What really interested me, though, was the support bands. Not for their quality, which was good, but for the nature of their tunes. I expect bands on the support circuit (what used to be called “unsigned” before that term became meaningless) to sound like whatever the current trend is and be somewhat mediocre – you don’t get chosen for support slots if you’re all weird and experimental, on the whole. And I appreciate my tastes have changed. Back in 2000 I remember being delighted by the prospect of a bunch of blokes with guitars making a racket on stage regardless of what they sounded like – I just needed the power of that amplified noise in my face. Now, having been to more gigs than I can count, I’m a lot more critical. If I never see another sub-Oasis atrocity I’ll die a happy man.

These support bands weren’t bad. I enjoyed what they did. It was perfunctory rock’n'roll with spirit and verve and very much did the job well. It was their songs, all of which were original but which felt like they were stitched together from loads of other songs.

That’s not to say this is a new thing. All popular music is a reinvention of older popular music. There are no new ideas under the sun. It just felt really raw and unapologetic, a subconscious admission that this is how things are now in rock. There’s no attempt to pretend that originality is possible – we just rearrange and repackage what came before. The everything-is-remix mashup culture that we assumed was internet/digital in nature has leaked into the mainstream. Which isn’t a surprise really, since there’s nothing subcultural about internet/digital culture anymore.

Again, it’s not a new thing. It’s more that it seemed normalised. Maybe it’s bloody Noel Gallagher’s fault with his tedious refactoring of Beatles riffs that lead to this. Maybe it’s come from the electronic sampling culture mixing with rock through bands like The Prodigy. I see Internet, but that’s my bias. It’s probably all sorts of things.

I’m not saying all music is like this and I’m not saying the tunes I heard tonight were bad. If anything they were quite sophisticated in places, mixing up some rather disparate elements at times. And if their roots were showing it’s because they haven’t found their unique voices yet, which is to be expected from support bands of this ilk.

It’s like Paton Oswalt’s Everything That Ever Was — Available Forever being performed on stage in front of me. I called it “every song ever over and over again and again” which could be taken as a criticism, but it’s also a summary of popular music, especially rock’n'roll.

Those who rise above it are those who add something of their own, something unique, and that’s what John Power and Cast did. Those who don’t are just regurgitating the past. And that’s fine.

I dunno what my point is. Maybe I just went to my first normal (as in non-Capsule) gig for a while and was taken aback at how normal it was. Maybe normal is weird to me now. Better get back to growing that beard again.

A photograph I took in Digbeth today.

Today, through circumstances which aren’t relevant, we found out some information about Mrs F from the chap who lives next door to the family to which she belongs (if a cat can be said to “belong” to a family). It seems she’s been actively visiting other houses in the area ever since a small child emerged from the womb of the woman who feeds her a couple of years ago. Which roughly fits our timescale of the first visit was the spring of 2010, give or take.

So she’s been displaced by a baby and is sharing her love elsewhere. Suits us.

The other week I had a long Skype conversation with Chris Pinchen about what I do and how it all works financially as part of a series of interviews with people “making a living on the edge” for Edgeryders, a Council of Europe / European Commission project. I was extremely wary as it sounded like some kind of wankery, overblowing my stumbling attempt survival into some kind of utopian best practice, but I’ve known Chris online for a while and met him a couple of times and he’s always struck me as a good chap. And I realised talking about how I earn a living might help me figure out for myself how it all works, since I’m as in the dark as anyone.

Chris ended up with an hour of me talking and when I reviewed it the next day I was pleasantly surprised. Maybe because I was still a little dopy from a late night, maybe because Chris put me at my ease, but I think there are some genuinely interesting things in there.

Chris has edited them into four chunks and posted them with a text summary of the conversation.

Once Edgeryders have had the attention they require I think I’m going to chop them down further into 3-5 minute bites. I might even do some more little videos like this, if feedback is good.

I also made some art out of it, because that’s what I do.

Having been in the volunteer chorus of their performance of Othello I am now, and forever will be, part of the extended Birmingham Opera family and while I wasn’t able to take part in their current production, Life Is A Dream, I was determined to go and see it. Fi and I have tickets for Friday but for some reason I found myself on the “press” comps list for the premier. Liking the idea of seeing it twice but not wanting to take the piss (I haven’t been “press” since giving up Created in Birmingham in 2008) I decided to take my camera and Do My Part for the family.

