Archive For July, 2009
I do miss not having a man in my kitchen so imagine my delight when Ed appears with his big hands and plastic bag full of danger. He’s here to do a bit of carpentry but has a sideline in smashing things. Already I’ve lost a favourite flower pot and he’s almost ripped my light [...]
Ooh, what a gay day; in the run up to Pride it’s been puffs on parade left, right and centre. Firstly, on Saturday night I went to see the Brighton Gay Men’s Chorus. It was all histrionic renditions of ‘Wherererererere is love’ juxtaposed with a very raucous ‘There is nothing like a dame’ and masochistic [...]
I took some shots of cables and wiring today, which I’ll add to this album if they come out good enough.
It was very a quaint place and somewhere that I hadn’t really explored much in the past. A real old feel to it, with a sense that time might just have stopped there. It also has a famous windmill up on the hill that overlooks the village, setting itself out as a local landmark.
The first of the above albums is taken from an afternoon spent at the Brighton Carnival 2009. It was a glorious day weatherwise and I’d never seen my hometown’s stab at a splendid parade before. Admittedly, this particular version began in 2007 (when I was living in Tokyo), but it seems there have been carnivals in Brighton on and off since 1923.
We had a great vantage point, right near the tail end of proceedings, and got to see the whole thing. I was very impressed with the fabulous costumes that people went past in and we all got swept up in the lively atmosphere.
Last weekend, we got in the car and trooped off to Britain’s best-known contribution to world heritage – the mighty Stonehenge. Again somewhere I’d never been, it was pretty impressive. More in a conceptual sense and a ‘How did they do that?’ sort of way I suppose, because when you get there it really is just a stone circle on an open plain surrounded by hordes of tourists. Mind you, on the stone circle front, there’s not really anything else to beat it!
Not too far away from this country’s most ancient piece of heritage was Avebury, another set of standing stones from roughly the same era. There were far fewer people there and the stones were more spread out, but it was a great little add-on for the day out. Pictures from both places can be found in the album above.
If you like any of the pictures, do please feel free to head over to the page and leave a comment – all input is much appreciated!
A quick post to announce a recent copywriting project.
Alistair Dodd Consulting (ADC) is a firm of architectural designers. Distinct from architects, ADC provide a range of services to property developers, architects, construction companies and home owners, including:
Loft conversion design
Planning permission (guidance with)
Remedial building work – planning and design
Sustainable property development design
How many potatoes can one person eat? Granted, when I ate my first new potato I was in raptures; in fact, I became a bit of a potato bore. Now however, I’m sick of the bloody things. Ditto spinach. I am also sick of being attacked by triffids and other wicked creatures. This weekend I [...]
These are interesting times, as the economy buckles and sways under the onslaught of rising debt and falling sales, the new economy, espoused by Wired magazine back at the turn of the century suddenly seems relevant again. As traditional companies fall by the wayside, a new breed of Digital Media Agency is poised to leapfrog [...]
Following are a selection of photos from the day. This is turning out to be a great summer.
Let it end with beats and rhythm, as it began
Tokyo & Yokohama – A High Speed Journey from Andreas Doppelmayr on Vimeo.
Andreas Doppelmayr, a Norway-based photographer and traveller, has put together the rather fabulous film above that shows certain highlights from both Tokyo and Yokohama. I was very impressed that he was able to get this much great footage after just a few nights in town and the film made me miss the crazy old place once again.
My source to these fine films is known as Jamaipanese, a Kingston-based blogger who seems to be Jamaica’s number one Japanophile. We’ve chatted briefly over Twitter, but little else yet. I thoroughly recommend his blog though, for a different outsider’s perspective on Japan.
Like many of the sites that I have some kind of presence on (far too many according to my wife, and she may well have a point) I get a weekly email from iLike.com, which tells me of the activity that’s gone on at my Shelf Life profile. I’ve done very little in terms of promoting this profile so far, and that email usually tells me that nothing’s happened since nothing last happened.
Today’s email alerted me to Shelf Life having gained two new fans. Although it’s easy to get pretty cynical after a while with social media (‘Barack Obama is your friend on MySpace!’, ‘Madonna is following you on Twitter!’, etc…oh really?), I was rather pleased with this little gem. After all, someone somewhere in the world had presumably dug my band’s tunes enough to nail their colours to the flag.
The band also appears to be making a little bit of progress over at the iTunes Japan store. No idea who’s buying downloads of our songs and no word from iTunes about it yet either, but I’m guessing that a maximum popularity rating must translate into sales somewhere down the line.
It seems to me that one of the many paradoxes of the web is that with user-generated content (UGC), you’ve still got to push and promote things that you do and make but at the same time it’s far too easy to get distracted, waylaid and sent off in a different direction from that which was intended (thus making it harder to concentrate on one task, such as promoting some content).
As C&M put it, ‘Build it and They Will Come’ was never a good maxim for the web. While it’s great that a creator in the internet age can bypass all the traditional channels of content distribution and connect directly with their audience (and therefore customers), without some form of effective promotion of that content, it’s just another lonely file in a vast, vast ocean of bytes.
In the case of music, many artists have long been aware that the industry is stacked pretty heavily against them (see Courtney Love’s famed diatribe against the music industry for further background, if you’ve not come across it before), and making a decent living from making music is about as easy as finding a large community of expat Americans in Pyongyang.
Even though the industry itself is still fighting hard in their losing battle against the existence of the internet, musicians of the digital generation are blessed like no other musicians that have gone before them. They can instantly connect to a global audience and set the terms themselves, without getting stung by contracts where they might scrape a few cents together over the years they produce their work. Most of this new generation would likely have little or no conception of how many hoops they’d have to go through and milestones they’d have to pass to even get a song played on the radio in the 50′s or on TV in the 70′s.
However, this amounts to absolutely nothing if there’s no promotion behind it (possibly the best future path for savvy record companies is to mutate into online PR and marketing agencies, once they’ve monetised new models of operation, to help today’s up-and-coming minstrels to get heard above the tsunamis of tunes available online). And the ‘blip generation’ gets so easily distracted by the myriad of media channels and producers of content all simultaneously vying for their attention that it’s much harder for a band to both build a loyal core audience and to find the time to push themselves through all the channels open to them.
Still, if you’re not expecting to make enough money from downloads etc that you’ll be able to retire from the day job early, it’s a great feeling to throw some tunes out there and eventually have them found and dug by someone!
