Please stop ringing my doorbell
From questioning the relevance of the Met Gala to a hilarious doorbell mishap in the studio, this edition covers a wide range of topics with humor and insight.
As I’m sure all my subscribers are keenly aware, this year’s Met Gala happened on Monday. All the world’s press and photographers turned out to breathlessly cover the great and good from the worlds of fashion, stage and screen. As I’ve written before, I’m not entirely qualified to opine on the various outfits, “looks” and other clothes-related news being made that night, but one thing did strike me.
I follow a former school acquaintance on Instagram and she—a dedicated follower of fashion—posted a breakdown of her thoughts on various celebs’ outfits and styles for the Met Gala. I swiped through half a dozen of her stories without interest, and then was slightly gobsmacked to see her immediately follow this set of fashion critiques with one of those reposted pleas for humanitarian assistance for mutilated babies in Gaza. How could someone just seamlessly swerve from frothy, frivolous rubbish like fashion directly into the crisis in Palestine?
I almost fired off a ranty post on Bluesky (RIP Twitter) about how things like the Met Gala should be ignored and irrelevant in times like these, before I caught myself. I remembered that the day before the Met Gala, this year’s Giro d’Italia began.
For the non-cycling aficionados, this is Italy’s equivalent of the Tour de France, and a big deal in the cycling calendar. I was excited to watch the three-week race unfold, and most of my media consumption this week has revolved around the race and the various dramas it’s already exposed.
Why was my interest any different from hers? Did I also apply my own maxim to this sports event: surely it was now frivolous and irrelevant to be racing bicycles around Italy while children are being murdered in the Middle East?
Of course, the reality here is that both things can matter: we can celebrate fashion (or bike races) and oppose genocide at the same time, surely. It might have felt tone deaf at first to pivot from Hadid to Hamas, but for this person, this transition was natural and obvious.
“Clicktivism” gets a bad rep, eg. reposting social media articles about global atrocities and appealing via your Stories for political leaders to climb down from the brink. But one advantage of it is that it keeps these topics current, and at the forefront of our minds. Like Coca Cola’s advertising maxim, sometimes just the constant, repeated presence of something can keep it alive in our minds long after we’ve scrolled past the advert.
In this instance, immediately following the fashion posts with a reminder of the deaths in Palestine wasn’t a tone-deaf display, but actually a canny way of pointing out that the thing that’s actually the anomaly is the genocide and death which makes normal things like sports and fashion seem like irrelevances in comparison. The more jarring the pivot, the more it brings home the message: stop the war.
Mini-feels this week
I’m thinking about my doorbell
I’ve been recording some new music this week and yesterday I was “laying down a vocal”, as the professionals probably (don’t) say. Just as I finished the final note, my doorbell rang. I have a remote doorbell speaker in my shed/studio, and took off my headphones to go and answer the door.
I signed for the delivery then returned to the studio to listen back to what I’d just recorded. 30 seconds later, the doorbell rang again.
I went all the way back to the front of the house to see who it was and saw my neighbour and her mischievous 10 year old—who loves ringing our doorbell—just arriving home. “Oh, did you ring the bell?” I asked. “No, wasn’t us!” she said.
Grumbling, I returned to the shed and resumed the music. Minutes later I heard the bell again, and ignored it, assuming it was more of the same. When it rang a fourth time, I stomped all the way to the house again, fuming. I looked outside but couldn’t see any neighbourhood kids running away giggling. Enraged, I ripped the doorbell button off the wall and brought it back into the shed with me.
You can guess where this is going: I hit play on the song again, and heard the doorbell AGAIN. How could it still be ringing?!
You’ve worked it out: the microphone recorded the sound of the bell when I was singing the vocal. Every time I played back the end of the song, the sound of the doorbell blared out from my speakers. For quite a long time I felt very silly, and then I laughed until I looked a bit crazy.