Is Kaki King a guitar god or not? The really interesting thing about music and other art is that we as viewers get to spin off in a multitude of directions and the real answer is that all of those opinions are correct and valid. There is no right answer to the musical question – there are only opinions about who we like better at the time.

I wrote this post as a comment after watching the video below.

“Kaki King, the first female on Rolling Stone’s “guitar god” list, rocks out to a full live set at TED2008, including her breakout single, “Playing with Pink Noise.” Jaw-dropping virtuosity meets a guitar technique that truly stands out.”

I once watched Leo Kottke in concert and while he is technically brilliant for me it was kind of sterile and neither the music nor the songs connected with me. Kaki is clearly one to watch as she is youngish and by the sound of it has some new music since this performance.

I have seen other virtuoso players before and so maybe this is not so surprising as it is to those for whom this style is a new thing.

Technical excellence is a great starting point for a musical conversation. Last year I watched Rufus Wainwright in concert and

I wanted him to hit some wrong notes so I knew I wasn’t watching a hologram.

He did make some connections but sometimes he was just playing the piano (fantastically well.) I was there for the songs – & not the tricks. That video eye thing in the first half was a bit much and the Elizabethan dress was OTT but we never got a good look at it really.

Regarding Rufus – his concert was gobsmacking nonetheless and his new album Out of the Game is his best yet – but I digress.

When we listen to music the brain makes instant associations and connections with our prior experiences so we all come to new musical experiences with our own filters & comparisons. That is how we are wired. Daniel Kahneman and Daniel Levitin have great research into this type of thinking.

Kakis mentor Preston Reed would say he is influenced by John Fahy & others who are largely forgotten by the music business. It seems surprising that no one has mentioned Bruce Cockburn who has been playing for 50 years now and is famous not because of his guitar style which is impressive but because he has written songs that make meaningful connections with many. ( Below is Bruce with Ali Farka Toure)

I’m personally more of a blues fan and that is a great clip. BTW Ali Farka Toure made 76 on the list. Bruce didn’t make any of these lists but is a personal favourite of mine – I actually got to have dinner with him a long time ago so that was a bonus.

There are other RS lists and Bonnie Raitt ( “Hello I’m the 89th best guitarist in the world” sounds more like a line from a future episode of Flight of the Conchords.

Musicianship is not really a competition and those lists by magazines are just easy ways to write a story that the magazine can sell ads around. I did have a look at a list of the “100 greatest guitarists of all time” on Rolling Stone and was amused to see that Joni Mitchell came in at 72 and Joan Jett was at # 87 (the only women in the list) – all of which tells us more about Rolling Stone than it does about music.

Joe Sullivan thought so to. Robert Johnson at 71 is just plain wrong.

Obviously the guy making the list never saw Jennifer Precious Finch play in L7 and there are many other female guitarists who should be on these lists but they are mostly only good for Bill & Ted style pub quizzes.

In my book Joni Mitchell’s work with open tunings and with Jaco Pastorius in particular marked her as a standout on any list. I had the very great pleasure of hearing Jaco play live but according to her wikipedia entry Joni is now

“A blunt critic of the music industry, Mitchell quit touring and released her 17th, and reportedly last, album of original songs in 2007. Now based in British Columbia, she describes herself as a “painter derailed by circumstance.”[6]

Is Kaki anywhere on that scale? Not in my view but she is one to watch as the video above dates from 2008. Enjoy.

There are not many ( if any) lists of ”painters derailed by circumstance” but there are a lot of other lists. Here is a top 15 acoustic guitar  players list (video.) More context for Kaki whose tapping is really not that unusual when seen in this group – she is #11 on this list.

(On this acoustic guitar list: Petteri Sariola 15. Kotaro Oshio 14. Justin King 13. Erik Mongrain 12. Kaki King 11. Peppino D’Agostino 10. Antoine Dufour 9. Andy Mckee 8. Stephen Bennett 7. Steven King 6. Don Ross 5. Chet Atkins 4. Lenny Breau 3. Tommy Emmanuel 2. Michael Hedges 1.)

The parliamentary elections in NZ last year will be remembered for having the lowest voter turnout since 1887

At the time a lot of commentators opined that this was the result of Labour Party voters staying away in droves because they knew they couldn’t beat John Key & the Nats.

