On a rainy Monday I decided to venture out of the Apartment and go buy some music, the music store I remembered was in Du Pont which was one Metro Station away. Du Pont is a cool little alcove in the DC landscape and finding that music store there five years later would prove testament to that sentiment.

Five years ago, I spent 15 minutes in there and $100. Something about independent music stores, they have all the romance that is High Fidelity, and it doesn’t matter where I am in the world I am comfortable in a record store and now later in life bottle stores are sacred ground for me as well.

Five years later I’m lost, the rain is heavy and I’m hoping that it hasn’t been swallowed up by the recession but after going around the circle, Du Pont is a circle or sorts, I find it, it was opposite to where I started a cross the road. I always get there, I tell my wet self, I may be a slow burner but I generally always get there and thankfully I found it otherwise it may have been a pathetic Starbucks moment waiting for the weather to clear and humbly plotting a plan-B.

I spent considerably more time browsing this time but I didn’t want to exceed my $100 budget which proved a challenge because after 15 minutes, I had eight discs.

One of them was Bad Lieutenant, which I mistakenly pronounce, left-tenant on purchasing, the sticker said the band contained members of the original Joy Division and New Order and I’m puzzled didn’t Joy Division become New Order, anyway this is a side project of Bernard Summer, there is no ‘Hooky’ on it.

And it’s ok, a nice little 6.75 out of 10 or three martini glasses and an olive out of five with three olives.

Today it’s in the player and Sink or Swim has just got me as these things tend to when you are at work with the headphones on.

From the archives of the Idler. Oh give me the simple life as the year end begins to mushroom and the Xmas show gathers pace, oh give me the simple life.

Idle Pleasures

The best things in life are free. Like love, or oxygen. At the Idler we have long sought out such pleasures, and here present a selection for your enjoyment.

If you would like to submit your own Idle Pleasures, please email us at the Idler and we’ll publish our favourites.

Balcony

A good balcony is an essential ingredient for a day of languor. It can be on the eighteenth floor of a tower block, where you water the window box of daisies, sit on a deck chair with a can of Holsten Pills, and consider the intricate, interwoven stories of the city. It can be on the third floor of a villa in Portugal, with the sea below waiting for you to make up your mind, as you stumble around in front of the barbeque, gripping a bottle of red wine by the neck. It can be on the fourth floor of your office, site of clandestine joints, snatched sexual liaisons and an exultation of indifference toward that bloody job.

Wherever you find your balcony, savour its essential pleasure – half inside, half outside. Like the Hokey-Cokey, you have one foot in the world, and one foot out.

Boats

There’s nothing quite like messing around in boats. From Ratty and his chums to Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men In A Boat, the daydreaming enemies of work have always sought solace in the slowed-down worlds of our rivers and canals. There can be no better way to drift off into peaceful reveries than lying in a drifting boat, opening one’s eyes to see a patch of sky, a cloud, slow moving treetops. Like so many idle pleasures, boating is a way to legitimise doing nothing. There is plenty to occupy oneself with – locks, preparing food, turning the steering wheel – but in reality you are doing nothing of any use to anyone. Which is wonderful.Boating doesn’t get you anywhere – it would always be quicker to go by car. The pleasure lies in the moment.

Innovations

Like the cartoons of Heath Robinson, the absurd labour – saving devices lovingly pictured and described in Innovations catalogues are strangely seductive. How often have we nonchalantly picked one up as it fell from the Sunday supplement, expecting to swiftly discard it and return it to the Home News pages, and then found ourselves utterly enthralled? Even the call to Sunday lunch has no effect: we sit rapt in the armchair, deaf to all entreaties to join the others, unable to move. The pleasure is compounded by the knowledge that we will never in a million years actually fork out for an air ionizer, electric translator, Corby trouser press, water purifier or mechanical grasper. No – the pleasure lies in indulging the fantasy of an easier life.

Staring

You’re inside, the world is out-side. Staring through the window offers thinkers and dreamers unparalleled opportunities to ruminate, and, in the best tradition of the Pathetic Fallacy, the sights beyond the glass will always reflect our mood. If we are feeling bright and optimistic, the birds will be singing and the children playing. If we’re feeling miserable and black then it will be raining and the trees will be bare. Window – starers, however, usually find that it is raining and the trees are bare. There is something about staring through a window which is suited to melancholic temperaments. Perhaps we associate it with the Sunday mornings of childhood, when Dad is playing golf and we’ve been fighting with our siblings. It is only through steady application to window-staring that we will manage to transform it from a sad exercise into a positive one.

