You know how I was saying I was working a little bit too hard the other day, and how I thought that had contributed to my weight gain?
Well tonight didn’t help much either, as dinner tonight consisted of an awful lot of champagne and canapes.
I was reminded briefly of a friend who used to work in the art world, and observed that she spent about two years in which her evening meal consisted of nothing but champagne and canapes, as she attended a range of social functions associated with her work.
“I became very fat”, she later observed.
Related to my work, I attended two functions tonight with champagne and canapes, and which billed themselves as international events.
The World Masters Games starts in ten days and features about 25,000 athletes competing, making it significantly larger than the Olympic Games.
“What was it like here in Sydney during The Games?”, a colleague who was from another city asked me over a glass of bubbly tonight. “Bloody fantastic”, I told her, observing there was lots to do both in terms of sport and cultural activities, the trains ran on time, the roads were reasonably free of traffic, and the city had a great spirit of co-operation about it.
World Masters Games Launch
Sydney International Food Festival Launch
Tasty
And the band played on…
Cheese
Jamon
Jamon
Manhattan
Mamma Mia at Star City
The other event launch I attended was for the inaugural Sydney International Food Festival, an event which has grown from the Good Food Month.
“Sydney is such a great place to eat”, I thought to myself over another glass of champagne. I love the fact that we have those really world class restaurants, which are often very expensive, but we also have an AMAZINGLY good range of cheap food. Not a week goes by when I don’t discover something new and interesting.
And best of all… “Mamma MIa” is about to re-launch at Star City.
Yesterday I stopped and looked for a while at the flowers in drums outside St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney. They’re absolutely beautiful. Lots of other people were looking at them also, in a sign Spring/Summer is well and truly with us.
I was on my way for a swim at the Cook & Phillip Swimming Pool, a ritual I’ve been enjoying for the last month or so. I get up, I have some breakfast, I go for a walk, I visit a gallery, and I go for an afternoon swim. Oh, and I have an afternoon nap also.
Last Wednesday I also caught up with my friend Kate, who was down from Newcastle. We enjoyed a couple of gallery visits, and a lovely lunch at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Wednesdays off?
Currently, I’m not working Wednesdays. This is because I have an “excess leave problem”, meaning I have accumulated more than my four weeks of annual leave allocation. So to bring things “back to normal”, I asked if I could take Wednesdays off, rather than take a block of annual leave.
It’s great. A couple of days work. A day off. A couple of days work. Two days off. I feel like it’s giving me much greater “work/life balance”.
And for my workplace, it seems to be working pretty well too. I’m still taking the occasional phone call, dealing with urgent emails, and have even attended a phone in video conference. But by and large, I’m able to achieve what I need to achieve in four, albeit slightly longer days.
So strictly speaking, I’m probably not making full use of my days off, but mentally, it’s giving me a wonderful mid-week break where I can put on the out-of-office reply on my email, and not feel “guilty” about it all.
A fore-runner to retirement? Maybe. Or at least a fore-runner to a retirement which may include some part-time work.
The long-running garage in my street has closed and moved to Peakhurst, I discovered this morning. As I don’t have a car, I’ve never actually entered the business in the twenty-something years I’ve lived here, though I’ve often glanced inside, as I’ve walked along the street or the back laneway.
Nickson Street Garage
I noticed it, as I went for an early morning walk. Along the way, I also snapped some photographs of the light rail construction underway on Devonshire and Bourke Streets, as well as the closure of a nearby cafe. The owners of The Book Kitchen were in the paper the other week saying the light rail construction had forced them to close, and from the photograph you can see why they had little choice.
Book Kitchen on Devonshire Street, Surry Hills
These are times of change in Surry Hills, and I’m involved in a project which I hope will launch in a couple of months time, which seeks to tell the story of a strong, living breathing community, and people who love this area. Watch this space.
Hollywood HotelGuerilla Knitting on Oxford StreetAstra Howard updates the Surry Voices Sign
“Because a lot of producers come from a journalism background, they mostly think about the words. I love that he spent so much time speaking about the sound”, I said to someone over drinks at the end of #ozpod2019 today.
We were talking about Dan Blank, creator of the fiction podcast, “Carrier”. Dan, incidentally, has worked mostly in the film industry, virtual reality and such, and this is his first major exploration of audio.
“We have a lot of people in our area with a previous film or vision background, and they make some of the best radio short features, using wonderfully layered sound, often much better than some who have worked exclusively in radio”, I added. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because they’ve often worked predominantly with images, sound presents them with a whole new creative canvas?
