Tag: Music

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Aesthetics Travel

Day 1680 and Tricking Your Parasympathetic Systemic Into Offline Relaxation Mode

I was introduced to music curators by what you might call third spaces in the aughts. If you were very good, you might program television show but the work of designing audio atmosphere was often about hospitality.

Boutique hotels, luxury gyms, and luxury boutiques looking to set a mood would hire these talent for playlists that fit into their brand book.

We’ve come to appreciate just how much a full sensory experience encompasses every detail. Decor, lighting or even a house fragrance can all be ruined by overloading your guests with discordant noises.

Unless it’s a nightclub or cocktail lounge, the blending of audio spaces and creating the right vibe to open up your guests to the experience is about settling sympathetic nervous system into the openness that comes with the “rest and digest” chill of the parasympathetic response.

I was part of a team that made playlists for Milk Studio’s New York Fashion Week, looked over the shoulders of the creative director who hired a well known curator for their playlists.

Fashion runway shows in Paris, Milan and New York City would also hire these DJs sometimes being the top of the diffusion spear but they were often collaborating with hotels where the fashionistas stay.m

I saw how the Standard Hotels made choices for their properties and was inspired by their work to get even deeper into the best boutiques and their choices. The beloved Parisian fashion staple Stéphane Pompougnac who became the wildly successful Hotel Costss house DJ.

Hotel Costes 6:
Combining casual glamor, “retro-canaille” and smooth house, this compilation evokes the luxurious, eclectic and elegant atmosphere of Hotel Costes.

Stéphane Pompougnac (born 1968) is a French houseDJ and record producer best known for curating and mixing the Hôtel Costes compilation series

It’s become such a part of my own relaxation and time off routine, I can hear a few bars from Hotel Costes 6 (a particular favorite of mine) and immediately feel calmer. Amazing what a ritual we can make of music. Sure it is silly but you can’t beat decades of somatic learning.

Maybe I’m not always going “a la peche” but my body doesn’t know that. From there, all I need to do is open up an Ian M Banks paperback and I can slip into a short trip of my own. Amazing mow malleable our minds can be to repetition.

Brand collaborations are everywhere you look
Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1052 and Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow

My mother is a real free thinker hippie iconoclast type. I’ve written extensively about my hippie Whole Earth Catalog meets Silicon Valley progressive technologist upbringing if you’d like to get a taste.

Her generation’s history of counter culture and inevitable rise to power has many cautionary tales we’d do well to review. The limits of starry eyed optimism and the cold hard calculations of power play out in every generation, especially as they age.

I recall her support of Ross Perot in the 92 election only to find us swept up as a country in the Clinton victory. The Clinton repurposing of a 1977 Fleetwood Mac song as its campaign anthem remains a vivid aesthetic memory from my young childhood.

Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow
Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here
It’ll be better than before
Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone

Fleetwood Mac “Don’t Stop”

The oddest element of this memory is that while the Clinton victory song may have won as core memory, the deeper aesthetics of the losers have a more visceral hold. My mother’s favorite song was actually used as Ross Perot’s campaign song.

The two must have shared some kind of fatalist streak about America as both chose Patsy Cline’s love ballad Crazy.

My mother can really belt out the pain and agony of Cline’s lyrics “crazy for trying and crazy for crying and I’m crazy for loving you.” I can sing it too thanks to the mimicry of childhood.

Maybe I’m crazy too. Maybe we all are. Because Perot, Patsy and my mother got to the punch of the Clinton victory and America’s love affair with thinking about tomorrow.

I knew you’d love me as long as you wanted
And then someday you’d leave me for somebody new

“Crazy” Patsy Cline (written by Willie Nelson)

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 534 and Never Go Home

They say you can never go home. I never took the saying to heart as I didn’t have a consistent childhood home for more than a few years at a time. We moved once every two years till I went off to college. And it only got worse from there as I wandered from dorm rooms to illegal sublets over a decade or so of instability. Probably why I’m so excited to be buying a house. For me there was no childhood home where I could return.

But the one place I considered home was Boulder Colorado. I lived in three separate houses in Boulder across five separate moves. The math involved my parents divorce and going off to boarding school for a bit. Yes it’s complicated.

But Boulder as a place has felt more like home to me than any other place. Even New York City where I lived the longest (over fifteen years if you don’t count the occasional breaks to San Francisco) never laid claim to being my hometown.

So I’m feeling a bit bittersweet about the prospect of leaving Boulder. I was running errands today and kept coming across Deadheads at every stop. Dead & Co, the name of the current not Phish, but not not the Grateful Dead, is doing two nights at Folsom Field this weekend. The town is filled with happy hippies. And also John Meyer.

A blonde woman walked into my coffee shop this morning without shoes and no one blinked an eye. Camper vans with Dead decals are parked all across town. I saw a man brushing his teeth in the Target parking lot wearing a tie-dyed shirt. The dispensary was completely out of my particular edibles. The concert crowds had cleaned them out.

It makes me feel a bit nostalgic for how I remember the town as a kid. Boulder was a town filled with folk music and weirdos. We were a hippie town and proud of the heritage. As I came over the hill into town coming back from my raw milk pickup I felt like I could never leave. Look at me doing hippie shit like being in a dairy cooperative. Boulder is still weird I said to myself. But I’m sure I’ll come to feel the same way about Bozeman in time.