chameleonic

Blog

  • Festival Essentials

    Festival Essentials

    With Glastonbury this weekend, Festival season is officially with us, so I thought I’d put together a quick list of what I feel is my personal survival kit after twenty odd years of making it a summer habit (it started for me with Reading 94′).

    Now this list will overlap with the countless festival guides that’ll pepper magazines, websites and weekend paper supplements every Summer, every year, but is my personal checklist that I feel can make the experience a little more civilised while keeping your luggage to a minimum. In recent years, I’ve taken to adding to this with cooking equipment , candles (dangerous, but in a lantern is a handy beacon) and an inflatable mattress (I’m getting on now), but this is intended for any upstarts embarking on what might be your first British summer festival trip.

    Tent / sleeping arrangements

    Autosave-File vom d-lab2/3 der AgfaPhoto GmbHYes, I know people who have made the pilgrimage to Avalon with nothing more than a blanket and the shelter of the stone circle, and you will no doubt witness a few bodies scattered about corners of fields in the morning that have clearly spent the night al fresco. I am a city dwelling wimp who needs a bit of peace and some shut eye of an evening, and if that means also sheltering from the elements, all the better. Lately I’ve also found some earplugs can help block out the madness at 4 in the morning and aid a bit of rest.

    If you don’t have a tent – at least take a sleeping bag and hope one of your friends will be willing to spoon.

    Warm clothes

    It’s summer! So surely you can rely on wearing nothing more than a kaftan and sunglasses right? Unfortunately not. Even if you’re blessed with glorious sunshine for the weekend, the nights draw in surprisingly fast and without the warmth of ‘civilisation’ it can get pretty chilly at night. Be sure to pack a few jumpers, base layers if you’ve got them, maybe a hat and layer up.

    Torch

    The manic organic might do a good carrot juice, but it probably won’t help you navigate a sea of guy ropes as you stumble back to your tent in the wee hours and once you’re under canvas, it’s handy to be able to see what you’re doing.

    Waterproofs & Wellies

    muddy welliesEven if it’s forecast to be a clear weekend, some parts of the country seem to have their own micro climates, and so a shower or two during a British summer is pretty regular. A waterproof jacket (possibly even trousers to be invincible) Is a good idea.

    Wellies. Goes without saying really.

    Small picnic Blanket

    Not so essential, but having something sit on the dewy morning grass whilst mulling over the coming day / nursing a foggy mind can make you feel damn fine. and actually using it as a picnic blanket / spot to have a drink with friends / roll a cigarette etc will make you festival royalty.

    Snacks

    Most festivals are a wonderful opportunity to eat some varied and delicious food, but it doesn’t come cheap. So I tend to make sure I can snack relatively healthily in the day, and treat myself to a badass meal of an evening. A couple of pot noodles won’t go amiss for those late night munchies either, providing you’ve got a…

    camping stove

    Okay, so this may not be slumming it, but a small camping gas stove and pan can be so handy for a pot noodle, whipping up some pasta and pesto, boiling an egg or making tea / instant hot chocolate.

    Water

    Hydrate! A big bottle of water back at camp is a good idea to replenish your fluids after a hot days festivaling , and a refillable bottle to have on you in the day is the smart choice against dehydration / sun stroke / alcohol poisoning.

    Toiletries

    Personally I can’t stand wet wipes, so I tend to take face wash to festivals. You’ll probably be near a water point wherever you camp, and the icy outdoor blast of water on your face in the morning does wonders to wash away the nights’ sins at the same time as cleaning your pores.
    Don’t forget your toothbrush either – it’s the small things that keep you feeling human sometimes.

    Costume

    9265679700_379d88743f_oNot ‘essential’ by any means, but the festival is an opportunity to let your hair down and be someone or something else for a night or two. Yes, seeing your umpteenth surly fairy or drunk man in a in a tiger onsie before lunch can be a bit grating, but come Saturday night you might want to make sure you can rock some Fluro warpaint or flutter some silver lashes like the best of them if you feel the need.
    I do not condone large novelty hats in this definition of costume however.

    Drugs

    However you spend your evenings, you might want to make sure you have some multivitamins to replenish lost nutrients and some paracetamol to ease a throbbing brain and aching bones (anti acids might also be needed some nights). Even if you don’t need them, invariably someone else in your tribe or a passing stranger might love you for them.

    Turn off your phone

    Without wanting to sound like an old man, I remember a time when if you wanted to hook up with friends you’d meet them at the stone circle at 7. If they weren’t there, then 7.30, 8 and then… oh sod it. Okay phones are useful for finding your pals, but, try and enjoy the moment (man) and a weekend without electronic information. Switch off and sure take the odd photo and text a long lost friend you think you just saw dressed as a panda, but try and save you phone for emergencies. You might even find it lasts most of the weekend without needing to charge once your data, wifi Bluetooth and location services are switched off (Keeping the screen brightness down helps too).

    Have Fun / let go

    It would be nice to see that one band you’ve waited your whole life to see and happen to be on the bill, but beyond a handful of must-sees, try not to worry too much about timing your day to be at the right place for such and such. Firstly, the festival site is probably bigger than you think, and if you spend the weekend planning, you’ll miss so much of what makes festivals the special thing they are and you might end up not actually seeing anything.

    Enjoy being in a field with thousands of folk in the same situation, make new friends, catch up with old ones, see some bands make some memories and don’t worry if you end up seeing an Hungarian electro-skiffle band instead of the headline acts.

    9262910895_55e27c17e8_bI didn’t get to go to Glastonbury this time round, but I’ll hopefully be at SuperNormal and GreenMan later this Summer. Give me a shout if you’re going and fancy a chai.

     

  • Secret 7 – Digital Witness

    Secret 7 – Digital Witness

    Another year, another Secret 7 entry

    Amongst this year’s choices to create a single cover around was St Vincent’s ‘Digital Witness’. As a long time fan of St Vincent, and this single in particular it seemed a natural for for me to make my 7 inch cover around the themes of privacy, digital awareness and what it means to share and voyeur online.

    I took screenshots of popular websites such as Facebook, Youtube, Twitter along with e-commerce shops like Amazon and a few obligatory porn shots. I then pixelated these images to create an ‘all seeing eye’ collage around them.

    Entry to Secret-7 Auction 2015. Design for St.Vincent’s Digital Witness.

    s7_2015_02  s7_2015_01 s7_2015_1 s7_2015_0s7_2015_3s7_2015_2

  • No mo mo

    No mo mo

    The first week of December and my upper lip is laid bare. Over the past month of (m)ovember I had cultivated half of my facial hair in the aid of helping to raise awareness of men’s health.
    As I regularly wear a full beard, I began the 1st of November clean shaven and let my Twitter and contact list know of my planned endeavour. I do envy those who have the discipline and determination to really put themselves out there for charity – running a marathon, climbing a mountain or pushing the limits of human endurance in other ways, so letting my tasty follicles free is admittedly an easy route, but it’s a bit of fun, I get to live the gentlemen’s dream and thanks to the people who sponsored me, it’s for a worthy cause.

    thankfully I’ve largely had quite positive reactions from people (including my three year old niece and family) on the moustache – a handlebar certainly seems to suit me better than the pure top lip affair I sported a few years ago: RAF-chav isn’t as appealing as it sounds.

    However, despite getting rather accustomed to my Freddie Mercury inspired chops, come advent, I felt it wouldn’t be in the spirit of the event to hold onto it, and as all good things must come to an end – my lip this week is smooth and fresh.

    movember.com

  • Taking another bite out of the apple.

    Taking another bite out of the apple.

    This is the fourth time that I’ve been lucky enough to visit New York, the town named twice, and doesn’t get much sleep. Each time, it’s that little bit more familiar, which in its own way makes there even more to discover. I think all cities of a certain size have this ever unfolding sensation, with infinite pockets of history, hidden treasures held together with an expanding newness and buzz for being THE PLACE to be. This place just seems to do it more so, and it knows it

    This trip is part week break and part family catch up. My parents have lived in Richmond, Virginia since moving to the states fifteen years ago. Unfortunately due to various health, pet and fiscal issues, they’ve not managed to explore this vast and varied continent as much as they perhaps would have liked. Recently they’ve caught the traveling bug and after visiting Jamaica earlier in the year, they’re finally making it to New York, NY and for my dad (who’s an architect), I know it’s kind of a big deal, so it seemed a good as place to meet up on my annual visit for a change.

    My first leg of the trip was from Cardiff via Schiphol (which afforded me enough time to pop into Amsterdam for lunch and an icy beer on the Singel) then arriving in New York Friday evening.

    I’ll never forget the first time I came to New York “it’s like being in a movie!” Everything about the place felt unnervingly familiar : the yellow cabs, the steam rising from the roads, the lights of Times Square, Massimo Vignelli’s subway way finding and of course the iconoclastic architecture — towering skyscrapers lifted from countless Hollywood pictures wherever you look! I fell in love with the place, and I do regret not taking advantage of the Erasmus exchange while at art college, or at least giving it a go in the Big Apple after finishing university. Every visit since, I feel an ever depleting percentage of that first rush of excitement to my senses, but there’s nothing quite like your first time. It’s one of the few places in the world I can honestly say I feel at home in – of course I’ve only popped in for fleeting stays, but it does feel as though one could be the most famous person in the world here and also anonymous at the same time, a melting pot of refuges, freaks, musicians, artists, business folk and chancers, looking to find their dream, their voice, their fortune, or outlaws simply looking to hide in the depths of the Gotham megalopolis.

    I’ve spent the last few days walking the high-lines of Manhattan and the East side avenues of Brooklyn until my legs have been ready to fall off doing a number of the must-do tourist points with my folks – we got the lift to the top of the Empire  State Building for a wonderful sundown view and went to the roof of the met after a picnic in Central Park, and on our last night ate Shabu Shabu in Chinatown 🙂 I know my Dad had an arm long list of things to see and do on his itinerary, and inevitably I think we probably only scraped the surface. In the throws of the mean streets and walking for blocks that seem so small on a map, each hour and day slips by until someone gets hangry in the rush to the right subway station and it’s way past everyone’s dinner time and feet and backs and minds are frayed. I know we could kick ourselves for not fitting in all in, but I guess that’s the nature of the beast.

    Despite fitting in a handful of my own whimsical itinerary (not including lunch dates) I did get to spend an afternoon at PS1 at an art-book fair and saw a great performance by Gang Gang dance, had fish tacos in Williamsburg, got excited by art again at the MOMA, and generally despite myself, fell in love with New York all over again. I met up with friends who have made NYC their home for lunch and went for dinner and a beer with a couple that live round the corner from me in Cardiff — We never get round to catching up in The Welsh capital but after bumping into them at Williamsburg market on Sunday morning it made sense to that evening!

    However, I did manage to not: have a hotdog at Coney Island, or drop into some of my favourite design studios while in town.

    Id like to think there will be a next time in the not too distant future, and who knows – maybe one day lady liberty will come a calling me.

    You can see my other New York Photos at my instagram and Flickr (in due course)

  • Getting Down the Garonne

    Getting Down the Garonne

    As an early Summer break, my wife and I thought it would be worth taking a chill week off and visiting France. Despite having traveled to a fair few far flung places, I’d not been to France before, and felt it was high time to dredge up my pigeon language skills and bag a baguette. We also wanted to make sure we could spend some time doing nothing bar drink wine and eat fine cheese, so we booked an Air BnB stop over in Paris for two nights before heading on down to the Bordeaux region for some R&R.

    Paris is certainly on my list of places to visit, so it rather exciting spending a few days traversing the tourist traps, catching fleeting views of the Louvre, Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel tower, Pompidou centre, dipping croissants in hot chocolate and munching on some delicious entrecôte and frites. Paris befitted all the romantic stereotypes – it was as crowded, stuffy, impersonal and urine scented as I’d always imagined and I can’t wait to visit again one day with a bit more time on my hands.

    Taking the TGV down towards Bordeaux, we arrived at our home for the next four nights – the Chateau le Bosquet des Fleurs, near the petite village of La Reole. Our host Karine, kindly picked us up from the train station and upon arriving at her chateau home, left us with a bottle of her own wine. We had arrived Sunday evening, so expected the nearby village to be pretty quite, but were pleased to find a pizzaria still open. What I don’t think we quite realised was that the village would also largely be closed Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday with cafes and restaurants finally waking up Thursday evening. If living the dream means only having a two and a half day week, I’m in.

    Our first day was spent exploring the rough round the edges village of La Reole. There is a sense that it may have had it’s day, but there were some charming highlights in this medieval settlement that was once the seat of French democaracy: The fantastic crepêrie, L’échoppe serving up delicious and cheap galettes and crepes, the ever reliable boulangerie and the picturesque monastery that sits on the edge of the village looking out over the river Garrone which provides the setting for Gustav Eiffel’s first major work – the bridge across it.

    Hopping on the train to travel further down the river, we visited Bordeau for a day out. Once the jewel in the wine producing region’s crown, it’s a vibrant multi-cultral city with a surprisingly unpretentious, but creative air and a laid-back atmosphere. the grey drizzle may have exposed it’s more gritty edges but we enjoyed lunch at less than half Paris prices and visited the excellent CAPC musée of contemporary art set in an old colonial warehouse
    That was showing a piece by Tomoaki Suzuki.

    After a rainy day schlepping about the chateau, having a chilly dip the pool, playing cards and catching up on some reading, we paid for a home cooked meal by our host. Karine cooked up a treat of wine poached egg salad, slow cooked duck and potato gratin all washed down with wine made from the vines in view from the window.

    Visiting the nearby town of Marmande was unremarkable, not least due to us forgetting that the town would shut down for about three hours over lunchtime – again, something the French seem to do so well 😉 However, I did partake of a popular lunchtime delicacy – steak tartare. Not through the typical foolish Brit abroad mistake, but I genuinely wanted to try it. The plate of raw chopped beef was presented with a raw egg and herbs to mix up and I munched it down with a side of fries. Interesting!

    My French trip was ever so fleeting, and I can’t wait to visit more of the country. I was surprised how quickly my terrible GCSE language skills came back to me and how accommodating and down to earth people were towards me at least attempting some Francais (yes, even in Paris).  Despite being a bit cliché, The food was great overall, and far more simple than I had expected. It’s the simplicity of meat and potatoes or bread and cheese with reliable wine that make it great and far less rich and overblown than I may have been expecting.

     

  • Summer Learning…

    Summer Learning…

    What I learnt this summer…

    The summer is never as long as you think it will be.

    Shorts are de rigur for hot days spent at a desk.

    Shorts should not be above the knee, unless you are a Scout or can pull it off (I’ve certainly tried but my pins / buns don’t quite cut it).

    Playing basketball throwing a ball at people and missing hooped targets during lunch with workmates is an excellent way to let loose and focus on the right stuff after a morning of screen burn.

    15 minutes of lunch spent training may well not be enough for team Burning Red to one day compete at inter-design agency basketball tournaments.

    Make sure you go camping / get to a festival at least once during the warmer months. I always find a few nights under the stars and being a bit closer to nature helps to reset the mind.

    Cardiff is an easily locked down town with little resistance from the resistance.

    Kittens are only kittens for a short amount of time. By the end of the Summer, they will be cats.

    Eggs poached in red wine is a thing!

    Oh yes, and Winter is coming…

  • GreenMan Sketches 2014

    I got to spend a weekend in August enjoying the wonderful Greenman festival vibe, enjoying great music and catching up with friends. Here is a selection of drawings from my sketchbook. Don’t forget to check out my Tumblr for for music and miscellaneous doodles.

    [otw_is sidebar=otw-sidebar-1]

  • Protected: Nic Finch CV

    This content is password-protected. To view it, please enter the password below.

  • Protected: Digital projects

    This content is password-protected. To view it, please enter the password below.

  • Trwbador Breakthrough 7 inch single

    Trwbador Breakthrough 7 inch single

    I’ve been working with Trwbador for a few years now, and when they asked if I’d design a 7 inch cover for their new single ‘Breakthrough’ I jumped at the chance.

    I have been working with overlapped geometric forms for a while, it’s something I enjoy working with, and this also informed elements of the debut Trwbador cover.

    blocking out the areas to include elements
    blocking out the areas to include elements

    Wanting to develop these themes further, I layered stepped geometric triangle / diamond / hexagonal shapes. Initially keeping these stark and coloured, I then then masked the shapes around photographic elements. The angle of the hexagon-to-triangles give some sense of movement and the photos literally ‘break through’ these shapes. As a finishing touch, I included some scribble drawings from my 2 year old niece (I’ve wanted to include them in some work since she could hold a pencil). The Song is about taking in the world and streets of everyday passing life, amplifying the small and mundane to see the magic that’s all around us (at least that’s what I’ve gleaned from the lyrics!).

    The Final Single cover
    The Final Single cover

    This cover artwork was then developed further for the video accompanying the single.

  • BreakThrough video

    BreakThrough video

    The electro-folk-rave duo Trwbador recently asked if I’d like to make a video to accompany their new single ‘Breakthrough’

    Owain asked if it could follow the design of the 7 inch single cover, which seemed like an exciting challenge. The 7 inch sleeve uses images from a multitude of sources – 35mm, digital SLR, phone camera and digital harinezumi. I’d have to gather similar footage, but ideally all from one source, so I set out with my DSLR filming aspects of urban life, with special mention for small bursts of nature and macro details. I wanted to keep the footage quite raw, to make no apology for it’s ‘video’ quality (rather than over-grade and make it feel more like film). The shapes from the cover take the form of simple animated masks. Initially seeming like simple video wipes and transitions, somewhat reminiscent of a 1980’s daytime BBC2 school documentary, building up to a multi-layered collage at the songs’ finale.

    Rather than focus the animation and movements on the songs’ beats and rhythm as I do for Trwbador’s live visuals, I wanted to take it in a more unexpected route and follow the underlying synth patterns, breaking the pace slightly for the chorus and breakdowns. Finally, I blended in animated loops of my niece’s scribbling endeavors, pulsating them according to the song volume.

    (please make sure it’s on HD setting before viewing)

    Trwbador – Breakthrough Feat. ESSA from chameleonic on Vimeo.

    storyboard
    BREAKTHROUGH storyboard
  • My Secret 7

    My Secret 7

    It’s that time of year again when sweaty palmed music lovers get up one morning and queue up at their local record shop to spend lots of money on ‘rare’ pieces of fragile plastic. Yup – Record Store Day is happening on April the 19th 2014. As part of this national day of independent music love, a concurrent event called Secret 7″ takes place, a blind auction takes place with the proceeds going to charity for 700 one off pieces of Seven inch sleeve artwork with a selected track inside. The Artists and designers are a mix of invited famous names and those who happen to submit their own entries. Surprisingly, I wasn’t one of the invited artists, but I thought I’d give it crack anyway.

    There are 7 tracks to choose from to create artwork for (each one is pressed 100 times). I went for Massive Attack’s Karmacoma as my choice, and eagerly began my design.

    acetate

    I had recently been doing some geometric line designs for the ‘Octa’ event in February, so I wanted to carry on with that flavour, and a single cover seemed a perfect excuse.

    As the cover was to be a one off, I felt it would be fitting to screen print it – printing being a means to mass reproduction, so a single print seemed a poetic way of creating it.

    liningup

    Taking my design to the PrintHaus in Cardiff, I printed out the deisgn onto acetate, making sure it was the right size for the sleeve. It was, Just.

    Next the design was burned into a freshly reclaimed screen. A few minutes in the exposure unit…

    exposure

    …and it’s done! (bar cleaning off the excess emulsion)

    screen

    A test print needed to be done onto a fixed sheet of plastic to help aid the ‘registration’. As it was a one chance only situation to get it right, I had to make sure it lined up.

    registration

    I printed out a couple onto paper for safe keeping / framing and gifting. The annoying thing was these came out pretty well. My single use 7 inch sleeve wasn’t the best pull, and lost a bit of quality in one of the corners. Note for next time – GET SPARES!

    testprints

    Anyway – the process was rolling, and I felt the cover needed a little something extra.

    It might be that I had been swayed by my easy listening at the time so I decided to glam it up a touch. Discovering that fine line glue pens exist, I went to town. A sober onlooker would have advised I quit while ahead, but I had a vision dammit, and that vision was golden and sparkly.

    closeglitter

    Almost there, I needed to add a frame. The rules state that the track title and artist should not be included on the design, but I thought it would be a nice touch to include, but obscure them – The final owner of the sleeve could then remove the ‘frame’ and have the finished artwork.

    cuttingboard

    Ta Da! All done.

    finalvintyl

    I posted it off before catching a flight to Texas, reasonably pleased with my glitzy tasteless sleeve.

    …….

    sadly, I was not accepted to the final selection, which can be seen here

    Anyway – Enjoy Record Store day on Saturday the 19th – and don’t forget to support your local music emporium

     

  • Some Frequently Asked Questions

    Some Frequently Asked Questions

    It occurred to me that there is a pile of (literally) Frequently Asked Questions of me and by me, some that are asked on a daily basis, or at least a handful of times a week.

    I’m sure I’m not alone in addressing some of these questions asked of us by our loved ones, house mates, work colleagues etc. So these may come as no surprise….

    What are you looking at? (on the internet)

    None of you business. It’s probably Instagram, Tumblr or Pinterest. Or I’m catching up on the Guardian, Medium, The Next Web or… no, not THAT.

    Well have you decided?

    Probably not, otherwise I would have come to a decision. I’m terrible at making decisions, it’s truly one of my Achilles heels. I’m getting better as I get older, and am more inclined to go with my gut instinct, but sometimes…. Damn!

    What do you want for dinner / breakfast ?

    It’s usually me asking this to my dear wife, after all I tend to do a lot (but not all) of the cooking in our house, and often need to pop to the shops on my way home to pick up supplies.

    Cup of Tea / Coffee?

    Good lord, if I got a penny every time I asked this or got asked (both at home and the studio) I’d be a rich man. Coffee gets the machine working, and tea sustains it. I cannot comprehend a world in which these words are not uttered. Unthinkable.

    Have you called…. (the doctors / vets / parents)

    AAAAARGH! damn my memory!

    Have You fed the Cat?

    It’s common sense that dictates that whoever is up first / home first will have fed the cat. So it’s at the weekends when time is a little more fluid that this gets asked. usually I have.

    What time will you be home?

    When I’m done and finished. To be honest I ask this too, it’s not a one way street – pretty much like the dinner FAQ.

     

     

  • Austin blitz

    Austin blitz

    As an antidote to my previous rambling posts, here’s a quick fire ‘photo story’ of my SXSW / Austin snapshots, all from my phone and not really processed / cropped. WYSIWYG. There’s other pics in my posts, but I might include them all here with captions too.

    For more considered photos, My Instagram lives here

    And for a run down of a more composed and architecturally informed Austin, see my Flicker here

    As you’re probably aware by now, I rarely take photos of people or bands, so don’t expect any ‘fun’ SXSW photos here…

    El Chilito’s take away cafe on Manor Road near where I was staying. Where I experienced my first and best breakfast (Migas) Taco.
    My Migas Taco! Egg, Peppers, Onion, tomato and chilli salsa in a tortilla
    My Migas Taco! Egg, Peppers, Onion, tomato and chilli salsa in a tortilla

     

    An abandoned establishment on Manor Road
    An abandoned establishment on Manor Road
    Gun Fun
    Gun Fun
    'Progress 2' by Luis Jimerez at the Blanford Museum of American Art
    ‘Progress 2’ by Luis Jimerez at the Blanford Museum of American Art
    Your Mum's got...
    Your Mum’s got…
    The Halcyon coffee shop where I recharged my mind and devices regularly during South by. I loved the glitter paintings by Sue Zola on the wall
    The Halcyon coffee shop where I recharged my mind and devices regularly during South by. I loved the glitter paintings by Sue Zola on the wall
    Meat Market. Literally
    Meat Market. Literally
    Bucket drummers were a dime a dozen on the streets of Austin, but not many feature a dancing Iron Man.
    Bucket drummers were a dime a dozen on the streets of Austin, but not many feature a dancing Iron Man.
    I think this is an agave plant that Tequila is made from. I drank some damn fine Tequila in Austin, and I loved the fact that cactus grow wild everywhere
    I think this is an agave plant that Tequila is made from. I drank some damn fine Tequila in Austin, and I loved the fact that cactus grow wild everywhere
    Queuing. You do a lot of it if you go to SXSW. I got fed up of it after a while, which is possibly why I didn't see as many bands as I'd have liked, but here's a photo in case you don't know what a queue is like.
    Queuing. You do a lot of it if you go to SXSW. I got fed up of it after a while, which is possibly why I didn’t see as many bands as I’d have liked, but here’s a photo in case you don’t know what a queue is like.

     

    On my way home late one night / morning
    On my way home late one night / morning
    obligatory plane wing shot. check!
    obligatory plane wing shot. check!

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • SXSW Day 6. Johnny 2 gigs

    SXSW Day 6. Johnny 2 gigs

    I got back into the British music embassy a bit later than expected (it’s taking me a lot longer to get places than  I think it should) but just in time to meet a Canadian publicist and Australian design agency director at a speed networking event. 2pm quickly comes around and the venue is packed for Gulp’s first SXSW show – for the fist gig of the day, it packs a punch with some great sound engineering in the mix. My visuals run as expected and initial feedback seems positive. Gulp’s new label manager asks if they can be put on a memory stick; sorry they can’t. A part of me was hoping she’d ask me along for the LA gig the band are heading to next week, but no such luck (one day!)

