Songs in the key of old are easy listening

Home Truths column in The Australian, in which I advance my pet theory on music and ageing. 

For years I have advanced a pet theory whenever the conversation swings to music or ageing, or ageing music. Jason’s first law of techno dynamics states that you start to get old when you close yourself off to new music. I watched it happen to friends from as early as their 30s, with the musical shutters slamming down and them being content to wallow in their personal easy-listening golden oldies playlists, their inventories of coming-of-age anthems, getting-laid grooves and breaking-up-is-hard-to-do laments.

A jobbing DJ until recently, I made an effort to keep abreast of new sounds. Not so my mates. I would smugly note another old codger in the making as glazed eyes and bored expressions greeted my enthusiastic encomia about the latest rebirth of cool. Namechecking this left-field genius or that must-listen new album won no kudos. Ah, but let them stick a dime in their life’s jukebox, baby, and watch the flood of emotion take them over.

Donald Trump is to blame for everything

Home Truths column in The Australian, in which I realise bad luck and trouble can be laid at the feet of one tiny-handed speaker of post-truth to power. Blame Trump! 

After a 2016 of moderate to extreme suckage on both a personal and global level, 2017 dawned with a rosy optimism and a feeling that things could only get better. It was time to put to rest a year where heroes dropped like flies, zeros rose like champagne bubbles and my health and wealth barometer plunged sharply southward, and go forth into the new year and prosper.

But suddenly, in short order, everything has gone to the dogs. A blissful visit from my overseas-dwelling girlfriend was cut brutally short when her mother collapsed and was rushed to hospital for heart surgery. I was confronted with having to deal with the reality of divorce for the second time around. And then to top it all off, from a reasonably busy street outside a major shopping location in broad daylight, some bastard with a boltcutter stole my bike, the one gadget in my life that had brought some happiness and a sense of freedom (after a shaky start with a bad crash), allowing me to begin to get fit again after a bout of pneumonia.

Hang on, your call is important to us

Home Truths column in The Australian, in which I go to war with the illuminati of idiocy otherwise known as Optus. Eventually the forces of good (me) triumph over the forces of darkness (Optus). But the struggle was long and hard and somewhat sanity-sapping. 

Dear Optus,

In a previous article in this newspaper, I called you “an Illuminati of idiocy, your unblinking eye staring from a pyramid of pure stoopid”. It now appears I was too kind.

Our short and turbulent relationship began when, arriving back in the country after 25 years abroad, I acquired a prepaid mobile SIM card at the airport. Why you, Optus? Perhaps it was the slick branding, with your patriotic green and gold logo and your insistent importuning in the affirmative: Optus. Yes.

It’s not that I object to your company being owned by people from a place William Gibson famously described as Disneyland with the Death Penalty (yes, Singapore, I mean you). It’s not that on consumer websites, thousands of people seem to dislike you even more than I do, with a proliferation of “I hate Optus, worst phone company in the world” posts, or that you secretly cut broadband users’ speed, or that you broke the hearts of English Premier League fans with your pallid promises.

It's a sticky wicket once you hit 50

This column in The Australian, was meant to be a light-hearted and somewhat exaggerated look at hitting the big five-oh. But boy did I get under the skin of the 70-is-the-new-50 brigade. It was the number one read piece on The Australian's website that day, and the almost 300 comments are more entertaining and revealing than the column itself. 

In a little over a fortnight, I’ll be turning 50. And let’s be clear about this — 50 is not the new 40, or the new 30, or this season’s orange or the new black. Fifty is just 50, and it sucks. Half a century, the big five-o, call it what you will, the plain fact of the matter is, barring exceptional genetics and some luck, your life is way more than half over and there’s not much to look forward to except a long slow slide into decrepitude, forgetfulness and aching in the places where you used to play.

