Stan-ding Room Only
Singularly one of my most favourite guy-moments that happened last year was the charming interplay between Australian Idol finalist Stan Walker and Canadian singer Michael Bublé. It’s an incredilbly warm one that’s neither contrived nor is it usual. Broadcasted moments like these infact, among peers, seem uncommonly rare.
Stan Walker has been described as a kiwi-aussie hybrid. Perhaps it refers to his upbringing. He was born in Melbourne, raised in Tauranga and Hamilton and now lives in Queensland. The thing I love most about Stan Walker is his total disaffectation of a celebrity ego.
I mean the term disaffectation in strictly the broadest sense. It’s a term coined by noted French psychoanalyst Joyce McDougall (as a strictly psychoanalytic term for alexithymia, a neurological condition characterised by severe lack of emotional awareness). Why does he giggle all the time? Perhaps Ian ‘Dicko’ Dickson simply needed a lesson in Polynesian culture.
A great guy moment
It’s sometimes a nervous, shy thing among Maori. Unless of course you experience it as a full on joyous laughter of being connected with people, among company you’re enjoying. You catch a glimpse of it in the video when Stan sings a few lines of the song How can you mend a broken heart’ and Michael jocularly jostles with him in the studio. It’s a great guy moment.
I experience it in that way too when I’m with my cousins. We laugh until our facial muscles hurt and we suffer lock-jaw. It’s the same with my hairdresser Zeb, I’ve never laughed so much having my hair cut. It’s totally infectious and warm and our lives should be filled with many of those simple but valuable moments. Our lives aren’t always, but where it’s within our power to have those moments we need to take them with both hands.
From time to time I get to thinking that we’ve made our lives so complex that simple, important life lessons are lost in our desire to always be looking over the shoulder of someone or a something that is right under our nose. Someone or something who or that is important and valuable that’s worth knowing and experiencing right there in the moment. Strange creatures we human kind. At times, so completely unfathomable.
What Michael Bublé said about that voice
Michael Bublé launches himself into a whole new stratosphere in my estimation. I mean Bublé is no slouch in the industry and theirs isn’t an industry given to self-effacement, yet in describing Stan’s vocal abilities as better than his own, I can’t help feeling the guy is a quality human being. I love how he describes Stan’s voice as, “like God kissed your throat.” It’s just a beautiful bloke acknowledgment.
It’ll be interesting to watch Stan Walker develop and grow over the next few years. When asked, “What were his greatest memories of Kiwi summers?” Stan said, “When we lived in Tauranga, every day after school we used to go up the mountain with our cardboard and umbrellas and sheets and built huts. Then, when we moved to Hamilton, I would hang with the boys and swim in the river.” Small beginnings. We all have them. It’s what we do with them that shows us the character of who we are. What will YOU do with that thought today?
The VIDEO
