industries that are dependent upon the technology, such as medical equipment, that was developed 20+ years ago.
The customers that are the easiest to provide for are the hobbyists – people who want to buy ten, 20, or maybe 50 floppy disks. However, my biggest customers — and the place where most of the money comes from — are the industrial users. These are people who use floppy disks as a way to get information in and out of a machine. Imagine it’s 1990, and you’re building a big industrial machine of one kind or another. You design it to last 50 years and you’d want to use the best technology available. At the time this was a 3.5-inch floppy disk. Take the airline industry for example. Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the avionics. That’s a huge consumer. There’s also medical equipment, which requires floppy disks to get the information in and out of medical devices. The biggest customer of all is probably the embroidery business though. Thousands and thousands of machines that use floppy disks were made for this, and they still use these. There are even some industrial companies that still use Sony Mavica cameras to take photographs. The vast majority of what I sell is for these industrial uses, but there is a significant hobbyist element to it as well.
Administrator (insidestory.org.au)There is no shortage of things that could be added to this list. The revolution’s questionable taken-for-granteds (“equality of opportunity,” “choice,” schooling’s economic contribution) badly need re-examining. So does the habit of looking for silver bullets in other countries rather than trying to understand how Australia’s system has developed and what it can and can’t become. So also the endless talk about what makes a good teacher or a good school to the exclusion of what makes a good system.
But the point is not in a to-do list. The point is that the revolution has failed and so has its way of thinking. The first step towards unbeaching the whale is to start thinking outside that suffocating box.
Dean Ashenden reflects on the failure of Gonski and the education revolution. He suggests that the biggest ‘success’ was the way of talking about education which focuses on outcomes:
The revolution’s one real success was in directing the attention and shaping the language of “policymakers” and “thought leaders.” They now have no other way of thinking and talking about schooling. Hence ministers declaring that yet another bad PISA result to be yet another “wake-up call,” hence more announcements about lifting teachers’ pay or entry scores, hence new tests to make sure that teachers can spell, and hence more looking at other countries to see what they are doing right that might work here — all less from conviction than from not knowing what else to do. Seen from the outside it comes close to a famous definition of insanity.
As a model, the notion of outcomes comes from health services. Ashenden posits that this is problematic as those doing the ‘working’ are in fact the students, not the teachers.
The most fundamental mistake lies in imagining that schools are essentially deliverers of the service of teaching in much the same way that hospitals and clinics deliver health services. In reality, schools aren’t like that at all.
Schools are sites of the production of learning, not by teachers but by a four million–strong workforce otherwise known as students. The big determinant of their productivity is not the quality of supervision but the organisation of their work.
As much as I agree with what Ashenden is saying, my fear is that we are all always already ‘inside the box’? I also worry about the metaphor of the ‘beached whale’ as some whales cannot be unbeached and are blown up, or simply left to decay, providing food for opportunistic seagulls and sharks.
What if Facebook – and the other tech giants – were simply less important to your life? What if you had lots of choices about how you and the people you care about could communicate with each other?
In a video and paper, Cory Doctorow unpacks how an interoperable Facebook might work. He does this by unpacking four scenarios:
– Notifying contacts that you are leaving Facebook
– Blocking content from particular federated servers
– Blocking objectionable material from Facebook that it allows, but your network does not
– Posting material that Facebook prohibits
What excites me about the world that Doctorow imagines in this paper is the control and nuance over such things as feeds. Personally, I would be just grateful to be able to follow updates from sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin via a feed, rather than having to log in.
I feel that Making It! is one of those albums whose whole is greater than its part. I remember hearing always be you a few months ago. I enjoyed it, but to hear it within the breadth of the album gave it different perspective.
I was intrigued that even with its liberal spray of sugar, Cerro is adamant it is not hyperpop. However, it is clearly inspired by the genre. Maybe what Montaigne is not is simple and straight-forward. That I found interesting is that although the album is not very long, its frenetic nature means that there is so much to dig into.
Montaigne has provided the stories behind the tracks.