“A total of 3,070,847 people were registered to vote in the election, with over 2.2 million votes cast and a turnout of 74.21%^[4] – the lowest turnout since 1887.^[5] The incumbent National Party, led by John Key, gained the plurality with 47.3% of the party vote and 59 seats, two seats short of holding a majority.”

Except that low voter turnout and “too close to call” elections are also happening in the UK, Australia and other places. Political parties now are so au fait with focus groups and polling that they have swapped a genuine passion for change and inclusive public policy thinking for facsimile results and so end up holding cardboard elections.

Many voters see through the card board characters and have lost faith in the voting process.

Somehow PM John Key has interpreted this as a big win* and is now proceeding on an idealogical path of asset stripping and other exploitation of natural resources.

Have a look at Partial privatisation numbers ‘don’t add up’

“Sustento director and economist Raf Manji said. It was admirable for the Government to lower debt, but the numbers around selling stakes in energy firms to do so did not add up, he said.

New Zealand debt servicing was at record lows and the energy firms were trading well, returning between 5 and 11 per cent, he said. It looked like the nation was heading into a prolonged period of low interest rates, he said.

“It’s never been so cheap for the Government to borrow money and the demand for Kiwi debt has never been higher. If the New Zealand Government was a business, there would be absolutely no reason why it would be selling.”

Diluting the public’s hold on the firms would risk lower investment in power generation infrastructure and higher prices, he said. No more important public good existed than energy, as it was essential to people and businesses, so it was dangerous to raise the firm’s focus on profits.”

Rafs Sustento website is over here and he is on twitter here @rafmanji

One Big Voice would be very useful in helping to change the governments mind about those asset sales. I’m old enough to remember Capital Markets and the BNZ fiasco / bailout.

Shortly after that the heroes scurried off to Switzerland to roll around in the cash they got from the NZ government. It is another story for another day but please excuse me when I say John Key is a former money market trader and a leopard does not changes its spots.

“1989: Government reduces its share to 51% by selling 34%; with 30% sold to Capital Markets Ltd, and the remainder to the general public”

It is time to make politicians accountable.

What to do about this?

A local Grey Lynn based project is helping to make it easier to to make your elected representative more transparent, accountable and responsive to you, the people that put them in power. It is called One Big Voice and it represents a new way for citizens to show politicians what we really care about.

“Have you ever felt you weren’t being listened to?

Governments have vast economic and political resources which means they set the agenda. The average citizen on the other hand has one vote, no real voice and few other ways to exert any influence over what goes on in the world. In short, if you don’t have the means to make yourself heard your needs are often overlooked or ignored altogether.

That just doesn’t seem fair to us so we’re on a mission to help place the power to shape the world back into the hands of the people. Yep, we know it’s a ridiculously grandiose ambition but we really want to help make the world a better place to be for everyone.

To get the ball rolling we’ve chosen to focus on improving the quality of communication between voters and their elected representatives.”

or you can watch the video below.

The team says

“We’ve researched our idea, figured out how to make it work and finally we’re at the stage where it’s ready to build. So far we’ve donated our time for free, that’s what you do with love projects, but to develop it further and start coding in earnest we need financial support.”

Pop on over the One Big Voice page on indiegogo and login with your Facebook id to get involved.

You can find OBV on twitter at  @oneBIGvoice or on http://www.facebook.com/oneBIGvoice

P.S Your question is- OBV looks just like Standup which is another excellent changemakers project They also would love your support as they need to find a new name for Standup.

“we believe we can come up with an even more descriptive and unique name for our organisation using ‘the power of the crowd’ Feeling creative? Suggest some other names for us>>> Help us choose a cool new name ”

What if David Attenborough could sing? How about Stephen Hawking? Brian Cox? Well thanks to John Boswell at Symphony of Science they can and the results are surprising, delightful, educational and musically inventive.

When my daughter was younger we watched hours of Attenborough to the point that she talked about David as if he were a member of the family. We replaced TV time with documentary time instead and we still watch plenty of docus today from TED and other sources.

Of course it would be just wrong not to watch Big Band Theory but we have the DVD’s right next to our Flight of the Conchords DVDs because they are very much mockumentaries in our world.

