If I Ever Feel Better

I’m not really ahead of the hype on this one, but I’m really keen on the latest EP by Kiwi popsters Cut Off Your Hands.  I first heard their song “You and I” a while back on a road trip but promptly forgot the name of the band.  Now “Fond Of You” is on high-rotation on JJJ and they could be the next big thing - for what that’s worth.

They sound a lot like most of those British bands that music journos call “angular”.  The strange thing from my perspective is that I’ve been completely underwhelmed by the scene that Andy Partridge calls “Future Dogs Die in Kaiser Ferdinand’s Hot Hot Car Party”.  Except for Bloc Party, who made my 2005 that much better.

For some reason these guys just have that special something.  Sheep maybe?

I was out on Saturday night with some friends at a new indie pop night. There weren’t many people there, because it wasn’t well publicised. But the people who were there were generally friendly and happy to dance together in a big dorky group. I even got a big hug for wearing the same colours as a couple of girls.

There was one notable exception, though - the DJ’s boyfriend. When she wasn’t spinning discs, she was out on the floor grooving it up with us. But he just stood off to the side looking unhappy. He even seemed to be trying to discourage her from dancing, but she wasn’t having any of it. And he just got moodier.

A lot of guys don’t dance - and that’s different to the guys that can’t. It’s usually self-consciousness or misguided machismo. Whatever it is, it can cause a bit of strain, especially if they’re going to stand around while their girl dances with others. And it doesn’t even have to be a jealousy thing - it’s just a case of missing out on some time spent sharing an activity.

For me, it’s easy - I love dancing and I don’t usually mind that I look goofy. But I reckon that guys who don’t like it have a clear choice - learn to like it, or lean to not care.

Thanks to Matt for his post on the difficulties of finding a church community for odd-balls when so many places are “like going to church at The Gap” as Don Miller puts it.

The tension for hipster Christians (for want of a better phrase) is the need to be around people who share your passions and interests but realising that the first and second loves of your life are rarely shared by the same individuals.  And most people who have one of your passions tend to look on in baffled confusion at the others.  So you end up ditching one for simplicity - running off into scenester secularism or “growing out” of your indieness and learning to stop worrying and love Third Day.

I’ve got to say, either option is a crying shame.  Because every single left-of-centre oddball who gives up on walking the difficult line because they want to belong in at least one club makes it that much harder for the next one to come along and find no one else in their church who gets their ironic t-shirts.

I know that being in community with other Christians involves accepting differences, but I usually only hear that admonishment from people who belong nicely in the prevailing culture.  It’s an easy lesson to teach someone, rather than learning it yourself.

So I don’t advocate separatism or anything - but I want to remind myself and others that the only way it will ever be easier to straddle two worlds is if we stick it out and keep dreaming of a community that we’ll be proud of.  And one that any hipster who hears the voice of God and wouldn’t find too hard to join.

Say ‘No’ to franchise Christianity and ‘Yes’ to Sufjan Stevens played while we move between Ancient Faith prayer stations.

Not literally, you understand - more in the sense that I have a very big man-crush on this guy since reading Blue Like Jazz this week. Big.

If you haven’t read it yet, you really should. It’s a rambling fusion of memoir and spiritual reflection and it’s funny as hell. And deep. And I should add, funny. It’s kind of the Christian High Fidelity - a self-involved man-child looking back at his life and starting to make some sense of it all.

I laughed, I nearly cried (I reserve actual crying for funerals and The Notebook) and I was inspired. Mainly because Miller seems to have felt and experienced nearly every single bad thing about the church and somehow still manages to believe that it’s worth salvaging. I know how he feels.

So if you talk to me in the next week and I gush and try to force a thin blue paperback into your hands, you’ll know what’s going on. And you’ll probably just go “Dave, why don’t you just marry the guy?” But just remember that I’ve already made that joke. I win again.

Before I moved to Sydney, I had always lived with other people.  There were brief periods when I would house-sit for some married friends and have only a cat and someone else’s CD collection for company.  And there was a short patch last year between housemates when I had the run of the house for two weeks.  Now, my little pied-a-terre is mine alone.

It’s taken me a long time to come to this situation because I’ve always been torn between two extremes.  Too much social interaction often leaves me craving some down-time.  But more than a few days alone and I really, really go nuts.  So living with other people has always caused a tension.

The idea of moving to a new city where my friends could be counted on one hand and living solo seemed a recipe for disaster.  But I’m pleased to discover I was wrong.  Life is busy, work is busy - a friendly too.  I am surrounded by other people most of the day, most days of the week.  It’s about right for my needs.  When I want to just curl up with a book, my little flat is there for me.

Question two on moving out was what kind of people to socialise with.  When you get to my age, most of your friends are coupled up.  Many are even married.  I fought against this for a while, mainly because the married people I knew were also the boring people I knew.  Now even the cool people are getting hitched and I still want to hang out.