    I spent a few hours that afternoon in the convention centre taking in ‘flatstock’ the annual gig poster exhibition. This is a collection of a who’s who of poster artists and designers with the big names of current poster design such as Methane studios and DKNG sat at booths hawking prints, stickers and t-shirts. I picked up a small print for burning red and got lost amongst the swathes of A2 papers and smell of acrylic ink. Admittedly much of the work almost blends into one – there is undeniably a ‘gig poster style’ which is exciting at first but does begin to feel a little generic. There were a handful of studios making some genuinely fresh work, and these really do stand out – however particular names right now escape me. I added to my business card collection (I’ve got a rather large pile which will need some serious sorting when home) and after a quick visit to south of the river on congress it was time to drop my gear off at the hideout theatre ready for the night’s gig and met the band for a pizza and glass of wine.
    Having a pre-show coffee in the coffee shop at the front of the venue, the familiar faces of the Cardiff bands turned up – gruff, sweet baboo, Mr. Hawkline and Cate le bon all in the house. At least there’d be an audience!

    It seems that the midnight hour wasn’t in tune with the gulp party. Gwion had to improv a drum kit without toms, Gid’s guitar didn’t have the sound he was looking for, a synth went wonky and half way through the set, I think the wound engineer accidental nudged the space that’s projector had been balancing on, sending it tumbling. I got it back up and running to a degree for the last few numbers but it did put a dampner ony last evening in Texas and the climax of why I was there. But hey – for all intents and purposes the show was a success and after bidding everyone goodbye I got back on the night owl bus out East for the last time.

  • SXSW Day 5. Late Pancakes, Springs and Welsh Music in a church

    SXSW Day 5. Late Pancakes, Springs and Welsh Music in a church

    I’m hoping that my body clock and sleeping patterns are so thrown up and sideways right now, that when I get back to the UK, I’ll sleep so well I’ll be right as rain for work Monday morning. Stranger things have happened.
    Which is how I had a 2pm breakfast (despite waking at 9am) in the Kerbey lane cafe, a typically  Austin take on the American diner – all fresh juice, responsibly farmed produce and tacos on the menu along aside French toast and burgers. I was proper stuffed after my short stack of buttermilk pancakes 🙂

    Checking out the Guadalupe road area around the university campus, I found a few decent thrift stores and an arcade bar playing punk rock in amongst the coin-ops. Seeing as I’d had a 2 o’clock breakfast I headed south to take in some of the south of the river vibes at Barton springs — a natural spring that is open for a short period every year for the public to swim in. Unfortunately the pool was shut for cleaning, but there was an area a little along that had people paddling and soaking up the sun. Feet all refreshed, I had to get downtown to get some music in me. I wanted to catch up with gulp and some of the contingent Cymraeg, so I went along to the turnstile records party at the st. David’s epistle church. It is a bit odd going all the way to Texas and hang out having a drink with a room full of people from wales, but it was a good night. Gruff Rhys played a lovely set accompanied by kliph Scurlock on drums, and Cate le Bon blew me away, despite having seen her a number of times – the sound and energy the band produced was great.

  • SXSW Day 4. Mary, Meetings, Cameras, Fans & Tradegy

    SXSW Day 4. Mary, Meetings, Cameras, Fans & Tradegy

    South by takes over this town, for good and not. It clearly brings an overwhelming focus and celebration of creativity to the town and generates a huge level of excitement and revenue, but also it seems a strain on the area and it’s resources.

    Initially I couldn’t make it to town for a networking breakfast due to my bus running almost half an hour late (I was running late anyway) and I just about managed to make it to the convention centre for 11.30 where I was due to meet the band I’m tagging along the coat tails of, Gulp in order to pick up my music wristband. It turned out I could pick it up on my own, as as they were running late, was just as well. Without any coffee or breakfast and rather tired from however many nights little sleep it’s been now I walked past Jarvis Cocker who looked like he’d just arrived – of course I recognise him so I gave a friendly nod, smile and hello. A momentary glimmer or recognition from him faded into a confused scowl. I forgot his doesn’t know me. (but he’d probably like to).

    I got to the dregs of the network breakfast and freeloaded on coffee, croissants and the strongest bloody Mary I’ve ever had (these Texans do like to free pour). A coffee shop meeting also failed to happen, so I spent the time drinking a cappuccino skyping with my wife.

    At a bit of a loss, and deciding to save music for the evenings, I went to the Charles Long exhibition at the Contemporary Austin. I place of solace away from the crowds and a space to consider the impact humans are having on the planet due to our greed. An ode to Catalin – an early toxic forerunner to plastic and how our hunger for cheap and ‘safe’  substitutes has lead to the slow destruction of the ocean and our need for air conditioning and a comfortable life errodes the ice caps. There’s nothing subtle about this show, but that’s probably a good thing, and the 3D ‘datamapped’ iceberg sculptures have an ephemeral delicate beauty about them that certainly helped to centre me ready for main Congress. Towards the West or downtown, I took snaps of the area and visited Book People, local bookshop who’s had a who’s who of visitors from Simon Pegg to Timothy Leary (their photographs adorn a celebrity wall). I read a book on some interesting sketching techniques which gave me a little  inspiration to get drawing (one of my personal aims of being here) . It’s not a library, so after browsing for a good hour , I bought a postcard, some chocolate and left. I LOVE American indie bookshops, well any bookshop really, I could spend all day in them browsing and feeling rejuvenated by the wealth of ideas, cover designs and knowledge (even if I’m terrible at actually getting to read of the bloody things once I buy them)

    Across the road was Waterloo Records, one of the larger records shops – not first on my list as I was holding out for a smaller place, but I went in anyway, as one doe and left with a few cheap second hands: A Willie Nelson (I’m in his town afterall), A solo Todd Rundgren, and the new St Vincent album. I had a fantastical vision that if I did, somehow I’d actually get into the gig tonight and she’d be happy to sign it for me.

    Another juice later (it’s all I seem to be eating and drinking here as I’ve lost my appetite in the heat,  travel and sleep dysfunction) and I went into Hut’s Hamburgers, an old style joint from the 30’s with authentically delicious grass fed Longhorn burgers to match. Nothing mind blowing, but how I imagine a very good all American burger should be, with fries that have their skin on. Whilst eating I Met an LA PR agent who’s been doing SX since the 80’s. She’d had a few glasses of wine as it’s her day off, but we got on well and she insisted on walking me out to where she was heading. I drew my first band of the day, and headed to town.

    The NPR showcase was tipped to be a good one, and some of the crew Cymraeg where at the venue. I discovered that they don’t allow ‘Cameras’ into the venue (more on my thoughts on this in a another post), and I pleaded and tried to work out a solution with the security and venue staff to let me in as I never take (digital) photos of bands these days, and how I was only out tonight to see St Vincent, but no. The man at the gate took a photo of me on his cameraphone and said I’d be able to jump the VIP queue if I came back after stashing it, which was really good of him. thanks to the sound engineer at the British Music Embassy, I stowed my cameras with him and heading back to Stubbs and saw Kelis then St Vincent play live. It was fantastic, despite the crowd taking lots of pictures with their cameraphones after being asked by the woman herself beforehand not to and afterwards I wandered  backstage unhindered to see if she (St Vincent) would sign my record, but she was clearly upset about something and apologised before being hurried away by her people. I was the only person there, Vinyl and sharpie in hand, but no.
    Wandering lonely around 6th Street, a homeless tour guide told me where to get pancakes near my house and about the oldest jazz bar in town – literally underground called the Elephant, so called because they found a wooly Mammouth bone while building it. I wasn’t sure if I beleived him, but sure enough there it was after everyone else had dumped me. I sat at the quiet bar drinking a nightcap of local bourbon on the rocks and a Spanish Austinite told me about the best burger joints in town and some super local tips as well as where Willie Nelson was playing tomorrow.

    On the bus home, we drove past a street of police cars where an hour earlier a drunk driver ploughed through a crowd killing 2 people and injuring dozens. A sobering end to the day.

     

  • SXSW day 3. Film, chill and bands (finally)

    SXSW day 3. Film, chill and bands (finally)

    Waking up I promised myself no migas taco for breakfast. So I hopped on the metro rail ( unfortunately not a monorail as I had initially thought) after the ticket machine swallowed up 7dollars of my change and went in search of city treasure thrift. It was underwhelming, so I decided to stop in Cisco’s for breakfast. Supposedly an Austin institution where political deals have been made and broken it seemed a good cultural stop. I didn’t realise it was Mexican.

    2 (good n spicy) migas tacos and a large coffee later it was time for the premiere screening of American interior , the new gruff Rhys film. Directed by Dylan Coch who also made Seperado with gruff and produced by Catrin Ramasut it follows gruff on a journey across America as he traces the footsteps of a supposed long lost relative called john Evans who first went to the new world to discover a tribe of native Americans that spoke welsh and along the way inadvertently helps to map the path to the pacific, and determines Canada’s border. It was a funny, heartwarming and enlightening film and rounded off with a special performance by gruff and kliph Scurlock followed by the magnificent Keith bear who talked about identity and played his hand carved flutes.

    I met some old and new friends at the screening and accompanied them back to their house in the hot and sunny Texan afternoon which was great. It was a very ‘chill’ afternoon drinking iced mocha, supping corona while schedules and plans were made.

    Following my new welsh/uk contingent back into town to latitude30 , where the British music embassy was hosting Huw Stephen’s uk music showcase, I had to watch the first half of sweet Baboo’s set from outside as I still didn’t have a wristband. Luckily Huw let me in through the stage door and I spent the night watching Alice Wolf, Prides, Bi Polar sunshine and Jungle. All in all a good evening with great company, decent music and some rather large rum and colas.

  • SXSW Day2 . Old Aquaintences, Tequila and Busses

    SXSW Day2 . Old Aquaintences, Tequila and Busses

    So, although I intended to get an early night, I couldn’t get to sleep until 2 am then woke up again at 4 until finally passing out at about 7. I’m not used to insomnia and pulling myself out of bed at 11am was a struggle. I don’t normally get jet lag going back in time, but somehow the day has been more of a haze than Sunday. More migas and coffee on my morning amble took me to bannau’s coffee shop . So hip it hurt, but a good friendly hurt with old sofas and chipped crockery. Almost everyone was sat at their laptops or iPads, everyone. The complimentary power supplies hanging from the roof do encourage it though. My cappuccino was a bit disappointing but the pizza slice was darn good.

    Again I walked to downtown with camera in hand soaking up the east side  atmosphere and ended up in the empire club, a re-appropriated auto garage and went to a VJ meetup in the main dance floor. A handful of local beamers we’re taking about their techniques and I met Topher Sipes, a local media artist, born in Bedford, raised in Texas. He’s projecting for scrillex on Thursday night in the garage – so if I can’t get tickets to lady gaga playing in the BBQ next door (unlikely) I’ll try my hand there instead.

    I met up with a friend from town who I met at a wedding in Italy last year (it’s a small world) for some margarita and tequila before he and his wife and friend had to get the ‘last’ train (at 6.30!) back up to the northern suburbs . Bleary eyed and a little legless I wandered the streets looking for my RSVP’d parties. I couldn’t get into he Wes Anderson talk and screening of Budapest hotel ( no surprise there) and I missed the party at the Jones centre contemporary gallery. Tired and disillusioned I west eastward where I’ve found the onion party in the Mohawk club. Chet faker on the decks and cymbals are out back. I thought I saw Donald Glover in the audience (it wasn’t) but it’d be fab to see him play this week. I’ve been told he’s doing an afternoon party on Wednesday, so I’ll try my luck if I remember. Now it’s bed time for reals.

  • SXSW Day 1. Acclimatizing

    SXSW Day 1. Acclimatizing

    After being woken by a bird (I presume) that sounded like a Guinea pig, and not being able to figure out how to use the coffee machine I headed out to explore the ‘hood. I picked up a coffee and a migas taco and walked west toward downtown via the Blanton museum of art. Housing a permanent exhibition of art from the Americas, the contemporary galleries displayed a refreshing Latin (and female) perspective on the rise of American abstract expressionism. The temporary exhibition was a retrospective of Eva Hesse and Sol Lewitt’s drawing experiments and how their relationship spurred each other on to challenge themselves. The musum’s main Atrium houses a commisioned permenant installation by Teresita Fernández made up of thousands of tiles of incandescent turquoise, giving the space an almost Mediterranean or Arabian feel.

    A postcard later, I pushed on downtown to see if I could so some sxsw. The chaos of sixth street pushed me into the halcyon coffee shop for a recharging snack of Nutella crepe and an iced coffee before wandering about the ‘interactive’ trade show in the convention centre hall. I thankfully managed to pick up some free t shirts ( I  didn’t bring enough) and some temporary NASA tattoos.

    As the sum went down, I went to the river to watch the bats fly in and out from under the congress bridge. They squeak a lot.

  • Sxsw day 0 . Getting to Austin

    Sxsw day 0 . Getting to Austin

    I kiss my dressing-gowned wife a goodbye and my journey begins. The taxi driver to the bus station tells me how he went on a long haul flight for the first time last year on a holiday to Florida and he found it scary, but it was okay. We chatted about what I might find in Texas which reminded him of a rodeo show he saw in Orlando and how magnificent the cowboys outfit was ” so smart – all black but with the sparkles. I wanted a costume like that” I promised I’d buy a Stetson and some fancy boots and he bid me a good trip. The national express pushes its way out of a twilit drizzly bus station bang on time. I should get a bit of shut eye now on the way to Heathrow.

    At the airport I was greeted by a ‘mobile’ passport control team : staff approving queuing passenger’s passports with android devices and walked past a talented Yale student tinkling the ivories of a communal white mini-grand.

     

    Now, 32,984 feet in the sky and 5 and a quarter hours away from Atlanta (my first leg) , breakfast at Tiffany’s has been watched and washed down with episodes of adventure time, uncle grandpa and a glass of red. Desperately tired but it’s still bright outside.
    Almost ten hours later I’m in Atlanta airport. Never been to Georgia before. Its hella southern. For an airport anyway. My eyes feel sandy and my brain feels squashed. I hope I nap on the next flight for an hour or so.

    Sitting in the gate to Austin, you can effortlessly play ‘spot the musician’ . its surprising how stereotypical ‘artists’ tend to look. Especially those just visiting .

    Between the gate and the plane I met Dylan who I thought I recognised from Cardiff, turns out her makes films and is premiering his latest film made with gruff Rhys this week. We chewed the fat and will try and share a cab ride into town. I was sat in between a richmonder coming to see friends and check out some parties and an international student from Morocco via Boston visiting a cousin and to see some bands, films and party. After landing in torrential rain , I shared a cab with gruff Rhys, cat and Dylan to the Hilton and then onto my home for the week. There was a key waiting for me under the mat and there house is all mine it seems. Now I’m tucked up in bed and hope to get at least 8 hours shut eye….

    2014-03-08 17.02.57

  • My Analogue Boxes

    My Analogue Boxes

    Cameralamadindong

    Over the years, I’ve managed to build up a fair sized collection of things. Stemming from an innate inability to let go of ‘stuff’, I continuously fail to live the zen-like lifestyle I like to think I aspire to. whether it’s badges, retro games consoles (and every version of street fighter two I can find for anything I won that has a processor), pens, magazines and on the shelf above my desk at home, cameras. I haven’t set out to ‘collect’ cameras, and each one is relatively unique, be it from a historical perspective or practical use / medium or aesthetic. Most of the camera are in use and serve a particular function. Or if they don’t ‘they’ll be useful one day’… Here’s a list of (some) of my analogue 35mm and 120mm cameras.
    It’s all very hip right now to use ‘real’ film cameras, and I guess I’m typical of a breed of photographer clinging onto what may well be the last gasp of easily being able to shoot with film. There is a different discipline involved, and I recommend it to anyone who only thinks digitally when it comes to photography. There’s a different impetus on pushing that shutter button, as you know it has to count, and there’s no way of telling if a picture will be any good until it’s processed. I also believe that  there’s a real physical quality to film based images, I don’t know if this is an imagined ‘false nostalgia’, but it’s almost as if there’s a spectrum of experience that defies current digital sensors in the same way that vinyl recordings hold audio frequencies either end the audible scale, I think that chemical photography includes a hidden spectrum that adds to it’s immediacy that can’t be faked with a retro filter.

     

    Minolta Dynax 500si

    My first ‘proper’ 35 mm SLR camera, which was a joint birthday / Xmas present when I first got interested in photography back in ’93. Although it might have been a bit overkill in terms or spec, it’s the camera I grew with and still used it fairly regularly until about 2007 when I inherited my first ‘D’SLR (a NIKON D70, which now belongs to my Dad). It’s still in good shape, despite the hand grip has discolored.


    Mamiya C330

    A Twin reflex medium format camera, similar to one reputedly once favoured by Dianne Arbus. Gifted to me in a semi functioning state, I’ve since shot a couple of rolls on it with pleasing results. it’s seen better days, and is a little temperamental, but once you get a clear shot from one of these things, nothing compares. wiki

    Minolta Hi-Matic 7

    After spending countless years gathering dust in my Father-in-law’s attic, I’m now the proud own of this wonderful little rangefinder. The quality of the lens is breathtaking in the right circumstances and the depth of field is fantastic. It has a rather peculiar focusing method, which doesn’t lend itself to super quick shooting, but as long as you’re not too precious when snapping with it, the results can be great. I tend to use this for people snaps, as I’m terrible at taking pictures of friends and family, but using this seems to take the pressure off, especially as I feel there’s an ‘immediacy of the moment’ that 35mm manages to capture, that can be too fleeting for the digital calculations of more modern photography.
    I’ve since seem a company that refurbished rangefinders like this to make them super fancy
    wiki


    Canon AE-1

    Another hand-me-down from a family friend who was about to list it on Ebay is quickly becoming my go-to camera when I don’t need the pin-point accuracy of my Nikon D7000. This is the only Canon camera in my rosta although I’ve gone through a few canon digital compacts, which I loved, but since owning a Nikon DSLR, the modern Canon’s never quite feel right in my hand. This analogue beauty doesn’t have this issue and I find shooting with it a consistent pleasure. wiki


    LOMO Lubitel 166B

    Picked up from a flea market a few years back, I only bought it because it was so cheap, and still with it’s original ‘Made in the USSR’ box and instructions. I’ve not shot anything with it as yet, but I’ve got a roll of 120 film in the fridge waiting to get exposed. wiki

    LOMO Colorsplash

    This little compact got me back into using 35mm film in about 2004 after a good few years shooting with digital compacts. from the ‘shoot from the hip’ stable of LOMO cameras the novelty factor with this device is the flash, specifically the ‘colorsplash’ flash. a bit of fun, and adds a certain flourish to blurry toy camera prints.LOMO page


    Polaroid 635 CL

    I think I picked up this simple beauty with it’s retrograde 80’s carefree lines from a charity shop in the late 90’s – an era when Polaroid film was still being made and sold by Polaroid and smartphones looked like this.The only Polaroid I’ve owned, there’s very little to go wrong in the camera body itself, as the film included a battery. it’s very much plug ‘n’ play, provided you can still find the film. Impossible project page

    I’ve got a bit of hunting to do to find any samples from the Polaroid, but will add then here when I finally recover them from an old shoebox in the attic.

  • Going South

    Going South

    South by South West is one of those events that has been on my ‘one day’ wishlist for a few years now, but the excuse to fly over to Texas for a week of music, crowds, tacos and sun has always eluded me. that is until this year.

    Flights are booked and a house share set up, I’m winging my way to Austin on the 9th or March for the Music week (and the end of the interactive). I’m lucky enough to be tagging along with Gulp who are one of the showcase bands, so I’ll be taking my projector along and hopefully doing some projection for their set.

    Now Texas may seem a bit of a long way to travel for the sake of a handful of half hour gigs (you’d be right), but it’s said that SXSW offers up innumerable opportunities to see, meet and share a drink with a who’s who of the interactive, Music and Film worlds. I’m personally seeing the journey as an excuse to immerse myself in the alternative ‘fringe’ SXSW – aside from filling myself with free tacos and saturating my ears with music on tap, I’ll be drawing daily (every band I see), photographing and writing for the Burning Red blog.

    They Ride Horses Don’t They?

    As for my music itinerary, I’m probably going to worry about that when on the plane or in the fray of Sixth street, and once I’ve had time to fill up my SXSW app schedule. I have a vision of throngs of people all trying to get in to the bands that are ‘so hot right now’ so if that does turn out to be the case I’ll likely go with the flow on that one.

    I’ll be living like a Texan for the week, and should I need a break from the bands, here’s my list of top things I’d like to try and see and do while ‘keeping it weird‘.

    Austinomnomnom

    I’ve heard Austin is the home of Tex-Mex, but I’m getting the impression that it’s a foodies paradise no matter the flavour. I’m on a mission to find the best burger, pancakes, milkshake, tacos that I stumble across. Oh yes, and a pharmacy.

    Speed Demon

    I will be staying in a shared house allegedly a 45 minute walk to the downtown area where many of the gigs will be in the evening. I’m used to cycling my way around Cardiff, and considering Austin is a bike friendly city (for America) I’d like to try and get hold of a bike while there. Although many bike shops rent, it’d work out pricey and the bikes on offer all seem a nit too good. I’m going to make my way to the bike farm when I arrive and see if I can pick up an oldie for under $100. (fingers crossed)

    Seeing is Believing

    When I feel the need to give my ears a rest, I’ll likely fancy bombarding my eyeballs and brain with  some art. I’ll cetainly be after some contemporary work, but the Blanton is a museum I see cropping up so I’ll start there, and see where that leads me.

    Going Down

    The wrong side of the river seems to be where it’s at. The South congress looks to be a long stretch of galleries, shops, cafes and curiosities. I can’t promise that I will be able to resist picking up a pair of boots while there though.

    So, only two weeks to go and I’m equally excited and vervous, but I’ll be updating this and the Burning Red blog as often as I can, not to mention my instagram and tumblr sketchbook

    Photo Credit: Phillip Kromer

     

  • Whispers From the Wires – Trwbador

    Whispers From the Wires – Trwbador

    I’m currently busy finishing off the 7 inch single artwork and video for Trwbador’s next single, so I thought it’d be nice to bounce some questions over to the duo at their home in Mid Wales via email….

    How important do you feel imagery and graphics are to music – does design matter? (although I know it’s all about the music really)

    Music is like the tasty cake and everything else are the icings and cherries. I don’t think there is anything wrong in making music a collective experience using other elements such as visuals,design & touch.
    For me I like to create a world where by people can choose to enter if they so wish, I see it more as a production as a whole, which is where I would like to take the live set furthermore too. Instead of the listener simply entering a room to watch us as people playing music, I would like for people to enter a small world to have a collective experience…..I guess.

    Summer is the other side of this winter – do you have any festival plans or offers yet?

    We play Dinefwr Literature Festival in June. There are a couple of others on the horizon too 😉

    and finally, if you were being sent on a mission to Mars, what one thing would you take with you to keep you from going loco?

    Chihuahuas

    The new Trwbador single (name still under wraps) will be out in April along with a new album expected in the Autumn 2014!

  • Don’t Call it a Resolution

    Don’t Call it a Resolution

    Aaaah! The fresh feeling of a freshly laundered year was upon us a month ago, and like many folk I had a small stack of hopes, dreams and let’s say, ‘resolutions’ – all racked up ready for the new year.

    These included most of the usual suspects – getting fitter with some daily exercise, to read more, daily meditation, learn a language and get a tattoo amongst others. Four stale weeks later and to be honest, not a great deal has stuck. They all seemed so possible for that first week / first day but now, its not all looking so optimistic.

    Realistically though there are a few bigger, more practical plans and attitudes to working that are still pretty at the front of my mind and might actually be doable with a bit of planning, patience and steady practice.

    Beam it Don’t Dream it

    2013 was a great year for me getting to do more live video mixing and projecting with bands. I had decided the year before that I wasn’t going to go to any more music festivals unless I was invited to take part one way or another. I had the busiest festival summer since the nineties last year – I played at the blue lagoon, did three shows at Greenman and even got to Glasto. I’m hoping to do more of the same and crank it up a notch if possible. This will hopefully include the next phase of the unbuttoned project with Zwolf that was a great experience last year.

    Update – I’ve managed to gather the means to visit SXSW this year, so will be taking my projector in my hand luggage with a view to beam beam beam (with Gulp!)

    But it’s so Beautiful

    There are a handful of aims / goals and wishes I would like to see happen this year, and in many ways I fee the best way to facilitate them would be to let go or unlearn the bad habit of screen addiction. It’s a modern day affliction that  feel stops me from reading more (real books), drawing more, making music and just remembering to be in the moment and breathe more and not get sucked into the twitchy ‘pleasure refresh’ that smart devices seem to encourage.

    This could be an excuse for laziness, but I’d like to at give it a try. While I don’t think going cold turkey on my iPhone is every going to be realistic, I am trying to think twice before mindlessly feeding my FOMO and letting it be the first thing I grab for when left for more than 10 seconds to my own devices. Making sure screens don’t go upstairs to bed with me is another thing I’m being careful to watch (well my phone at least – catching up on episodes of Parks and Recreation on the laptop is a pre-bedtime necessity!)

    Skill is a B*m Disease

    At the beginning of last year, I enrolled in an intaglio printing class at the Print Market Workshop. It was a fantastic few weeks learning the ins and outs of the printing process that I missed while at University. It sparked a new found excitement in me to get my hands dirty and actually make something tangible rather than from pixels. I had intended to fully enroll at the branch near me, but never quite got round to it, and eventually lost momentum.

    This year, I’ve been bought four sessions at the Prinhaus to get me into some more making, not to mention become more familiar with screenprinting. As a focus over the coming weeks, I’ll be making a book – binding it and filling it with one-off prints, drawings and collages. Just because. As and when I make a new page for this, I’ll no doubt post it on my Tumblr where all my sketchbook work ends up.

    Never Enough Time

    I do have a list of projects and goals for this year as long as my arm, but I wouldn’t want to jinx them all by broadcasting my hopes here.

    What I do hope to do overall though is to try and keep a momentum of personal projects rolling, even if that’s remembering to draw at least once a day.

