Brighton Carnival 2009

Yesterday's post was intended to be short, snappy and completed in next to no time - got to get me into the habit of blogging more often yet wasting less time when I actually do write something. In the end however, it actually took me about an hour and a half, which was far too long! As I'd like to have a little more community action around this blog, I realise it needs a little more input from me, so the art of writing snappier posts more regularly is definitely something I'll have to get sorted out.

I visited Brighton Carnival today, along with my wife and mother-in-law. It was the first one I've seen in Brighton and it was great fun - so lively. I don't think there used to be one when I lived here before, so it makes for a very welcome addition to the city's calendar. Who needs Notting Hill or Rio de Janeiro when Brighton Seafront's got it all (well, Rio might be nice)?

Following are a selection of photos from the day. This is turning out to be a great summer.

A reveller in bright costume, early on in the parade

Somehow based around a deck of cards...a fabulous outfit

No carnival is complete without a little input from death

Brighton + Carnival = 'Green Floats'

Spread those wings

The Brighton School Of Samba makes their presence felt

A carnival queen

Clown on a unicycle

Kids street dancing

One group makes it an anti-smoking campaign...

...and really gives it some with their message

Tiger kids with drums in orange

...and it's pretty damned proud of that fact too!

The 'Wow! factor' starts raising on the costumes front

Now that one's really quite spectacular

So much to carry around with you

The end of the parade brings out the boldest and best

A fine outfit you have, sir

Part of a complete dinner service

Positively radiant, my dear

Let it end with beats and rhythm, as it began

Another great Tokyo video via Jamaica

Tokyo & Yokohama - A High Speed Journey from Andreas Doppelmayr on Vimeo.

Following on from the last post of time lapse Tokyo footage comes another via the same source.

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.

Shelf Life get some new fans

When you're signed up to several internet services at the same time, a lot of the mail that fills your inbox tends to come from these sites. Out of the personal email that I get on a regular basis, probably only about 5-10% is from friends or family. Pretty much how it is with physical mail through the door really.

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!

Pecha Kucha Night in Brighton

Dr Dan Pinchbeck and Jessica Curry, 'Computer games as experimental art?'

I went along to the second Brighton Pecha Kucha Night tonight. I'd been wanting to go along to one of these events for a while as I'd come across the name in Tokyo, discovered that it had become a bit of a worldwide thing (happening now in 210 cities around the world) and I'm always interested in a Brighton contribution to a global event.

There was also a bit of a personal connection too. The format, where a series of presenters speak in front of a live audience showing 20 images for 20 seconds apiece, was first devised in 2003 by Japan-based designers Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham to show their work and attract people to their exhibition space, Super-Deluxe. This experimental art space/nightclub is in Tokyo's Roppongi area, a part of the city that is simultaneously sleazy and high class, and is one of the few parts of Tokyo where Japanese and non-Japanese mix and mingle with each other quite freely.

The first Pecha Kucha Night was held in 2003, the year that I arrived in Tokyo. Three years later, I held my own event at Super-Deluxe, a launch party for the 'Peace Not War Japan' CD co-organised with the record label. I also got to perform that same evening, DJing as Control K and singing 'Imagine' with some of the members of Shelf Life. It was probably around then that I began to pick up the name Pecha Kucha, which roughly translates from the Japanese as 'chit-chat'.

It was a muggy evening in Brighton tonight, though nowhere near the oppressive humidity of a Tokyo summer, and the event was being held at Redroaster - an airless coffee house at the beginning of Kemptown. Already packed with punters by the time we arrived, there was no choice but to stand at the back and strain a little to hear the speakers, who were mostly all a little underconfident with microphone technique.

Nirmal Dhiman, 'Visual diary drawings'

Most of the presenters were artists of some sort but although some of the talks were quite interesting or engaging, we left during the interval. I was satisfied that I'd got enough of a flavour of the event, dug the format and was in the company of a wife who was feeling the stuffiness of the room so was happy not to stick around.

It's definitely a good format for spoken word events or presentations, as it cuts out any chance of waffle and gives presenters a standard that they all have to keep to, whoever they might be. The programming of speakers is a very important element of these events too. Tonight felt a little too much like a series of art college end-of-term presentations for my liking, though that was both appropriate for Brighton and seemed to go down well with the audience.

I do however applaud each of them for going up and giving it a go, particularly as I suppose that visual artists don't tend to spend much time speaking in front of live audiences. And I'll certainly keep an eye out for future ones - you never know how these things could develop.

Now, TED talks in Brighton...that would really be something I'd stick around till the end for.

Time lapse Tokyo

static : pulse from Samuel Cockedey on Vimeo.

Bit by bit, slowly but surely, I'm about to start moving with more online activity after the recent hiatus. Following at least a month away from being permanently online, I'm now connected again.

Although it feels good to be back and I'm looking forward to reconnecting with some of the things I've been missing out on, being offline has also been positive in other ways. I've noticed the birds singing more, I've got a little sunburnt and have been having more face-to-face-conversations with actual people rather than through an internet-enabled device.

I think that it'll have to be a bit more selective and productive this time around, with less time spent just jumping from place to place. Easier said than done once temptation is laid out, but I'll give it a go.