Laundrette

Every other Sunday I lug bin-bags of dirty knickers around to the laundrette and settle in for the afternoon. The laundrette hones the pleasure of doing bugger all whilst still sorting your life out. It is virtuous inactivity, it washes you whiter-than-white. Games abound too, like watching the tumble of a green sock as it gallivants on its bi-weekly vacation away from your feet. Or you can eavesdrop on the squabbles of couples who have resolved to do all their domestic chores together. There’s also the chance to work your karma by being absurdly nice to the cackling biddies who do the service wash. I become the perfect gentleman, laugh at their lame jokes and make saucy comments about corned beef thighs and arses lik two badly parked VW Beetles. And if this is too much for you, you can still immerse yourself in the mantra of the machines, and meditate upon the underwear revolution.

Just Looking

It used to be called browsing. But browsing implied a freedom to roam with no obligation to buy. “Just looking” is different. Your entry into the shop ha aroused expectation in the Armani-clad assistant. You are his ticket to a sale, an extension of the band. A well place “just looking” shifts the power balance. Pick some things up and put them back down again. Shop rents are so high that every minute you’re “just looking”, you’re also shop-lifting – stealing attention, space and valuable “brand-time”. You are a fl??neur dwelling within the flow of the shop but individually unchallenged. Everyone else is a consumer. You’re “just looking”.

ANDREW MALE

Smoking

Many Idlers love to smoke. It gives us something to do when we’re not doing anything. “The smoker simultaneously injects and excuses idleness into his life with every cigarette,” observed Collette of this dignified pastime. This ancient aid to relaxation and thought is ceaselessly bombarded by the envious snipes of the scurrying swarms of the anti-idle. Will these busybodies not leave us alone? All idlers – smokers or not – should resist members of the anti – smoking lobby for the oppressors of leisure and contemplation that they so clearly are.

Dreaming

Dreamland is the original cyberspace, our own built – in spiritual virtual reality. Our dreams take us into other worlds, alternative realities that help us make sense of day – to – day life. Dreaming is a connection to our unconscious, to our selves. It is to be treasured. Isn’t it extraordinary that an activity which takes up so much of our lives is so often relegated into the realms of unimportance? We are based on dreams, they are at our centre. Listen to them.

Bathing

Sliding down the gritty surface of the bath until your head is submerged is as sublime as slipping into unconsciousness. The power shower cannot compare to the methodical ritual of sponging the length of each limb, pointing your toes free of the water and surrounding yourself with a playpen of bubbles. And when it is over, the swirl of the water draining down the plug – hole conveniently informs you which hemisphere you are reclining in. The hours spent soaking take us back to the good old days before we crawled out of the ocean.

Driving

Treated in the right way, motoring trips can provide marvellous possibilities for idleness. If you manage to escape the seductions of anger and frustration that assail many of us on today’s congested roads, a long drive can offer unparalleled opportunities to pursue reveries with a luxury not afforded by daily life. In a car, you can be truly alone and truly in control of your own environment. You choose the music and the temperature, as well as the refreshments. It is best, when stuck in a traffic jam, to indulge as far as possible in this heaven – sent opportunity to do absolutely nothing. Driving can be a great cover for covert Idlers – to the rest of the world you are achieving something, going somewhere. But you know you are doing nothing at all.

Transatlantic Plane Journeys

Long plane journeys are most routinely associated with non -stop, high – pressure life styles. The true Idler, however, knows that they offer eight hours of delicious inactivity. Every need is catered for by the aeroplane staff: food, drink, entertainment. Everything is brought to your seat. The only physical activity required is a thanking nod of the head to the stewardess or a welcome leg – stretch to the lavatory. Above the clouds with nothing to do, you are closer to God and closer to yourself.

The Merry-Go-Round

The carousel goes up and around, nowhere to go, just the delight of undulating upon a gaudy horse and watching the older kids slouch towards sexual liasons. Your parents appear, smiling, after each revolution and you live forever as a spinning child. And when you step down onto the plastic stirrups, you beg for more money so you can go up and around some more, and finish your dream of riding a cock horse to Banbury Cross.