    To be more mindful and aware of opportunities as and when they arise, and not to be afraid to say yes (but know when to say no!)

    Live in the NOW. Don’t let pressure run away with me, but use all experiences as opportunities to learn.

    Oh yes, and finally get around to having that tattoo 😉

    Mayan Calendar image by kimberlyeternal used with a Creative Commons license,
  • UnButtoning

    UnButtoning

    Towards the end of the summer, I was asked if I’d be interested in working on a project with composer Tom Raybould and Sinfonia Cymru to produce a series of performances aimed at encouraging a new audience to experience classical music, and exploring what a ‘classical’ music concert can be.

    We set about putting together the first show in September with a feeling of much trepidation. It wasn’t fully clear from the outset how we would achieve the goal of a ‘new’ classical experience and for that reason, we possibly ended up trying to throw everything at it in order to see what would stick. We knew the raw ingredients: electronic music, Classical music, String instruments, video projections and some sort of ‘interactivity’.

    We had a shortlist of musical pieces to work with, and I set about filing some macro footage of ‘nature’ themes – taking on the elements as a starting point of concept, which I planned to use a starting point for live visuals – each piece corresponding to an element. Tom Set about creating rather foreboding, bass heavy interstitial electronic soundscapes to be played in between classical pieces along with a reworking of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings – you’ll know it if you hear it. A favorite of ‘remixes’ made famous by the likes of William Orbit, it is a piece most people recognize, so it was felt to be an easy win.

    That first evening didn’t quite set alight the world of music, but it was clear what didn’t work and which elements the audience reacted to. It was possibly a case of not enough ‘collaboration’ between all parties, and too many ideas in the mix. It was clear if the following performance in November was to succeed, something needed to change. So we changed pretty much everything.

    Tom Set about actively remixing a trimmed down selection of classical pieces, with a more contemporary flavour, turning them into electronica driven beats. These were then scored for the string musicians  into new arrangements. Rough Collie were brought in with a brief to create seven animations spanning each section to follow a geometric path. visually, we were imagining simple beginnings – a dot or lines to become more lines and develop form, gradually becoming more complex and beautiful. The first show had us projecting down onto the musicans and also onto two standard large screens. This time, eight ‘shards’ – tall, thin screens purpose built for a previous project were put in the mix. One screen per string musican and two left over for the electronic. The video needed to feel a part of the music and ‘react’ to the musicians, so we used contact microphones on the instruments to produce a midi signal, which then corresponded to a video file which I could affect with the ambient sound. John Collingswood agreed to apply some Isadora magic by creating generative graphics connected to Tom’s midi signals, this would help demonstrate a slightly different feel of imagery between the electronic and the orchestral, whilst definitely coming from a shared common ground. Tying it all together would be Katy’s lighting skills (as well as her superhuman project management skills).

    The Second UnButtoned took place on the 13th November and getting the shards in place, successfully projection mapping onto them as well as getting the piezo mics to convincingly work in-situ felt it all coming into place. This would be the show we had been wanting to create from the beginning. The fact that the response from the audience was overwhelmingly positive and that the team working on it had big smiles across their faces on the last note was even better.

    There are bits to refine, add and change, but in essence the December show will follow the same format. If all goes well, there is talk of possibly touring the show next year. Fingers crossed.

    UnButtoned will be at Chapter on the 13th December.

  • How to Boil an Egg

    How to Boil an Egg

    I like eggs.

    I don’t eat them as often as I like, but my weekend breakfasts certainly have a ellipsoidal shaped space for them.

    cat eggCommonly on Saturdays I’ll go for a fried egg in a croissant for breakfast – sounds odd, but I urge you to try it, an American play on fried egg sandwich, the sweetness of the pastry and savoury egg combo is a winner. Sunday, is more a louche poached egg on toast vibe (the secret is not to let your water overly boiled and add a cap-full of vinegar to the water before cracking the egg in, don’t worry about creating an otherworldly vortex – it’s a myth.

    However, since working only four days a week, Friday’s have become my boiled egg day.

    The simplest of recipes, yet with enough nuances, Delia Smith needed to write a book about it to encourage people back into the kitchen in the 80’s.

    Doing a quick internets search, there seems to be as many different techniques as one can realistically invent, and while most are variations on a them (put egg in water and boil it), it is surprisingly varied.

    My personal method ignores Delia’s good advice (although I might try it next time to see) and goes on my gut instincts, so if it doesn’t work for you, I’m sorry. This method does not guarantee a perfect soft boiled egg, and I take no responsibility for hard boiled disappointment, but this is how I roll.

    Method

    • Put your egg into a small saucepan.
    • Just about cover with water
    • bring to the boil (many chef say simply simmer, I would say go more than a simmer, less than a roll)
    • as soon as it’s bubbling, set the timer for 2 mins 30 seconds
    • Put your toast in the toaster (Soughdough if you can get it is preferable)
    • Time’s up! – quickly put your egg in an egg cup, while you butter and top your toast (Marmite for me please)
    • Bash, Slice, Peel – whatever you need to do to get into your egg.
    • Fingers crossed the yolk is runny and the white solid, NOW EAT!

     

    Here’s a quick video I made a while back illustrating this, with sound by PhantomHead

     

  • Week–a–Gig–a–Thon

    Week–a–Gig–a–Thon

    It’s October!

    Unofficially the busiest time of the year. In the space if a month, Cardiff plays host to the Cardiff design festival, the welsh music prize, made in Roath, Swn festival, Cardiff contemporary, some of these in the same weeks!

    Welsh Music Prize
    Jon & Huw Introduce the MWP

    Usually on the week of Swn, like clockwork I’m guaranteed to have a cold, luckily this year I mostly got it out of the way last weekend, and just as the phenylepheriine was wearing off, Thursday evening welcomed the start of Swn with the Welsh Music Prize Awards. I arrived at the kuku club just about on time cycling through a sunny Llandaff fields from a student design presentation at Cardiff Met. After sweatily wandering into a dark sober club straight from work seemed to leave everyone a bit spaced out, so after a complimentary bourbon and lemonade, Jon Rostron and Huw Stephens welcomed everyone and Adam Walton warmed us up for the nominees. As a clip and introduction to each artist was played, the tightly packed crowd of journalists, bands, friends, promoters and fans nodded along and cheered each other on.
    Georgie Ruth deservedly got the honour this year, and was genuinely surprised and excited. Wolfing down a ‘mini food’ trio of canapés, I hot footed I over to the angel hotel – somewhere I hadn’t been since a fetish themed rave in the late nineties. It’s good to see such forgotten venues with magical carpets being home to festival events. Eventually I managed to line check the projector and balance it on the edge of the stage (the only place to put it) in between HMS Morris and Chlöe Howl.
    Walking round the corner to clwb Ifor bach I set up my projector and laptop just in time for a fantastic set by gulp. Their disco space pop filled the packed room with Guto Pryce’s psychedelic synth bass and Lindsey Levan’s soaring vocals. I always enjoying beaming with bands in clwb as I usually get to fill the stage upstairs with moving light, hopefully helping to produce a far more immersive experience than simply using screens. As the gig finished, I ran with asthma inducing speed around the corner to plug in, borrow Owain’s Ventolin and projected above the stage for a solid Trwbador gig in the Swn venue with the best carpet.


    Friday, I had other commitments in the evening, but during the day, I popped into town to have a brief look at the Cardiff Open exhibition in the Castle arcade. Happening about every 6 months, it’s an exhibition made up of artists from around Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan, while the types of artists are varied, it does focus on the more ‘tangible’ side of art – paintings, sculpture, printmaking, photography and ceramics. The standard of the work does seem to be pretty high, and this year, I particularly enjoyed the huge lino print by John Abell with it’s beautifully primal depictions of medieval-wild welsh coal mining valley tales. Natasha Mayo’s blackboard painted clay sculpture of a hairless child holding a duckling standing in front of a large blackboard also caught my eye.

    I went next door to chance at having my psycho analysis drawn by Casey Raymond, but probably fortuitously, he was fully booked.

    Mr Ohm at Made in Roath
    Mr Ohm at Made in Roath

    Saturday saw the Made in Roath festival kick off with full steam. In its fifth year, made in Roath is a truly community led affair. Celebrating creativity in all its forms, the weekend plays host to workshops, music events, live art, exhibitions, street theatre and the hugely popular open houses, where people hold art exhibitions in their homes. In the afternoon I went over to check out ‘Inverness groove’ where there annual Roath bake off was held in spice of life, a dodgy postcard and tea room wa,  cf≈ ≈s run by the SHO gallery, and artist Richard Huw Morgan DJ’d on the street with drunken miss orderly. The duo only played records from the record shops bargain crates. Rhm or ‘Mr ohm’ focused on only playing 60’s 7-inches with messages or notes scrawled on the sleeves, whilst Zia torta matched her outfit with a music diet of 80’s rock pop and early rave.

    Saturday evening I was back in clwb to visualise for fist of the first man, for what may be their last going for a while (as guitarist allun Gaffy has gone to focus on other projects). With the lights off, I attempted to pummel the audiences eyes with audio reactive geometric white shapes while Mark Foley’s deep bass melted the walls to zwolf’s compositions.

    After packing up my equipment, I stopped for a quick dance to the extremely loud and deep bass of clipping. While I couldn’t get on board the MC’s lyrics, his delivery got the crowd excited and the bone rattling sub’s got us wobbling.
    I caught a chunk of the Wytches enthusiastic teenage pagan rock before catching the debut full band gig by Cardiff legend Foley’s sh…apes project. Simian-esque psychedelic phrases with the best use of a brass instrument in pop music I’ve ever heard (filtered and distorted into another worldly antagonistic wall of human sound).

    Sunday, although I didn’t catch any more bands, going back to town via a house on my road that was housing an art exhibition (with a unicorn sign outside), I visited Paul Granjon and his ‘Thingy Robots’ at the ArcadeCardiff exhibition space in the Queens arcade. taking residencey with his automonmous electronic friends opposite a temporary electronic salvage ‘Dynamo Wreckshop’ – a space where discarded electronic goods are dismantledand reconfigured into new configurations. the room is sprawling with the innards of old scanners, printers, VCR’s and computer parts, there’s certainly a lot of dissection going on, and I was assured that plenty of new hybrid experiments are being created daily.

    Weekends like this are what makes living in Cardiff such a delight. It’s small size means you can cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time, and you still won’t get to see everything. The city feels buzzing and creativity feels like it’s seeping out of the cracks in the pavement.

    The fun still isn’t over either. There’s  the Darkened Room screening of ET at g39 to look forward to followed by the now annual Roath nocturnal walk finishing up at Milgi for a Made in Roath closing party Thursday evening.

  • FAQ: What’s the Best Web Publishing Tool for Creatives?

    FAQ: What’s the Best Web Publishing Tool for Creatives?

    This is an updated version of a post written earlier this year.

    In the following post, I’m mainly talking to those who would like an online space to show their work but who might not have the tools or inclination to write a website by hand. In a fairly loose way – painters, photographers, sculptors, designers, illustrators and fine artists. Indeed, anyone that feels they need a portfolio website but doesn’t want to build one from scratch.

    I’m often asked by friends who make things (often technophobes) what the best way to get their work online is. Initially, I suggest they might want to hire a professional webs designer to build them a site, but for artists on no budget, this may not be practical or even necessary.

    Despite being able to design and build websites from scratch myself (it’s my day job), when it comes to how I show my personal work online, I’m still working out and developing the best way for me to do it. In fact, until recently all my current ‘online nodes’ were websites that are hosted and run on third party platforms, and while I’m capable of building the sites for scratch, web design is a job in itself, and as a web manager at Burning Red, I like to see what’s already out there and what is the easiest and best tool to use for different purposes. I’m not showcasing my web design skills with these portfolios, but using them as an online repository for my graphic design, photographs, video, drawing and art. All these fields are something I care about as individual pursuits but unless I can edit down these as individual projects, I’m keeping them separate.  That’s not to say I might bite the bullet and build fully bespoke and hand-stitched master portfolio site next month, or indeed switch my blogging platform of choice next week, but the web is a fluid beast and maybe I don’t like putting all of my eggs in one basket.

    So, if you make things and are thinking about how to get your work online without learning (much) HTML or paying a web designer, read on.

    Now, ask yourself –

    • Do you even need a website?
    • Are you getting by without one? Or do you feel you might be missing out on some WWW. Magic?
    • Will a site help generate more interest about you and your work?

    What will its function be?

    • An online portfolio?
    • A shop to sell work?
    • Or a contact point, a ‘hub’ of all things you – feeding in your social networks and a signpost to other places online you might exist?

    Whatever the reason there’s a likely hood there’s a tool out there to help you create a site yourself. many of these will be free, at least to try or to run a ‘lite’ version. At the end of the day though, it is important to remember that no one service will do it all, and you may well have to compromise on design and or functionality. If you need your site to achieve specific goals or wish to create an online space as unique as you and your work, then stop now. You need to employ a designer to help you create a bespoke site, tailored to your needs. It will mean investing somewhat, but it will often be money well spent.

    Before you begin.

    Do you have a Domain? A Domain is the name of your website – ‘youracewebsite.com’ for example. many free services will give you a ‘sub’ domian to their service ‘yoursite.blogspot.com’ or ‘yoursite.tumblr.com’ and if you have bought your own domain, you can usually forward it to one of these sub domains or sometimes with an upgrade to the service, you can use your domain ‘natively’ on top of a service.

    I won’t go into recommending domain and hosting services here as there are hundreds out there, all vying for your attention. There’s a few I’ve used over the years – Rackspace, 4Dreg, 34sp, Dreamhost and they all have their differences (and price brackets), but generally I’ve been very happy with the service from each of them. Some people recommend keeping your Hosting and Domain provider separate, but it depends on what you’re doing – keeping them in the same place simply makes for easier management, especially if you only have one or two to deal with.
    If you’re a design studio juggling dozens or more, then separating may make sense for unseen possible eventualities.

    Most of the services / platforms mentioned below are ‘Hosted’. This means they give you webspace and and maintain it, look after hosting and server space etc without you worrying about it for free in return for you using their service and spreading the word. (Rather than ‘Self-Hosted’ in which you host a website on some server space you own). Out of the box, they can be somewhat limited in design and functionality, but it keeps your hands away from code and potentially breaking the internet(!)

    Publishing platforms.

    WordPress.com

    Not to be confused with WordPress.org. .com and .org are essentially the same platform / Content Management System, but the .com hosts your site for you and is a more ‘hands off’ service. If you don’t know the first thing about coding or html, .com might be a good place to start.

    If you fancy getting your hands dirty and have heard of  FTP, CSS and HEX numbers before,  you might want to download the latest version of wordpress.org (if you do that, you’ll need to have already set up a domain name and hosting). Many Hosting companies will install it for you, but once it’s up, it’s up to you to customise and tweak it.

    But be warned – this will depend on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go – take this pill, and you may unwittingly be taking the path of the web designer and could be knee deep in markup and hyper-text tags before you know it. That’s not a bad thing, but you’re probably reading this because you’d rather be making artwork and writing engaging blog posts than spending you days learning to code. Remember that *

    It is possible to gain greater access to the workings of your .com site – linking it to a domain name, access to the HTML / CSS etc for a small monthly fee, however for most purposes the free flavour should suit you fine.

    WordPress is widely supported by developers and designers creating ‘themes’ to change the look of sites and plugins which can push it’s functions far beyond blogging and basic website management. If you want a ‘proper’ website, WordPress would be a good place to start.

    * Saying that – a little HTML goes a long way,  just like any language – and you’re in the internet now.
     

    WordPress.org

    WordPress.org  is a very powerful CMS platform and is more than capable of running a full featured website (this site is built in WordPress), in fact if a client doesn’t need or cannot afford a fully bespoke Content Management System, WordPress is my go to platform to create fully dynamic and expandable websites. With a huge open source community behind it, it’s a platform you can grow with but you can also get a site up and running relatively easily, certainly compared to other self hosted CMS alternatives. however, if you are not interested in learning HTML it’s probably best to leave this one to the professionals.

    Blogger

    The original and erm, best. Was once independent, now owned by Google, Blogger has traditionally been a fairly get up and go low frills blogging platform. If you want to get publishing online, but with a little more old-skool kudos, Blogger is great. It’s not always been the prettiest or enjoyable platform to use, but it’s all hosted for you like wordpress.com and is easily customisable within reason. There is a large community creating templates for Blogger, many of which are free and If you know some HTML and CSS, tweaking your template can go pretty far. I personally find it a better fit for writing and posting up the occasional image and would likely opt for another platform as a main gallery or portfolio site.

    Tumblr

    The current darling of the internet, Tumblr is a hugely popular platform. Originally set up as a really simple blogging tool for those who didn’t have the need or patience for a Blogger or WordPress type site, Tumblr does a few things and it does them quickly, well and in a ‘fun’ accessible manner.

    Due to it’s simplicity, it seems to mean different things to different people and can be used in a few different ways. I would argue it’s largest user base is young things expressing their feelings and populating their feed by re-blogging things they love in a torrent of consciousness popularity race.
    This waterfall of information feel of Tumblr fits well with it’s ‘Tumble blog’ model, but it can also be molded onto a more conventional website. It’s convenient place to post images, video, audio and to a lesser degree words. I don’t find the writen word very effective on Tumblr. if other people follow your feeds, I imagine it’s a the more immediate imagery that they’ll notice. I find writing gets in the way on Tumblr. that’s not to say that’s always the case, and if you use your Tumblr as your main site, it can be constructed into a  ‘regular’ website of varying degrees. There’s a large theme developer community as well as all having free access to the HTML and CSS if you’re brave.

    Cargo

    Cargo is billed as a collective of creative people and makers, and does manage to exude a certain coolness and exclusivity – mainly due to the high caliber of the artists that use it and that you need to either be invited or accepted to join.
    Applying for membership is as simple as filling in a short blurb about yourself and work and a link to any existing work online. If you meet their requirements, you have access to a pretty full featured website builder. It is intended as a portfolio / gallery platform with access to the CSS to tweak colours and layout to a degree, but there’s a large number of quality templates available – as with the other platforms, ranging from free to not.

    Like WordPress.com, you can gain greater access to the workings of your site – linking it to a domain name, access to the HTML etc for a small monthly fee.

    Indexhibit

    Not as famous as wordpress, or as hip as cargo (although it could be argues cargo owes much inspiration to the layout and design of Indexhibit), it is worth knowing about.
    Designed by Daniel Eatock it was developed as a CMS for artists and designers who care about simply displaying work in an easy to navigate manner. It’s stripped back aesthetic lends itself to a particular artist website aesthetic, and is fairly easy to use. you do need a basic knowledge of FTP uploading and a smattering of HTML might be helpful (in fact a little HTML is useful anyway).

    Flickr

    If you are a photographer, the chances are you already have a Flickr Account. While it’s lost a fair bit of ground to services such as instagram and facebook for those who love to share their snapshots and 500px for the more pro/enthusiant user, I’d like to think it’s still got a place in the heart of the intenet, even more so since their recent reboot.

    I think it still serves a more discerning internet user and many people host their portfolio work here, not just photographers. Illustrators, painters etc.

    While not a portfolio site – more a community network,  It can function as a host to your photos online – you can link to the images via your own website /blog and as a sort of backup (if your harddrive goes kaput). Since relaunching earlier this year, they now offer a free terrabyte of storage to boot – not to be sniffed at!

    Behance

    Owned by Adobe, Behance is the largest online portfolio site online. It’s free to use and enormously well populated. It serves all kind of creative folk from Motion Graphic Designers to painters, Web Designers to Costume designers, Type creators to illustrators and pretty much most things in between. the standard of work always appears high, and the community and support around it seems vast. I would as far to suggest that even if you have another main platform to show your work, it might make sense to have a Behance account, just to tick the box. it’s easy to use and serves as a handy repository to show your work, and you can even allow people to download files from your site – type foundry’s often allow free downloads of their fonts for instance, but you could offer a PDF of your resume or mini brochure.

    The one thing to note is that you do have to allow for the fact that it is so hugely popular, it makes it harder to stand out from the crowd. the layout and template is pretty much one size fits all, but they do offer a ‘pro’ version which allows you to customise the layout of your portfolio and use a custom domain name, but obviously you do pay for the privilege.

     

    So that’s pretty much it. There are indeed other publishing platforms and web building tools out there (Squarespace for instance looks promising) but these are the most popular and tried and tested. Like I said earlier – none is better than the other, but it’s worth testing them and seeing what fits you best. You may find that non suit your needs, and in which case you’re probably best calling the pros;)

  • Fresh porcini mushroom pasta recipe

    Fresh porcini mushroom pasta recipe

    It’s autumn again, and that means the hills and woods are alive with fungus! One of the most sought after cooking mushrooms are Porcini’s, or ‘Ceps’. I first encountered fresh porcini’s last summer while staying near lake Como in Northern Italy, where I ate the most amazing simple dish of mushroom spaghetti , seemingly cooked with just butter and parsley.

    This is a version of that dish, with a few additions to add a bit of colour and sweetness, but remember to go easy on anything extra, as it’s the delicate flavour of the porcini that is the real star here.

    Ideally, this meal is a just reward for a days shroom hunting, but I got mine at the Roath farmers market from boys at Blaencamel farm.

    Ingredients:

    Some fresh Porcini mushrooms

    Garlic

    Parsley

    Cherry tomatoes (if you want them)

    Butter (or Olive oil)

    small glass of white wine

    Squeeze of lemon

    spaghetti / Linguine (or any other pasta to hand)

    Method:

    20131001-221058.jpg
    A fresh porcini!

    20131001-221116.jpgClean your mushrooms with a small stiff brush – a mushroom brush ideally, but do not wash them!

    20131001-221131.jpg

    20131001-221150.jpgI cooked my mushrooms with garlic, butter, white wine, parsley, cherry tomatoes, Parmesan (or any other good quality Italian hard cheese) a squeeze of lemon and spaghetti!

    20131001-221204.jpg

    20131001-221220.jpg

    20131001-221231.jpgFirst, pan fry the mushrooms in a dry pan, for a minute or so, until they just begin to golden, but not browned. Add a good corner of butter (or glug of olive oil if you prefer) and the garlic. Stir it all in until the mushrooms are coated in melted butter and garlic. Don’t have the heat up too high as to not burn the garlic, but keep a gentle sizzle.

    20131001-221240.jpgCook your spaghetti at this point.

    20131001-221251.jpgThrow in a good splash of white wine

    20131001-221303.jpgparsley, tomatoes, a squeeze of lemon and a sprinkle of cheese

    20131001-221314.jpgToss in the spaghetti and serve!

    20131001-221323.jpg A glass of easy going red is a perfect accompaniment . I picked up a dependable bottle of Baron de Badass(arrie) from the bottle shop on Albany road, arguably the best independent beer and wine merchant in Cardiff (there’s even a dansette playing a selection of jazz records in store while you shop).

     

     

  • Beginner VJ tips

    Beginner VJ tips

    I’m often approached at gigs when doing visuals by people with questions. These range from asking what software I’m using and where I find video footage, to “Is that you doing the pictures?” Or “Are you doing the sound?”

    I have been mixing video live at clubs and gigs for long enough, that I know what works for me, and I thought I might answer some of those questions here, so this is a rundown of my personal approach to ‘VJing’…

    Video Killed the Radio Star

    By it’s definition, Video Jockeying requires moving image of some sort. The early club visuals of the 1960’s were a mix of Liquid light shows, as pioneered by the likes of The Joshua Light Show, Mike Leonard and The Brotherhood of Light using overhead projectors with coloured oils, alhocol and inks along aside film and slide projectors, as made famous by Andy Warhol’s Exploding Platic Inevitable and the Velvet Underground. These days, while a more hands-on ‘multimedia’ approach can still be found, most visuals are digital.

    Nam-Jun-Paik_photo_by-Mark-Barry
    This could be you if you follow my simple steps

    When I began VJing, I cut my teeth with a ‘scratch’ VJ style. Originating in the 1980’s when hip hop, sample culture and the VCR were on the fringe of club nights, the scratch VJ produced an often cynical visual commentary on culture, society with juxtaposition and contrasting imagery taken from film, archival footage and TV. My first taste of this was watching the U2 Zoo TV tour in the early 1990’s and it strongly influenced my style when starting out.

    You can find Archive footage that is the archetypal look from various sources. Online, have a rummage through the Internet Archive a treasure trove of public domain film, information broadcasts and advertisements from the 1930’s onwards. The BBC motion gallery is another exhaustive archive as you’d expect. Most of the footage is Roalty free for a fee, but there’s some amazing things in there. I would tend to be cautious when pilfering places such as the archive.org though, as I can guarantee all other VJ’s that have come before you have also started here 😉

    There is loads of stock video online, and many companies offer freebies – The Vimeo stock footage groups are worth looking at, and with a little browser-plugin know how, you can essentially download anything you want from YouTube. However, please be responsible and respect copyright and intellectual property where applicable, after all if you do play out at public events, you need to be confident you’re not breaking any laws.

    Most of the footage I use these days with bands is video I’ve shot myself, either on Super-8 or my favourite toy digital camera I love called a ‘Digital Harinezumi’, which I picked up in Japan. Many VJ’s use motion graphic software like After Effects, or create stop motion animation and films using whatever is to hand. Have some fun and experiment until you find your look.

