I’m so old and I don’t even care anymore

I had so much excitement and motivation when making last months newsletter, and finally pivoting to just putting everything on a platform I owned. Then I got hit with a month where I had zero bandwidth, and so haven’t really been able to take it any further. Which is frustrating, obviously. It is also a big advantage of just having one day a month that I post things. Some months might leave me time to make a lot, and for others it may be all I can do to just write the damn newsletter. But at least I can pretty much always do that, and do it quickly.

So this will be a pretty minimal one, in advance of what I hope will be a gigantic birthday spectacular next month where I’ve made a ton of stuff. I live in eternal hope.

Having said it’ll be minimal, I do have a blog post. Last month I created a blog series called The Quiet Part Loud (where I could push all the politics out of the newsletter and thus stop each month from being a massive downer). I didn’t think I’d have time for it this month, but the Green party by-election win on Thursday made me optimistic enough to splurge a fair bit at the last minute.

I’m also sharing an old song this month that I wrote a million years ago. I’ll get to that at the end.

But first, I’m going to share a bunch of YouTube videos. Nothing remarkable about that – I do it every month. Except this time I have a bit of a thesis.

I’ve been writing for a while about how YouTube has been turning into a boring hub for two-dude video podcasts, but this month I realised something…

There is still a niche of old style YouTube videos that are doing very well, and they are the ones which are, for one of a better word, spectacular. They don’t just look good: they have a kind of visual energy and excitement to them.

In fact, let’s get into that now.

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XYLA FOXLIN FLIES COAST TO COAST

I have shared Xyla Foxlin videos in this newsletter many many times. But I want to share this two part video of her flying the United States from Coast to Coast in her 1943 Cessna prop plane, because I think it is a perfect example of where YouTube has moved.

The tutorials, the react videos, the daily flogs, even the video essays have increasingly been broken into small clips and put on TikTok and Instagram Reels. That’s where the audience is, and I think fewer and fewer people are watching them on YouTube.

But when people want to sit down and watch something on their big TV screen (and it’s hard to find a small screen these days) I think it tends to be this kind of YouTube video.

Someone doing something exciting and epic, usually outdoors. Not a video about ideas or conversations, but about travelling or building or enduring.

The views in both these videos are stunning. (And I don’t mean the number of times people have watched it.)

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LAURA KAMPF’S $1 CAMPER

I’ve also shared Laura Kampf’s videos a bunch of times. And, while a bit less epic than flying across the US, I feel like it’s still in this same category of videos that are actually interesting to look at.

Years ago she had a weekly series where she was renovating an old house in Germany. She has now moved to Los Angeles with her wife and stepchild, and in this project she is renovating a caravan that she bought for $1.

I find it hard to track down fun, easy-going, low stakes, non-political videos that I can just watch and relax. This is one of the very few.

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KEEPING A LIGHTHOUSE

I stumbled on this a couple of days ago, and it seems to be yet more proof that YouTube still favours people that make videos that are amazing to look at.

This guy’s job is to maintain lighthouses.

He (Scott Tacchi) has only 11 videos on his channel but they all have a ton of views (a couple in the millions) because he’s a good videographer and they are stunning to look at.

This one is his most recent, about what it’s like living in a lighthouse during a storm with 108mph winds.

And everyone in the comments loves the fact that onscreen he shows icons for TikTok and Facebook with big red crosses through them.

Recommended

BACKROOMS

I realise that I tend to share trailers more than I share movies, and that’s because I don’t get to see many movies at the moment. But the all-seeing algorithm does feed me plenty of intriguing-looking trailers.

This seems to be a horror film just based on the fact that some rooms feel intrinsically threatening. (Actually, on further research, it seems like it’s based on a whole pop culture phenomenon.)

I hope the film is good because the trailer is creepy as hell.

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DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS

This is very silly, and I keep watching it over and over again.

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GEORGE LUCAS VIDEOBOMB

This is even sillier, and exactly what the title suggests.

The Quiet Part Loud

BRITISH POLITICS CHANGED YESTERDAY

This is the first properly optimistic thing I’ve written on politics in a while, I think.