As brain researchers uncover more about the brain and learning we discover from Donald Ford in an article called How the Brain Learns”

“What does this neuroscience research suggest about learning?

We need to ensure that learning engages all the senses and taps the emotional side of the brain, through methods like humor, storytelling, group activities and games. Emphasis on the rational and logical alone does not produce powerful memories.

A third recent discovery at the University of Michigan’s Biopsychology Program confirmed that the brain behaves selectively about how it processes experiences that enter through our five senses. The brain is programmed to pay special attention to any experience that is novel or unusual. It does this by making comparisons between the new information brought through the senses and existing information stored in our brain’s long-term memory. When the brain finds a match, it will quickly eliminate the new memory as redundant.

When new information contradicts what’s already stored in memory, however, our brains go into overdrive, working hard to explain the discrepancy. If the new information proves useful to us, it becomes a permanent memory that can be retrieved later. If this new information does not seem useful or if we do not trust its source, we are likely to forget it or even reject it altogether, preferring to stick with the information we already possess.

Since learning inherently requires acquisition of new information, our brains’ propensity to focus on the novel and forget the redundant makes it a natural learning ally.

In fact, our brains are hard wired to learn, from the moment we are born. Our native curiosity is driven by our brain’s inherent search for the unusual in our environment. “

Ok lets skip to the video now – so here you are…

“[David Attenborough]
All life is related
And it enables us to construct with confidence
The complex tree that represents the history of life

Our planet, the Earth, is as far as we know
Unique in the universe; it contains life
Here plants and animals proliferate in such numbers
That we still have not even named all the different species

Darwin’s great insight revolutionized the way in which we see the world
We now understand why there are so many different species”

And so it goes.

We also like Physics so here is one called “The Poetry of Reality (An Anthem for Science)” Just so you can say you’ve seen Stephen Hawking sing. By the way almost no one read that book of his but it was the Harry Potter of it’s day and they did make a movie of it called “A Brief History of Time”.

Want to see Brian Cox & Morgan Freeman sing about “atoms and subatomic particles, the jiggly things that make up everything we see”. Try “Symphony of Science – the Quantum World!”

What do you think NZ teachers, musicians, educators and other creatives – should we be mashing up the curriculum into musical brain sized memes ?

Do check out the other Symphony of Science clips as well.

“The goal of the project is to bring scientific knowledge and philosophy to the public, in a novel way, through the medium of music. Science and music are two passions of mine that I aim to combine, in a way that is intended to bring a meaningful message to listeners, while simultaneously providing an enjoyable musical experience.”

Onward to the Edge! + Yoda – Feel the Force (Yoda Remixed)

Enjoy learning and “love the questions themsleves.”

Ever since Brian Sweeney and Remo Giuffre told me about TED back in the early 90′s or maybe before that (TED started in 1984) I have been a huge fan.

Brians 7×7 events in NZ were inspired by TED and they still resonate even though today we have TEDxSydney, TEDx Auckland, TEDxEQC Christchurch, TEDx Christchurch and other local TEDx events. (Disclaimer: I help out on the Auckland event)

My Architect is one of my favourite movies and that movie featured Richard Saul Wurman the TED founder - film makers documentary link here – Nathaniel Kahn.

For me the story of TED is very much like the story of My Architect.

It combines personal insights, amazing stories, incredible people and giant ideas – all things with the power to transform our lives and just like in “My Architect” we are taken on a journey through an amazing life as reflected by the buildings that Louis Kahn built and the people he knew.

People keep asking me to update my about page but really I work across a wide range of disciplines and projects and while I wear many hats my background job is always the same.

“In short I live to change everything for the better by thinking differently about ideas that matter for people I like. If your project excites me than I will move heaven & earth to get results you can’t pay for but they are the ones you really, really want. “ Go over to TED.com to see my full profile

Recently I completed organising the 4th WordCampNZ. Ostensibly it is focussed on WordPress and what a very fine bunch of WordPress users get up to but in my world if you have to explain a software interface it is not as good as it thinks it is.

WordPress back end usability is in my opinion the best out there but personally I’m far more interested in what the users (many subject matter specialists) are able to achieve as outcomes for their various causes and projects.