    Hardware

    While there’s a part of me that wants to manipulate my images with nothing more than an Overhead Projector and Carousel slide projector, a laptop is far more practical. Most modern laptops with at least 2GB of ram and a multiple core processor should be capable of serving you well. Ideally, you’ll want something with a dedicated graphics card, rather than ‘integrated graphics on a chip’ and of course, if you can squeeze in more RAM, max it out! (you can never have enough RAM). Operating Systems are a personal decision, but some of the software you want to run might be platform dependent. (Module8 is osX only, and until a few years ago Resolume was Windows for instance). Personally I use a Macbook Pro that although is pushing 4 and half years, has never let me down. They are robust, and dependable machines, but you do pay a premium for that. Also, don’t forget you can always run more than one Operating System on an Apple computer if you need to. If you’re on a budget though – a decent modern laptop of any flavour should be a good workhorse.

    Novation_Remote_Zero_SL
    having a hands on approach makes sense for live performance

    Midi controllers are another thing you’ll want to think about – they allow you to control your visuals using physical knobs, keys and faders, basically allowing you to be more hands on and using the software as an instrument. you don’t want to be fiddling turning a virtual knob with your mouse in a nightclub trust me. Which controller to get? Anything that can produce a midi signal is game, and there are some beautiful dedicated controllers out there, but ebay is a good place to have a sniff about. Have a think if you’d prefer to twiddle knobs or slide faders, maybe a matrix monome style pad like the Novation Launchpad is up your street, or you could even use an iPad or Android tablet. In the past I’ve used basic midi keyboards, a Behringer BCR2000, and an Akai MPD24, but these days for it’s portability and simplicity I mainly use a Korg NanoKontrol 2.

    Get with the Program

    I’ll assume you have a laptop handy to run your visuals from , or at the least a computer of some sort that you can bundle into a taxi. Now you’ll need software to let you play your video clips in demand, and be able to mix them in realtime. There’s a fair few applications out there, such as VDMX, Module8, Resolume and Arkaos . The more adventurous and programmer minded visualiser might want to have a look at VVVV,  Isadora or possibly Processing for a truly ‘generative’ approach. however these last few really come into their own in an installation setting rather than improvising along to a club night.

    softwarePersonally, I started off using an early version of Arkaos. It’s very much a ‘clip trigger’ software, and talks nicely to midi keyboards, so it’s perfect to get a tactile feel for ‘playing video’ in real time. These days I use Resolume, along with a Korg NanoKontrol, as I’m no longer churning out banks of clips one after another over a 3 hour club set, When working with bands, my set is more focused and based around fixed pieces with the bands I work with, and Resolume gives me more fine control over what’s going on, but at the same time is a relatively simple program to use ‘out of the box’ as opposed to something more bespoke and object oriented like Isadora.

    Most offer a free trial so you can get the feel of what each program can do before buying, and some of the more professional modular tools like VVVV are open source for non commercial use.

    Beam me up

    For many many years, I was fortunate to play at venues that had a projector set up and ready to roll, so much so that I pretty much took it for granted that I’d ever need to purchase my own. That was until I turned up to a venue who’s projector was broken, and I was up a creek with no paddle. Fortunately I made a call and borrowed one that evening but you can’t always rely on that kind of luck. Since purchasing my own ‘Beamer’ (as they’re called on the continent) I can rock up anywhere with my rucksack holding a projector, laptop, cables and midi controller and be ready to plug in and play self sufficiently.

    The-Joshua-Light-Show-with-artist-Seth-Kirby
    A liquid light show set up

    Projectors are no longer the prohibitively expensive investment they once were, and for around £300 you can bag yourself something half decent, but you do get what you pay for. You may not be ready for all situations though, as depending on your ‘throw’ you may not be able to get a large enough image in small spaces, or you may have too much for a bright image in larger ones. If you know the space you’re most likely to be playing in, a throw calculator will help you make a more informaed decision. Make sure you get the brightest (measured in Lumens) model you can afford, generally 2000lm and up. Ideally, you’ll want to have HDMI input as well as VGA and video phono to cover as many bases as possible. while projectors are very forgiving with video resolution (some of my clips are only 640×480), it’s recommended to get the highest resolution projector you can. After all, you’ll probably want to use it to watch HD movies or play Mario Kart on your living room walls on your night’s off right?

    What have you forgotten?

    There’s nothing more galling or embarrassing than getting to your gig, unpacking your kit and realising you’ve packed the wrong sized USB lead, or left your Display Port to VGA connector plugged into your TV at home. So, a last minute check before you leave the house for your VGA, Kettle, USB / and or midi, Laptop power and any other connectors or convertors you might need before heading out is essential.

    So this is a brief round up of things to think about when thinking about ‘Video Jockeying’. it’s an exciting thing to do, and if you can latch onto music that you love while doing it, all the better. There’s no wrong or right way to go about it, but do make sure you get out and see what other people have done and are doing with their visuals:  from generative, 3D camera visualisation, interesting lighting set ups, video mixing to overhead projectors, it’s all up for grabs, so use your imagination and give it a go.

  • Everyone is a photographer now / Diffusion Festival Platform 1

    Everyone is a photographer now / Diffusion Festival Platform 1

    Each week throughout the Diffusion festival, there are informal presentations and discussion events providing a space to explore issues facing photography today. The first of the platform evenings was looking at the idea that ‘Everyone is a photographer now’.

    The main focus was around the work and a presentation by photojournalist Matt Dunham, who works for Associated Press. Due to the nature of his work, this question and discussion naturally revolved around photojournalism and news imagery rather than photography in a fine art sense for instance.

    It feels as though everyone is obsessed with taking pictures all the time these days. We feverishly document all that is in front of us, often without a conceptual filter. Everyone with a mobile phone has a camera in their pocket, and therefore are potential photographers, but that does that make us more aware, discerning and capable of taking outstanding pictures?

    here are iconic images that stick in our collective memory – (the Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, by Joe Rosenthal and the image of Phan Thi Kim Phuc for example) are well known because they encapsulate a particular, defining moment in time with one simple image. Such photographs are taken because somebody with the right equipment and know-how was in the right place at the right time, so by rights – the sheer number of extra eyes on the ground in the guise of the phone wielding public today means we should all be taking photographs that make the news.

    So what makes ‘official’ photographers and their photographs of an event so special? Is it the access to areas that only a ‘photographers’ pass can get? Is it professional training, artistic ability, or just plain luck?

    Photograph: Matt Dunham/AP

    In the case of Matt Durham’s photograph of Charles and Camilla fleeing student protests, Matt claims he was essentially lucky and had his wits about him. He had seen what looked like a royal car coming his way so prepared himself to be as close as possible. Indeed those around him were also brandishing cameras, but few of them were looking for a shot to encapsulate the tension of the scenario with the added bite of showing the protest from the perspective of the privileged.
    Being in the right place at the right time with a particular intent and practised eye is what bagged the image. Of course working for AP may have helped get it published in the papers the next day.

    What then of ‘citizen journalists’ that are touted as the great news media democtratiser?

    There are incidents when mainstream press haven’t been the first channel to deliver breaking stories. The London tube bombing was one such event that realised the potential of having millions of potential news photographers on the ground: as phone footage from inside the tunnels was the first view of the aftermath broadcast on that morning’s news. We’ve got used to shakey low bitrate video footage on our TV’s and don’t find a low resolution phone snap in a tabloid newspaper particularly surprising any more.

    The recent Boston marathon bomb was a case in which most official photographers had left the main road after documenting the main race and were in hotel press hospitality suites downloading their pictures when they heard the blast. It was opportune members of the public, likely filming their loved ones coming late into the finish line that captured the actual blast moment that was then splashed across rolling news and the next day’s front pages. However, it was photographs from determined photojournalists prepared to flaunt police lines in order to get pictures showing emergency services at work, intimate portraits of the injured and in shock that provided a more human view of the aftermath of the incident.

    Despite agencies such as AP striving to deliver ‘News’ as unbiased, honest and ‘true’ as possible, it is the artist’s subjective eye and strive to encapsulate an event or moment in the most compositionally interesting yet universally telling way that creates a newsworthy image of artistic merit. It may be naïve to think aesthetics do not play a role in the way photojournalists tell a story, they have control over composition, light and a degree of darkroom processing that all alter the semantics of an image.


    Does skill and technique amount to anything anymore in the age of Instagram? It could be argued that we all have the ability to produce beautiful photos worthy of print using smartphone apps such as instagram and hipstamatic.

    The photojournalist Damon Winter came under critical fire when his iphone Hipstamatic pictures of American servicemen in Afganistan were published in The New York Times. As a professional, the use of a civilian tool such as a phone app could be seen as gimmicky and a means to over-process and aestheticise news. It can be assumed it is easy to take interesting images using a phone camera, but at the core of every solid image are essential ingredients: composition, information, moment, emotion and connection. These are skills learned through formal training and practice. Damon argues that using his phone put him on more of a level playing field with his subjects and allowed him to gain a more intimate portrait of grunt life than brandishing his large professional SLR ever could.
    We are all capable of great photos, and there are likely quality images being taken of events by the public that aren’t seen on front pages, but those trained in getting them are considered the most reliable, and working for a news agency guarantees to a degree that images used are trustworthy and authentic.

    Many of us live life through a screen and many of us incessantly record what happens in front of us with no goal or objective. In terms of archiving modern living as a documentation of events, it seems we are all potential photographers, but it’s the few key images taken that can tell a story beyond face value that become powerful signifiers of event and iconic images in their own right.

  • Focus Wales

    Focus Wales

    I’m writing this on a train traveling backwards from Wrexham where I’ve spent the last thirty hours seeing a couple of gigs, providing projections for a couple of bands and catching up with people all due to focus Wales, a new annual international music gathering across the city.
    No doubt spurred on by other city festivals like sonar, SXSW and Cardiff’s swn , focus Wales provides a showcase for up and coming new music and ideas with a cymgraeg focus but international awareness.

    I arrived at the Glyndwr university’s Catrin Finch centre midday after an 8.30am bundle into a mini bus, (seated going backwards) with the band gulp who I was doing said video projection for that evening. Guto from the band was taking part in a discussion panel with a mix of members from the music ‘industry’ looking at issues facing new musicians- in this instance, what are currently the most effective ways to promote music.

    With late capitalism having something of an identity crisis at the moment, its a mine field out there when it comes to ways of launching a new musical venture, and yes there were some great tips on using the usual social networks but between the old hand label heads, new indie labels, online digital distribution enthusiasts and even musicians there felt an underlying optimism that it is still possible to make a bit of money and get noticed. It might not be as clear cut as it once was, but the playing field is fairly wide open and producing a professional DIY project has never been easier.  Punk’s not dead after all, it’s just reads the guardian. A Limited Vinyl release seems to be an effective way to target the writers of influential blogs, and subsequently more established media outlets, with digital a no-brainer.

    setting up ready for Gulp
    setting up ready for Gulp

    Gulp wasn’t due to play until a quarter to midnight, so after a sound check and a polystyrene tray of complimentary curry we had a few hours to kill. Heading back to the guitarists’ house  for copious cups of tea and chocolate biscuits, I walked back into town at sundown to catch a few bands.  Moja were my stand out show – a girl (drums) and boy (bass) duo. They made an almighty fast and furious racket with contagious enthusiasm and rising sun politeness.

    Meeting up with old friends at the main venue in time to regrettably only catch the end of violas and hear some lovely tight licks from the Rosevile band then set up my projector in a makeshift guerilla balancing act on a bass bin. Gulp played a stonking and loud set of their unmistakable psychedisco synth rock pop. The bass was belly rumbling and vocals soaring (I’m not biased or nothing), the crowd were numerous and in such good spirits too, making it all the more special.

    Man without country started delightfully heavy and melodic, but my host was keen to get home and chew the fat over pizza, and who was I to argue with that?

    trwbadorfocus
    Trwbador lunch club

    7 hours after going to sleep on my sofa, I was back in the car on the way to town to see Trwbador play to an eager lunchtime crowd (big up the breakfast massive!) and beam some videos and graphics onto the ceiling behind and above them – which in retrospect I should’ve tried the night before, but hey. Such an early set was always going to be challenging, but Owain and Angharad picked up the baton with aplomb and dropped their trippy electrofolk effortlessly for the bleary eyed audience.
    A chocolate brownie and coffee later I roamed the old market-steel-coal metropolis – taking in the towering Gothic cathedral, hidden alley ways,  and rather downtrodden shopping areas before getting on this train going backwards to Cardiff.

  • Dr sketchy’s miss out of the world beauty pageant.

    Dr sketchy’s miss out of the world beauty pageant.

    After going up to the north Wales and Chester’s Dr Sketchy’s Cream Tease last year, I was very excited to be asked back up for their fist ever miss out of this world beauty pageant life drawing event. Inn the weeks running up to the evening, the Facebook page was awash with anticipation and ideas for outfits – as this sketchy would coincide with madame ex’s birthday, so an after hours space disco was planned with a pretty much compulsory fancy dress code. So after the three hour train to Chester, I made it just in time to Don a lick of silver face paint and take my seat amongst my fellow intergalactic sketchers.

    Normally the Dr sketchy events have a handful of models and burlesque performers taking part, but as this was a pageant, no less than thirteen hopefuls from around the local galaxies, some professionals, but also some first timers giving it a go for fun, were in for a chance to gain the judges favour and win the chance to be the queen and mating partner of High Priest from planet Vaginus (Neil ‘Nez’ Kendall)  Needless to say the dressing room was a chaotic disarray of silver and gold body paint, clouds of glitter and the odd green bosom!

    150430_443023635781166_1371864383_n
    Madame Ex kicks off the Proceedings. Photograph: Karolina Skorek

    The proceedings were orchestrated and watched over by Madame Ex and judged by the High Priest along with Mavis (Titsalina Bumsquash) a kindly old lady from Yorkshire who thought she’d been asked out to the bingo.

    544120_443024542447742_1627601557_n
    High Priest from planet Vaginus. Photograph: Karolina Skorek

    With such a healthy number of contestants, each model held a small number of quick poses for  approximately  the length of one space themed tune. This did mean s fast turn around of sketches – much to the occasional gasp from the slower drawers, but being used to drawing quick fluid sketches of live music, it was personally a fun challenge. Posing for the drawing was the lovely Treena Angel as cosmic princess, Lolli Liqueur from the Glitterati constellation, and Miss Pepper wearing an authentic 1950’s burlesque outfit – fantastically authentic cheesecake tease. After the contestants who were purely modelling had done a turn, there was a quick break for punters to get a drink from The bar, a space cupcake from the cake stand and to fix any wonky false eyelashes.
    The second half of the pageant allowed for the performers to entertain. Alfie Ordinary & LeLig – Baldonia aka The Wig Brigade astonished onlookers with their anti-burlesque tale of lust and procreation. princess Leia performed a feat of the force. The two headed gold skinned ‘beauty’ from ChhHhkakkaherhap bemused with their conjoined savage display of  strip ‘tease’. Velma Vimto from the Planet Powder Puff showed off her assets with kitsch sweetness, Uranus showed us her *ahem* and the night was rounded off by Susie Sequin leading the audience in song – glitter shorts saved my life.

    Once it was over, the chairs were cleared, yet more outfits were changed and the disco rave began!

    More photos from the event here

    My sketches from the night:

  • Alan Dix – Walking Wales

    Alan Dix is an author, professor, and it seems, a keen walker. His primary interest at large is how people interact with computers at large. Initially, his research has been around the physical input methods and user interfaces of the devices we use and the ways in which we engage and work with others through them. He is increasingly interested in how people might need to use technology in remote and isolated environments.

    He embarked on a three month long tour last Thursday (18th April) during which time he will be walking to walk the thousand mile perimeter of Wales. The reasons are both personal and practical, whilst exploring the computing needs of walkers, and local communities he will be hoping to actively develop solutions to the problems and questions he finds. He has also offered himself up as a walking guinea pig for developers of physical computing, carrying with him various sensors, mobile computers, biometric devices and walking equipment. He is also hoping to deliver talks and workshops at community groups, schools and universities whilst travelling.

    You can follow his journey and read his about his experiences at his blog and Twitter

  • 2012

    2012

    It’s January 2013 and today is my 35th birthday. There’s nothing inherently peculiar about that – a year has ended and another begun. It’s that mid-point through the first month of a new year and the Idea of a new date is settling as it does every year: cheques have been signed with an incremental change (yes I still write the occasional cheque) and future dates noted in calendars. The thing that makes it feel extra strange this year is that for the past 15 years or so, my sense of the future stopped at 2012. I had set up my mental vision of the world to end at the solstice to send this civilisation into disarray and uncharted territory.

    It became very trendy towards the end of 2012 to talk about the end of the world, so I suppose I was just another dead weight on the bandwagon. Maybe it was that 2012 as a date featured as a final target for so many things in the media and politics – various reports would be due, the end of analogue TV, the Olympics, not to mention a Hollywood movie. Non the less, the idea of an immense paradigm shift on the 21st of December had shaped my world view for so many years, I feel the need to write down my thoughts surrounding the non apocalypse and my current feelings on what it might have meant and how it has in fact shaped all of us to some degree.

    It began one summer in the late 1990’s (1997 I think) . I had spent much of my summer holiday sitting under trees in the local park, thinking about my spiritual practice and wrestling control of my mind. I was going through an awakening of sorts – working through my waning teenage years, gathering a sense of who I was and what I might want from the future and attempting to develop my creative language (something I’m still struggling with). Anyway, I found d myself reading Terrace McKenna’s True Hallucinations, a book about his psychedelic discoveries with his brother, a fellow ‘ethno botanist’ as they made their way through the Amazon basin and the various drug experiences they encountered along the way.

    dec2012_pryamid

    The one thing to take away from this book was the notion that ‘the end of history’ would take place in this lifetime, specifically mid morning of the winter solstice in 2012. This date was arrived at through a mixture of i-ching, the end of the Mayan calendar long count and a piece of computer software that mapped out ‘novelties’ during our idea of civilised history; you the resulting graph was ‘time wave zero’ and stopped at 11.30 am 21/12/12. I should point out that McKenna was also the ‘shamanic’ guide to the pop-rave band the Shaman, and features on a track which talks about a coming time of increased human consciousness.

    I was about 19 and 2012 seemed a lifetime away. By the time I’d be approaching my 35th birthday, I imagined I’d be well engaged in my artistic career, possibly with a wife / hareem of lovers and certainly living a sustainable lifestyle on a small holding or commune of like minded hippies. Whatever the outcome, I felt confident I’d have the skills to weather an apocalypse – carpentry, mechanics, plumbing and huntsman. I’m still yet to begin my apprenticeship in any of these skills unfortunately. Maybe I’ll be ready for the next one.

    The one thing that Terrace McKenna stated was that he felt it would herald the end of history, not the end of the world per say. I set about formulating various scenarios around this idea right up until the end of last year. A mixture of science fact, history, science fiction, paranoia, seemingly inevitable eventualities and my own and friends ruminations. The usual suspects were there :

    The sun’s due solar flip resulting in huge storms that would knock out our infrastructures including the Internet. Our current sense of place being so heavily dependant on which would leave us without any clear idea of who we are, coupled with having to go back to basics taking us out of the current trajectory of civilisation and starting fresh.

    The earth’s magnetic poles would flip (possible triggered by the sun) leaving us in a similar state to above but with more of a planetary shift; for one thing up would be down, compasses would be wrong, birds and animals would be confused, seasons may shift along with extreme weather patterns and widespread flooding and earthquakes wiping out and changing the continents as we know them. Again, a fresh start that would make our history redundant.

    From a western perspective, it could be a subtler shift. Consumption of the now would reach saturation, nothing could be new enough resulting in a break down of where we’ve come from or going to. This could in fact be a superficial satori – only the now is real. However, I feel if such a sense of enlightenment was enforced on a population, there could be casualties, madness and fear. Only those ready to be present would survive with their minds and sense of self intact. This ties in with McKenna’s view that it would be best to experience the solstice whilst under the influence of a strong psychedelic.

    The end of a current Christian understanding of history would come to an end. The solstice after all is the birth time of most myths and religions concerning children of gods. Would this be a new era of belief? Would our alien masters return to enslave us, or would a prophet figure be discovered to lead us into a new era beyond a Christian world view? Maybe the sun’s solar flares would change the earth’s atmospheric chemistry resulting in a world wide shift in consciousness resulting in a mixture of the above scenarios.

    Maybe post modernity’s journey would conclude at a point where nothing more from the past could be re appropriated. All sense of irony and juxtaposition would become meaningless.

    Again, if this the end of history was important, Would CERN uncover the secrets of time travel, leaving our view of linear time redundant, heralding the end of history as we understand it?

    So, the 21st of December 2012 arrived and the apocalypse was mainstream. Facebook was brimming with jokers, he evening news ran features on it and ‘preppers’ became the final word on how to survive apocalyptic fallout. Life plans got in the way of my preparations ; I had imagined the party to end all parties, but it clashed with too many of my friends Xmas parties, and truth be told my wife and I were worn out. We had to go to a wedding a car ride and overnight stay away on the 22nd, so the 21st itself was nothing like the fire fueled, psychedelic driven meditation on time that had been the end point in my minds eye. We cleaned the house, packed our bags and watched a DVD. Our pagan ancestors would have been so ashamed. We did light a fire and burn the yule log though.

    I have a friend who was also looking to the 21st with anticipation. For her it had little to do with any doomsday scenarios, and admittedly, I felt that some of the ideas I had offered an apocalypse in the true meaning of a shift or change in time. She never really said what it would mean to her, and more that it was a time of transformation, of change and higher awareness. She had had a very trans-formative year with her own sense of self, relationships and spiritual awareness. I was increasingly feeling a void of any sense of change. Feeling disconnected from any magic, I let the date arrive and go.

    Unexpectedly, I did feel something. I am fully aware that after waiting for something for so long something had to happen, psychosomatic or otherwise, and my ego would likely do all it could to give it all some meaning. That said, the day of the solstice and the days following it, I felt a change. It was as if this was in fact the end of a sense of where we’ve been and brought with it a renewed sense of purpose. Humanity could now look forward without the past biting at our heels. I felt optimistic and ready for what was to come. It was ever so subtle, but with a great power to be whatever we want to be and to shape the reality we desire.

    Of course, on the 22nd of December, everyone acted as though nothing had changed. We were all still here and Google was still online. The doomsday never happened, and in some way I wonder if we were all a bit disappointed.

    These prophecies come and go every once in a while and it will no doubt be the last. Nothing ever happens of course, but what they do seem to do is focus large groups of people towards one idea. It’s a pity that this idea isn’t a bit more productive and the focus not used to better our collective lot. What they may do in some small way is offer some reflection on humanities place on this blue marble and bring to light the responsibilities we all have to make the future better and more importantly appreciate what we do have and how we can make it work in harmony. After all, the only thing we can be certain of is ‘now’, in which case there’s nothing gained in worrying about the past or the future. Maybe I’m not the only person to have been made more aware of this in 2012; if so, the shaman may have been right after all.

  • Twitter in wordpress Woes

    Just a quick note to anyone experiencing twitter feed difficulties in WordPress – specifically ‘twitter for WordPress’ or old jquery.twitter plugins.

    It seems as though a twitter api agreement has changed (probably set in motion a while back, but only the last few days has made the switch)

    For ‘Twitter for WordPress’
    change the line:

    $messages = fetch_rss(‘http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/’.$username.’.rss’);

    with

    $messages = fetch_rss(‘http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline/’.$username.’.rss’);

    For jquery.twitter.js

    replace all code with:
    (Thanks to Damien du Toit)

    (function($) {
        /*
            jquery.twitter.js v1.6
            Last updated: 16 October 2012

            Created by Damien du Toit
            http://coda.co.za/content/projects/jquery.twitter/

            Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 3.0 Unported License
            http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
        */

        $.fn.getTwitter = function(options) {

            $.fn.getTwitter.defaults = {
                userName: null,
                numTweets: 5,
                loaderText: “Loading tweets…”,
                slideIn: true,
                slideDuration: 750,
                showHeading: true,
                headingText: “Latest Tweets”,
                showProfileLink: true,
                showTimestamp: true,
                includeRetweets: false,
                excludeReplies: true
            };

            var o = $.extend({}, $.fn.getTwitter.defaults, options);

            return this.each(function() {
                var c = $(this);

                // hide container element, remove alternative content, and add class
                c.hide().empty().addClass(“twitted”);

                // add heading to container element
                if (o.showHeading) {
                    c.append(“

    “+o.headingText+”

    “);
                }

                // add twitter list to container element
                var twitterListHTML = “

      “;
                  c.append(twitterListHTML);

                  var tl = $(“#twitter_update_list”);

                  // hide twitter list
                  tl.hide();

                  // add preLoader to container element
                  var preLoaderHTML = $(“

      “+o.loaderText+”

      “);
                  c.append(preLoaderHTML);

                  // add Twitter profile link to container element
                  if (o.showProfileLink) {
                      var profileLinkHTML = “

      “;
                      c.append(profileLinkHTML);
                  }

                  // show container element
                  c.show();

                  // request (o.numTweets + 20) to avoid not having enough tweets if includeRetweets = false and/or excludeReplies = true
                  window.jsonTwitterFeed = “https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?include_rts=”+o.includeRetweets+”&excludeReplies=”+o.excludeReplies+”&screen_name=”+o.userName+”&count=”+(o.numTweets + 20);

                  $.ajax({
                      url: jsonTwitterFeed,
                      data: {},
                      dataType: “jsonp”,
                      callbackParameter: “callback”,
                      timeout: 50000,
                      success: function(data) {
                          window.count = 0;

                          $.each(data, function(key, val) {
                              var tweetHTML = ”

    • ” + replaceURLWithHTMLLinks(val.text) + “”;

                              if (o.showTimestamp) tweetHTML += ” ” + relative_time(val.created_at) + ““;
                         
                              tweetHTML += “

      • “;

                              $(“#twitter_update_list”).append(tweetHTML);

                              count++;

                              if (count == o.numTweets) {
                                  // remove preLoader from container element
                                  $(preLoaderHTML).remove();

                                  // show twitter list
                                  if (o.slideIn) {
                                      // a fix for the jQuery slide effect
                                      // Hat-tip: http://blog.pengoworks.com/index.cfm/2009/4/21/Fixing-jQuerys-slideDown-effect-ie-Jumpy-Animation
                                      var tlHeight = tl.data(“originalHeight”);
                     
                                      // get the original height
                                      if (!tlHeight) {
                                          tlHeight = tl.show().height();
                                          tl.data(“originalHeight”, tlHeight);
                                          tl.hide().css({height: 0});
                                      }

                                      tl.show().animate({height: tlHeight}, o.slideDuration);
                                  }
                                  else {
                                      tl.show();
                                  }
                     
                                  // add unique class to first list item
                                  tl.find(“li:first”).addClass(“firstTweet”);
                     
                                  // add unique class to last list item
                                  tl.find(“li:last”).addClass(“lastTweet”);

                                  return false;
                              }
                          });
                      },
                      error: function(XHR, textStatus, errorThrown) {
                          //alert(“Error: ” + textStatus);
                          //alert(“Error: ” + errorThrown);
                      }
                  });
              });

              function replaceURLWithHTMLLinks(text) {
                  var exp = /(\b(https?|ftp|file):\/\/[-A-Z0-9+&@#\/%?=~_|!:,.;]*[-A-Z0-9+&@#\/%=~_|])/ig;
                  return text.replace(exp, “$1“);
              }

              // sourced from https://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js
              function relative_time(time_value) {
                  var values = time_value.split(” “);
                  time_value = values[1] + ” ” + values[2] + “, ” + values[5] + ” ” + values[3];
                  var parsed_date = Date.parse(time_value);
                  var relative_to = (arguments.length > 1) ? arguments[1] : new Date();
                  var delta = parseInt((relative_to.getTime() – parsed_date) / 1000);
                  delta = delta + (relative_to.getTimezoneOffset() * 60);
                 
                  if (delta < 60) {
                      return “less than a minute ago”;
                  }
                  else if (delta < 120) {
                      return “about a minute ago”;
                  }
                  else if (delta < (60*60)) {
                      return (parseInt(delta / 60)).toString() + ” minutes ago”;
                  }
                  else if (delta < (120*60)) {
                      return “about an hour ago”;
                  }
                  else if (delta < (24*60*60)) {
                      return “about ” + (parseInt(delta / 3600)).toString() + ” hours ago”;
                  }
                  else if (delta < (48*60*60)) {
                      return “1 day ago”;
                  }
                  else {
                      return (parseInt(delta / 86400)).toString() + ” days ago”;
                  }
              }
          };
      })(jQuery);

  • Thrifty times

    It was an early start to the day with a rude awakening from one of the other house guests, Maya the bengal cat. She and mariska are staying with my parents for a few weeks while a friend moves house from Porthcawl back to her home country. They are magnificent beasts, with very individual temperaments and very cute and chatty.