So I’ve come to terms with being a third, fifth, seventh, ninth wheel and it’s not so bad.  I don’t think of myself as being a freak for being single and I don’t expect they do either.

If you’re going to be a single guy in the big city, you could be doing a lot worse.

The great housing debate of 2007 continues with this little article suggesting that the reason the young folks can’t buy houses is because they’re unwilling to live in the suburbs.  Shocking stuff.  It’s a clear sign of selfishness and immaturity, wanting terrace houses near restaurants and bars over identikit houses forty minutes drive from the nearest train station.

Of course, there’s nothing more complex at work here than simple generational rivalry.  The oldies think the young-uns are spoilt and the youngsters think they’ve been sold a dud by their elders.  Who’s right?  Neither and both, I’m guessing.

Another job, another set of personality profiles.

This time we’ve done the Team Management Profile and apparently I’m an “Assessor Developer”. This generally means I steal your ideas, talk over you in meetings and get promoted faster than you. Like you didn’t know that already about me.

The only real surprise was that personality profiles tend to peg me somewhere in the “mild extrovert” part of the extroversion-introversion spectrum. Not this one - I was off-the-scale extrovert. This apparently came as no surprise to my co-workers, who laughed when I exclaimed “But I have heaps of introvert traits!” Maybe they just don’t know my internet nerd habits yet.

Dear Sufjan

I realise you are friends with cool people like Rosie Thomas and The National and they appreciate your guest appearances. I really do. But shouldn’t you be doing other things right now, like…oh, I don’t know…maybe RECORDING ANOTHER ONE OF THE FIFTY STATES?

There are 48 of the suckers to go, you realise? You’re what, 31? And since 2003 you’ve managed to do two of them? Time is ticking and you don’t need a Flavor Flav-size clock to tell you that.

I’m not even fussed which one you do. I hear Arkansas has a lot of history and the world is crying out for more orchestral pop songs about naughty Presidents and forced school integrations. Or what about finishing off the midwest. Ohio has had a lot of songs written about it - surely that means it’s easy pickings.

Don’t feel the need to reply - I’ll take your next album as being more than enough.

Dave

Since my weekend post, the papers and pollies have been discussing the “housing affordability crisis”, so I felt it deserved some extra consideration.

The economics here are quite simple - incomes are rising, people want to own houses, houses aren’t being made available at the same rate as they are wanted - hence the prices rise.  “But if incomes are rising, then what’s the problem?” you may ask (if you’re a die-hard free marketer).

Well, simply put, the houses are in the wrong places and the wrong price for the people wanting to buy them.  If you’re poor, you can only afford the suburban fringes, but your job may not be so flexible or transferable as to allow you to work there.  And just because average incomes are rising, doesn’t mean that the incomes of the poorest ten per cent are keeping pace.  So some people miss out.

Now many would agree that this is a problem and would like to see it fixed, but the political will just isn’t there.  Even our Prime Minister has pointed out that people like to see their house-prices go up.  No one really wants to risk cutting house prices, simply because that would seriously cut into the wealth of the home owners.

Which ties back into my earlier post about the unsustainable cycle of property investment - everyone wants their house price to go up, but no one wants to pay too much.  The economist in me can come up with a whole heap of solutions.  The rest of me thinks the answer is for some of us to start getting off the treadmill and opting-out.

A sign of getting older is when your friends start becoming home owners and begin the litany of complaints about their mortgages that will continue for the next 25 years. Exciting times indeed.I’ve always been more cautious about getting into debt than many people I know, but before you dismiss this as Generation Y unwillingness to accept adulthood, let’s look at the economics of home ownership in a critical way.

First of all, you’re looking at tying up the value of your house (say $300,000 if you’re very lucky) plus 25 years of compounding interest in one single asset.

Then you look at what you could have earned if you invested the money (including interest) in something else, like shares or bonds or whatever. From a strict return perspective, the capital gain on your house less tax and less all the interest you’ve paid over the years has to be more than all the interest or gains you could have earned on other investments.

But a lot of people point to rising house prices and say, “Look - the gains are huge, you’ll never get that on the share market.” True, but that really only works for investment properties that you can buy and sell at will. Your own home is less easy to turn into cash - simply because you will still need a house to live even when your fibro shack in the outer west of the city is worth $1,000,000. And if you wanted to get another house, it’s going to be similarly over-priced. If you had a time machine and could take that million dollars back to when you first bought your house, it may buy two houses. But you’re not going to be buying a 2007 house - it’s a 2017 house and it’s going to cost a buttload.

So unless you can be sure that the maths is going to work out, the main reasons for tying yourself to a bank and a repayments schedule are because you prefer nails to 3M adhesives and because it seems like “the adult thing to do”. Compelling?