Besides architecture (& quite a few other subjects) I am very much still a musician at heart. I have a personal theory of music where   the universe is explored via music. Song-lines for navigation are very real for me. I love the way that music can take us to a different place and open us to new ideas and incredible serendipitous moments.

I love Daniel Levitins book “This is Your Brain on Music” and have written about that several times here. I also love Daniel Kahneman’s more recent book Thinking, fast and slow but I know that most of you won’t read the Kahneman book despite it deserving to be compulsory reading for all adults, all educators and anyone who is remotely curious at all.

I have watched hundreds of TED videos sometimes more than once. They are fun AND good for you. Civilisation as we know it is screwed – business as usual is over. Yet despite all of that of that I completely believe that we can still reinvent, remake, restore and rebuild and that starts with ideas and a willingness to change.

So where to start?

So what about if the first TED video you watched was the “remix version from 2012-Time for TED” see below.It has some great music and a few quotes. Wonder – insight, ideas. BTW – TEDx Sydney is on Saturday 28th of May. TEDx Auckland 2102 is coming in August  (watch this space.)

John Boswell, of the “Symphony of Science,” came to TED2012 and made this remix of the speakers onstage (and on TED.com). Symphony of Science is my new favourite website if you are a musician or an educator skip right on over there. I look after Science Media Centre and Sciblogs with about 60 bloggers but unfortunately none of them break into song or publish remixes.

Boswell has made a series of other clips that you might like. Here are some Q &A s with Boswell on how it was done.

“What software and tools did you use?

I am using Reason 6 to put together the music, then Adobe Premiere to edit the video. The song is done independently first, then the video editing once the song is finished.”

For the geeks out there – you know who you are – and of course I want to do this for some local events. Wouldn’t that be amazing. The future of music has long been video related but with crowd sourced (very selective) lyrics and great energy why wouldn’t you want one of these clips on high rotate at breakfast time.

Here is another one called ode to the brain – enjoy..

You may also enjoy the TED Blog Video channel over here

On a more sobering note – if you live in Auckland, New Zealand there is a documentary film called Finding Mercy that has a  Fundraiser Screening next Monday 14th May 7pm at the Bridgeway Theatre , Northcote Pt.

A heart-wrenching search for a childhood friend becomes a dramatic guided tour through Zimbabwe’s Mugabe era.

I worked on the website for this project a few weeks ago and I hope to be at the screening to hear from film makers Robyn Paterson and Leanne Pooley.

Last year a couple of big finance stories caught my attention. I had just seen the movie Inside Job .

What was very interesting to me was the idea that economists and other academics in the finance world had been utterly compromised by the global financial meltdown.

The other story concerned Wachovia bank laundering $400b of blood money but more on that one later.

In fact they (academic economists) have been completely implicated in the demise of the system yet those very same people were reappointed to high ranking roles by the Obama administration. So point 1 – same old, same old means the same results which is privatise assetts – socialise losses and that bailout was US$700b.

(Add both numbers together and that is $1100b and that is thought to be a tip of the iceberg read of that problem.)

Follow the money. $700b is a very big honeypot and what has happened to that money?

The Four Horseman Film attempts to answer these questions and more. Accountability and public policy results?

“Four Horsemen is the debut feature from director Ross Ashcroft which reveals the fundamental flaws in the economic system which have brought our civilization to the brink of disaster.

23 leading thinkers –frustrated at the failure of their respective disciplines – break their silence to explain how the world really works.

The film pulls no punches in describing the consequences of continued inaction – but its message is one of hope. If more people can equip themselves with a better understanding of how the world really works, then the systems and structures that condemn billions to poverty or chronic insecurity can at last be overturned.

Solutions to the multiple crises facing humanity have never been more urgent, but equally, the conditions for change have never been more favourable.”

Update: In NZ? – listen to this interview from Kim Hill show today (5th of May 2012)

The Four Horseman is currently showing in New Zealand at the Docu Edge Film festival

Ann Pettifor interview is 30 mins but well worth watching. It is not in the film. Key answer from Ann: “We have to regulate & control the banks” – Keynes & Roosevelt had the right tactic back in the 30′s.