Before I begin getting busy again with what's up in Brighton and the shape of my new life, here's a video I recently came across with some beautiful time-lapse photography of Tokyo. Can't beat those sunsets and cityscapes in my book. Thanks to Jamaipanese for pointing the way and to Samuel Cockedey for putting in the graft.

Brighton: born ('71), lived ('92-'03), married ('08), returned ('09)

I'm in a short period of transition at the moment. It's a positive one and in the right direction (after being in limbo for too long), but it means I'm only with very intermittent internet access for now.

Having the tap turned off for a few weeks certainly makes me realise how much of my life I usually spend online. It's actually quite nice in a way. The birds seem to sing a little more brightly and I've been interacting with people that live much more of their lives offline. I'm still rather itching to get back on though.

The first year back in the UK was spent in Scarborough, on the North East coast of England. It's a place that is not entirely without its charms, but after the thrills of five years in Tokyo, was a significant comedown. Browse through the pictures below to get a bit of a feel for the place:

After six years away from my birthplace and the town where I also spent my twenties, I have now returned to Brighton, with wife in tow. We're about to get ourselves set up a little more solidly. It's going to make a radical difference to being stuck out on a limb in Yorkshire or rushing headlong through the madness of the metropolis, and is suiting us both very well so far already. I hope to get a bit more involved with Brighton's netheads too, but all in good time.

In a fortuitous piece of timing, we've arrived in town bang in the middle of the Brighton Festival too, giving a whole stack of things to see and do. For non-British readers of this, the pictures below will give you an idea of this fair English seaside city I am now calling home again.

I won't write too much now as this is just a snatched moment online amidst all the mass of sorting out of a new life. When the dust has slightly settled, I'm hoping that this blog will gain a new lease of life. Until then, I offer a final group of pictures from the last place that I called home before returning here - the city that marked such a major turning point in my life - Tokyo.

Catch you soon.

Launch of Globalism TV

Hot on the heels of my Collected Writings site comes the second significant online media project I've launched in less than a week!

Above is the player for Globalism TV. The channel currently consists of an hour's programming pulled in from my YouTube channel, using the Mogulus platform. In time, it'll grow and feature more content produced with a global outlook. In the meantime, it's up here for you to take a look.

Click the 'Turn On' button to watch the live feed and if you have any comments, drop them here on this post.

Happy viewing.

New blog of collected writings launched

Beginnings

'Postings From An Edge' began with a first post back in May 2006, making it now on the verge of its third birthday. Were I able to put more of my focus into it, I'd probably mark that particular anniversary (perhaps with a masthead or something). As it is, energies are still largely directed elsewhere so it'll probably pass quietly and make far less noise about the fact than the average three year old. However, this post is not about how irregularly I update this particular blog.

Six months after I began it, I started a second blog as a place to collect all my publishable writings together. I began it on Blogger, using the same service as this one uses, and started sifting through my archives of published and unpublished works for pieces that were up to a decent enough standard to push in front of an audience. Of course, as it was on the internet anyway, it's been effectively live and linked to for some time and has even had a little action around it (always good to get relevant comments).

The intention was to fiddle around with the HTML and figure out how to make it more easy to order and navigate once all the content was uploaded. Given that it was being done at a pace considerably slower than that at which the internet tends to operate, by the time it was almost ready I'd discovered that it would actually be much better to use Wordpress and build it up in there rather than hacking around with code.

With all posts up, I imported the whole thing into Wordpress and then had to go through more cosmetic doctoring to clear up the import. Most posts look as originally intended, but there was a weird function of the import where many of the inverted commas ended up the wrong way round. For now, that's how I'll leave it. The original Blogger site will remain online but will not be updated with any new content.

Dom Pates: Collected Writings

After all this time and with plenty of tweaking over the years, the site is now fully up and running and ready to meet its audience. Dom Pates: Collected Writings is an archive of written works that includes magazine articles, interviews, reviews, travel pieces, short stories, song lyrics and more. The earliest pieces date from 1991, when I served as Music Editor on a Cardiff college magazine that I helped found along with fellow students. The most recent material comes from 2007, and covers lyrics for the Shelf Life album 'Best Before End', plus various pieces I wrote for publications in Tokyo.

Hopefully, it should be easy enough to find your way around the site. Pages are ordered by Features, Fiction and Lyrics with a drop-down menu on the right side to go to a particular category. There are also a number of other features, allowing you to share any content you like, subscribe to the RSS feed to stay up to date with new activity on the site, or to find me elsewhere on the web.

For any readers new to the service, each post can be voted on using Digg.com. You'll probably need to register an account with Digg, but once you have, you can click on the yellow button on the top right of the post to add your vote and help get the content a little more noticed. If you like (or loathe) what you read, do please leave a comment on the post itself - the more comments from readers, the more I'll be encouraged to write!

Future content

The amount I write does tend to depend on where I'm at, both creatively and personally. As I produce more material in the future (eg columns or magazine pieces, more short stories or lyrics for a second Shelf Life album), it'll find its way onto the site.

In the meantime, dip in, take a look around, give it some feedback and please help spread the word. If you'd like to exchange links for a similar or relevant site, there's a Contact page too for getting in touch.

Thanks.