... or The Beatles, if you prefer, whatever. Let me calm my racing mind, sit in the kitchen, roll up a cigarette. Let me write calmly. Jack, Jack's house, all that jazz, rhythm and blues, and gospel (those are just labels...). Again, please. Ok, yes...
It's funny how ideas come together and join up and come into your life and that synchronicity occurs - or at least it used to be funny before every man and his sister's dog started spying on us. Anyway, yes, so I began reading Lewis Hyde's 'The Gift' today. A very powerful text somehow. Fairly quickly the import of what the writer was saying ('How the creative spirit transforms the world') really started soaking into the pores of my brain (osmosis). It felt quite liberating and revolutionary. Wow... the power of words! Google quickly sent me a link to an article about a woman living fairly comfortably without money. It's not synchronicity, it's just my phone listening to me (I had been reading aloud to my partner) or similar which shouldn't and probably doesn't shock the more tech-savvy readers among you. Anyway...
Yeah, so that was... that kind of linked in a little with some Substack articles I read today. Not hugely but a bit. And then well, er, ok backstory... I was on a train less than a month ago, maybe two, three weeks ago and it hit me a bit stunningly what my career should be. I'm getting on a bit now so I need to start thinking about a career (joke). A Mark E. Smith lyric (haiku?) puts it better than I can:
Life should be full of strangeness
Like a rich painting
But it gets worse day by day.
I'm a potential DJ.
Isn't that great? I don't know exactly what he meant but when you think about what actually happened to a lot of musicians moving beyond the years of their pop chart celebrity... well, it really did pan out like that for a lot of fading pop stars. Mark's star may shine a little longer, I think.
Anyway, my more mundane point here is that I thought, yeah, I'll become a DJ because something I am good at is... well, not spinning records and not even having good musical taste but... I don't care if this sounds stupid... getting a party started. Sometimes I think I can do that very well. So maybe I should just be the next Bez (some non-UK-based readers may need to search 'Bez, indie' to understand that reference). And maybe a very large amount of people think they are good at getting a party started, which is fine with me.
I ran with the DJ idea for a while. I tried. I researched the techniques a little, despaired about the requisite gear (100 Watts frightens me; do you need a van?), fantasised, worried about insurance and getting sued, paid for a very cheap DJ controller on eBay and got a bad deal on it, sold that on and my mood came back down to, you know, my more frequent Seasonal Affective Disorder and shit governments influenced aargh this (my life) is all going wrong low mood - nothing too severe at all but ok, maybe I don't want to be a DJ. And there we are until yesterday.
I forgot to mention that music documentaries about the early years of house music 'really bloody get me in the mood' (an Alex Turner lyric). They helped bring the DJ idea back. Recently I've been using Google/Google has been using me a lot more and so it was hard work but I sort of managed a bit of mixing on a Chromebook. And then I went back to my flat and proper woke up the neighbourhood with a 20 minute set just before the civilised hour that they have in Germany for 'music in built-up areas should stop now, really.' And calming down from that high, I got all the social-media-for-musicians websites like the 'definitely not social media' (that's irony) Substack and the possibly not very social media Bandcamp up and... well, many hours later I'm still up (yes, I could do with some sleep) and writing in a notebook about some aspects of my day yesterday and thoughts I've had in recent weeks.
And it don't mean Jack, which is cool, but that's some of what I've been up to. An increased media presence this evening. It feels fun and interesting at the moment where this might go. Changed my artist name to 'Good Life Jack' which is so in debit to the Inner City gang it'll have to go but it'll be ok for a while.
It was really nice to get my hands on a desktop tapping here, shifting windows over there. Right-clicking on a laptop is so frustrating as is pulling down those slide bars on the right of windows. Laptops are hard work. Anyways, brothers and sisters, that's an update. Spring is on its way in my part of the world although of course the internet's geographical reach is wider than that (or so I have been led to believe; I don't get out of the country much).
