Listen with Patience

Ideas and Opinions | Milo

In this piece I am looking to describe the joy I experience whenever I listen to music, as well as how I listen to music. Milo out.

You can grab one from Amazon or Urban Outfitters

It's the day after boxing day, and it's roughly six or seven o'clock in the evening. I am sitting on my bed. On the floor sits a Christmas gift, a turntable that is conveniently shaped like a suitcase. I'm not sure I will ever need to take it with me, nevertheless I feel like there's a cheesy poetry to a music player shaped like a suitcase, after all music does take you places...

Still with me? Good. Anyway the first time I tried to use it to play a vinyl, I couldn't get it to work.I read through the manual before embarrassingly searching: How to play a vinyl using a turntable on Google to no avail. I was both comforted and cringed by the number of videos and articles written about the subject, but was mostly dismayed because none of the information helped. I bailed, and left it for a few days.

Once I returned to the task, it was a simple matter of flipping an innocuous switch on the side to get the machine to work. A switch, I might add, that was not mentioned or fucking highlighted in the instruction manual. Nevertheless I managed to get it to work, and was rewarded by my first experience of the warm, soporific thrum of vinyl music.

The first vinyl I listened to was Swans: Love of Life

The introduction to this piece might come across as being long winded, uninteresting or incredibly anticlimactic. "Great," you might think, "you managed to get a turntable to work. Big deal Shit-lock" and to you I would agree, it's not a miracle and it's not a big deal. But I wanted to use an exaggerated introduction, and a somewhat ponderous pace, to better illustrate how I enjoy my music.

As the needle spun and the music jerked to life, I found myself pacified and enraptured by the sounds coming from the kitsch little box. Moreover there was a childlike, boyish joy to be gained from simply watching a vinyl spin. There's a stupid wonder in it, a silly delight much like the smug satisfaction gained from saying "I told you so." Yes it's a simple, silly pleasure gained from patience and pausing ones own business to listen entirely to the business of another.

I listen to music, always and in all ways. I listen to it when I'm writing, when I'm playing video games, when I'm jogging, and when I'm on the bus. Indeed if I'm the only one in the office at work, I'm playing my music there as well. Due to my constant submersion in the aural, I am melodramatically surprised whenever I meet other people who are not similarly knee deep in music.

Pictured: Musical "debators" (from American Psycho)

For some people music is merely background noise, and for others it's a distraction. On the flip side for some people music is an excuse to have a "technical" discussion, it's a chance to talk about tempo, chords and decibels. It's a chance to debate the merits of pop music, and to rain down judgement on the poor taste of others. Lastly there are people like me.

Whilst I frequently listen to music as background noise, I will also devote an hour of my time to listen to an album from start to finish. Moreover I could barely tell you what a chord is, don't really know what a riff and could easily mistake a treble clef for some sort of foreign currency (although what a politically charged mistake to make! Right, right I'm being cheesy again, sorry). What I do know, however, is that with time and patience comes great rewards. Music can steady your breathing, arrest your thoughts and take you into a timeless space. It can make your daily tribulations more interesting, as it can make your routine happenings cinematic. Moreover it can also instruct you about yourself, as the strange daydreams and mental escapades a song takes you through, is as good a mirror for the self as a diary.

Really it doesn't matter whether you listen to, whether it's One Direction or Oren Ambarchi, and it doesn't matter whether you purchase vinyl records from niche stores or stream on Spotify. But whatever you do, if you do not do this already, try to listen to your music with patience. See if it fits.

Stop the Clock

Ideas and Opinions | Milo

In this piece I am defending the right to live a thoughtful life, and that "thinking" at the expense of "doing" is not only OK but is a necessity of living in the "first world". Milo out.
 

Image from John Saddington

Humanity marches forward right? That's what it does, we progress, we march, we improve on the works of our fathers and seek absolution from the sins of our fathers, ultimately improving all the same. Indeed in this world of unflinching progress, where we will forgive athletes all manner of abuses because they are great, and we will forgive musicians all number of obscenities because we adore them, and ignore other such billionaires because they are our leaders and benefactors, there is no time for anything other than progress. 

You're a bum if you are working in the same modest job for fifteen years, and you're a loser if you are unemployed. We are raised with the expectation that we will inevitably hate our jobs, and some of the most popular sitcoms of our time deal with the awkward mishmash of necessity, and incompatible personalities, that make a 9-to-5 the biggest bane of the (hideously named) "first world".

Office Space Gif

If I was to stroll through London I would be bashed and bruised, knocked aside by the hundreds of busy, busy people all participating in this culture of progress. No one seems to have time these days, despite time being all we have as people of the "first world".

It is with this perspective that I seek to stop the clock. After all it is "our" clock to stop isn't it? We have stopped many a clock in the past, such as when sundials were deemed inefficient, and then we stopped even more when trains required a standardised time to run smoothly.

So there, I've stopped the clock.

When I miss my bus stop because I am reading a novel: I have stopped the clock. When I live a monkish existence rather than rush into my next job: I have stopped the clock. When I take an hour to decide whether I want to wake up, or stay in bed for a further hour: I have stopped the clock.

However aside from these petty rebellions against our busy and "progressive" society, there is a more meaningful reason to stop the clock. We in the UK speak the world's most convenient-to-speak language. We live in "our" world, and with that comes a sense of stewardship and compassion that cannot be expected of those "outside" of it. We are charged with thinking about how best to live, because our actions have consequences for hundreds upon thousands of other people. Right now how I choose to value myself as a worker affects those who I will work with, and those who will benefit from my employment. Moreover the attitudes I have will affect my ability to live with my neighbours in peace. This goes from the insignificant (like deciding whether to have patience with the noise of a neighbours DIY) to the significant (like deciding ones perspectives on welfare, refugees, sexual identity and gender identification).

Time and Tide by Vlolscraper

Therefore I have chosen to spend my days thinking in solitude, before then writing these same thoughts up, or discussing them with my friends. I have done this for years in small and sporadic ways, before founding The Patient Approach with my partner-in-thought Moose. I have since turned my thoughts into actions, without transforming their essential nature.

But these new found "actions" do not validate my thoughts, and the fact that I have something to "show" for all my solitude is not a proof of its worth. Indeed whilst thoughts and actions are not the same thing, a thoughtful life is an active life all the same. Blowflies hover and zip for their lives are short, they do not have the gift of stopping time. We do. We live at the speed that we choose to, and time passes as the rate that we decide. Therefore stopping to think and consider one's life is not to stunt one's progression through life, it is to redefine it.