Another related story from April last year

“How a big US bank laundered billions from Mexico’s murderous drug gangs As the violence spread, billions of dollars of cartel cash began to seep into the global financial system. But a special investigation by the Observer reveals how the increasingly frantic warnings of one London whistleblower were ignored”

That large banking group in the paid $US150 m in fines recently for money laundering something like 400 billion $ of drugs money. $150m is a large fine but compared to $400b & all of the other similar cases that didn’t get prosecuted – it is a slap on the hand with a wet bus ticket. ( My calculator can’t cope with that but as a percentage $150m/400b – its a rounding error!)

‘More shocking, and more important, the bank was sanctioned for failing to apply the proper anti-laundering strictures to the transfer of $378.4bn – a sum equivalent to one-third of Mexico’s gross national product – into dollar accounts from so-called casas de cambio (CDCs) in Mexico, currency exchange houses with which the bank did business.

“Wachovia’s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations,” said Jeffrey Sloman, the federal prosecutor. Yet the total fine was less than 2% of the bank’s $12.3bn profit for 2009. On 24 March 2010, Wells Fargo stock traded at $30.86 – up 1% on the week of the court settlement.

The conclusion to the case was only the tip of an iceberg, demonstrating the role of the “legal” banking sector in swilling hundreds of billions of dollars – the blood money from the murderous drug trade in Mexico and other places in the world – around their global operations, now bailed out by the taxpayer.’

Another version of that story is over here - Cocaine smugglers laundered billions through Wachovia bank

“Somehow, the major banks in the United States have gone from serving as the main bulwarks of credit and entrepreneurial pluck to the moral equivalent of a James Bond villain.”

Turns out the GFC was an opportunity for some big finance houses to rort the public finances as well as actively engaging in eye-popping financing of criminal activities. In little old New Zealand I don’t remember any of these stories even making the news.

I can remember the Savings & Loan crisis of the 80′s but these more recent stories are much more significantly disturbing. The finance system is completely broken and the sooner we change it the better.

Of course there is more to the story;

“By 2007 the trade in derivatives worldwide was one quadrillion (thousand million million) US dollars – this is 10 times the total production of goods on the planet over its entire history,” says Stewart. “OK, we’re talking about the totals in a two-way trade, people are buying and people are selling and you’re adding it all up as if it doesn’t cancel out, but it was a huge trade.”

The Black-Scholes formula had passed the market test. But as banks and hedge funds relied more and more on their equations, they became more and more vulnerable to mistakes or over-simplifications in the mathematics.”

Tim Harford writes Black-Scholes: The maths formula linked to the financial crash

“The equation is based on the idea that big movements are actually very, very rare. The problem is that real markets have these big changes much more often that this model predicts,” says Stewart.

“And the other problem is that everyone’s following the same mathematical principles, so they’re all going to get the same answer.“*

….

“Not all of those subsequent technologies, says Scholes, were good enough. “[Some] had assumptions that were wrong, or they used data incorrectly to calibrate their models, or people who used [the] models didn’t know how to use them.”

Scholes argues there is no going back. “The fundamental issue is that quantitative technologies in finance will survive, and will grow, and will continue to evolve over time,” he says.

But for Ian Stewart, the story of Black-Scholes – and of Long-Term Capital Management – is a kind of morality tale.”

*According to a friend this idea about finance models being trapped in their thinking mode is a key one. ( Thanks to Raf Manji for comments below) Raf’s site is Sustento go there for more smart insights 

“The problem with all these models is they don’t price in liquidity (i.e.. the ability to shift volume at a certain price). When everyone wants to exit the building at the same time, there is a crush!

It’s very similar with financial policy making. They work from theoretical models, which might have some validity on paper or in small, closed situations but don’t hold up amidst the rampaging and unpredictable hordes of humanity.

This is what I meant by saying policymakers are operating out of the same toolbox and, therefore, can never find or consider solutions that might actually work.”

As many of you know I have been working on re-development of a significant NZ government related website which focuses on the roll-out of ultra fast broadband over the next few years.

That site Crown Fibre Holdings finally went live a few weeks ago. I’m very proud of the great design work that has been done on a project of such national significance. In replacing the old site the CFH team and my team wanted to re architect the site and improve usability so that it was much easier to reach out to the key sectors.