Stepping comfortably into somewhat new territory for the-artist-also-known-as Jess Cerro, leaning more to a kind of burbling, low impact electronica intersecting with shiny floor pop that doesn’t so much sprinkle the sugar as spray it liberally (in other words, a kind of hyperpop), these songs have the kind of in-built momentum that make actual tempos secondary.
Where on Cerro’s previous records, the music would serve to uplift their vaudevillian prose, here it’s just as crucial. The bitcrushed percussion and wonky keys on ‘SickCryDie’ let the listener feel the pangs of anxiety Cerro depicts in their lyrics, reckoning with the impact trauma has on a blossoming relationship. And without its angular collision of wonky tropical house beats and garish brightness, ‘JC Ultra’ – a biting critique of major label ethics in the form of an instructional guide on becoming a “vessel for the pro-alien agenda” – would just feel cheesy.
Cerro has called making it! “neurotic computer music”. In fact, they were largely inspired by their beloved video games. “I really wanted to have that influence the sounds that were chosen on the record.” But, working closely with producer Dave Hammer (Lime Cordiale), Cerro similarly latched onto the exploding hyperpop genre, citing SOPHIE, Charlie XCX and Caroline Polachek. “Both of us were really excited by those sounds and found them really addictive and really good to listen to.”
Place between Charli XCX and Architecture in Helsinki.
These diverse stories don’t just help us better understand ourselves, though. They also help us understand and empathize with people of different backgrounds.
“It is a huge loss for people to not be able to find themselves in books, particularly if they’re a person of color, if they’re queer, if they’re women or trans,” Kendi says. “And it’s a huge loss for people who are not trans and people who are not queer and who are not people of color. It’s a loss because they’re not able to learn about others.”
The Chemical Brothers bring more gear on stage than most of us have in our studios. Matt Cox is the man who has to make sure it all works come showtime!
David Greeves speaks with Matt Cox about the live setup of the Chemical Brothers. With all the different synthesisers, samplers, effects, midi clock and computers, he says the heart of it all is the mixing desk.
The hardware mixer has always been central to the rig, but as more gear has been piled around it, Matt has had to contrive ever more involved means of keeping it all in sync. “Back then [in 1996] it was a 16-channel Mackie [mixer] with a couple of analogue keyboards and a [Roland SH]101, and an [Akai] MPC that was the kind of brain of the whole thing. That grew on the next tour to a few more samplers and a few more keyboards. After that, we started to use [Tascam] DA38 [digital multitrack tape] machines with a little bit of audio printed to them, plus timecode to run the MPC, so that kept the MIDI and audio in time with one another. And then from there it went to [Akai] DR16 hard-disk recorders for playback, again with some audio printed from the Logic file. That drove SMPTE, which drove an MPC, which drove the MIDI gear and held the MIDI and audio elements together.
What I find most interesting are the people behind the scenes who make it all possible. Although Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons make it all happen, this would not be possible without the work of those programming the machines and maintaining everything.
There’s two of us that set the kit up. I do the programming side of it and Aaron [Cripps, the backline tech] looks after the maintenance side of it. On occasion there are components that need to be swapped out, so out comes the soldering iron.
This leaves me in even more awe of James Murphy doing both roles in the early days of LCD Soundsystem. I wonder if this was the same with The Chemical Brothers in their early days? It also leaves me thinking about artists like Autechre and how technology has made things ‘more doable‘.
Planning Tool that corresponds to the Diversity Wheel.
There have been times along the way when I lost the writing habit, second guessed myself, wondered if I had anything left to say… and then got back on track albeit less and less frequently.
Thank you for sharing your journey Edna. Good luck with your future endeavours.
What I’ve been up to this week.
Doug, I was reading your Weeknote and was confused with all your Thought Shrapnel posts. I thought, I have not seen them show up in my RSS feed. I then checked the feed and noticed that the last post seems to be June. Not sure if it is just me or if the feed has broken?
Simply click ‘Next’ and continue to be amazed. Select your favorite country. Play a slideshow in fullscreen. Use as a screensaver. Best way to kill your time.
John, there is something beautiful about serendipity. Whether it be surfacing random albums on Spotify or looking out somebody’s window. Random Street View is another source of such joy.