Music discovery for people has changed with the popularity of short videos
I hear it with my kids listening mostly to music from before they were born, because they have almost always had all recorded sound within reach.
It is such a contrast with my era when cover art played a huge role in the music I heard before Rage and the Js began broadcasting around the early '90s.
One amusing thing when I last listened to Triple J was hearing an hour dedicated to '90s music, because the government-funded youth radio has to follow their legislated demographic.
I like a lot of contemporary music, but what hope does it have to be heard when there is a back catalogue from times when songwriters had careers and musicians who performed all the time were being recorded by actual engineers?
Recently I read that Australian wine consumption has dropped around 25% in the last couple of decades
I mention this because it is unusual that I bought half a dozen bottles recently.
For
me it's also unusual as I last bought wine for drinking,
rather than cooking, about a decade ago.
Sometimes I'm drinking wine that I bought decades earlier, since I have
been enjoying the benefits of cellaring bottles in cardboard boxes.
So, what prompted me to buy wine in 2026?
This also seems unusual because I was prompted by a Youtuber.
Bobby Fingers is a wry Irish artist who makes entertaining videos about building dioramas.
His
interests extend to dabbling in a variety of media, such as the music that's
often included in his videos, as well as a recent excursion into
writing romantic fiction.
The most recent video
shows the process of constructing a small scene discussed in the
defamation proceedings between actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, which prompted Fingers to try making his own wine as part of research into
Depp's fondness for fermented grape juice.
Since
I've already shown the result of that digression from the detailed
diorama, it's no spoiler to share that Bobby Fingers ended up in South
Australia at one of the most highly-rated wineries.
One
of my top five wine experiences was a 1998 d'Arenberg Footbolt shiraz
and I still remember a eureka moment when it hit my tongue.
That
taste was when I understood some of the wine terminology about vertical
stacking of tannins, as the flavour was bold and seemed as though the
taste continued to explode in my mouth after the wine had gone down my
throat.
While the Bobby Fingers branded Toilet
Wine is a decent drop, although a bit more expensive than what I normally
drink because Australian wine is generally very good value for money and
I'm cheap, I think d'Arenberg have done something that will be
emulated for years to come.
The wine itself shows the same clever
blending that I associated with the 1998 Footbolt in having a
long-lasting taste, although it is surprising to me the flavour does not
seem to be as decidedly fruit-focused as Australian wine is generally.
It
might be that I'm so far out of the habit of drinking wine that I
haven't noticed it before, or maybe d'Arenberg are making a conscious
decision to aim for a more European sensibility since Mr Fingers is based in that part of world.
A clever aspect of this
marketing-based product is the obvious affinity that Chester Osborn has
with Bobby Fingers' art-making and I thought the suggestion that the
Toilet Wine might actually contain fermented toilet was hilarious.
While I couldn't taste toilet in my glass, it's not something that I have much experience in discerning.
However,
while Australian wines don't usually note the blends in detail on the labels
unless it is more than a certain threshold, I thought it was also clever
of Chester to link the role of malbec in the blend in the video.
It was memorable to compare the meaty taste of that grape to seared kangaroo.
This is the kind of small, yet amusing consideration that could cultivate a broader audience for tasting the product and developing an interest that goes further.
At risk of being sentimental, it was sweet to have my appreciation for wine given another lesson from d'Arenberg.
They have produced a wine with Bobby that could have been ordinary, but instead they appear to have seized on an opportunity to reach an new audience and educate them a little in doing so -- which might be what this Australian industry needs in the longer term.
A friend recently shared this idea that our sense of continuity is what undermines argument that time passes.
To be fair to Heraclitus, his idea was that new water flows past every second but the person stepping into it has changed.
Knowing the previous note is that change.
Yes, I think one of the failings of modern thought is that notion of discrete sections.
There's so much more to be gained from presenting a subjective view of time as an experience, rather than pretending one can be wholly objective.
One of the bigger possibilities is then shifting to a view that places one's self within a broader context, and I wonder if the quantum view will prompt that but it could also be through something older like the Dreamtime.
(Although, I'm not suggesting these are interchangeable, just that they offer prompts beyond the individual.)
In some ways I can see this is probably more in line with the Romantics and their rejection of science at the expense of wonder, which also offers a cultural tradition closer to my own heritage.
It leads me to appreciate how Jorge Luis Borges inverts how to think the subject in this quote:
"Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire."
This is what Youtube thinks I look like based on a video from 21 years ago
There are a number of AI features appearing on that site and I was curious what it would recommend for a thumbnail image.
The video is a song about listening and mentions bare branches, so it drew those themes from my Autotuned attempts at singing.
I'd put the music to footage that was the first thing I uploaded on Youtube about 20 years ago, showing a clip of mountain biking outside Wagga where you briefly see my face at the end after I stacked.
So their AI has taken details like my spectacles and beard, as well as the lyrics to produce this image.
At this rate I expect it will be able to generate a video for my music within a couple of years, or maybe create the music too?
He uses his Advision shopfront in Wagga to make a number of provocative statements and one of the most recent prompted an article on the Region website this weekend.
I am particularly amused by their typo "famous catholic paining" as it seems like an apt slip.
One of the outcomes from training for an RSA certification this week was craving alcohol
I haven't felt the need to drink for ages, so my mind turned to the collection of bottles in my dwindling cellar.
This Morris Durif was a gift from my father-out-law and, when I saw the year, I knew it needed to be drunk.
While durif usually benefits from cellaring, the year 1998 was sweet and fruity and that meant many of the wines didn't have the same tannin structure you want for keeping them longer term.
The wine reminded me of a wonderful jam that I bought at a church sale, which was cherry with vanilla.
This durif had some oak flavour prompting the latter, while the softness of the body was like juice.
There's a lot I could write about the RSA course, which was a full day and weirdly structured with important details like defining intoxication left until the fifth module.
It also neglected giving detailed consideration to the antisocial impacts of this legal drug, such as the disproportionate number of men who suffer violence from strangers.
However, it was eye-opening for me to learn about the strategies for minimising drink-spiking that impact on women.
