Today I’ve made a decision. Everything’s been so insanely messed up, and likely to continue so for at least another week, that I’ve been feeling really guilty about how little progress I’m making with my stated Creative Pact project. But as we all know, guilt is a useless emotion, so I’ve decided to change the direction of this CP and make September purely about input. Listening, viewing, reading. Mostly listening. And of course some thinking. Then maybe I’ll do a second CP in October which will be more about doing.

And to make an excellent start to this new world order, today I have done no listening whatsoever so far. That’s right. Nothing at all. Um. Bugger. However, I have gone back over my iPhone’s music, deleted some stuff I listened to last week and slapped on some new albums for the week ahead. I did cave and leave on a tiny selection of things I’ve already listened to: Blur’s 13 which I’m rapidly becoming obsessed by, and the two soundtracks I wrote about last week, La Dolce Vita and The Belly of an Architect because not only have they stuck with me more than most of the other music I’ve listened to this week, but because we’re supposed to be going to Rome tomorrow for the weekend, so it seems appropriate to have these two available if I feel a need for a Roman soundtrack 🙂 and Phil Maguire’s smll hnd/dctfl hnd because I’ve been obsessed with this one for months now and can’t go more than a couple of days without it, even if I don’t remember to write it on my list.

I found it curious to be deleting things I only put on there a week ago. Normally I don’t update the music on my phone for months, and it was quite daunting to scroll down and see how much stuff I haven’t listened to yet. Of the things I had, my tendency was to keep them on there, so I had to really push myself: “Do I really REALLY want to listen to this again in the next few days? More than I want to try some of the other great stuff on here?”. The answer, when it came down to it, was often no.