    After coming to and a spot of breakfast, the humans of the house removed a sprawling fig tree from the garden. The justification bring that it was taking over and that the racoons are eating the fruit as fast as it can produce it. Personally, I probably would have kept it as a great specimen, but my relaxed attitude to gardening is something of a departure from my mothers exacting horticulture management. A near fainting episode and sweaty half hour later, the finch family had felled the tree and space for another big plant was prepared.
    This afternoon I stopped by a goodwill thrift shop and picked up a few records before pipping to the pet store for a laser pointer for dual cat teasing and power point duties.

  • Richmond in heat

    After arriving in virginia late Saturday and a lazy Sunday, aside from a spot of gardening in the morning, today was labour day in the U S of A. Commemorating the signing of labour laws, but now a good excuse for a Monday off work and traditionally a big BBQ day.
    My parents aren’t really the outside grill sort unfortunately, but we did pay a visit to the virginia museum of fine art. I always enjoy dropping in – it’s housed in a fantastic building in the heart of what’s known as the historic district of town, full of colonial style houses, adorned with ornate iron work on each veranda.

    The permenant collection is a solid one, and today we spent some time in the Indian artifacts galleries. The statues of Shiva in various avatar guises and a Tibetan skull rattle were especially fun.



  • Back to Pisa

    After breakfast, we bid farewell to the mountains and made our way back to Milan by bus and train to get our long train back to Pisa. We originally thought our flight was tomorrow, but turns out it’s Wednesday, so another night in Pisa has been booked.
    I’m quite looking forward to Pisa, despite a general consensus that beyond a broken tower, there’s not much to see or do. If nothing else, a night’s hotel room below 30° and some air movement will be a welcome change! I hear the weather in the UK is less than summer like, so I will be appreciating the hot sun here as much as possible too for or final day and a bit.

    1.06 am update…
    Eeesh!  The train wasn’t too bad – long as expected, but once our arrival time came and went with three stops to go, something was up. Mi capisco (I don’t understand) what happened. The doors kept malfunctioning along the trip, with increasing occurrence the further along the journey until at one point the train seemed to give up as the doors took on a life of their own, triggering an automatic stop mechanism.
    Eventually we made it one stop out from Pisa and the engine turned off and there was a lot of passionate shouting and gesturing from the other passengers. Running over an hour late, we got off and boarded another train to the town as the sun was setting.

  • Giorno cinqo

    Lazy day.
    Walked down the hill to Argegno town, pizza by the lake.
    Walked back up the hill, nap in the hotel.
    Cola and reading on the lawn.
    Shower and walk back down the hill for dinner.
    Made cultural faux pas by confusing the locally tart, slightly fizzy red wine with something gone bad.
    Had three gelatos to make up for not having one the past two days (it was my pre-holiday goal to eat pizza and gelato at least once a day).
    Watched ussain bolt win the race. Bed.

  • Giorno tre

    Our last morning in Milan was a quick affair. Despite my best intentions, I failed to make an early morning wander / photo ramble on any of our days in the city and Friday was no exception.
    After breakfast we got to the train that would take us north to lake Como where the wedding is. The fast, modern euro train got us into the mountains within the hour, from Como, we took the ferry to Argegno where Fabio collected us for the quick drive up a hill to la Grigllia – our hotel for the weekend.

    The scenery around this area is truly awsome in the true sense of the word. So picture postcard perfect it doesn’t quite sink in that it’s so real and so amazing right here in front our eyes.
    At the hotel, we met our fellow wedding guests over the evening as we ate the most delicious fresh spaghetti and porcini mushrooms and ricotta olive ravioli washed down with local easy red wine. Welcome to the real Italy!

  • Giorno quatro

    Waking from a long hot sleep, we joined the other guests at the breakfast table for brioche and nescafe instant cappuccino (when oh when am I going to get a decent coffee in Italy?). Thankfully the rain seemed to have stayed away despite the forecast.

    Once all suited and booted (or jacket and sandled in my case) we got into minibuses and cars for a ten minute drive to a medieval monastery turned registry office on the bank of lake Como. A string quartet greeted guests as we huddled under the shade of olive trees and the local mayor took control of the ceremony and wedded the happy couple. All very fairytale perfection with a twist Italiano!

    The just married couple made their getaway in a vintage fiat to be met back at the ranch over looking the lake from high up in the valley. Drinks and nibbles were served on the lawn, nibbles being locally cured meats, salami and dried, smoked hams accompanied by at least six assorted Italian cheeses. Children played on lawn and the trans-euro-pan-asian guests drank strawberry juice with prosecco.

    Debbie and I are the only guests direct from the UK except for the bride’s mother and step dad. Most of her guests are friends and family that live and work in Hong Kong. On the groom’s side, from German and Italian heritage with a curve ball of Greek, this is possibly the most global and certainly multi lingual wedding I’ve been too.

    As the day drew on, speeches happened (in English and Italiano) and dinner was served; it seems Italian weddings are a gastronomic challenge. Absolutely delicious, but a challenge non-the-less. After the cold cut appetizers (in Italy, it seems it’s all about the cold cuts and cheese), we sat down to the first of the first courses… risotto and courgette flowers followed by ricotta ravioli and dried pancetta. Meals are a three course affair before dessert here: starters followed by a first plate, which is usually the pasta or risotto course, then the main course is a meat or fish and possibly a token vegetable. It’s hearty and honest food, but a celeriac-vegan-vegetarian nightmare. The main dish, which on the menu was also a two course affair was paired down to one, much to the relief of the diners, to a beef and pork fillet with potatoes.simple, but really well cooked.

    Staggering back onto the lawn where fruit and chocolate mouse or panacotta awaited us, the sky had clouded over as the sun had began to set. The greaser three piece band arrived and the lightning light show began. The air was eerily still as a storm made it’s way over the Swiss border and the dragons played a rockabilly cover of white wedding. The wine flowed and like a scene from a thriller, the wind picked up and began moving the garden furniture and leaves swirled around the building above our heads as the flashes from the sky lit up the clouds with greater frequency.

    Then the clouds dropped their load. Like a scene from a bourbon advert everyone ran into the veranda as the shutters came down and the band got more raucous – at least their was no excuse but to dance the rest of the night away.




  • Giorno duo

    My romantic vision of today was to wander through the brera part of town. The guide books promise a wealth of interesting little shops, galleries,  studios and cafes. We didn’t quite find the bohemian treasures I had imagined, but were did take a peek around the astronomy department of the university and stumbled upon ARMANI’s design studio (I wonder if he’d be impressed with my counterfeit sunglasses? ).

    After a limonate for Debbie and a crema café fredo (a short, strong, sweet, icy and creamy coffee) in my belly we headed to the modern art gallery back over in the palestro gardens for a forgettable one man show. Back to the hotel for a refreshing drop in the pool it was then 🙂
    This evening we met up with Laura and her fiancee Fabio along with their fellow teacher friends in Ingrid and Stuart from Hong Kong and turkey respectively. We all went for a pizza (capricciosa for me tonight) before parting before our meeting tomorrow at lake Como for the wedding (Laura and Fabio’s ).




  • Giorno Uno

    Luckily I awoke to the sound of the underground (literally – the metro is below our hotel) as the shutters on our window betray any sense of the time if day. I was worried that we almost ‘Did an Osaka’ (where we slept in until 3pm due to the effectiveness of the curtains), but we did make breakfast.
    We spent the morning down at the main area of the Duomo Catholic cathedral and galleria vittoro emanuelle (cathedral of shopping).
    The Duomo was breath taking in terms of scale and craftsmanship, you can only imagine how other-worldly this monument to god would seemed in it’s original splendour when the marble and stone would have been bright white and the copper and brass untainted. The gargoyles were as insane as ever with disapproving Nobel beings, peasants intestines spilling out, angry wild animals and mythical creatures in abundance.

    The galleria was also very impressive with its nineteenth century exuberance. A mecca of posh shops (and a maccy D’s). After making sure we span round on the magic bulls testicles for good luck, we stumbled through the glass ceilinged arcade a little bemused from the midday heat and in need of a decent cup of coffee (surprisingly, the standard of the black stuff has been a bit disappointing – I’m yet to find anything that matches a Waterloo tea house cappuccino!).
    After crossing town to the parco sempione we spent an hour in the aquatico civico, the city’s free aqurium. Debbie does enjoy a good aquarium, and despite being a bit modest was a well air conditioned way to see some fish.
    This evening we dined along a canal in the navigli district while the mosquitoes dined on us and had a delicious gelato shaped like flowers on our walk back uptown to the hotel.





  • Milano

    Debbie and I are taking our first (non-family) based holiday in a while. We’re heading to lake Como in the north of Italy, but first, we’ve decided to spend a few days exploring the sights, sounds, and smells that the country’s second largest city has to offer.

    We arrived in Pisa yesterday morning and Emory got on a 4 hour train ride north-bound for Milan. The oven blast of heat that greeted us when stepping outside was a sure fire sign that we weren’t in blighty anymore, with daily temperatures hitting the 30’s.
    The ride from Pisa to Milan was long and sleepy after our 3am start but wound through some breathtaking valleys and followed expansive coastline with sapphire seas.
    The train itself did the job, but did feel as though had seen better days. The station in Milan however was a grand statement of deco architecture and reminded me of Washington DC’s union station in style of design, in fact its easy to see where eastern America at any rate got much of it’s architectural and infrastructure inspiration. (I’ve just found out that Milano centrale was infact based on union station! )
    We retired fairly early in the evening, after an interesting quatro stagioni pizza in a restaurant with an aquarium floor!




  • Dr Sketchy’s Cream Tease

    Dr Sketchy’s / 21 june 2012

    Held at various venues around the world, Dr. Sketchy’s offers up an ‘anti-art school’ experience, giving those who like to dip their nibs in ink a life drawing class with a difference. When I was at art school there was plenty of drink and dames, but not much life drawing funnily enough, so I was very eager to find out what the world of Dr. Sketchy’s was all about.

    I ventured up to Chester to take part in The mid-Summer celebration of the North Wales and Chester’s chapter, which looked at the culture of tea and cake (Cream tease to be precise) through the ages. Each set of the performers poses having a distinctly unique feel. Starting with Marie Antoinette (Bexi Owen), with a pinky out, brandishing a cream eclair, moving to the 1800’s for high-tea with delightfully uptight and proper victorian Ma’am Kittie Klaw (of the Ministry of Burlesque).

    During the interval the most delicious cupcakes and freshly brewed tea were served (Supplied by Mad Hatter’s of Chester) which give everyone a chance to stretch their legs and have a nose at fellow sketchers’ marks. The second half proceeded with Cherry Blossoms dipping her ravishing fruit into a picture perfect 50’s-retro picnic scene, while Sherry Trifle rounded off the individual poses by showing us how to make the perfect lady sized trifle, topped off with a generous helping of whipped cream of course 😉

    The poses at Dr. Sketchy’s are pin-up perfection, with ravishing costumes, delightful company and pencil fuelled panache. Each model did their performance and held a handful of quick poses of a minute or so before giving drawers a more in-depth five to ten minute stance. The class is held by the inimitable Madame ex, the mistress of ceremony – she runs a strict school, but ensures everyone has a wonderful time. The finale of the evening brought all four ladies back on stage for a creamy tableaux that seemed to get messier and sticker by the minute for a whole quarter of an hour. At the end of any Dr. Sketchy’s it’s customary for everyone to put their personal best drawings up for viewing from which the models choose their favourites.

    There was a real mix of people taking part that seem to share a genuine sense of community and excitement. It’s also common for the North Wales and Chester drawers to come along in costume depending on the theme: indeed, I shared my table with Treena Angel, a sketchy’s regular, who turned up in full prim victorian regalia. I certainly had a great time, drank lots of tea, did a good deal of drawing, made some new friends and with any luck will be back for more burlesque inspired life-drawing very soon.

    My Sketches

    creamtease_legs
    cream tease legs
    Cherry Blossoms
    Cherry Blossoms
    Kittie Klaw
    Kittie Klaw
    Kittie Klaw Tea
    Kittie Klaw Tea
    Cream Tease Eclair
    Cream Tease Eclair

    More information / links

    Dr Sketchy’s Anti-Art School

    Dr Sketchy’s North Wales Chapter Facebook

  • channelling

    The day’s task was to get back to the hook of Holland in time for our 2pm ferry. In my mind that would be a genteel trip to Massluis (where we got Gareth’s bike fixed on the first day) where brunch would be taken before meandering back to the port. however, the weather finally caught up with us blowing a north easterly wind and unpleasant rain.

    I made it 15k before my knee thought it better to jump on a train the rest of the way; after all we still had a good 10k plus ride waiting for us in the dark back in blighty.
    The ferry journey was a slow six hours, but offered an opportunity to buy unimaginative last minute souvenirs and a chance for a snatched moment of shut eye here and there.
    Our last and possibly most dreaded leg of the journey still awaited, so we left the terminal only to find the rail replacement busses waiting and offering a direct trip to London. at first the drivers offered up a belligerent denial of service, but after some good old drunken bullying, they caved, and our big bike trip was over.
    It has been a great five days. getting to spend some quality time with such long time friends is something i find very precious these days, and that’s the reason i went. I may have caused a bit of frustration amongst the others along the way for slowing the ‘real bikers’ down, but it was an experience we may never get to repeat; although on the coach home, plans for the next cross-uk trip were being made. I’d better get into training.



  • Rotter. Damn.

    After the tourist saturation and relentlessness of Amsterdam,Rotterdam feels more spacious and laid back, albeit with an underlying seriousness. in many ways it reminds me of Osaka. having been demolished during WW2,it’s full of quite brutalist modernist architecture, and seems to have a decent amount of cultural things going on to give it an important buzz.

    Gareth and I checked into the hotel and found a great bar that appeared to serve the most magnificent sandwiches ever large, full and well presented. Before long the rest of the consortium arrived tired and victorious having competed the 70+km ride down. some food and beers later it was time for an early night.





  • Goin’ down to Rotterdam

    team bike woke up bright and early to a glorious Easter Sunday, there was a clear sense of relief that the rain and driving north easterly wind forecast yesterday was not to be (not this morning anyway).
    Gareth, Ad and I rode into the city for some breakfast where i managed to spill my meal into my lap. another coffee and change if trousers later, Ad hit the cycle straad to Utrecht and G and I are on the train. We just passed gouda where the hardcore not long ago had lunch, so they shouldn’t be to far behind us.


  • Dam day

    I woke quite early and went to forage for breakfast with orjon. after a few rounds of coffee and toast,we made our way back up to the centre.

    I cant remember if there ever was a plan to ‘do’anything,but it was agreed that eight people feels like a critical mass when it comes to touring round a place as one group.
    Sure, every vintage camera shop, book shop and curios corner caused a pang in my heart,but it’s great to be hanging out with this group of people and besides, maybe i can visit again for a selfish shopping and photography weekend next year (maybe Debbie would be up for a genteel cycling trip too).
    Speaking of genteel, the ride here didn’t do an old knee problem any favours, so I’ve decided to get the train to Rotterdam with Gareth and Ad.

    so yes, we spent the day wandering from one bar to the next, never quite finding what we were looking for (but isn’t that every tourists experience of Amsterdam), punctuated by a delicious beer in a very Dutch brown cafe and  finishing with a hearty Mexican meal and a super fun night time cycle back to the flat.






  • Dag drie

    After a hearty night’s sleep, we awoke to a gloriously bright day. Meeting up at the train station (some of us stayed at a hostel, Joe and I crashed at Ads’ place – after recently moving to Utrecht to do a masters), ate breakfast and set off.
    Thankfully, the pace was more easy going than the previous days mission, making it from Utrecht to the outskirts of Amsterdam in about 2 and a half hours. I think 40km is my stint limit : about 15 minutes before the we reached our ‘yoga house’ accommodation, I really began to hit a wall. A quick stop for tea and cake probably would’ve helped, but that ain’t how these cats roll.

    Our apartment is really comfortable, albeit a fair way out if town. There’s 8 of us sleeping in the mezzanine top floor, and three shy high boys on the ground floor of an eighth floor flat in a block.
    There are  radiators ten feet up on the walls.
    The evening was spent in a bit of drunken dissary. After one of the best burgers, milkshake and early evenings of surreal banter and nonsense with old friends one could hope for and several rounds later, we seemed to fall into a peculiar habit of cycling to a random bar, having a rushed drink before restlessly moving on. Somehow this happened all around the north of the town along with all the other tourists – despite not being naive teenagers any more. Thankfully, half of the man group don’t seem to remember ending up in an Irish pub.This is probably for the best.





  • On a boat.. .

    All meeting up at Liverpool street station, each of our trusty steeds in tow it was suddenly real.
    A night spent catching up over beers on a ferry and 5 hours sleep later and the rudest of tannoy in the face wake up calls,  we’ve hit the cycle paths of the Netherlands.
    Today was marathon trip of roughly 100km from the hook of Holland to Utrecht.

    An eventful day marked by a bike repair stop10k into the ride and two of us ducking out early and getting the train from Rotterdam way (with one other sacrificing the ride to chaparone what would have otherwise been a solo10km to the nearest train station. We all managed to redevous at Utrecht train stain at a similar time to each other. The hardcore are visibly tired from the trek. Pizza and beer later,it’s bed  o’clock.







  • Cycle of spring

    I think it was the beginning of March that I eagerly agreed to join 7 of my school friends on a cycle ride from the edge of Holland to Amsterdam and back with a few overnight stops along the way at Utrecht on the way there and Rotterdam,  the way back. 
    It’s going to be an interesting weekend to say the least


  • Venezia!

    Aaah, venice with your open sewers and creepy carnival masks, you’re so romantic!
    We disembarked this morning and spent a few sunny leisurely hours wandering up and down canals around the piazza de roma before grabbing a pizza and beer for lunch and mozy-ed onto marco polo airport where I’ve just had the best coffee of the week and debbie is passed out in the departure lounge. about to board the flight home and long train journey back to the diff.


  • Cruise culture

    Yesterday was ‘easter saturday’ at sea. Perfect – a time to catch up with done reading, drawing and music listening. Although it did feel like a lot of finding a spot on deck for half an hour only for the wind to pick up and for a tea break to raise it’s head.
    It was decided we would partake of some ‘classes’. In the morning it was mask painting – painting a selected pallet of pink, green, yellow, brown and black onto a creepy plain face ‘ venetiaAn’ style mask. It was difficult not to make it hella drag, and I’m sure it’s a hit with the trans-gendered community on board. My mask was fierce if I may say so. Debbie did managed to get more glitter on her than her mask which was pretty impressive. We later decided to give the masks away as easter gifts. Lucky people.

    A lazy day in all, finished off with a raucous dinner which culminated in a restaurant-wide thanks to the hard working staff on board. The waiting and house keeping workers it seems have 8 month contracts and work 12 hour shifts with no days off. Theres a huge importance put on awarding individual staff recommendations of excellence from guests – only by getting a high rate of ‘bravissimo’ can the crew be awarded a day off. this macro culture of hierarchy can be hard to stomach, but it’s neither unique or cruise specific, I guess it’s just more noticeable in this situation. By being here though I’m unwillingly endorsing it. But hey, I’m here to eat shit loads and live leisurely, not feel guilty dammit.
    We arrived in dubrovnik this morning and had a few hours to rush around the once heavily shelled and picturesque walled city. Once away from the throngs of day trippers, there’s some nice spots to be found, and I’d be well up for re visiting the dalmation coast. Back on board now though sipping afternoon tea and looking forward to getting back to venice in the morning.


  • Rhodes

    “what’s Rhodes like?”
    “you drive cars down them”
    A heavily fortified port town that appears to have had it’s fair share of power struggles and handlers over the years. We had a good amble through the walled old town, ate some dolmade and greek salad in the sun. Had we more time, it would’ve been good to see more of the island, but as discovered yesterday, that’s not necessarily the point of cruising 😉
    So now I can see our tug readying to drag us out of harbor as we set sail towards the damnation coast and Dubrovnik. I’m looking forward to my day at sea, reading, drawing and maybe a game of bowls on deck!

  • Yissaou!

    I think it’s thursday. I’ve still not managed to upload my blogging, but still intend to write this bastard thing till the end for the heil of it. Yesterday we arrived in grecian waters and stopped at the port of katakolon, famous for being near olympia, the birth place of the games. Shunning any organized excursions, we decided to explore the untouched mediterranean backwater and while away the afternoon lounging on golden sands. It seems katakolon’s economy is driven by the cruise industry and the consumers it delivers every day. So after a cup of greek coffee and a walk along a disheveled sad beach we got back on board the fortuna and a sleepless night being tossed and bashed about by choppy european waters. This morning we did find ourselves awake for a golden champagne sunrise through the islands of santorini.

    Santorini although a beautiful island and settlements built high atop cliff tops, whose hot spot is a neighboring volcano island, our trip ashore felt overwhelmed by a town over run with nothing but tourist industry. Nothing wrong with that per say, after all if economies can thrive on the circumstantial spending power of richer nations, good for them. What does feel galling is that this floating populace simply stops by tourist spot after tourist spot for a matter of hours and then leaves with a false sense of having visited a place without really getting a feel of any culture what so ever. That said maybe if we were more bothered to engage with the organized excursions (if they weren’t such a rip off maybe we would) then that experience would be delivered. However as a casual observer of places, cultures and ever changing scenery, this cruising lark does deliver. Maybe I was hoping my first visit to greece would be a lazy week actually in greece rather than international waters. God I sound like such an ungrateful moaning sod. I am having an interesting time honest, maybe I should stop thinking about it so much and deliver myself to gay abandon as illustrated by the 1920’s murals that adorn this pleasure liner.

  • Toot toot, all aboard!

    Belated Monday 18th April
    Well, this is a report on the first full day at sea. I did write a rather long post yesterday on our first day of travel and my initial apprehensive thoughts on the  matter of spending the next week on a cruise ship. Technology failed my uploading and seemed to have erased my post, so I will consider it gone and attempt to carry on writing this blogiary over the coming days – both to satisfy my ego (which I failed to destroy during a lucid dream two nights ago) and empty my potentially cabin fever-addled mind.