I’m delighted that the content and the thinking has progressed along and like all great projects there are some more changes to come.

Crown Fibre - Website by dialogCRM

For the WordPress geeks out there the site is a custom theme which uses lots of video and for government related entities – yes – it is running on a Microsoft IIS server.

Individually and collectively as a group there has been a great deal of effort put in to make the website work on as many levels as possible. It is a learning system and I hope and trust it will become a showcase for all the NZ communities it seeks to represent and engage with.

But wait !- there is more. I’m fascinated by all the debates going on – all day, every day on twitter and other forms of media. Comes a time though -when some straight talking is needed.  I work in marketing and communications and so I organise or help with various events and conferences. I much prefer organising parties  and concerts but conference events have their place as there is no substitute for face to face in real time.

With any project what we are really looking for is for real street level moments of truth. One of my tag lines is “ideas into action”. Yes we need the talk – but we also need to share from our hearts about what moves us and what connects us and what makes a difference and that is ultimately measured in actions.

I was delighted to have Poutaua and Nikolasa Biasiny-Tule as presenters at #WordCampNZ 2012 as our keynote speakers only last week. They believe in speaking the truth with love and humour and it shows.

The clip below comes from another event that I hadn’t seen before today. We have video still coming from #WordCampNZ however here are Nik & Taua’s slides Nikolasa & Potaua Biasiny-Tule – DigitalM?ori & WP Magazine Stylz but watch the video below first.

The conversations we have about ultra fast broadband are important. We need to have more of them and we need to be present and really listen to each other.

As always let me know what you think – are we doing enough to be inclusive and enabling with our ultra fast broadband policy ?and the roll-out? – what more can and should be done?

Please also follow @DigitalMaori over at TangataWhenua.com for more from them.

Wordcampnz is all about creating an affirming space with the best coffee, best people & looking for those magic moments and happy accidents.

Why have a musician talk about his website when you can hear him sing a song he wrote ? And why say good bye when you can sing goodbye.

That would be like asking rugby players to talk about their game. No wait MSM does that all the time and it is actually the wrong way around.

Luke Hurley was a (in all but name) lightning speaker but wouldn’t have done it if we had asked him to be a speaker. He was there as a WordPress user whose core content is songs and music. Asking Luke to talk about his website would have been the wrong thing to do. And perfectly ok to take it at the level of “at the end we had this local singer come and play a few songs” but really were were wanting to engage on more than one level.

In my opinion what Luke does best are songlines and these are best understood not by talking about the songs but by hearing them sung. We also wanted to have a counterpoint to the earlier welcome by @digitalMaori so he also performed a mihi for a largely non- Maori* audience in a way that they didn’t even know that is what it was. (*Macron support broken sorry.)

At other NZ wordcamps we’ve wanted to to acknowledge Maori, but not in that fake corporate way that sometimes happens so having Nik & Poutaua do that in a really natural organic way – “priceless” as they say in bank adland.

The reason there were 3 songs is that the last one “Make Room”  was part of the services to the WordPress community award for @radiowammo who is Glenn Williams.

Glenn is a national treasure. But here’s the thing – I’ve been there a few times and if you were to ask a staff member of one of the stations in the building where he works – most staff don’t know who he is or which studio he is in. I love that he is in effect hiding in plain view.

RadioWammo is like a secret project that flies under the radar most of the time.

We know though and the 2,313+ videos on YT plus all of the other projects he does is magnificent contribution to NZ culture and all kinds of exploration and engagement via his radio and video shows.

Glenn Williams gets Community Service award from Wordcampnz. Photo credit: Vaughn Davis

Show us the art, the vision – the big idea – WordPress is an enabler not an end in itself.

Wordcamp is not about “show ussome code” it is show us the poetry – but most people don’t get that part. Luckily there always some who do… It may sound counter intuitive but if a customer visits your website (on WordPress of course) and just wants to talk about your website instead of engage at a series of other levels with you and your content then that is the wrong conversation.

We could argue that other web people want to do exactly that but now all day and after 8 hrs of talks and presentations we wanted to mark the transition with the ukelele and Lukes songs so we could move onto the after party.