I turn 50 in a few weeks, and part of me doesn’t really care, and part of me very much does.

As ever, I’m going to use this as a notepad to help myself process what’s going on here.

There is definitely a big part of me that is absolutely dreading it, particularly the day itself.

In maybe August last year I realised I should probably get moving on organising a big splashy birthday party, and invite all my friends. I knew life would get busy, and the later I left it the more difficult it would get. Life gets in the way.

Well, this time life absolutely got in the way. Life stood in the middle of the road and started building a barricade.

By the time January rolled around, it was looking pretty unlikely I would pull this off. And then we had weeks of the whole family being ill, where I didn’t have the energy for anything other than looking after the children and getting the day job done.

I was thinking of appropriating the Bastard English Session as a party for all my folky friends, so I could obviously utilise that, but I wanted to have something for non-folkies too. I provisionally asked H and Mark (my brother) to help book a local pub the following day where people could drop in.

Yesterday I scrapped that idea. I just don’t want to do it. I realise I was just doing it because I thought that’s what you’re supposed to do.

I do very much want to catch up with friends, but I remember my 40th birthday when my friends making a lot of effort to come to an event where I felt overstretched and like a bad host. I felt like I inconvenienced them for something I didn’t really give myself the chance to enjoy.

This time I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t want to see everyone on the same day. That is everything that stresses me about New Year’s Eve, multiplied by a thousand.

Instead, I want to mark turning 50 by spending the whole year focusing on catching up with friends properly. At times that suit everyone, where we can have proper conversations.

So yeah, that’s dealing with the day itself.

But there is the more general microtrauma of being reminded of your mortality. Tick tick tick…

Maybe I’m starting to come to terms with this, however.

I think as we move from our teens to our twenties to our thirties to our forties and so on… we need to keep updating our identity. We need to rethink how we present ourselves to others, and to ourselves.

This is the tricky part, I think. But once you know it needs to be done, it gets so much easier.

So I am currently in the process of working out what kind of behaviour is socially acceptable in your 50s, and deciding which parts of that I agree with and want to lean into, and which parts of that I want to push against.

For example I think there’s an expectation that, when you get deep into middle age, you become more focused on serving your community in whatever way you can. I’m very happy to lean into that. I think there’s also an expectation that you’ll start to despair about kids these days. Rotting their brains on social media, short attention spans, don’t know what it is to do a days hard work, blah blah blah. I’m happy to push back against that.

Perhaps turning 50 doesn’t even really push me to face new situations. Perhaps it’s the same old trade-offs that just get more pronounced: you’re hopefully acquiring more wisdom, but also your time is running out.

I found the transition from teens to twenties to be difficult. I found twenties to thirties to be easy. I found thirties to forties to be difficult.

Guess we’ll see about the next decade. Everything to play for…

One of the things that really saddens me about getting older is how little time I’ve been able to spend making music.

No one has the time to do the things I really want, particularly in this economy, and I feel wildly privileged to be able to have made as much music as I have.

But still, I always daydreamed it would be something I would constantly be doing, and that hasn’t played out.

That said, I made a pretty strange discovery recently.

I had decided that if I didn’t have the bandwidth to make new music now then it might be an idea to go through some of the old music I made years ago that I never released, finish it, package it up and put it on Bandcamp.

So I had a trawl through, and I was a bit amazed to discover not only how much there was, but how good I thought it was.

These are tracks that I had always thought of as early drafts that weren’t quite fit for public consumption.

Being able to examine them years later, I’ve changed my mind. I think I was always embarrassed by the amateurish production value, but a) it’s actually pretty good and b) in a new era of generative AI slickness, that’s maybe even an advantage.

I also realise that, individually, they might not be as strong as I might like, but when you put them all together, they do very much tell a life story. Much more so than I realised at the time.

So I hope to be posting quite a lot more music soon, but from my murky distant past.

This video below is one of my favourites, and I’m not sure how well it stands on its own. It was kind of a rushed demo. But if you know any of my other music, and my various philosophical obsessions within it, then hopefully it should carry a bit more weight.

It’s called For A Moment.