The Loose Connections Recommender #8

On DIY, Doing It For Yourself & Just Doing It

‘If you want to see something beautiful, make it yourself’

There are few things more satisfying than making something happen yourself, just the way you want it. Dreaming it and doing it. Done.

In my book, I wrote the above sentence in reference to a house that I loved walking past every day with my son on our way to school. An elderly Italian man spent most of his day out front, tinkering with his garden and watching the world go by. Obviously a lover of beautiful flowers, he had made cunning use of spectacular fakes in amongst the real to give his garden an uplift. In fact I don’t think any of these flowers are real. He changed them out all the time, sometimes he featured blue flowers with glitter and some lovely fake butterflies. The point is, he satisfied his heart’s desire and brought beauty to the world around him.

1. I’ve been busy, on the move and had very little time to care about my surroundings, and I’m feeling it. My home is a mess. I have work to catch up on and still very little time actual free time available to me, but just enough to start dreaming about making some little fixes around my house and garden that will make me so happy when they are done. I’m a renter, so I can’t do too much, but this was my last little jazzing up project and I’m still loving it. A couple of those flowers are even real. Flowers make everything more beautiful. Look at those tiny bud vases my kind and clever ceramist sister in law made for me after I complained that I could not find tiny vases anywhere. I can now steal tiny bunches of flowers from my neighbours gardens whenever I go for walks and enjoy them at home. My number one recommendation in today’s edition is to make/do something yourself that will bring you some aesthetic joy.

Kitchen sink before and after photos

2. Here’s a photograph my daughter sent me that makes me want to go and paint all my furniture. Maybe it will inspire you too.

   

3. Out of pure intractable stubbornness and necessity, I have found ways to do almost everything required in my ‘business’ of making and releasing records of the past 20 years myself, including learning how to do the artwork/creative vision and the promotion. The whole process has now become second nature to me, and I can’t imagine doing it any other way. Mostly it’s the freedom of it and the happy accidents and surprises that occur when you embrace doing things your own way that I find so satisfying. My close friend and frequent creative collaborator Katerina Stratos recently mused that she felt like creating a music video and did I have any songs that needed a video. Well of course I did!

   Katerina and I hit the streets while she stop motion photographed an amazing selection of tunnel like structures and spaces she’d selected around Sydney. My job was to gently hold her elbow to keep her steady and to attempt to keep marauding strangers from ruining the shots. Her vision and ability to imagine how this could all work astonished me. So cool.

   

   Here’s a secret sneak peek of the video she created for my new single ‘I Just Had To Run’, together with incredible director of photography Toby Oliver ACS who kindly filmed my antics. It will officially premiere tomorrow on my favourite music blog Post To Wire.

   This is Katerina’s director’s statement: “I wanted Lo to fill up the centre of the screen, singing with joyfulness and urgency while the background travels through a world of Sydney tunnels, both natural and man made. Both Bjork’s ‘Big Time Sensuality’ and Maya Deren’s film “Meshes of the Afternoon” were strong tonal inspirations.  Originally we thought to make it in black and white, but we had captured such great colours and textures in the background footage (which was shot as stills and made into stop frame animation), so we kept it colourful. We captured that internal dreamscape feeling of the song by making Lo’s form transparent and omniscient.”

3. In keeping with the spirit of this missive, today I am going to recommend ‘How I Built This with Guy Raz’, on Wondery, a long running podcast (since 2016) which features endless interviews with entrepreneurs and CEOs about how they came up with their successful business ideas and started up - such a fascinating and illuminating collection of stories across so many fields, from dating apps to renewable energy. What fascinates me is how many tales of failure and rock bottom disasters are the basis of so many of these lightbulb moments that set people off on completely new ventures. Inspiring stuff.

   My favourite episode is this interview with the founder of Headspace, Andy Puddicombe, who gave away everything he owned to learn how to be a Buddhist monk before deciding to go to clown college ….

As the great Waylon Jennings once said “There's always one more way to do things and that's your way, and you have a right to try it at least once.” I say, just keep trying.

Lo x