Wordcamps should be like the first rule of fightclub; 1st rule don’t talk about fightclub.

So first rule of wordcampnz is don’t talk about wordcampnz sounds crazy but it works better that way & it is not a literal thing and in many ways you have to be there to get the vibe.

Excited About WordcampNZ Rahul Singh (Go Unitec) on storify for Day 1 captures some of this if you read all the pages.

Vaughn Davis ran rings around everyone on twitter – just like he does in that plane of his. You can take him out of the plane but he is going to be low flying that special intersection of insight, plain silliness and laugh out loud stand up.

Vaughn Davis

I’m looking forward to the day we can have a WordCamp where no one mentions WordPress (not going to happen but) that is the territory we are heading into.

WordPress & the best wordcamps work because it/they get out of the way and allow us all to be creative and connected and ultimately transformed by that engagement.

As Giapo says “there is no secret sauce”

Passionate people sharing in a way that works for them with invisible technology support. You get the idea

My coffee this morning was especially great..

Earlier this morning I was privileged to be on Radio Wammo live talking about this years #wordcampnz in Auckland next Saturday 21st of April. We talked about who should come along, why and what it is all about.

The format is q & a with no real script. Glenn Williams does this every day and once the talk is over the video goes up on the Radio Wammo site within minutes.

RadioWammo runs on WordPress (as do many media sites now.)  It is radio with the added zest of being able to watch it either live on ustream or later off the site. Below is my post on the wordcampnz site

“Glenn Williams is a tech media whiz. His @radiowammo show is a treasure trove of radio shows with great people such as Vaughn Davis, Jayson Bryant, Ben Young, Russell Brown and even a very long running series with Sam Hunt.

What is different about Radio Wammo is that Glenn live mixes the video on air. The various shows are on each weekday between 7am & 10am (UTC 1900-2200) and on demand 24/7 at other times.

The show is mostly completely unscripted and completely live with no edits – enjoy. Questions and comments as always are very welcome.”

“P.S – For wordcampers – Glenn will be doing a lightning talk on Saturday afternoon about Radio Wammo see our latest speaker announcement.

I forgot to mention we will filming all speakers on Saturday and making a mixtape DVD of the results for #wordcampnz attendees. BTW – we won’t be live streaming since there are some bandwidth challenges with our particular location although we may try to do some of that if we can.

Sites mentioned in the show:

• TangataWhenua.com    speakers Nik & Potaua see speakers
• Paleo Zone Nutrition speaker Julianne Taylor
• Crown Fibre Holdings speaker (the writer – Jason Kemp)
• NZ Womans Weekly“

Special feature (WordPress example in the show) have a look at the Crown Fibre site. CFH is all about the Ultra Fast Broadband rollout in NZand is a project that I have been working on for quite some time. It has been completely rebuilt in WordPress and I’m delighted to have been the developer on the project.

Will do a separate post about that – please let me know what you think about the video and do come along to #wordcampnz next weekend.

John Cooper Clarke was like some wordy icarus who flew too close to the sun & got sucked in by a blackhole Never mind the metaphors – on Thursday he was back, better than ever in Auckland town live at the Kings Arms.

“People all ask me the same question  -John – How did you get here? I tell them – In a Hirecar baby“

Cue an avalanche of free association poetry all about the things we may have done to a hire car, then it’s on to the next story; chuckling all the way. John seemed very much like Sam Hunts funnier twin brother –  at ease with the world and its ambiguities and evidently pleased to be here.

“Marine Biology is to our decade what media studies was in in the ’90s. Are there any marine biologists in the audience ? Apparently its all because of David Attenborough’s Blue Planet. So the question for all marine biologists is – What would the real sea level be  if there weren’t a whole lot 0f sponges down there (under the waves.)”

And so it went. Or as close as I can remember it. Photos below courtesy of Jonathan Ganley from  http://www.pointthatthing.com

John Cooper Clarke at the Kings Arms, Auckland, March 22 2012

Something very delicious about hearing a poet in freeflow and especially one who is obviously having such an excellent time of it.