    After arriving in venice yesterday morning, the three thousand or so passengers were herded into a large ferry terminal and set on quite a protracted embarkation procedure.
    Once on board I do think the fear began to set in. overtly shallow musak was playing out from the piano over a budget midi backing backing track and the glowing tack of italian inspired chintz felt a bit over whelming. Lunch was rushed at a seemingly plastic inspired canteen and the fare was also a bit sub par while looking out over venezia port through salt-stained windows. it all felt a bit like euro-butlins, which is what debbie kept jokingly saying it would be like, but neither of us seriously thought it would be. The evening was a bit non descriptn, supported by an okay meal from a heavily vibrating dining table.
    Tuesday 19th April
    Okay, so I sound like a hater, like I haven’t given it a chance, and you’d be right – that was my feeling before a good nights sleep. Upon waking from the deepest sleep in a while (there are no windows in our cabin, so when the lights are off, it’s hella dark) and made my way to the gym for an abdominal workout (it’s my mission to develop something of a fitness regime this holiday). In the light of a new day the trypta-ketamine-esque decor no longer seemed quite nasty and over loading. On one hand this made me feel a little calmer about the situation, but one does worry that my psyche is actually getting used to the merry prankster nightmare that is passing as interior design on this vessel.
    The day was mainly spent in port at Bari. We couldn’t find the pleasure island with log flume, but did marvel at the catholic opulence of Saint Nicholas’s cathedral and the towns ancient castle, washed down with an icy biera and creamy gelato.
    Wednesday 20th april.
    After a more restless sleep, we woke fairly early for morning stretches which appeared to target the same muscles that got pummeled during the ab workout the previously morning, and then discovered pancakes, bacon and maple syrup for breakfast.
    The food on board is an interesting affair. There are a few places to chow down on during the day and night, and although the sit down restaurants offer the illusion they are of a higher class than the buffet canteens, it’s pretty much the exact same fare. On the whole the munch is pretty fresh and fairly varied. There is also 24 pizza available by the slice and I’m making it my duty to consume at least some every day.
    Feeding times do tend to expose the dark under belly of our fellow passengers though as the scrummage that ensues at breakfast and lunch can be a tad disturbing. Admittedly it’s a bit confusing initially that the trays and plates are made of the same material and are of a similar size, but a size difference enough. The concept of self service surely implies that one can return to the buffet for seconds, but a large number of people pile up huge mounds of carbo-combos onto the trays as though it will be their last meal for days. In fact it feels as though you needn’t go longer than half an hour without consuming something on this floating behemoth. I’m quite enjoying this store of grazing, but the obtuse greed all around still disturbs me.


  • Toot toot, all aboard!

    Well, this is a report on the first full day at sea. I did write a rather long post yesterday on our first day of travel and my initial apprehensive thoughts on the matter of spending the next week on a cruise ship. Technology failed my uploading, so I will consider it gone and attempt to carry on writing this blogiary over the coming days – both to satisfy my ego (which I failed to destroy during a lucid dream two nights ago) and empty my cabin addled mind.

  • Android apps to get

    This list is a little outdated, but might be useful for folk who’ve just got themselves a new android…

    ASTRO – file manager. there’s a full feature free version (with ads)
    This is kind of like ‘finder’ on your droid – you can back up apps you’re not using and reinstall back up apps from your SD card. it also gives you easy access to your downloads etc.

    Aldiko – Book reader. There’s some great free books in it’s database already, and you can always convert PDF’s to ebooks using ‘Calibre’ on your mac. also there’s a user book list called drinkmalk – http://www.drinkmalk.com/stanza/ with some other books in.

    Astrid Tasks – to do list that syncs with remember the milk – http://www.rememberthemilk.com .
    Gtasks (google tasks) is also good, if you use Google calender / docs etc.
    ‘Note Me’ is a simpler one still. Daft there isn’t a list / notes app already in android.

    Evernote / Springpad – two note taking apps that provide more crazy online syncing stuff. more full featured than aldiko – I’m still trying to find uses for all of them tho.

    Barcode Scanner – you’ll need one of these to scan the QR codes you’ll find about the internet that link to the market to let you download apps.
    also handy for…

    Google Goggles – living in the future. nuff said.

    Handcent SMS – I’ve tried a few SMS apps over the default one, ChompSMS being a popular one, but Handcent is all round the best in my opinion, once you’ve got it all configured and defaulted to your liking.

    Beeb Player – i player fun on your phone.

    Google Sky Map – again it’s star trek

    Google Translate – does what it says

    Listen – a pretty cool ‘podcast’ downloader / manager and player. it’s bit kooky and buggy, but it’s from google labs, so still in development.

    London City – free tubemap and planner. not the best, but does the job when I’m in town.

    NewsRob – got the free version, but might upgrade soon – I find it better than the default RSS reader, but only because I’ve been using Googlereader for a while and this is the only news reader that syncs well with it. If you use a different RSS feed manager, then there may be better ones out there.

    The Guardian Anywhere – the guardian are apparently still working on their android app, so this unofficial one fits the bill for now. I don’t actually use this anymore as compared to the iphone/ipod app I found it frustrating, so I now just have a bookmark to the guardian mobile site instead.

    Guardian Lite – more user freidnly than the guardian anywhere, but not as full featured

    GDocs – handy if you use Google docs.

    Ringdroid – if you like making your own ringtones. but I think HTC sense has one already.

    Seesmic or Twitter – if you tweet professionaly seesmic is good. if you’re casual, the offical twitter app is ace and much better than Peep.

    TED – for watching some great TED talks.

    Wapedia – a good, well designed Wikipedia app

    Solaris – keep up to date with Sun activity and sunspots / storms etc. ready for the apocalypse

    Swype – I’ve nearly forgotten what a pain it is to type on a phone screen. try it.

    Uloops Music composer – had a fiddle with it, and will write my next dubstep hit on it.

    TV-Guide – free and does what it says.

    Dropbox – links with a free dropbox account and app on your mac to transfer / store files online.

    DoubleTwist – media player that syncs with the doubletwist mac app – kind of like an itunes for android, but still not as good. paid though.

    Ebay / Pky Auctions eBay – two ebay apps. one official, one has a hardcore fanbase.

    Earthquake – seismic activity delivered to your pocket!

    Spotify – unfortunately needs the 9.99 a month subscription. giving it a go and think it rocks.

    Foursquare – not sure why I want to broadcast to the world where I am, but hey – everyone else is doing it.

    Facebook – uh huh.

    Vignette – retro analogue photo thing. paid for though.

    Movies – watch trailers and find out cinema times

    mVideoPlayer – plays most codecs for your video pleasure

    PdaNet – lets you tether your computer to your phone so you can surf the net on your laptop where there is no wifi

    Shazam – you hear a tune, shazam tells you what it is.

    the Schwartz Unleased – no phone is complete without a lightsabre app
    —————————————————————————————-

    APPS I’ve tried and are worth a spin, but dues to slimming down on memory, I’m waiting for froyo to re-install them…

    —————————————————————————————-

    Weather channel – it’s raining.

    Alooqa – tips, food, things to do when in a new town.

    Qype – kind of as above, and a bit more slick.

    XE – currency convertor

    Digg – as in digg.com

    Dolphin / Opera / Skyfire – all alternative browsers with various enhancements, and tools that make them more super. however, I kind of like the stock browser and have gone back to basics recently.

    Doodledroid – drawing app. not as good as any iphone offerings, but okay like.

    Earth. google earth. amazing, but way to PHAT for now. (20+megs)

    fring – until recently allowed for Skype calling. they’re in trouble and doesn’t work anymore 🙁 keep an eye out though

    Gmote – control your itunes on your laptop from your phone

    IMDB – what trailers and get film info as in the IMDB website

    Layar – a cool experiment and a taste of a minority report-esque future.

    Meebo IM – if you instant message it’s great.

    My Tracks – go somewhere, and this will trace you and draw a map of where you’ve been.

    Open sodoku – seemed perfect, then I realised some of the boards were just ‘wrong’ still looking for a good free sodoku.

    Qik – live video streaming from your phone to the internets!

    Tricorder – like being spock

    TuneWiki – looks through your music and lets you sing along with the lyrics displayed.

    Urbanspoon – nice idea, but I didn’t like it.

    WaveSecure – If your phone gets nicked, you’ll need it. but it’s paid for on subscription i think.

    Wikitude – an augmented reality app like layar, but possibly more useful.

    —————————————————————————————-

    GAMES, and Sound toys – these are ones I like, but don’t have many installed any more due to space 🙁

    —————————————————————————————-

    WordUp! – like boggle / wordsearch

    Speedx 3D – rip roaring speedy racer from the future

    SNesoid (Lite) / Nesoid (lite) / Gensoid (lite) – emulators of namesake consoles – you’ll need to downlaod some ‘ROMS’ for the consoles fisrt from the interwebz.

    Robo Defense – tower defense with robots!

    Radiant (lite) shoot em up old skool flavours gone retro

    Jewels – bejeweled clone

    Bebbled – bejeweled but different

    Abduction – jumping accelerometor game with cows

    Blockx 3D – 3D tetris. pretty cool.

    Drop7 – addictive number / colums falling game. like crack.

  • 72 hour video challenge

    As part of the Arthouse co-op video challenge, I made this during my breif visit to New York on my route down to Virginia to visit my parents…

  • Musings on androids and i-devices

    So, I’ve been using an android phone (HTC desire) for the best part of two months now after a fair bit of research and although I could have gone iPhone, I made a considered decision to sell my part of my soul to Google (Apple have had a good share of it up until now).

    I have owned and used veraciously an iPod touch for nearly a year and was very used to the apple app eco-system and by and large love the way the iPhone OS works. Well, it does just work doesn’t it? Had I not already owned an iPod touch I would’ve almost certainly snapped up the iPhone – if for nothing else than to se what the fuss is all about. That said, were I not so curious about the competition and feel a sense of duty to be informed about such things, then iPhone would also be an obvious and enjoyable choice.

    I’m going to try and not get too focused into the little differences between the platforms, but will point out the differences that seem to matter to me using both on a near daily basis, and while by no means exhaustive, I may cone back to this post and add things as I come across them further down the line.

    ‘Open’ vs ‘closed’

    There has been a fair bit of internet chatter lately about the closed nature of Apple’s i-world in terms of Flash, app rejection and lack of freedom for users. Yes, Apple are locked and tight,and while many are bemoaning the lack of Flash on i-things, Apple has it’s. Reasons and those largely come down to user-experience. The reason apple products appear to work so wonderfully and seamlessly compared to say the windows world is because Apple wants to make sure everyone using an iPhone has largely the same experience and to not get frustrated to notice that their phone has crashed. Of course, iPhones crash from time to time, but they do it fairly seamlessly and one can blame the app rather than the phone. If flash were struggling in the safari browser or videos were stuttering then people may associate this with the phones shortcomings and apple don’t want to risk that.

    Flash has a hard time Running smoothly on my old 1.5 ghz PowerBook, how can anyone expect results on a 500 mhz- 1 ghz phone? Sure, it might ‘work’, but it’s not going to be great. Flash (lite) works on my android device, and by and large it handles it well in small doses – I can’t imagine desperately wanting to play flash games on it, I’m blind to adverts and I play most video content either in the YouTube app or with the inbuilt media streamer.

    By and large, I don’t think it makes much bones, and I’m excited by the future potential for html5 and JavaScript to one day make Flash plugins less ubiquitous. In fact I can imagine adobe creating a timeline based html5 / CSS3 production tool much like Flash (the production software) is today.

    Controlling the app store also means that Apple guarentees to a certain degree that all users are getting a similar experience. I may not agree with the censorship that Apple has shown in the past in principle, but it makes sense in the Apple world.

    The android market in comparison though feels more like The wild west at times (although google still have the right to pull anything malicious or illegal), and will probably leave many users confused as to why they can’t find certain apps on their version of the market or why just browsing or searching the market uses up loads of internal memory. such things are not helpful to users – which brings me onto my next point:

    Memory not Memory

    When you buy an 8 gig iphone, you get just that. With android you have the option of installing an sd card of any size you wish -I picked up an 8 gig one with mine. However, that 8 gig is only used to store media and app-related data, NOT apps themselves. I’m rather complacent with the ipod, downloading any old app that comes my way. My android only has a couple hundred megs to spare in which to install apps meaning that all to soon you can be faced with a low memory warning and the phone gets funky. Its possible to back up any apps to the sd card for use further down the line and if you’root’ your device its possible to install apps into the sd card also, but the average consumer shouldn’t have to be concerned with such matters. The new frozen yoghurt flavor of android (2.2) addresses this issue somewhat with the ability for developers to allow apps to be installed to sd card, so hopefully any app updates from here on in will do that.

    There’s an app for that

    The mini applications, or ‘apps’ that arrived with the first iPhone have now become an incredibly commonplace reference point when discussing phones. These ‘apps’ have arguably always been on mobile phones – clicking an ‘SMS’ icon , or ‘address book’ on apretty much any mobile since 1997 is doing the same thing, but by opening out the possibilities of what an app may constitute so wildly, the iPhone did something quite special. The iPhone isn’t about having a phone – it’s a device that can pretty much do whatever a developer wants, and that opens up some amazing potential.
    The influx of games and entertainment apps has been massive and has turned the iphone/ipod into a gaming platform in it’s own right – something that started with the Symbian phones, but now has gone off in many different directions at once.

    I think the iPhone and Android have a different philosophy regarding apps, even if Android isn’t aware of it. The first hurdle being lack of space to download and store hundereds of the little buggers on a whim, which is very easy with the iPhone. This means when using an Android device on a daily basis, I imagine people with begin streamlining fairly quickly the most important and useful apps that they carry around with them. This might mean weeding out the best possible note taking client, or Twitter app and deleting that Bejeweled clone, simply because soduko gets the brain moving a bit more. Indeed my Android device has very much become a ‘work/organisational’ tool rather than an entertainment tool. Of course, I still have iplayer and a Megadrive emulator on it, but for me the ipod touch does a better job at catering for my casual game, experimental toy and other frivolous needs – the amount and quality of games far surpasses those on Android at the moment, and the biggest issue for me is space on my phone. I’m happy to see this seperation and it means I’m not carrying around the kitchen sink wherever I go. It also means there’s a fair amount of cross over between the two – for instance when I’m home – I can check my email on either Android or iPod, stream or update Spotify playlists, check facebook or Twitter and so on. but I know if I want to get into a game – the iPod touch is the go-to device. After all – I’m not going to get a phone call interrupting my play! The logical conclusion of this argument would mean this set up would lend itself very well to an ipad / Android phone combo.

    The funny thing is, the more I use Android, the more I feel it works better for me as a phone – it feels more serious and expandable. The iPod is a fantastic entertainment device. Yup – I don’t have an iPhone, so can’t really comment, but isn’t it just an ipod that makes calls?

    I must say, with the release of the iPhone4 – I’m a wee bit envious of it’s camera capabilities. The video looks absolutely superb and the ability to edit video on the device is a bonus. there isn’t a dedicated editing tool on Android YET (except Quik) but give it time. That said, the HTC Desire takes as good snaps as my old Sony Erricson, and much better video and is fine for quick youtube snips – just not quite the raw creative potential that the iPhone allows.

    It Just works

    The mantra of the Apple crew. You know you can just get into something on an Apple product without the Operating system getting in the way, and by and large the iPhone does that well. it’s faceless – no obtrusive buttons or branding – the experience is 100% from the apps. It just works too. It talks to iTunes without a hitch you can sync it effortlessly between your Windows or Mac machine – you don’t need to know how it works or why, it just will. It’s future computing – an appliance anyone can intuitively. perfect.

    Android is not these things. It does not sync with ease to a Macintosh, it’s drag and drop files, it’s downloading apps and installing them, it’s creating new folders on the SD card to allow it to do something, it’s a mini computer and it feels like it. Personally I wouldn’t trust a lot of people with an Android – it would confuse them, but that said, I think if you approach it ‘as a phone’ and consume what’s on the plate it would be fine. Although not a proper geek-hacker, I do like to push things, try stuff out, tinker and see how it works probably more than your average iphone buyer in the street. I get excitied rooting about in the file structure in a perverse way that reminds me of using a PC for the first time in the 90’s – Android does allow you to break it, and no two people will get the same Android experience due to what they want out of the phone and what hardware & what version of Android it’s running. Everyone gets the same iphone experience (unless it’s jailbroken of course) , and that’s just fine.

    Apple have done a great job making people who wouldn’t have ever wanted an apple computer, who until now have been windows to the bone suddenly lust after a product that carries the apple philosophy deep in it’s core, which is pretty damn impressive. The iPhone certainly did raise the bar in terms of how and why we interact with mobile devices and has set the standard by which all other ‘phones’ are now marked against. This often leads to the question which is better – iPhone or (in this case) Android. I don’t think either one is the best. They are, despite their similarities and competition actually quite different in the way they ‘think’.

  • Going Android

    I do indeed have an ‘Android’ phone – the HTC desire.
    I had initially wanted to get the Legend – it’s a looker, and seeing as my main computer is a macbook pro, I wanted a ‘mobile computer’ to match (that is after all what these smartphones are – computers, say goodbye to the simplicities of having a phone).

    However, a few reviewers mentioned that due to it’s sharp metal edges, it’s not too comfortable to use as a phone up against ones ear and that although it looks like it’s from the future and looks more apple than apple, it doesn’t have too much under the hood in terms of power compared to the Desire, but all the reviews say it’s snappy and a joy to use.

    This is where things can get a bit geeky and you begin talking in terms of computers rather than phones – processor speed.
    The Legend is clocked at about 600mhz (faster than my old old powerbook laptop admittedly, which now is a glorified stereo) The iphone is about the 550 mark, but I guarentee using my crystal ball that the next iphone, which should be released around June time will certainly have a 1ghz chip (like the ipad).

    The Desire (stupid names these) although doesn’t look that great – it reminds me of a mid 90’s PC in terms of design) is fast – it’s 1ghz in speed and compared to the iphone (I’ve got an ipod touch) feels more snappy and responsive when pushing it. However, speed isn’t everything, and you’ll need to decide if you want a phone that does everything, could take over the world and will likely hold it’s own Top-Trumps style further down the line, or a solidly built, good-looking phone that will do pretty much what an iphone can. If it’s the former, go for Desire, the latter, Legend.
    Deciding between the two, you’re best off going into a shop and trying them both out. I was certain on the Legend, but boy-geekery got the better of me and I went for power over style.

    I’d ask what it is about the iphone you feel to be a rip off – admittedly having used my ipod touch quite a bit before getting my ‘droid on, I got very much sucked into the ‘app’ eco culture of the ipod, and to be fair, it IS slick and very easy to use – instantly accessible. There really is an ‘app for everything’ and because it’s so tightly controlled, it feels very ‘safe’ and it syncs seamlessly with my macbook.

    My reasons for not going down the iphone route were down to the fact that I’m sick and tired of seeing every other person with one, mostly people who would never have dreamed of buying an apple computer a few years ago, are suddenly Steve Job’s lap dogs. I’m not saying it’s bad that more people are getting a better user experience, and finally realising why apple computers have always been a pleasure to use, but it now seems that to ‘Think Different’, there needs to be an alternative.

    At my other job at Newport University, a lot of students have iphones, and most of the staff do too – I genuinely wanted to see what the competition had to offer. If I didn’t have an ipod touch and felt I’d ‘lived the dream’ a little, I might well have got me an iphone instead.

    Android is an interesting operating system – it’s often billed as ‘open source’ but is ultimately managed and controlled by Google, in association with a long list of software and hardware producers. I did have some serious reservations about buying into Google so fully – Their privacy policy is a bit dubious and they are hell bent on practically owning all of our online life. But I in a moment of intellectual brain-fart, I threw caution into the wind and now I’m Google’s bitch. I already use most of my email though gmail and use google office at work and so going all the way didn’t feel too hideous.

    These new phones are about being online, so your Facebook contacts can be synced up to your phone contacts, you can have a ‘friend stream’ of your flickr,twitter and facebook aquaintances trickled to you constantly and it can feel a bit exposing at times, but these are the times we live in, and for me, I want to see what it’s all about with the future promising to be geo-tagged and location based, augmented reality on tap, it’s there for the taking, but there is an aspect to ‘taking the red pill’

    I enjoy using the Android, and particularly HTC – they have their own ‘skin’ called ‘sense’ over the top, which makes the phone feel more tactile and pretty than the standard android phones – I wouldn’t really touch an android from many other phone manufacturers yet, although Motorola might have a nice one soon, and SonyEricsson are on the way, albeit using old versions of Android.

    Compared to iphone, Android kind of allows for the possibility for things to go wrong a bit more – you do have control over files a bit more, and it’s through apple not allowing you any control that keeps it shiny and ‘m m magical’

    One really annoying thing is that there isn’t much space on the phone – which holds your contacts, emails, texts, and ‘apps’ Although you get a 4GB micro SD card with it and you can put one up to 32GB in , all your apps get stored in the phone, which means you have to be fairly selective of apps and a couple of big ones, such as Google Earth (at 22MB) will fill up your space quickly and the phone begins to spazz-out a bit until you trim it down. It is said that future versions of Android will let you save onto the SD card though.

    Apps – yes apple started it all and now all the phone makers want them. The Android Market place is quickly building up it’s numbers, but as there is no quality control (unlike Apple’s strict enforcement) there is a LOT of crap out there, but I have generally found apps that let me do the similar productive things as iphone on android, and more and more developers are creating android versions of iphone apps and vice versa, so as more people go Android, this should get stronger. If it’s games you want to play, iphone wins hands down. There are some okay ones on Android to pass the time, but again – not as polished as iphone.

    Syncing up my phone with my Computer isn’t as straight forward as it should be yet either. With iphone – it revolves arounf itunes – it syncs up music the apps, movies, contacts, everything.
    Android does have some special syncing software, but it’s PC only – There are paid software sync software’s out there – ‘missingsync’ is one, but so far I’m getting by using a hotchpotch of ‘doubletwist’ which supposedly manages music and media (although no where near as well as itunes) and ‘busycal’ which I have synced my google calendar to my mac calendar fairly seamlessly, although busycal does cost money. So it’s not as easy to let it link in to the mac, so if you want it no fuss, iphone would be the best choice if you must have that streamlied, but I do think there’ll be more solutions further down the line.

    Android feels quite experimental and on the fringe, and I like that. I like the fact I can geek out and tinker with it, but it can be confusing and does remind me of the complexity of using a windows or Linux machine compared to an imac for instance, (although I’m not sure how much that is down to me wanting to hack and push it, as opposed to ‘normal use’) but if you’re fed up of seeing an iphone everywhere you turn, then go Droid. Without paying extra (with a 24 month contract at about £30), you get a phone that has all the bells and whistles of the top-end iphone – compass, video recording and a slightly better camera than the iphone as well as all the apps you would reasonably want on a phone without it becoming a complete entertainment system.

    If you feel just the smallest pang of jealousy when someone whips out an iphone and you want something that will ‘just work’ , play nicely with your itunes and want the ability to get the latest app or high-end game every Sunday paper supplement is talking about then you’ll need an iphone – but if you do, wait until June when the new one will be out (at a premium) and the current models come down in price.

    Gizmodo Legend Review:
    http://gizmodo.com/5488019/htc-legend-review-frankly-it-feels-expensive

    TechRadar Desire Review:
    http://www.techradar.com/reviews/phones/mobile-phones/htc-desire-679515/review

  • in org your ay shun

    They say yesterday was the most depressing day of the year. Without realising it, I was indeed very down in the dumps for no real reason. it was raining on me during my cycle into work, I was REALLY tired and brain dead after a weekend away and I had far too much to think about in my jobs to really want to focus on any of them. Anyway, an early(ish) night to bed and 8 hours later I’m a bit more equipped to take on today.

    WTF? However, I have just heard on the radio that 90% of the tickets for Glastonbury have been sold. I keep telling myself I’ll go every year, but haven’t made it since 1998. It probably isn’t meant to be.

    What was I saying? Oh yes, shitty days, now is a good day I hope. I’ve personally got the fear for the day ahead, but only because I’ve got to give assessment feedback to some students, and it’s new territory for me and I don’t want to bring them any bad news. Maybe though the good news of today will wash it away somewhat. The good news being OBAMARAMALAMADINGDONG! Yup, all the attention is on Washington DC today as Mr. Obama becomes president in Amorica. It’s all quite exciting – more so if you’re American I imagine.

    Mr. Barak does have a real sense of celebrity razamataz about him. The first time I saw him stride into a press conference after being elected, I felt a buzz in the air (even though I was watching on TV about 3000 miles away) He’s got the super celebrity that someone like Frank Sinatra or Munroe might have had. Every word he utters is expected to be inspirational and will help usher in a time of peace and growth for all of humanity.

    It’s all a bit crazy isn’t it?
    The world have now put so much expectation on every move, every letter that falls from his mouth. From here on in the weight of the world will be jumping about on his shoulders. I hope the world doesn’t get too disappointed when this time next year there’ll still be wars in the world, The global economy will still be in tatters, and probably getting worse and there still won’t be a cure for Cancer, Aids or the common cold.

    I’m sure Obama will be the best president of the USA in living memory and I sincerely hope he keeps living the dream and gets America and the world back on it’s feet and talking to each other about how to make things better, but we do need to keep in mind he’s just a man, not a superhero.

    Unless of course he’s a reptile from Sirius, but that’s another story…

  • You shouldn’t be on the Pavement

    My bike is my main mode of transport. Closely followed by my legs, taxi’s, buses and as a passenger in my girlfriend’s car (I do have a license to drive, but I”m out of practice, scared of driving and feel eviro guilt).

    I cycle to work every day, and back again. I normally adhere to the rules of the road, and occasionally use the pavement as a means to get somewhere safer (than I would on the road) or if I’m particularly tired, or it’s dark and I have no lights.

    This morning on the way in I came to point in my journey where I slip onto a busier road – this morning was chocka, with a long bendy bus holding up proceedings, too many cars too close to the kerbside, so I decided to hop up onto the pavement until I got further down the road. The pavement was clear, aside from one or two commuters and the man who gives away the free tabloid newspaper by the traffic lights. I came to two women, probably younger than myself and slowed down and walked the bike with my feet on the ground, as I normally do to avoid seeming to impatient and a bike bully. In the heirachy of my transport world, I have utmost respect for pedestrians, as opposed to not much for drivers on the whole (of course if I’m in the car, that changes). I was shunting along behind these girls, and one said to the other “oop, watch out” – they sidestepped and I passed with a “Sorry” and “thankyou”. The ‘friend’ came out with
    “Well you shouldn’t be on the pavement anyway”.