Having gotten 40-odd decent pics which I hope are good enough, I’m making them available for free use in the promotion of the opera. Usually I just slap at Creative Commons license on my photos which means anyone can use them anywhere for whatever reason as long as it’s non-commercial. Commercial use has to pay me. In this case I’m waving that in the context of this opera. So if a newspaper needs a photo to accompany a review they can use one of mine, and so on. Any commercial use that isn’t connected with this opera requires payment in the form of a donation to Birmingham Opera at the usual industry rates.

It hopefully goes without saying that the opera is fantastic. Yes. the storyline is complex and you’ll be lost if you don’t know the story but that doesn’t really matter. The set pieces are emotionally engaging and unlike the chaos of The Wedding (their last production) this is relatively sane and coherent. Relatively.

Because I was stuck behind a lens all evening, wrestling with some rather complex lighting, I’m not going to attempt a proper review. I’m going to wait until I’ve given it my full attention on Friday for that. In the meanwhile, here are three of my favourite photos. The full set is here.

Click on it for full resolution, and please spread it around the place if as you see fit.

We’ve got seven people booked and I reckon 25 is a reasonable number to take on a guided stroll. Full details on the Eventbrite page or book using this widget here:

Can you spot the joins? It should settle in time and we may get the middle re-turfed, but for now, feel the width!

Gardening inevitably means cats and we have a new contender. The young couple next door got kittens last year and have started letting them out. The ginger lady is timid and doesn’t go far from the door but the tom is exploring like a crazed explorer. Interestingly this has kept all the other cats at bay (though we have seen Mrs F a couple of times). His name is Battle Cat and he has the most absurd tail.

I have a suspicion that adult cats leave kittens alone, at least for a while, which would explain the absence, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens when Battle Cat is old enough to be a threat to The Ginger Tom (who, we hear, is terrorising poor old Ming from two doors down). I shall report on these developments as they happen.

Lots of fun, though there wasn’t much to do with the angle. We’re going to try finding a spot on the side next. Steve recommends a point on the golf course.

Fiona’s photos are here.

Gmail, and I think most other email programs, displays the first line of the email after the title. This is very handy when skimming through your inbox to see what’s worth reading. If you’re using your newsletter to get people’s attention you could argue it’s the most important part after the subject line.

Unfortunately most commercial email packages encourage you to use templates which clog up those first few lines with cruft. “View it in your browser” is a handy tool but it shouldn’t be the first thing you read. Yet there is it at the top of the page.

The problem comes from confusing the flow of text in a document with the visual priority it’s given by the designer. Here’s a pretty standard Mailchimp theme ready for populating:

Looking at it you can see what are the most important bits of text – the title, the headings, and so on. But email programmes don’t read visual styles. Unless they’re being very clever they just parse the text in order. So the most important part is “Use this area to offer a short teaser”. Which is right, you should, but as we can see above people often don’t.

So watch out for that. When you test send your newsletter don’t just check it for typos. Look at how it displays in the inbox. You could try looking at the addresses in your mailing list and if there’s a lot of @hotmail.com see how it looks in the Hotmail inbox.

Related to this, I’ve been playing with newsletters a bit myself and someone asked me for some advice on how best to write them. Bearing in mind there are as many correct answers as there are newsletters and readers of newsletters, here’s my basic guide (which I rarely completely obey, to be fair).

1. Keep it short. People get a lot of email and want to get through it quickly. Try and keep it to 2 or 3 paragraphs with a simple call to action like a link.
2. Keep it simple. Don’t bundle up lots of disparate things in one email. Pick a topic and stick to it. If it is a roundup newsletter with lots of items, prioritise one and list the rest.
3. Link out. Don’t put all the information in the email. Link to it on your website or blog. This helps keep the email short and sweet and also, if you’re tracking clicks, shows you what people were drawn to.
4. Simple layouts. Don’t get carried away with fancy layouts. They often don’t display well, especially on phones, and are a distraction. I’m a big fan of plain text emails because they get straight to the point and can be forwarded easily.
5. Look at your own use of newsletters. Do you read every newsletter you’re subscribed to? Do you click on every link? Which newsletters do you actively engage with? How would you approach your newsletter as a reader? You should also do a bit of user testing on your friends.

Finally, remember that while the contents of your newsletter is vitally important to you, it’s of passing interest at best to everyone else. Make it easy for them to get to your point and act on it.

As mentioned before, Antonio and I are curating one of the Flatpack Festival events, something called Bring Your Own Beamer where artists who have a projector of their own are invited to bring it along and beam their work on the walls, all at the same time.

It’s on Friday 16th March from 7-10pm and due to the magic of state funding there’s no charge to attend – you’ve already paid with your taxes. Aren’t taxes brilliant?