Looking around the audience I spotted a few people who I haven’t seen since the early ’80′s. Good on them for getting off the couch for the night . There is obvious comedy just looking around at an average age 50 something audience. For Cooper Clarke this was a cue for a joke about Easter eggs and Alzheimer’s. So there we were – a whole crowd full of musical time travellers from an age when music really meant something.

The audience all had great stories. One woman told me all about her first year at uni and when I asked her what she studied – it was medicine but it was the music she remembered best. My first year at uni was ’77 and the shock and thrill of watching the birth of punk rock was truly a moment in time worthy of legend. Even if we couldn’t get any of it (the music) right then we felt the seismic shockwave from 12,000 km? miles away.

Johnny Green at the Kings Arms, Auckland, March 22 2012 © jonathan ganley 2012

As Johnny Green said on Thursday “It was all about attitude” it didn’t matter that no one could play or sing. Green who was road manager for the Clash ( Topper Headon story here)  wrote a book about this. He read a few pages from “A Riot of Our Own: Night and Day with the Clash“ as the warm-up for Cooper Clarke. Green talked about the “London Calling” album – how the record company didn’t want to release it and what do you do after working with the Clash. In his case he went to Texas. Thought I heard Townes van Zandt mentioned here as one of those Johnny worked with but I could be wrong (anyone know?)

When I was a student one big luxury was reading as much poetry as I could get my hands on. I even used to write a few lines. What I loved then and still do now – is the idea that a few words and ideas can resonate in a way that is concise but at the very same time open to multiple flights of fancy.

The closest most of us get to poetry are songs that like some kind of incantation recall a time and a place in our memory. A great song/poem  becomes a stepping off place for the imagination to lift the spirit and move us in a day and age when nothing much else has that kind of cut through. Daniel Levitin is the music and memory guy, but Thursday was all about being there and making a new memory.

It’s a cliche but I can remember whole blocks of life by remembering where I was when I first heard a certain song. Some songs are way better than others at rinsing out every colour and capturing every aspect of their life pulse. Cooper Clarke for me was a master then and clearly still has it in 2012.

Here is one of those songs that for me captures a certain time in 1980 when music reconnected with the street. I still remember it vividly like it was yesterday…

“Spend a year in a couple of hrs, Where the action isn’t , That’s where it is…”

“The rats have all got rickets
They spit through broken teeth
The name of the game is not cricket
Caught out on Beasley Street

..cars collide, colours clash..” *

These lines come from John Cooper Clarke’s song Beasley St off the Snap, Crackle and Bop album. For a time there, Clarke single-handedly re-introduced poetry into the culture of the day. So much so that I used his poems to teach high school students cramming for English exams (in 1982.) At the time It was fun and a respite from the official curriculum. Now apparently in the UK Twat is on the official syllabus but we did it here first. Best of all – my students all flew through their English exams.

Clarke’s rapid fire spoken word delivery is still striking even after more than 30 years. A couple of years ago (2009) he gave this interview – a life of rhyme – his first in 20 years.

Many of those at the concert heard the excellent Radio NZ interview on the Kim Hill radio show Sat 3rd Mar.

Full link below if this one doesn’t work for you.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2511667/john-cooper-clarke-poetry-and-punk

Another recent NZ interview by Marty Duda on 13th Floor

Thank you John Cooper Clarke. Now if only I could remember the rest of the concert – I’m off to hide my own Easter eggs just now.

Note: I wrote the second part of this about Beasley St back in April 2011- just never published it and so the concert was an extra delight to be able to hear Cooper Clarke live and dangerous and seemed the perfect time to refresh my memory.

* For some reason this line connects me straight back to Bruce Cockburn’s Tokyo song from Humans 1980

“pachinko jingle and space torpedo beams. Comic book violence and escaping steam”

Great music makes time travel easy, but that is from another master songwriter and another story for another day.

Hyperbole is exaggeration for effect. It is an overused technique in advertising and now it appears to have become an artform called “Copyright Math” by comic Rob Reid

“a remarkable new field of study based on actual numbers from entertainment industry lawyers and lobbyists.”

Of course – protecting IP is important but after heading some of these numbers you might wonder why we haven’t heard more comic routines based on this before.

Its only 6 minutes and you know laughing is good for everyone even copyright lobbyists.

“some people think string theory is tough”