    I wanted to retort “Well, you shouldn’t be allowed outside you ugly bitch”.
    I didn’t, and apologetically said “but look how busy it is, I don’t want to die”.
    She said something else inaudible, then in a rage of early morning-no coffee just started ramble swearing as I do with a multitudes of go fuck yourself you fucking stupid fuck. I don’t think she heard, but it really put a pisser on my morning. The sun was shining, I was getting some excercise on my bike – lovely! Then a pedestrain, one of my non-combustion brethren pees on my parade. Damn.

  • ripped jeans


    It’s a few years late, but I’ve finally got myself a pair of ripped-in-the-knee jeans. I’d had a day of not much direction and very little focus – going from errand to errand, which involved buying a new inner tube for my bike as my back wheel was so peppered with punctures it only seemed fitting to furnish it with a brand new inner tube (I even splashed out on the fancy self-repairing variety). After swiftly replacing it, I did a couple of hours procrastination (work) and then decided to go and pay a cheque into the bank.

    Riding my fully pumped bike into town on a day with some rare sunshine, music in my ears and on a mission, things were great. Great until the back wheel of my bike decided to come undone and throw me over the handlebars in the middle of rush hour. I felt foolish and luckily unharmed. Please with myself that I had decided to wear my helmet on this outing, I picked myself up and got my steed ready to carry on the journey.

    I thought nothing of my slightly grazed knee feeling until I locked down and saw the hole in my jeans’ knee and could feel a damp bit of blood. I didn’t want to look and felt it more prudent to just go home and forget about town.
    Anyway – a long story later, it now means I’ve got a ripped pair of jeans, which make me feel like I should be in McFly or even Busted circa 2006.

    On my way home I encountered a cyclist taking the route I just had, but he had no helmet and was beaming with cockish abandon with only one hand on the handlebar and his other hand resting on a jaunty 90 degree knee. He must have been a fairweather cyclist fuck face I decided with no regard for my tragedy, and merely rubbing my face further into the asphalt. Then to show me how cool I might now look I stood next to a man also clearly in his thirties while waiting to cross at a pelican crossing wearing a pair of purpose cut in the knee jeans. He seemed equally as smug as the fairweather cyclist fuck face, brandishing an empty Mc Donalds drinks cup, a topshop plastic bag (no doubt full of more cut-knee jeans) and ‘WE ARE THE SUPERLATIVE CONSPIRACY’ headphones (I don’t know why, but headphones made by a fashion label annoy me to buggery, but after reading WESC’s manifesto, I don’t care and think they are a way-cool brand that I might one day buy into. yeah. um what was I saying? Oh yes, and I wondered in a comedy fashion (high in the head from endorphins) – how do Topman or any other high street or high-fashion brand/label they get the hole in the knees? And why did someone think it be a good idea to pay a premium for? My favourite (only) pair of jeans were bust up and blood stained. Cool as hell.

  • Scrumpy

    I apologies for this post – it’s a geek-out-fest and up tight ramble that is probably far too long for any sane person to read fully, but I just needed to get it off my chest. not that really know what it is.

    Those of you who know my computing habits and preferences will know that these days I generally favour using Apple computers. I own a 2ghz 20” G5 imac and a 500mhz G4‘hotrodded’ Pismo laptop with as many bells and whistles as could possibly be squeezed in. I also have a beige box under the desk running windows and Ubuntu. All of my current computers are either hand me downs (the beige box) or second hand (pismo and imac). I’m just not in the financial position to afford brand new computers when I eventually need to upgrade, especially because my tastes happen to be on the pricey side of the computer market. To me, my G5 imac is one of the fastest computers I’ve had the pleasure to use on a daily basis, and my daily basis consists of a mixed bag – web and print design, a bit of flash, identity design, illustration and occasionally some motion graphics and video editing. The pismo has served me well and as a mobile computer it has felt perfectly usable for basic web work, photoshop, VJing and I recently had to complete a motion graphics project on it using After Effects 7 – it was painful, but it did the job. My old Windows desktop(RIP) that I used until the pismo turned up was pushing 5 and would still be in use if the celeron hadn’t burnt itself out. I’m sure however, if you regularly use a computer made within the past 2.0 years would be amazed at how I can survive on such ‘ancient’ technology, especially with the inclusion of speedy dual core intel processors in all apple computers since early 2006.

    Recently I’ve been getting the odd bit of work from a small design studio that requires me to take a computer with me to work. Due to the nature of the work – mostly motion or video, I’ve been taking my imac, but it’s just so unwieldily and impractical, and even been putting up with the pismo on occasion. If I was to keep getting such work and be able to do the job without getting laughed out of town, it was clear I needed to get a modern laptop. The Pismo will go to a good home in the form of my lovely girlfriend who will mostly use it for word processing and web surfing. It’ll be a huge speed boost , as she’s been used to using a hand-me down G3 Lombard (from her sister) and it means I can keep an eye on the geriatric workhorse (the laptop, not Debbie) and keep it ticking along (that’s one machine I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of – it’s a masterpiece).

    So I needed a cheap laptop. I don’t have any savings, I currently live out of my overdraft, and I didn’t want to have to get finance (although it was tempting). My first temptation was of course a new macbook pro, but at £1,500 just wasn’t an option. There’s phone bills, rent and the cat’s vet bills to be paid, So I hit ebay. A ‘new’ ‘book costs about a grand second hand, and the earlier pro models are anything between the 600 mark and £900. I’m a struggling freelancer without a bean to my name, and the plan was to buy this laptop on a credit card and py it off in two installments. I was going to have to take a more drastic cut. I considered a Windows laptop (unfortunately Ubuntu just still isn’t an option for my professional work) as I could probably get a dual core, with about 2 gigs of RAM for about the £400 price point. The studio I do some work for are all on Windows (so I’m the black sheep when I turn up) so that would work fine, but to be honest I don’t think I could bring myself to do it. I’m happy to use windows if I have to, and I don’t have anything against it, but I just prefer using OS X especially if it’s my own personal machine we’re talking about.

    A friend of mine was selling a G4 Aluminium powerbook. about a 1.3 speed I think and 1.5 gig’o’RAM. However, it’s a bit battered – has been around the world a number of times and I don’t think has ever had it’s permissions repaired. I thought I’d probably be able to get it for about £200, so it would make sense. When I enquired, he had already sold it to a colleague for £500. Blimey – the second hand apple market is more bouyant than I thought. Scouring ebay it seemd the colleague must have thought it to be a macbook pro. At a push, a dubious 1st revision model macbook pro will be about £550 and a mid range G4 powerbook, about £300-400. I put a bid on a final revision G4 – 1.67ghz, 2 gigs RAM and 80 gig HD. It also came pre installed with Leopard (I foolishly thought it would include the Leopard install disks, durr) . I won it and it arrived last week. It hasn’t got a scratch on it (it now does have a large scratch from god knows where). It’s as good as new and the battery lasts about 2 hours. I unpacked it from it’s original box, complete with every bit of original packaging. So, despite it’s age, at £350 I felt I’d snapped up a bargain. However, when I do this sort of thing I usually get racked with doubt – I’ll spend days trying to justify a move to myself. The internal debate rages –

    “I wanted a cheap laptop to replace my aging pismo and I got one”
    “Ahhh, but G4 powerbooks are such old technology, it’ll be unusable in a years time”
    “but it’s a final revision – this is 3 year old computing at it’s best, and I’m sure some good stuff must have been done on computers as long ago as 2005 – it’ll see me good for another couple of years at least”
    “Yes, but how’s it going to cope with CS3 and all modern software from here on in?”
    “But my G5 handles most things”
    “But it’s a G5”

    And so on AdNauseum. So I was going to sell it on for the price I bought it for and rinse my credit card another 3-4 hundered to get a second hand macbook pro, but what if it’s not in as good condition – this powerbook is a rare find. I don’t like doing lots of work on laptops, and I still really enjoy using my 20” screen imac. If I was using a dual core intel I’d leave my imac to rust, but then again I could always get a really big screen to run off my super fast laptop and maybe the next version of photoshop and osx won’t run on powerpc chips. I looked on forums and the opinion seemed to be universal – ‘You’d be silly to get a PowerPC computer these days, intel blows them away. G4 is old reduntant technology, why get outdated machines to do todays work?…..I’ve been driving myself insane for days with thoughts like these. Hours spent looking at online reviews and forums when I should’ve been working are taking it’s toll and I just need some conclusion. Then I saw a quote saying “I’ve got a rule of buying a new computer – it must be at least twice as fast as my current model”.
    This G4 is at least 4 times as fast as the 8 year old Pismo I’ve been using as my on the go / on the sofa computer and as a live performance machine. It will be a perfect companion to my G5 – they feel to actually seem run at about the same pace (imac on Tiger, powerbook on Leopard).

    I’m a luddit with new technology and I’ve never regulary used one of these new fangled mactel things so I don’t know what I’m missing.
    This laptop is absolutely beautiful and is so light and just runs amazingly compared to the pismo, and I’m becoming rather attached to it.
    I can now turn up to meetings and jobs without looking like I’ve just stepped out of 1999.
    I’m getting asked to do more live video performance, I used to use my pismo with ease – this is going to blow me away.

    So! Finally I have come to a happy conclusion. I really do enjoy using this laptop and after using it for my steady workflow the last few days, it handles everything I’ve thrown at it with style and panache. If I can use an 8 year old computer up untill two weeks ago, this metallic beast will surely see me good for at least a couple more years, by which time I’ll really be aching for a new desktop – and the cycle will be complete. I’m still computing it old skool and rocking PowerPC with pride. The pace at which technology seems to outdo itself is staggering, and I almost wish there would be a cut off point where we say “Right! that’s it. there’ll be no technological advancements for a while, so that everyone can get an optimal computing experience”. I don’t need or even want to be living in the uber fast lane.

    A computer is just a tool after all, and the current system seems to doom everything to obsolescence as soon as it’s on the market. I wonder if it’ll ever reach a tipping point.

  • back on the horse. (not that one)

    Maybe it’s my lack of getting up early over the winter months, a periodic dissatisfaction of always being ‘on’ , or forgetfulness but after not touching my blog for a while, I fancy getting back on the wild horse that is wasting time writing my blog. Most of my entries seem to start this way, as if I’m apologising to my imagined public – hordes of readers hanging on my every bloggy movement. Not sure why.

    So, TV turn off week came and went from April the 21st – 27th, although this year it was billed ‘Mental Detox’ week, as in this modern age, it’s not just TV that is vying for our head-space, but the internet, video games, mobile phones, toasters etc. I think the idea was to not waste time surfing the net when not working (at your computer) and instead of playing Ikaruga (on my Dreamcast), have a potato gun fight. Addicted to Scrabblicous? have some friends over and dust of the analogue board. I wholeheartedly agree with the concept, but although I kept the idea in my mind, life got in the way and I pilled up on the mental junk food as normal. I do plan on going camping at some point over the Summer though with my mobile turned off, So I’ll just postpone my detox. 
    Of course, Shut Down Day this weekend might be more successful as I’ve got into the dangerous habit of actually having weekends lately. Crazy but true. I’m also having fewer late night working sessions – I must either be getting lazy or deciding that slothfullness is greater than being a workaholic. Maybe it’s the consequence of living with my girlfriend. I’m not blaming her, but god knows if I was still al bachelor I’d be burning my candles 24-7.

  • Full Effect

    I was thinking just the other day that something was missing in my life. Not physical things – I have an amazing girlfriend, a house, a cat, a speedy bike and just about enough gadgets (although a DS would be nice). No I realised I was lacking a certain ephemeral something. I tried some yoga, meditated for a few mornings, had a chat with the Jesus, sat under a tree with Buddha, but nothing was filling me up. Then I remembered! I haven’t done my blog in a while – that must be it. Let’s see…
    Well January was a bit bonkers – I turned 30 for one.

    Normally getting older doesn’t bother me, and indeed the past decade or so getting older has seemed to equate with life getting better, more together and despite time speeding up, has generally been a good thing. Not 30. something hit me for a good week and I still don’t know what it was exactly – maybe it’s the realisation that I haven’t achieved quite what I was expecting as a boy dreaming of life in my 30’s – I’m not a millionaire for one thing and I’m constantly being reminded by all the hep young talented twentysomethings that this is their time – they’ve got the skills and drive to get them where they want, they’re telling me to step aside granddad or something. Debbie reckons I get moody every year around my birthday, and indeed I do use the time for reflection and gathering myself ready for a new year, but this year I felt blue.
    Anyway, that’s all passed now and I’ve begun teaching basic web stuff at two (count them) different Universities and despite me almost cacking it before each lesson, it’s all going along just fine so far. I’ve been drafted in on more than one occaission to another design studio to help out in a freelancing sort of way and the weather has been sunny for almost a week now. Things are groovy.
    However, since turning 30 one thing has truly made me a MAN. No, I haven’t wrestled an Alligator, and I haven’t killed another life with my bare hands (yet).
    A few weekends ago Debbie and I hired some industrial machinary and I sanded the bedroom floor. Don’t snigger, it was hardcore. we spent two days dressed up in protective clothing, ear defenders, safety goggles and dust masks and shaped those muthaluvin’ planks of wood with so many expensive sheets of sandpaper (starting with a coarse and ending on a smooth fine) and felt the onset on vibration damage through my arms with the glorious tone of tinitus ringing in my ears.
    I’m not much of a DIY person truth be told, but damn it was satisfying. going from warped, dirty and painty boards so a smooth pine finish with a beautiful grain shining through. The plan was to do my studio room too, but once we began, that was thrown out of the window. It’s a nasty job (I know a man who charges £400 a day to do it) and I wouldn’t do it again in a hurry, but now I have the knowledge, it’s one less thing for me to be afraid of once the apocalypse comes.

  • Twothousandandeight – Don’t be late

    aaaaaaah! the feeling of a freshly laundered year is here again just like clockwork.
    I’m back from America now – I had intended to be up early every morning and type away musing on the oddities of US living while sipping a mug ‘0’ Joe, but before I knew it xmas was done and I was on a plane back to Heathrow. Oh well, it’s the thought that counts.
    Christmas was a quiet affair – Me Debbie and my parents. We ate, drank a little, exchanged gifts (watched were popular this year) and went to the cinema. It seems to have become a tradition of my parents to go to the movies on Christmas day now – they claim it’s because there’s nothing but it’s a Wonderful Life on TV, which I don’t think is a bad thing at all, in fact the first year I visited them in 2001 we went to the glorious Byrd cinema in Cary street, Richmond and watched it’s a wonderful life on the big screen with pre-show carol accompaniment from ‘The Mighty Wurlitzer’! Amazing stuff. This year we watched Sweeny Todd at a muliplex – not quite the same ambience, but I thoughraly enjoyed it none the less. My Mum was convinced until she could see Johnny Depp’s pasty pallour on screen that we must be in the wrong screen because there were too many young people in there. “Don’t they know what it’s about? Do they realise it’s a musical?” I tried to explain that the yoof are loving musicals right now and it’s a Tim Burton / Johnny Depp extravaganza so anyone with a pule will wasnt to see this film on opening weekend over Christmas when there’s nothing on TV, but it fell on deaf ears. My mum did enjoy it too thankfully.

  • Back in the USSA

    After 21 not so long months I find myself back in the Not-so-United-States (which can’t even make their own laws anymore without the feds busting asses) of-Dissary. Oh I mean America.

    I don’t mean to sound so jaded, but it’s barely 7.30 in the morning and I can’t sleep due to jetlag. 

    Yesterday when I really could have just slept into the late morning, both Debbie and I were made to get up and help my parents do the annual leaf clearing mission. Yes they’re my parents and yes it was good to get some exercise and take in some crisp air, and yes we did all feel a great sense of achievement in a battle of man against nature – but for the love of god, I had been up for 24 hours the day before traveling AND this is meant to be a holiday. I don’t really mind though, and we did get to go out for Mexican dinner in the evening (even if I felt the ‘authentic’ enchilada panchita was not a patch on my own anglo version – far too greasy and not enough fresh Cilantro (see I’m in America now). Ok I’m tired grumpy and a snob. but at least I know it.

  • Folicles Nonicles

    Well it finally feels like the shock of the new is wearing off. No, I’m not talking about Contemporary art’s 20th Century rebellion against the bourgeois, I’m talking about my new haircut.
    For those of you that don’t know, I got a haircut last week. No great shakes I hear you cry, but all weekend, if I wasn’t getting blanked, I was making ladies cry and being shunned by hippies. In the middle of last week, I had got so fed up with my overly long unmanageable head of hair I decided I’d stop off at the first barbers I walked to. Normaly I’d go to my wunderbar hair-dresser Lisa (in fact she’s the only person I’d normally let near my locks), but she’s on a four month work placement in Turkey, so no can do.

    I felt I wanted a smart, but still Vagabond cut, in fact I’ve been trying to get a trim in the style of Robert Altman in the Long Goodbye and I’ve long dreamt about walking into a real man’s barber saying ‘like Bob Altman in the Long Goodbye please – the Barber knowing exactly what I mean because it’s one of his favourites and we both wax lyrical about being detectives, cats and good film endings.
    Last Thursday was not to be that day.
    I popped into said ‘first baber I come to’ and pointed at my unruly mess of hair. The young Turk looked afraid (I don’t actually know if he was from Turkey, but due to the reputation of Turkish Barbers he’ll be Turkish just to give the story a spin). I sat in the chair. Between my morning brain and his lack of English, we both agreed that just a trim, or ‘middle size’ was the order of the occasion. However, his tentativeness and confused look led me to say ‘it’s okay – you can make it shorter’….. He grabbed a handful and sliced like a butcher slicing the arse off a cow
    . I let go and resigned myself it’d be short. Ten minutes and a sweet black tea later I was done. my out of control mop was an inch thick and forced combed back all over with an extra long bit at the front. Officially the worst cut I’ve ever had, the saving grace being it only cost 7 pounds Sterling.
    Needless to say I went home and got the clippers out.
    (Thanks to Anna for the artistic representation)
    So Now I’m rocking a grade 4 all over and it feels good. I haven’t had it this short for about 10 years, which means most of my friends now have never seen me without curls, including Debbie my girlfriend. shaving one’s head feels like going incognito, in disguise – there’s no pretensions with a shaved head, people can’t make a snap judgment about character when there’s no style to pin point.     I also think Mord my cat like me more now too.

  • needles

    I had my first ever acupuncture session yesterday, quite by accident (and no this isn’t a euphemism for anything hypodermic). I’ve been having a problem with styes and odd lumps on my eyelids that have come and gone for well over a year now, and the last wonderfully disfiguring bunch have been with me for nearly three months now. My GP has put me on courses of antibiotics, eyesdrops and stuck me on a waiting list to see a ophthalmologist, an appointment that I will recieve notice about in the post. One day. Maybe.


    After a chance meeting with a friend who mentioned that chinese medicine is good with styes I stopped to pick up a leaflet outside of my local oriental herb establishment yesterday and was unwittingly invited in, handed over my details and within 10 minutes I was in a dark room, half naked and with a dozen long needles in my extremities. Apparently I have bad heat energy that is getting trapped in my eyes. Combined with bad circulation, slightly low blood pressure, staring at the computer all day every day and probably some general ju-ju as you get a setting perfect for lumpy eyelids.
    After falling asleep, waking up, removing needles and receiving a massage I was fleeced for lots of money in the aid of a complete course of remidies and walked away with a large plastic bag full of herbs which I am to boil down and knock back twice a day. They are brewing away now and have filled my house with a pungent bitter aroma that reminds me of experiments I performed with ‘Yuba Gold’ legal highs of my youth – thrying to steep an intoxicating tea which invariably tasted gaggingly foul.
    I think this might well taste much worse.

  • better than crack


    AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH! It’s that first sip of ‘espress’ froth from the top of my milky-yet-atomic strength steaming mug of coffee in the morning. I don’t care if it’s an addiction, it’s damn fine.

    That is all.

  • offline

    So this is what life was like before the 90’s?
    This week I have been without the internet. okay, that’s bit of a lie – I’m writing this live and direct on the interweb it is true. What I mean to say is my home broadband has been offline all week, and it looks like it won’t be resolved until the weekend at least. At first I assumed I was to be left redundant in so far as getting any work done.

    How foolish – After the initial shock I realised I could quite easily just pop round the corner to one of my favourite coffeeshops, and do all my emailing there. I have been making a website this week too, which one would think would be nigh on impossible, but no – it just means I have to get as much ready as I can at home and ferry the files on my (t)rusty old powerbook for some wirelss-coffeeshop-ftp-action! I have found that I’m managing my time a little batter as I have no distraction to scan digg, flickr or check my email every 5 minutes as usually happens.
    I now get locked down, do what I have to do and pop to shot in the dark in the afternoon to get my intertubes fix. Saying that, I now find myself leaving and half way up the road remembering what it was I went to do and who I was meant to email!
    Now, if you’ll excuse me – I must get back to my studio and do some work 😀

  • hot meat

    This Summer has been very on and off – for a week or so in May (was it?) the UK enjoyed a week or so of glorious sunshine, and since then it’s been grey or rainy or cold or hailing or a mixture of these changes throughout the day. Yes, it’s been like this all over the world this year – all shook up, but hey that’s the unpredictable fun that is Global Warming™.

    Yesterday, Debbie and I finally got round to inviting folk round , cleaning up the rusty bucket-on-wheels on the garden and having the first BBQ in out new house. It was a small, intimate affair – mostly due to only deciding upon it at the last minute as I was meant to be playing with my man band in Camarthen, but had to pull out of the festival due to our times being changed about so we couldn’t realistically make it. We are however playing at the Buffalo bar in Cardiff on Monday evening and we will make the day of anyone that turns up with a glorious feast of sound to fill the emptiest of souls. yeah.

    I’m not sure what I was going to say about the BBQ other than it was fine. I ate a tasty burger and then fired up my new Shisha pipe with some fresh apple tobacco….mmmmmmm smooth. Everyone did leave quite early though due to hangovers from the previous day, so I still ended up getting an early night, which was something of a disappointment after my visions of inebriated philosophizing waxing lyrical well into the wee hours with close friends. aaaah well – another time maybe.

  • Done to your hair

    Well, I’m into my second week of full-time freelancing, and while it’s had it’s fair share of downs as well as ups, it has been great. Still trying to build up a portfolio of good habits, my ‘getting up at 6.30am’ only really lasted Monday and Tuesday of last week but were then scuppered by a vicious 24-hour period of work when I went to bed as my 6.30 alarm clock went off on Wednesday morning. It’s been 7.30-8 ever since.

    Resisting the temptation to do a bit of shopping or meet for a coffee is hard too, as I always underestimate the chunks of working time it actually takes out of the day. Saying that, a half an hour chat somewhere removed or a stroll to clear the mind can also do wonders for a bit of extra gusto or to dislodge a glob of stuck ideas.

    However, being able to be master of my time in the day is great, and having a full week in which projects (or a number ofdifferent jobs) can be planned out and tackled head on, without hoping to rely on evenings, weekends and time when I fell I’m meant to be taking time out, or at least reading up and researching ideas, not slaving away in front of the screen.

    Slaving in front of the computer screen has left me a little worse for wear of late – for about a year now, I have noticed that too many late nights clickety clicking away staring at pixels leaves me with sty’s in my eyelids. These have varied in severity and frequency, but do seem to be linked to my being run down. My week away in Egypt seemed to confirm this as while lazing by the poolside and snorkling with tropical fish were my only responsibilities for seven days, my eyes were better than new. As soon as I started back to work however, I earned two lumps on my left eyelid that have now become permanent fixtures. My all-nighter on Tuesday has also left me scarred. I thought I was developing the inevitable little sty on the Thursday, which has now got infected somehow and my lid is puffed up all red and sore. I’m on antibiotics.

    This on it’s own wouldn’t be so bad, but why on earth is it when I turn on radio6 I seem to catch the new Manic Street Preachers song? what deal have 6music done with the devil for chris’sakes? with the chorus so passionately asking “baby what have you done with your hair?” and a guitar solo that sounds like a pastiche of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular bells during the part when after going through the instruments being synthesised gets to ‘ELECTRIC GUITAR!”. If this was meant to be a big glam joke song, nodding to Queen and Tubular Bells I think it might have a place in my heart, but I fear it’s a piece of shit poo’d out by a sorry bunch of middle age ‘rockers’ after a late night out on three pints of S.A.Gold. They were a fun band to throw yourself about to fifteen years ago. Time Gentlemen!

    Aha! and back to computer screens – the new iMac . It’s nice and yes, of course I’d like one, but what I’ve been thinking is – I have a G5 imac which is my main workhorse now, and it does a good job, I do find some things lagging behind and when I can I will no doubt upgrade. I don’t want to throw the computer away, and yes I’ll probably hand it onto my girlfriend, or someone in the family, or just keep it as an interent/business machine, but what I’d really like would be to be able to link it to a new iMac and not only use it as a second moniter, but also use the hard drive space, RAM and maybe even kick in the processor to share the work load. Essentialy the iMac range of computers as a modular system fitting together as you wish. Buying a new iMac could be an upgrade to a system, not a whole new stand-alone machine.

    It is this lack of being able to re-use the monitor for instance which is what will probably lead me to buy a tower when I am next in the market for a desktop (which won’t be for a few years yet – I’m more likely to get a laptop). But damn! it’s true those new machines sure are purty. Now all I have to do is wait for new ipods (that I will be getting. The sucker that I am).

  • Clawing and Biting

    Egads! it’s been well over a month since my last posting here, and I guess a fair amount has been happening in my life and the world generally (the crazy flood weather, I went to Egypt for a holiday, my friends are all still getting married left right and centre, and Mord the cat still keeps puking up at 5 in the morning every few days). I still concede that there are still not enough hours in the days though – this factor plays quite a role in the reasons why I haven’t been bloggin’ my mind recently. Of course, poor time management probably plays a bigger role in this failure along with my inevitable oncoming psychosis.