I’ll be projecting my work (probably something derived from the KiteCam footage) and will also be playing some tunes inbetween the proper DJs. However I won’t actually be there because I booked a holiday over that weekend before I’d put it in my diary. This is because I am occasionally an idiot.

So please attend the event I’m running where I won’t be present. It should be brilliant. And you can tell me all about it afterwards.

• Recalibrating success
  • Doing “media” stuff, be it music, writing, whatever, was an all or nothing game. Now there are gradients, but people still think in all or nothing.
  • Stuart Lee on finding a sustainable crowd that allows him to do his stuff,
  • Steve Lawson casestudy.
• Building relationships
  • Metapod Connect stuff
  • Followers are relationships
• Be helpful on your own terms.
  • Don’t crush your individuality for a broader reach.
  • http://www.schmutzie.com/weblog/2012/2/25/we-can-become-known.html
• How to follow efficiently.
• The personal in public
  • Levels of intimacy
  • Context
  • http://www.chrisunitt.co.uk/2012/02/trustfunding/
• Personal responsibility for actions
  • Dont blame medium for allowing you freedom to behave badly.
• Free vs Free vs Free vs Free
  • How can you charge in an age of abundance?
• “how do I get followers?”
  • If you have something people want, be there so they can follow.
  • If you don’t, have patience. These things take time.
• Advertising and the web
  • What’s wrong with advertising in general?
  • The web needs better adverts.
  • keyword driven ads only work when the intentions overlap. Doesn’t work for the good stuff.

It’s mostly ideas I’ve had in the shower or after reading something interesting and it’s by no means a reflection on what I’m going to write, but it’s a start and gives a vague indication of where things are headed. It looks like there are two strands (two books?) – how to do stuff and what it all means. I think the two are connected – you need to know what it all means in order to do stuff effectively, especially in a DIY scenario – the the how-to angle makes it more accessible and immediately useful to people.

I’m still pondering the revenue model for this. I’m definitely going to use Leanpub but that pays out quarterly and is still slightly after the fact. If I’m going to dedicate a good chunk of time to this I’m going to need some kind of advance, so maybe a crowdfunding model is more useful after all. That adds a level of complexity I’m not overly keen on (am I writing a book or running a crowdfunder?) but if kept simple and designed around helping the book get done it should be manageable.

Let’s have a sketch of what the rewards might look like:

Advance purchase of the book – This is a tricky one to do smoothly as ideally people would do this through Leanpub so they get updates. I guess they could download the book for free (the book will be available for free) and I could make an honour payment to Leanpub for those purchases. Basically this is a donation without a “reward” so it might be worth keeping the book out of it and calling it that.

Watch me write – I’ve been joint-writing stuff on Google Docs lately and have been fascinated by the live-updates when your collaborator is writing. As the letters emerge on the screen you really get a sense of their thought processes. I’d like to experiment with this by opening my writing up and allowing people to have a conversation alongside it. (If nobody wants to pay for this I might just do it anyway.)

Skype consultancy – Face to face consultancies tend to use up the whole afternoon I find, but a half-hour chat via Skype would be doable. Basically you have my rapt attention for that time to ask me anything, ideally something to do with the book which I can then turn into a chapter but not necessarily. Maybe you just want to run some idea by me or have a moan about the government.

Signed photo print – I’ve got nearly 10,000 photos on Flickr. 99% of them can be turned into a decent sized print which I could sign for you.

Sponsored chapter – This is riffing off a similar idea Fiona had and it’d need a lot of careful thought but the notion of a chapter about a subject someone wants to be associated with being paid for by them is interesting. Think along the lines of the Future of Local blogging I did for Talk About Local last year which was the sort of sponsorship I’m comfortable with.

That’s about all I’ve got at the moment and I’d welcome ideas, but be aware I don’t want to offer things that would detract from the writing of the book. Yes, I could do a photo shoot, but then I’m spending a day doing a photo shoot.

Also I’m not looking for a lot of money. £500 would be sufficient and I’d set the target lower to ensure I reach it.

(I plan to spend some time on the next edition of This Much over the next fortnight, so hold tight for that.)

The resulting footage was, well, a little sktechy. Not only is the camera really quite poor quality (it’s made out of cheap cameraphone parts) but the box kite wasn’t as stable as I was lead to believe box kites were supposed to be. It’s not as mad as a stunt kite but still a long way from a balloon.

