The year was 1980 and I had fulfilled my end of my father’s bargain; having completed 1 year at a “normal” college with a 4.0 GPA I could, as the agreement allowed, attend The School of Visual Arts (SVA) in NYC.
Before the end of my first semester at SVA I started looking for my next school—my interest in subjects other than art had me yearning for a “normal” college. Funny, right? Fast forward 1.5 years when I ended up at Bennington College as a philosophy major. Within two weeks, I switched back to fine art.
Today, my life isn’t solely concerned with hifi even though writing about hifi has been my full time job for the past 14 years. As I learned during my time at SVA, I need other influences, other interests to feed me, to keep myself running and to avoid overheating the main hustle.
The opening image is the view looking left from my knockoff Florence Knoll couch on the Barn’s A-Side and it contains some of the other things that help fill my life—books (mainly literature, poetry, philosophy, and art), Pueblo pottery (a small collection), art, and objects—where each and every one has a story to tell.
Another story. Back in the 2000’s, I worked with an older guy, let’s call him Don, who was looking to change careers. Kinda semi-retire and Don had plans to buy a Mail Boxes Etc. franchise location and he was on the hunt for the right place. A place with good visibility and regular traffic. Sensible!
One day Don shared he had found what seemed to be the nearly perfect spot–great visibility and tons of regular traffic passing by.
“What’s the down side?” I asked.
“Well, it’s hard to make a left out of the parking lot and that’s the way I like to drive home.”
The place Don found was directly across the street from where we worked, a place he could turn right to go home (I’m not making this up). Going left, across the traffic, turned out to be a bridge too far for Don.
The moral of the story: it seems to me we can get so comfortable in our quiet routines, our perfectly manicured day-to-day habits that the slightest change from this cozy norm can seem to be an insurmountable mountain. Having to make a left instead of a right.
Some audiophiles—and I include hobbyists, reviewers, and others—appear to fall into this trap where some sort of silly little thing becomes an impossible impasse.
And here’s one big tell—anger. People who get angry when discussing hifi clearly need a healthier and wider perspective. Following on from anger the next obstacle we trip over is—certainty. While a bit more subtle compared to anger, certainty applies some small self-imposed rule to EVERYONE! and the wider the net that self-satisfied certainty covers, the more obvious the delusion.
My solution—just look left. Right works, too.
If we fill our lives with other important things like family and interests we are passionate about, and extra especially things that require us to get out of our comfort zone, we may very well learn a thing or two or three or four. Who knows, we may even come to realize our rules are just limitations.