More people you know, and more of your heroes, start dying. You talk about the television shows and movies you grew up with, and get blank stares from younger folk (call yourself a millennial and I’ll punch you on the nose). You might still feel 21 inside, but you get out of a taxi in slow motion and you have become strangely invisible to the opposite sex (unless you are turning 50 and a squillionaire, in which case, party on, Bruce Wayne).

A Visitation from St Hip

Latest Home Truths column for The Australian. In this bumper Xmas edition, it's a very hipster Christmas .... Original in the paper is here, http://bit.ly/2heQYAu  or read it below. 

With apologies to Clement Clarke Moore

’Twas the night before Hipstmas, when all through the flat,

Not a being was stirring, not even a gnat;

The leggings were hung by the chimney with care,

(Hand-knitted alpaca from wool traded fair);

The hipsters were nestled all snug in their futons;

On frames of limed oak — got a great deal from groupon;

Hipster chick in her keffiyeh, bloke in his beanie,

Both toasted from roasting hand-stuffed pulled pork weenies,

And making preserves from those damned sugar plums,

That hip friends would soon smear on sourdough buns;

Hell on Two Wheels

My latest Home Truths column in The Australian, in which I discover riding a bike isn't just like, er, riding a bike. Here's the link to The Oz: http://bit.ly/2fYTRB1

I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike. 
I want to ride my bicycle. I want to ride it where I like.

Queen, Bicycle Race 

Well, thanks for nothing, Freddie. Some advice that turned out to be. I’m sure the immortal strains of Queen’s paean to pedal-powered transport were echoing in my head last week on a dark, stormy night as I coasted out of the office carpark on my gleaming new machine and my flashing red USB chargeable taillight slowly faded into the gloom. 

I’d only bought the damn thing two days earlier. With my half-century on this planet approaching like a fat-bottomed girl riding a fixie down the Alpe d’Huez and a recent fortnight in a hospital bed laid low with pneumonia, I had a mini-mid-life crisis. It was either buy a Porsche or get a bicycle and attempt to get fit after several years of indolence and a life-threatening illness. 

As I have no money and can’t afford a Porsche, the decision was an easy one. So off I schlepped to the local bike shop in Glebe and handed over $600 smackeroos (a Giant Cross City, for the bike tragics; a middle-of-the-road mountain/road bike hybrid designed, as its name suggests, to cross cities.)

Breaking Bad on the Boardwalk Empire for The Wire's Mad Men in Peaky Blinders

Latest piece in The Australian, in which I out myself as a decadent and depraved television binge-watcher. Yo McNutty! Omar strollin' ...

My name is Jason and I’m a television binge-watcher. It has been six hours since my last tumble down the fibre-optic wormhole: half of Game of Thrones, season two, since you ask.

When season one of Game of Thrones was released I devoured the entire thing in one slack-jawed sitting, eyes glazed and unblinking like Malcolm McDowell getting a spot of Ludovico’s technique in A Clockwork Orange. I was late for an important meeting the next day, a waste of space warming a chair, occasionally muttering “winter is coming”.

I knew I’d hit my rock bottom and things would have to change. Night after night I’d find myself up until 3am or 4am, sometimes later, jabbing at the remote occasionally to fast forward the credits, just another Netflix narco flicking at the lever that supplies the dose, a Boardwalk Empire bonobo with Roku raccoon eyes, victim of some nightmarish experiment, skulking into work with a blue-screen burnt-in hangover of plot lines, ever vigilant for the merest hint of a spoiler.

The rot set in with 24, the Kiefer Sutherland vehicle where the contrivance of things unfolding in real time across 24 hours led to concentric circles of plot holes and convoluted twists until each season collapsed in a black hole of silliness and viewers were left shaking, twitching and rubbing their eyes, wondering what just happened. But 24 was just an appetiser, a loosener, a gateway drug to harder hits. I got truly hooked on the glowing cathode crack pipe of The Wire, the gritty five-season trawl through decaying Baltimore and its urban blight, with its street-smart, note-perfect writing, penned by a former cop and a journalist.