Here’s some raw footage (the timestamp gives away my inability to judge top and bottom on a kite):

That said, the camera’s inability to deal with the conditions does lead to some interesting digital glitches, especially when you freeze frames or slow it right down, and I’m really taken with how the sun is rendered as a purple dot. I can see myself playing with this footage quite extensively. Expect art.

Which we duly did. Here’s my result.

Yup, Bodie is the best character in The Wire. I think his journey, and the manner of his demise, represents everything The Wire is about.

Other characters are way cool, for sure, but I’m with Kottke on Omar (“he’s one of the show’s most manufactured characters”) and applied that criteria accordingly. Bunk vs Bubbles? I love the Bunk but Bubbles is right at the heart of the show.

Fi got Marlo in a throwdown with Carcetti but that’s for her to justify. Who did you get?

More on this page.

Of course spending a long afternoon running a course and walking in the (very) fresh air has taken it right out of me so I’ll save the proper thinky writing for later.

The next Photo School is on April 1st and is the total opposite of this, looking at the detail and grain of the city. £40 per person. Bargain.

Until very recently this was a picture of me that I’d uploaded to my otherwise redundant and empty Google Profile a few years ago. Now there’s a penguin associated with my otherwise redundant and empty Google+ thingy.

But why is it a penguin?

Because when you create an account on a Mac you have to choose a picture and because I don’t really need to have a photo associated with my computer and I couldn’t be bothered to spend 30 seconds getting a pic of me I went for the penguin. I mean, it’s not like it’s something earth-shatteringly important like, say, my Twitter icon. My god, can you imagine?

So how did this photo get to be my graphical representation in the ever-growing Googleverse? Did I accidentally not opt out of some privacy thing?

I don’t know and I don’t really care that much. It just feels like Google, the browser company, have crossed a line. Though I do I wonder how much other information Google has accessed from my address book.

Gee, I hope I haven’t stumbled upon another scandal…

Here’s the breakdown of my readers and what they paid:

Dubber, who is also leanpubbing a book, commented “That’s a really good strike rate. I’m currently at around 20% paid, 80% for nothing.” I reckon I’m getting more paids than freebees because this has a narrower, and therefore more intimate, appeal. It’s selling to a small number of people who have known be longer and feel more invested in my work. For some it will be payback for years of reading my work for free, for some it’s an investment, for some it’s something completely different. But there’s a personal connection. With Dubber his subject matter, and his reputation within that field, taking him to a much wider audience and intimacy doesn’t scale. Most of the people wanting his book don’t care about Dubber the man.

Both situations have their advantages and disadvantages. While I’m enjoying the warm glow of my 11 readers I expect, and hope, to have a slightly less intimate relationship with those why buy my next book (which will have stuff like the above paragraph all through it.)

I’ve set myself a target of £50. If I generate that much in sales then I’ll dedicate a day to getting the next edition ready. That will mostly involve going through each post and ensuring it makes sense in the context of a book. Right now it’s just the text and links from each post, a process which took a couple of evenings. Next I’ll be making it more of a standalone item.

I set the recommended price at $5 but people can pay as much, or as little, as they like. They can even take it for free if they like. So far I’ve raised $18.50 which equals £11.62 at today’s rates. So I’m over 20% there.

Wanna buy a book?

Similarly Instagram isn’t about the faux-vintage effects. It’s about the tone of community it currently enables. My Instagram feed is cozy and intimate, a peek into the trivial minutae of people’s lives. It’s the opposite of how most social media environments have evolved where the primary goal seems to be to get the most hits, the most followers, the most retweets and all that shit. I’m as guilty as anyone and it’s in some ways a necessary evil given this is where a lot of business takes place now, but it’s nice to have a refuge and currently Instagram is that.

But not for long, I fear. Here’s my News feed:

Picadilly Opticians are an opticians in Birmingham who are posting pics to Instagram. While there is nothing wrong with that it seems pretty clear that they’re aiming to use the service as part of some social media marketing strategy hence they’re following 400+ people. In itself this is not a problem and there’s nothing offensive about it. Sure, I don’t like to think of Instagram in that way but my opinions don’t really have any weight and I don’t have to follow them back. But it’s the trickle which will soon become the flood.

Why? Because Instagram won’t be content with being the place people share intimate little photos with small number of people. Like most social startups infected with venture capitalist money they want to take over the world. From an otherwise positive article about them growing sustainably:

Instagram doesn’t just want to be bigger than, say, a competitor like Path. It wants to be Facebook big. It wants to become the indispensable visual strorytelling medium. It wants to be an entertainment platform, where people can come and consume. And getting there means getting on every platform, in every country.