    I must confess – the last month is now a blur of thoughts which frustrates me somewhat seeing as when I’ve been having the odd epiphany here and there , I’ve been aching to write it down here, but due to the afore-mentioned issues it falls to the wayside – I’m bound to have some time over the weekend I foolishly think, or on the sofa of an evening or indeed get into the routine I long for – getting up with the birds and preparing the day before it begins. This is where I am now I’m pleased to say.

    Today I begin my full-time freelance life working from home. I’ve just finished a 3 month placement at RoughCollie working on an exciting cartoon project and really getting a feel for the studio life and managing workflow (read dedication and putting the hours in). Unfortunately they don’t really have room for one more so I’ve taken this current juncture to do what I’ve wanted to do for a while – give freelancing a go on a full-time scale. I’ve been working freelance for about 5 years now, but always along aside a part-time job and doing my projects on two week days and evenings and weekends which always left me unsatisfied – it meant I couldn’t really knuckle down to a job in those few days around my day job and I had no time to progress any of my more personal projects.
    I’m hoping I’ll be able to treat this phase in a more business-like manner, working an essentially 9-6 job (not including the odd inevitable late night) and actually be able to get on top of those projects that while might not be well paid just need to be done, and Cleaning that slate will be so satisfying, and I know that if this doesn’t quite work out in a few months I’ll be back buried in job pages. This means I’m going to have to work to get the work coming in regularly and have my finances tip-top (shudder). This is where I long for the ability to bring another person on board to help – an ideal set-up would be like sweet or build where one of us does ‘the business’ and the other ‘does design’. I know that these particular examples are a million miles higher than my current league, but what’s the harm in dreaming? For now it’s me and the cat. As long as he doesn’t try and make the coffee It’ll be okay.

  • salad days

    I don’t know what it is with the Autumn, but there’s something in the air that means an astonishing number of Birthdays in May and June, I guess it’s the realisation of the cold winter months approaching that makes folk need to cuddle more? I’m not complaining, but so many people I know have birthdays this time of year, it’s hard to keep tabs on it all. Anyway – Happy Birthday if you’re a Summer Flower (or something).

    I traveled down to Devon a few days ago to see an old friend I hadn’t seen for well over five years (I had been invited to her Birthday), and it was great to get out of the city and into the country for an evening – some quality peaceful downtime. Anyway, since I last saw here, she’s had two children – lovely boys, full of beans and she’s doing very well with them. However, it seemed so many other parents of my age came out of the woodwork that weekend and there were children everywhere. Now, I’m well aware that I’m ‘of that age’, but there’s nothing like a field full of little ‘uns to bring it home. Talking of bringing it home, I visited some other friends down the road that brought home their new baby a couple of weeks ago. I had thought that the switch between reckless, wide-eyed person and responsible ‘grown up’ adult was having a baby. I still think it’s true, but I’m beginning to wonder if that’s all such a bad thing, after all we’ve all got to take total responsibility for ourselves at some point and nothing makes you do that quite like producing some offspring. Maybe the Summer is making me broody.

    If it’s not babies, loads of my friends have got engaged or have agreed on dates to tie the knot! I think it’s great, and indeed I get a bit misty eyed thinking of all the love in the world, wonder what it’d be like to have my own big celebration with a big cake, big drinks and big dresses (ahem), but that’s not the point – again it’s a wake up call that I’m not getting any younger and that it’s the norm now be going to friend’s weddings, having babies and finding oneself with a mortgage. Of course, it’s no great surprise, I just thought all these things would never happen to me, and now I’ve arrived, it’s not at all as horrific as imagined. It might actually be great fun.

  • don’t fade away

    It’s sad that in order for everyone to meet up in solidarity, warmth and a common bond, to catch up with long lost relatives, friends you haven’t seen for decades (or in fact an excuse for a good old chin wag with good friends that live round the corner, but you never normally manage to find the time), something tragic has to happen.

    It seems there’s nothing quite like a wake to bring people together. To drown sorrows like they’ve never been drowned before, to intoxicate beyond grief into a renewed optimism and gusto for life. Monday I attended a memorial service and wake for someone who I wouldn’t necessarily consider a close friend, but he was an acquaintance and a member of a wider circle of friends, and I know how much he meant to so many people I would call good friends. There was never any animosity between us, I just think we didn’t ever hit it off only because we never got past pleasantries when seeing each other out and about. Friendly hellos, and nothing more. I’d always think “Damn I’d really love to get an opportunity to sit down and chew the fat with that man” as everyone only had good things to say about him, but in this case I think our mutual level of weariness-cum-shyness got in the way of that ever happening.
    Having been aware of his artwork and skills since moving to Cardiff, I respected what he did and after all – we were in the same business, so often his graphics and ideas would spur me on and push me a little more.
    He had a magnificent send-off and the days proceedings were certainly a celebration of all the things he did by the people he touched, with some truly passionate speeches by his loved ones who have been so strong. I know it’s the cheesiest thing to say, but all this has really hit it home hard that you only know what you’ve got when it’s gone. I’m learning to appreciate my friends and every waking moment I’m blessed with more than ever. I’ll be watching myself from now on and fighting not to give into apathy when invited to go out, to grab new opportunities by the scruff of the neck when they arise and stop thinking ‘there’ll be other opportunities’, because there might not well be another day ahead. It’s this life that’s for living, in the now.

  • life and loss

    As I was leaving Allen’s Bakery this morning (Allen’s is a glorious place hidden in an alley way in darkest Roath, Cardiff with an old Victorian oven and fresh organic breads, ciabatta and pastries.yum) I was stopped by an elderly gentleman, in his 80’s. I’ve seen him getting a morning pastie from there before, but today he stopped me and asked me what I thought the nature of reality is. A bit dumbstruck, I answered in a nonchalant way that there is no reality, only our perception of it. Luckily, he seemed pleasantly surprised by this answer and launched into his views on how this life and that to love are the only reality. That the creator of the universe creates with only love and as humans we need to understand this concept or we will never progress to a new reality, but instead be stuck in a perpetual loop, not getting anywhere. I told him I agreed and his eyes lit up – He referred to governments as the controllers, and that it upsets him greatly that in his late years, nobody ever seems to learn from history, and if anyone questions – then they will be silenced. His Afro-Carribean accent and deep rumbling cadence assured me that he spoke from experience and held a refined wisdom. Then he thanked me for listening and got into his 1970’s Mercedes Benz, and I walked home.

    It’s moments like these that feel almost so unreal you know they must be real. It seemed timely to talk like this – only last night I was thinking about the terrible loss of Jon Clee, a popular face around Cardiff, and part of the foundation of the music and design scene here. His work has adorned album covers and club posters since I moved here over 8 years ago, and I know many people who were so close to him, and loved him dearly. The reality of how his passing has affected so many people dear to me, and the wake up call everybody seems to have had from it moved me to uncontrolled sobbing last night, the first release I’ve had all week, and been needing to have since I heard the news. Although I didn’t know him that well (he was someone I’d been introduced to, and we’d exchange pleasantries when out and about) his death seems to have really shuck me deep down. It’s made me look at my life and friends and my attitude to living and made clear that it’s so important to live each day like it’s your last and to love your friends and family so wholeheartedly because when all is said and done they are all you have in this world (and they will be the ones to shape your memory when you leave this reality).

  • werking and Conning

    Again I feel I need to begin this entry by aplogising for not updating my blog enough – crazy really because I doubt anybody reads it ever – but to just make sure they don’t I’ve added the google analytics thingy to it.

    the last few weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind really – started a work placement at rouchcollie a few weeks ago to hrelp out on projects in any way I can with my limited skills and with any luck get to tr my hand at After Effects and Cinema 4D on real projects and for it to give me enough momentum to carry it on! along aside that I had been finishing off a few freelance project – not least doing some marketing materials for the moviemogulfund which is begining to take off – and is in Cannes all next week. I’m not going unfortunately, maybe next year eh? I’ve also been working on graphics and brochure for the Hay fringe festival, a community run festival that runs along aside the main hay literary festival in Hay-on-Wye funnily enough. It’s been a last minute rush on both of these projects meaning 15 hour days and late late nights (it’s been a shock to my pussy-footin’ system ), despite me promising myself and my long suffering girlfriend that I wouldn’t leave it until the last minute. Pah! where would the fun be then?

    A couple of weeks ago I went to see Bobby Conn play in town! I love the chap – it’s the pompus-glam orchestration mixed with end-days paranoia that makes it for me. I took my good friend Jon along for the ride and he loved it to bits. It began a little awkwardly: the place was half empty (half full) and when the band came on, Bobby looked a bit ‘oh great – nobody here, what the hell’ and they raced through nearly the whole of the new album with no chit-chat as if in dire desperation to kill this gig asap. However, after the forced encore they cam back on with a hell of a lot more gusto about them, maybe the first half had made them sad because the front-mans wife was looking after their newborn, rathe than playing rock-violin in South Wales. whatever it was it was banished and the second half was blinding! And yes – I got my photo taken with the chap. he does look a tad terrified, and I do look rather gormless, but that’s rock and roll. Isn’t it?

  • Homey-oh! Path

    This time last week I was pretty much caffeine free and in the throes of a psychological and emotional purging. One may have enhanced the other, I’m not too sure, all I know is that I’m back with the drug I love (caffeine, although not to extent I was) and I’m still feeling the effects of my sea-change last week.

    What gave me a second wind came in the form of three tiny tiny pills based around compounds extracted from plants and had some truly mind-manifesting effects. What’s more it was 100% legal!
    I had tried homeopathy many moons ago when I was about 10 to try and cure my asthma. it seemed to me then to be relatively orthodox – I was tested for allergies, my diet was watched and I was given a huge course of pills to take over months. The experiment was stopped short however when my school doctor caught wind of this and threw my precious stash away saying this isn’t how we do things in this day and age’. since then my ‘remedies’ have consisted of the occasional dose of rescue remedy dropped onto the tongue when feeling peaky.

    A few weeks ago I went to see my homeopathy doctor and had an hour long chat about what ails me. There’s nothing properly wrong – I’ve jut finished an intensive course fuelled by late nights and Debbie felt I might need some direction and de-stressing, so she packed me off for a consultation. It felt more like a counseling session and I felt with a slight weight off my shoulders. A few weeks later my package arrived. three small sugar pills with instructions – one at night, the following morning and at night again – a short sharp dose.

    that night I had the deepest sleep I could remember, followed by me oversleeping to some very vivid dreams based where I grew up, meeting up with old friends. That day I was dazed and light headed, but suprisingly contemplative. I was also quite short tempered and not afraid to be argumentative from an unusually subjective stance. I was also breaking out in pimples.
    the next day I awoke from an equally deep sleep to the sound of the cats fighting, and went back to sleep to some vivid cat dreams, in an almost feverish state over and over again in my head. I eventually dragged myself out of bed feeling more calm and collected than I had in along time – then I began to cry uncontrollably – not happy or sad, just an outpouring of raw emotion. all very odd.

    Since this episode I have been feeling a lot more focused and able to see things from a wider perspective, I’m also a lot more opinionated, and know what I want, which can only be good considering how numb to my own opinions I had become.

    All very psychedelic, and not at all what I was expecting. People usually see homeopathy as a rather benign medicine, and I had always considered it to be more physical – meaning for ailments of the body. I had never thought it to be quite so mind altering.
    Either that or my homeopathy doctor is a which!

  • cafeeeeeeeeeeeeeine

    Well, maybe my last post was a tad reactionary and off the cuff, but I had given drinking coffee this week in a vain attempt to quit caffeine, but ended up drinking loads of tea for the first few days, but today all I’ve had so far is a couple of cups of DECAFFEINATED coffee.

    I never thought I’d stoop so low as to have to start drinking decaf, but desperation has got the better of me. It tastes good, and I think it might be fooling my brain into submission (you’d have though caffeine was crack the way I’ve been climbing the walls the past few days).

    So, it’s Easter weekend! hopefully I can celebrate the coming of Spring with some fertility rites (you don’t honestly believe Easter originated due to biblical stories do you)? it’s a big spring festival all about reproducing (the eggs) and Female fertility (Estre – Estrogen – Easter). so bring on the chocolate bunny – I needs feeding!

  • Sprung

    Well well well, I’ve finished my 6 month post-grad-dip at dimension 10, and now I’ve got a few freelance projects bubbling away for the next month which is rather exciting. I’m meeting someone tonight to hopefully get placed on a work attachment with their company and learn my mystical ways of the motion graphics ninja! So, Spring is springing and Debbie (my girlfriend) and I have a cat called Mord, we’ve bought a house (soon to be redecorated) and things are generally good. Things would no doubt be better if there was actually 36 hours in the day and not 24, but hey – whach’ya gonna do?

    A few things have been getting my goat this week. First off the marines who got lost and ended up getting caught by Iran. Yes, I’m sure Iran could have said ‘oh dear, looks like you drifted a few meters, go on your way now’ and we would have had done with it, but what would America or the UK have done? ‘It’s Guantanamo for you kids – hope you like sleep deprivation, torture and no right to trial!’Everyone keeps harping on about how terrible it is their being so poorly treated and humiliated. The TV clips show them having a smoke, eating dinner together and being allowed to tell the world they haven’t been locked in a concrete cell without toilet access or stripped naked and had the dogs unleashed on them. Poor souls. They joined the army for a bit of excitement, some focus in their lives and to see foreign lands – what’s the problem?

    Another thing is this. A few (well maybe ten) years ago the independent on Sunday ran a long long campaign to try and get Cannabis legalised, with many high profile celebrities and politicians pushing the cause. This was great news for pot-heads across the land, finally the debate had begun and was being delt with seriously and with some dignity. a few years later, I think it was 98, or 99 a huge rally in London show in numbers the smokers view on the matter and in 2003 Cannabis was downgradded from class B to C, making a barely recognisable offense. “Huzzah” shout the UK’s dope-fiends as the rest of the world also seems to be slowly shifting their Dope laws (surprisingly enough most rapidly in America it seems). Now a couple of weeks ago the Independent on Sunday issued an apology on their weed views and have decided to U-turn, claiming that the weed smoked today is up to 25 – 30 times stronger than it was only a decade ago! Who makes up this shit? I remember reading the original pro pot paper at a time when I was just discovering the demon weed after a stop over in Amsterdam and tried some original ‘Skunk #1’. It did indeed blow my mind every which way – yes it was strong, but later I discovered it’s possible to get hold of weaker stuff if you want it. for a long time, hash ,or what is meant to resemble it that is sold in the UK (soapbar) was my smoking staple, until I realised it was cut and bulked up with god knows what, causing me and friends to have to stop smoking it as it had got so bad in the late Ninties, it felt like we were being spiked with nasty, tranquilisers and psychosis inducing chemicals – it was dirty stuff. We started smoking weed – the purer and stronger the better. The ‘indy’ claims that kids have no choice but to smoke the super-strong skunk (and when will newspapers realise that skunk is only a particular hybrid, not a general class of drug?) They only don’t have a choice because the fact that it is illegal means there can be no choice, no quality control, no informed discussion or decisions!
    Anyway, were was I? oh yes – the paper on Sunday April 1st – I went to buy a paper – the Observer was sports monthly, so I didn’t bother, and the Independent had ‘Skunk turned my son into a Monster” on the front page. It strikes me that the Independent is turning more and more into the Daily Mail each day. How is anyone going to take that sort of reactionary headline seriously except people who don’t know better? Shameful!

  • Glaswegian kiss

    Och aye! I traveled up to Glasgow last week with my friends the Panacea Society for a gig at the National Review of Live art. It was great fun – I was doing the visuals for the band and got to hang out with some lovely people including my old college chum Richard.
    Glasgow seemed to be a lovely city with beautiful art Nouveau and Deco styling on the old buildings. In some ways it reminded me of some North American cities with it’s huge square shop fronts and deep red brick.
    I even brought back some vegetarian haggis which was delicious with potatoes and peas!

  • oh seven

    In this coming week I’ll be busy moving house and looking forward to the shiny new year that is 2007.
    Going against my grain of previous years, I’m attempting to make some resolutions for the coming 12 months…

    • I’m going to become vegetarian again. I’ve recently found myself getting greedy on the flesh front in a way that would make Buddha weep. However given my new found taste for dead animals I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to stick at it.

    • Get back to the analogue – emails are out and hand written letters are in as far as I’m concerned. Bin the DAB and get out the shortwave tuner, Quit Illustrator and crack open the Indian ink. Ok, so this is mostly hyperbole, but I worry about putting too much faith in bits rather than atoms.

    • Remember how to breathe properly. It’s all in the lower lung apparently

    I could go on but I won’t, my tea is getting cold…

  • Traaaaaaaas

    A week ago I shot, cut and sent off my entry to the Radar Festival. I doubt I’ve a Rat asses chance in hell of getting anywhere with it, but I’d be kicking myself if I didn’t at least try. Admittedly I had all Summer to make this, but the deadline got extended, I started college and forgot about it until a week before it had to be in and I got a reminder email from them. So I hired a sports-cam from the amazing boys at Widelode , and filmed me cycling about for a few hours until I almost crashed into a bewildered pedestrian and fell head over hells off my bike, riping the cable from the back of the camera -oops, my bad. So with limited footage, I spent two 7-hour nights cutting it up. I was hoping to treat the footage a bit and colour it – get it all shiny like, but just didn’t have time. In a way I’m glad – I like the lo-fi feel of it, it links in well with the ruffness of the tune, and if I had spent all Summer editing it, it may have been knitted to death as my high school Art teacher would say. I hope you like it!

  • Rock, Paper, Saddam


    Saddam Hussein: Sentenced to death for the 1982 killings of 148 Iraqi people in the town of Dujail.

    G.W. Bush: President of the most powerful nation on earth after presiding over an illegal war based on lies that has killed over 650,000 Iraqi civilians.

    He was a murderous, nasty and often down right crazy leader (shooting relatives over dinner because they didn’t agree with him kind of nuts), but lets face it – you need one hell of an insane mofo to keep Iraq in order without it falling into tribal and civil war – look what’s happening there right now I’m suprised the US didn’t ask him to get back into power after the mess they’ve made. Before Saddam was captured, I used to have a re-occuring dream in which all the world’s leaders were at a dinner party (I’ve no idea why I was invited), Tony, Bush and Hussain were always there, and Saddam was the life and soul of the party – well read and full of wisecracks. A lovable rogue. As the US government used to call him in the 80’s.

  • animal emotion

    I just read this article on whether or not pets and animals in general have emotions and consciousness. Is it just me or is that not absurd? not the fact that animals have awareness of themselves and others around them, but that some people find it so hard to imagine that humans might not such a separate entity after all. I think it’s just something that I’ve always taken for granted – that animals have just as acute understanding of pain, loss, confusion, love and communication, but it’s obviously not in a form that humans totally understand – it doesn’t make it any less valid, it’s just different. I don’t see why humans have such a monopoly on being any more complex than anything else on this planet.

    It kind Reminds me of an incident a few years back when a friend of mine got stopped and was asked why he was vegetarian – my friend didn’t really know what to say until a barrage of ‘You know animals don’t have spirits, they don’t understand or feel anything’ only humans have souls and Jesus and can yours…’.

    Humans eh? think they’re god’s special children with a right to selfishly command over all that we think we own. I can’t wait until the shit hits the fan and everyone no matter which version of god they believe in, no matter if they’re the good guys or the baddies – everything finally gets put into perspective and our insignificance in the grand scheme of things smacks humanity into a paradigm shift that turns all the blinkered minds into a delicious neuron smoothie.

    Please excuse me, I’ve been canning the beechams powders all week. I may have become a little unhinged.

  • Idiots

    I’ve been off school with a flu type thing all week, and so have rarely ventured out of the house. Yesterday, I popped to Abdul’s (the corner shop by our house) to pick up some washing up liquid only to walk into a crime scene… A Policeman, Abdul, his wife and one shopper who witnessed the event – Some twat stole the charity box you see. We all watched the CCTV footage and saw the criminal distracting Abdul’s wife so he could half-inch the tower of change. Idiot.

  • Fight

    Over the weekend I travelled down to Bracknell (between Reading and Slough) to take photos of a Kickboxing Tournament called “Armageddon”. I went down with the Widelode boys as they were making a DVD of the event and needed a photographer, So I donned my photographers pants and had a quick round of Streetfighter2 on my gameboy before leaving the house.
    It was an interesting and fascinating day out, and I was suprised how into it I got – not necissarily the fighting, but the aesthetics of the fighters and their moves. The children fights suprise me, as did the ‘Mai Tai’ no holds barred full contact with elbows and knees fights. the ringside seats were litterally blood splattered by the end of the night.
    I’ve put some pics up on my Flickr Account, and might add some more over the next few days.

  • me and the doctor!

    Well well. For some bizzaro reason I recieved an invite to the torchwoood premiere in Cardiff Bay last night. It was quite a funny scenario with a whole host of fellow reprobates I know huddled about drinking far too much free wine and eating mini food off trays – the mini fist-sized chipolata bangers and mash was crazy like.
    The actual showing of the first episode was interesting – the actors who play the ‘torchwood’ team were sat in the row behind me whooping and giggling like over-excited kerayzees and the GLC sat to my right (Egsy told me he had a jazz cigarette beforhand to get him in the best zone possible).

    Torchwood was much better than I thought it would be – I’d seen a trailer on TV and to be honest it looked a bit too try hard and overly overtly ‘set in Cardiff’. A fact which it has no shame in (and quite rightly) but the constant self refrencing and the line ‘so why are you in Cardiff’ and cardiff this and that all gets a bit embarressing at times, but in the excitment of watching it for the first time in the same room as David Tenant and Billie Piper I didn’t mind too much, siting at home on the sofa however I might start getting shouty. there’s blood, running, it’s funny, there’s a bit of swearing and it does look really good.

    So, right now I reckon Torchwood might be worth a watch, and besides I got to meet the doctor!

  • 10th dimension

    Well my internationally renowned and top rated blog has admittedly been on the back burner for a while, but I’ve been busy in the real world, only to spend more time in online funnily enough.
    I’ve just started an Interactive media post graduate course with CYFLE so I’m currently going bloggin’ crazy! – I’ve set this up for the man band I’ve joined – WastonBowersandFinch and now I’ve got a ‘working’ blog to write down notes and tit bits for ‘Dimension10’ or ‘D10’ – the course I’m doing. I’m not sure why it’s called Dimension10. There are 10 people doing the course – so that makes sense, and I guess it’s kind of futuristic making interactive multimedia things, but I still can’t see dead people or astral project – unless that’s next week.

  • Dead Animal Round up

    Well I’ve been in a whirlwind of change and busy-ness the last few weeks – and no bloggin action has taken place! I was going to write a blog about my worry over what forms my blog should take – should it be an emptying of my heart? A soapbox for my politcal thoughts? a day by day account of things I do? I couldn’t come to any rational decision on this, so decided to make it whatever I damn well feel like when I get round to adding to it OKAY? good.

    Ahem – where was I? oh yes – dead animal time!
    First up is a dead dog I saw on my way to work. I had forgotten my glasses so actually thought this to be a real dog untill I got closer (it’s the tongue hanging out of it’s mouth that gives away it’s deadness).

    However I have been finding dead birds in the garden. I don’t think Mr. Ruddock has caught them as if he catches something, he’ll usually display it for us as a gift. Debbie and I reckon it’s the newly errected mobile phone mast just beyond our garden – I’m sure I read somewhere that everytime a mobile phonecall makes a connection, that burst of electro-magnetic radiation can knock some bird’s radar out, sometimes killing them. remember – everytime you pick up a call, you kill a sparrow.

  • KIT no KAT


    Well there I was – fending off a mid-afternoon pang of choco need, so I popped down to the cornershop, and bought myself a KITKAT. I always feel a bit guilty buying them because Nestle apparently rape babies (RAPE BABIES I TELLS YA!) but they do taste good. Just that right balance between chocolate and wafer.
    NOT THIS TIME! I got all Kit (the chocolate) without any KAT (the wafer). I was shocked and amused – at first anyway, I mean it’s not everyday this sort of wonder happens is it? I ate the first finger, assuming all would be normal on the second, but AGAIN! it was solid chocolate. I then took a photo about half way through before finishing it off. I was going to save the last two fingers to send back to nestle, but I got hungry a bit later on and ate them too. I’ll probably still send them the wrapper and an angry letter of course.

  • weeky

    The weekend, it came and went – Ian and Heather had a birthday party on Friday night at Buffalo – it started swinging, but what with gatecrashers ahoy and muscling in DJ’s with shit records, it turned a tad dull – so much so the birthday boy and lady left before anyone else.
    Saturday I tried to do some work but technology got in my way. 6 hours wasted and I went to a HRH Queen Elizabeth styled tea party. Very tasty with scones, cucumber sandwiches and Pimms. Lots of Pimms.
    Sunday I felt a touch broken and lacklustre. Debbie was feeling the blues and we spent the day tidying the house and doing supermarket shopping.
    Meh.
    My toe hurts less now though – so it’s not broken, just a tad kaput.

  • Achy Breaky Toe

    Well it is my fault. I was attempting to play Rounders bare footed last night and during the furore of the game, I slipped and felt my big toe bend down. It hurt, but brushed it off as an awkward bruise, but it didn’t stop paining all last night and today I can barely walk – hobbling about all limpy.
    Darn it.

  • The Great Outdoors

    During my mid-week jaunt into town this afteroon I discovered that the open air market is closing down for three years while the city centre gets it’s millions of pounds worth of makeover. It’s a sad shame – it was one of those places you could get a bag of veg for few quid and made town feel that little bit more effortlessly cosmopolitan. ahh well.

    If you don’t know where I’m talking about it’s this bit in Doctor Who