Ironic I dare you? Yesterday in yoga they played a track that I haven’t heard for an age, Galaxy by Hippiehaus, it’s on one of the Hotel Costes albums, number five, I think.

I remember this song from a rather miserable time, I had just gotten into lounge, well I was problem knee deep in it if this was the fifth edition of Hotel Costes but I got this track off an Austrian Dj who was on holiday in Cape Town and we got to talk music, a couple of days later he was asked to play a set at Caprice and ended up borrowing some of my cds which was when we swapped some tunes.

But it also co-incided with a little emotional summer turbulence and hence it had a that profound, pop song, meaning for me. It’s a good song and yesterday they played it in yoga class just after the Thievery Corps best Bossa Nova, So Com Voce. The irony is that it made me smile and for five minutes instead of worrying about everything I just quietly hummed along.

Though I know I could be wrong
There seems to be a way to linger on
Will we stumble will we phone

I feel, I feel down and live
Oh yeah

Though I know I should be strong
I feel that I’ll be weak and you’ll be gone Though I know I should believe

I feel, I feel down and live

Though I know I should be strong
I feel that I’ll be weak and you’ll be gone Though I know I should believe

I believe that we will see
Tomorrow is the day for you and me
In the end we will be free

We’re stars …in love galaxy
We’re stars …in love galaxy

I’m listening to the Smiths and trying to simplify things and every so often I wonder, ‘Is this a good thing?’

I’m inspired when This Charming Man is playing and I’m all boppy and energetically optimistic and there’s progress but then I get to How Soon is Now and it’s impossible.

You never out grow the Smiths (even in when sung in ChGerman).

Let me specify that I’m not talking personally, I’m talking about work, hell I know that listening to the Smiths and trying to forge ahead on the personal front is a bad idea, it’s indulgent if necessary every so often but ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ acutely makes that point.

No I’m talking about project work moving it along from problem space to solution space, stripping out all of the noise and focussing on what needs to be done, nothing more, nothing less just those items. And this is the hardest thing for consultants to understand, don’t push paper think about the solution and make it tangible and real.

When I’ve worked with the best of them it was like we were building the thing together, the thinking nimble and the actions astute but now I’m coaching a group who have probably never done anything from start to finish other than dabble in their little areas of ‘expertise.’

So that’s why I’m listening to the Smiths, to keep me ‘f#cking sane and to make sure that I just focus on the solution and nothing else and not to get caught up in all of my petty frustrations, of which there are many. Projects are easier than people think but then they start to think and I start to wonder if it’s just me and the way my mind works that is different.

Note to self be nice, be professional and no ‘Big Mouth Strikes Again!’

Here are some of the photos from my phone, there are many more on a camera card which I need to go through but until this slacker actually gets it together to do that I thought let me share these:

On the edge of China Town where they have the most amzing fruit, we had Sunday brunch at 10h30 which is not customary in NY, where it could start at 14h30 and you get to wear your brunch clothes. We were on a schedule, we needed to get to the Garden later so we made an early start. The Dim Sum was very good we shared but I order ed the 10 portion vegetarian special which was amazing even the ‘pink’ one was good.

Macy’s on the historic wooden escalator, going up to the top floor. This is a shot of our feet we snapped up one earlier that weekend in the Moma and so why not. I would tell you more but then I’m going to ruin a certain surprise and I know that person will disown me and I’m sure she reads my scribbles. But all the way to the top floor amidst 40% off signs and Christmas decorations.

Lilian, Erin and Alan say ‘fromage” outside of the coffee bar.

The Garden, yes it’s very retro and that’s the Knicks vs. The Celtics (NY versus Boston) we were right up near the top, amongst a whole host of Celtics fans. The Knicks are playing some D-FENCE here, they punched above their weight that afternoon, got the game into overtime until KG hit the winner for Boston.

In the Moma, it was free on Friday, Lilian got there first and hovered around our tickets, I enjoyed it and as I said it was free. This is Jackson Pollack’s room and it’s the scale that just gets you.

The sign on the bus: Great happens when people get together!  Autumn in NY…what a wonderful feeling.