It was fascinating to attend this conference for the fourth year in a row, and in particular, to note the evolution of the podcast industry.
True Crime podcast panel talking about fraudsters.
True crime podcasts are still extremely popular, and there was a terrific panel featuring three people who’ve created recent podcasts. One in particular, I’d call out is “Snowball”, which is about the real-life experiences of Ollie Ward’s family who were taken in by a trickster. It’s great listening, and in particular, revelatory hearing how his family really opened up over what was, clearly, an embarrassing situation.
“The key to successful fraudsters is the personal humiliation which makes people not want to talk about this stuff”, Ollie commented.
Another journalist, Greg Bearup who works for “The Australian” spoke about the backgroud to his podcast, “Who The Hell Is Hamish?” which is also about a real life trickster known to his friends and family.
I smiled as he spoke about what it’s like to be a journalist, with thirty years experience, working at the moment. “You feel like you’re the crab in a Chinese restaurant, waiting for the hand to reach in, pick you up and take you away. I just wanted to stay relevant”.
Greg described his interview with a seventeen year old girl as “the most extraordinary of my thirty year career”.
My awesome colleagues, Ian Walker and Kellie Riordan from ABC Audio Studios
Throughout the day there were lots of other handy tips for those currently making, and those aspiring to make podcasts.
Andrew Davies, for example, said the research indicated the online headline and personal recommendations are the top drivers for listeners to try new podcasts, over and above things like cover art and even the actual audio itself.
Marc Fennell noted that in the area of putting together a complex and long-term project that, “having a one line clear reason about what story you’re hoping to tell will get you out of hell every time”.
The interesting development in the podcast space right now is narrative fiction.
One of the panel members talking about this has noted it’s no longer, “knock knock, who’s there, come in” which may have been the style of earlier radio drama.
“People have learned a sophisticated cinematic language since the 1930s and 1940s”, Dan Blank noted, as he spoke about the way this type of audio drama needs to keep pace with the time.
Rachel Fountain from ABC Audio Studios speaks with Dan Blank, creator of the Carrier podcast.
As a “sound guy”, I was fascinated as he spoke about a type of audio recording techniques which can give you a “3D-sound”, which is more natural to the human ears than simple left-right stereo.
As well as catching up with some friends and colleagues from interstate, attending the conference also gave me an opportunity to meet some people who I’ve only ever known through email, phone and video conferencing. There were hugs.
“You know what the best thing about attending a podcast conference is?”, I whispered to a colleague during one of the sessions. “Conference speakers actually know how to speak into a microphone properly!”.
The worst (or perhaps the best) podcast submission received by the ABC.
We had our final Swedish class tonight (in the current series) and I feel a little bit sad. Although it’s sometimes been quite hard – especially some of the grammar – it’s also been quite fun, as I’ve got to know a little about the stories of those who are doing the course.
It’s the final class because our teacher, Marianne is headed overseas on Friday for her son’s wedding in England, to visit her daughter in Canada, and to spend some time in Stockholm. And that’s just the start of the disapora of our Swedish classes. Also going soon is a bloke who will lecture and study in Uppsala later this year.
Most of those doing the course, though, have been doing it for family reasons. Two of the blokes doing the course are going to Sweden to get married (we’ve helped one with his wedding speech). Two others, who are already married to Swedish-born women are also going there, one of them possibly permanently to raise their forthcoming child. Two of them women doing the course are also travelling for family reasons : one to met her step grand-children (she’s married to a Swede), and another to live with boyfriend, possibly permanently in Stockholm. Oh yes, and there’s the girl who is returning to live in Europe, whose family owns a summer house in the archiplego.
We shared some food and champagne tonight as a rite of passage, though I hope when I return and class resumes at an intermediate level, most of them will be back.
In the meantime, there’s an open invitation to attend the Swedish Mid-summer Celebrations in a couple of weeks time in French’s Forest. I’m definitely gonna go, ahead of a Roger Woodward concert later that afternoon.
Bit buggared actually. The combination of long days at work and a busy social life is catching up with me, I think.
And so tonight, I came home, hit the couch, and did not much else aside from watch television.
There’s a show I must download, purchase legally, called “How The World Was Made”. It’s all about geology and rocks and tsunamis and volcanos etc that I watched on The History Channel or some such station. Gosh it was good.
That’s enough energy exerted for a Wednesday night, surely?
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 67,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
