Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 15. This month’s theme Lost and Found, 12 minutes or so of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the mic. I’m broadcasting from our studio in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while.
The first half of our married life saw an average of a move every eighteen months, one being in a caravan in a backyard. The second half has been somewhat different with a reasonably contented life in a small bungalow in the outer west of Sydney since 1995. I wrote the first song heard on this episode in February of that year. I was in the second year of a horrendous commute to work which was longer than the teaching day, starting and ending in the dark. I needed something to assuage the mid-life blues.
Best I could come up with was this song, the chorus of which references a Ron Cobb cartoon depicting an old man in a rocking chair set out on the nature strip with the trash for collection- a withered Christmas tree by his side. Ron Cobb, was a cartoonist, born in LA but who spent most of his life in Sydney. In my own private pantheon, which is populated with poets, composers, painters, dramatists, novelists, sculptors, and ordinary people, I include cartoonists – they have lightened, and, indeed, enlightened, my existence from the time when I was a kid reading MAD magazine in Aruba to today as I laugh at the evisceration by cartoonists’ sharpened pens of their myriad buffoonish targets infesting politics, the media and business.
Another Cobb cartoon which has stayed with me is one that exemplifies MAD- Mutual Assured Destruction- Cobb was preoccupied with the thought that the Dr Strangeloves of the world would miscalculate badly and reduce us all to glowing nuclear ash. His cartoon has two men cowering under a broken concrete shelter surrounded by rubble and skulls. One man says to the other, There’s a rumour goin’ round that we won. My song, No Surrender, is not the obdurate snarl of the ideologue or religious bigot, but rather the refusal of the ordinary man or woman to be beaten down by life’s vicissitudes. [insert song]
There are really only two ways, it seems to me, in which we can think about our existence here on Earth. We either agree with Macbeth that life is nothing more than a ‘tale told by an idiot,’ a purposeless emergence of life-forms including the clever, greedy, selfish, and unfortunate species that we call homo sapiens – the ‘evolutionary goof.’ Or we believe that, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, ‘There is something afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth.’ In other words, a plan, a purpose to it all. So writes Jane Goodall in her book, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey published in 1999.
I really like that phrase that defines us: the evolutionary goof and see no reason not to accept this characterisation along with de Chardin’s idea of the universe giving birth to something meaningful. I suppose this grows out of my own experience of life and self. I am a bit of a goof- defined variously as a bozo, fathead, goose, mooncalf, nitwit, or simpleton. A rather aimless, gormless stumblebum right out of a P. G. Wodehouse story.
After I retired from teaching, I wrote a blog between 27 April 2015 and 14 June 2016 called The Summa Quotidia comprising 120 songs with accompanying mini-essays. I also recorded a similar number of songs and instrumentals I had performed with the folk group Banter. These I transformed into a pandemic project entitled Letters From Quotidia, in various iterations, from January 2021 to December 2023. I’ll finish with the song I composed for episode 120 of the Letters, Love Everlasting Complete. [insert song]
Credits: All written text, song lyrics and music (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.
Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 10 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.
Quentin Bega's Blog 