[...]

“I don’t like the idea of Instagram as a photo sharing service, and I don’t think it is,” says Systrom, “it’s very much a communication tool, it’s a visual communications tool.”

“The printing press did something really big for the world when everyone could get books in their hands and read. I’m not saying we’re a printing press, but I am saying technology pushes people forward in some way and unlocks potential. we’re not focused on how we can make toys, we’re focused on how do we change the world in some real way. Like, how many companies have been handed the opportunity to get 15 million users in the first year? Not many. We want to take this ticket and ride.”

That kind of attitude worries me because it’s effectively about the privatisation of social spaces. Yes, it’s great to develop new ways of communicating but it’s bad for those ways to be locked away on proprietary platforms. It’s like saying the Internet is great, except for all those things that enabled the Internet to be great.

But this sort of obsession with huge is also a problem because it changes the tenor of the service. As you get bigger you attract the marketeers and once the marketeers get on board the spammers creep in. Ironically it’s better to be a small, relatively unpopular service which isn’t worth the salespeople bothering with. I suspect striking that balance will be the major challenge for the next few years.

Right now, though, Instagram appears to have turned a corner. Reality has hit. It’s still a nice place to visit (just as Twitter is still a nice place to visit) but it’s not the same.

A few weeks ago an Arts Council funded commission came over the tootvine which looked pretty interesting. Turning Point West Midlands and Writing West Midlands were looking for a writer and visual artist to undertake a road trip across, you guessed it, the West Midlands and create some art during and about it in return for £4,000. My writer chum Jon Bounds suggested I put my photographer hat on and we apply for this thing, bringing Jon’s frequent writing partner Danny Smith on board as well. It was one of those rare occasions where you read something on an art funding website and think, hang on, I not only understand this but I reckon I could do it.

Neither of us had written a proposal like this before and while Danny has a fine art degree he was bad poorly with the sick and I don’t think he ever went in for that proposal writing thing anyway. But we have friends who can do this sort of thing in their sleep so advice was to hand and in the end we put together something fairly coherent.

Yesterday the rejection emails were sent out and we got one. Apparently there were 78 applications which apparently is a lot. And apparently an organisation which is in part there to assist artists in the pursuit and creation of their art isn’t able to give feedback on individual applications (and I do understand why writing 77 feedbacks isn’t necessarily the best use of public money) so we don’t know if we were in final shortlist or throw in the round filing cabinet right away.

It strikes me that while the whole arts commissioning thing has some fundamental flaws. There exist 77 ideas for a road trip across the West Midlands which will never see the light of day. Even if we apply Sturgeon’s Law and assume 90% of them were shite ideas that’s still 7 good ones. And think about all that time those people spent on their applications, time that could have been spent on something more productive.

More importantly, there are 154 people (2 per application) who aren’t going to do a thing they were intending to do. That strikes me as a terrible shame. Yes, the ideas wouldn’t exist without TPWM/WWM sparking them with the commission but that’s one hell of a bottleneck.

I hate bottlenecks.

We’ve decided to make our application public for anyone to read.

Here’s the PDF and here it is online.

We’re putting it out there for a few reasons.

Firstly to get a bit more feedback on this thing. We’d really value any comments, positive or negative from people in the industry.

Secondly to publicly demonstrate what we’re capable of and willing to do. We’d like to get paid to do this sort of thing more often and we think this document helps that cause.

Thirdly to see if anyone else wants to commission us to do it or something similar. The bid is written with TPWM/WWM’s raison d’etre in mind and we can probably adjust it for other box-ticking requirements.

Fourthly because it seems a shame to spend so long writing something and to only show it to a handful of people. We are natural bloggers after all. To not publish it feels weird to us.

But mainly to test the water for a crowdsourced crowdfunding exercise.

On the one hand we could try raising a sustainable level of cash to enable us to do it. Not necessarily four large but enough to put dinner on the table.

On the other hand it’d be really interesting to get the funders to collectively write the commission. Bear in mind I’m making this up as I type and haven’t consulted Danny and Jon at all, but let’s say we decide on the How but you decide on the Why. You give us our remit, our focus.

Or something like that.

Of course it could be that our idea is shit and should rightly be rejected by all and sundry. And if that’s the case then that’s fine. There are plenty more where that came from.

Final note – please don’t read this as sour grapes or an attack on TPWM/WWM and the whole arts funding setup which has real value in certain situations. It was our first ever application and we’re realistic about our chances. It just seems a shame to waste it.