Video for 'Change' now online

This weekend, I have completed and posted the first video made for a Control K track - 'Change'. The video can be seen above or at my YouTube channel.

'Change' is an overview of the key moments of the 2008 US election, culminating in Obama's victory address at Grant Park in Chicago. With bouncing bass, some spectral notes and a laid-back groove, it is an audio-visual postcard from a historic moment on the world stage.

The video revisits some of the characters and key headlines from the tale, then takes a trip through the speech, all in full campaign colours.

When promoting Shelf Life (as with any band), the focus has to be more on the personalities of the members and how they work together as a unit. The video for 'Endgame' would be an example of this.

With Control K, the visual side can be much looser and focus more on images conjured up by the music itself, even explore the use of video as a tool in its own right.

This means that videos for Control K material should be easier to make and have potential for more experimentation than for Shelf Life, which I'm quite excited by. There's already a stack of ideas in the pipeline, just not an awful lot of time available in which to explore.

Guess it'll be a case of 'watch this space, but don't hold your breath'!

New President, new song

Now that the dust has settled a little on last week's incredible news from the US of the election of Barack Obama, I'll add my contribution while it's still fresh enough in people's minds.

The cartoon above, taken I think from The Washington Post, seemed to capture the historic nature of the moment - a convergence of the paths of Presidents past with the movement towards justice and equality for African-Americans. It's a shame though that both of the hands on his shoulders belong to leaders who were assassinated.

The outpouring of joy, relief and goodwill towards America was quite a moment to be part of, almost a Berlin Wall for the 21st Century. There now appears the very distinct possibility that the US will make a more constructive contribution towards the international community rather than the destructive one it has shown for the past eight years.

This is coupled with the potential for action on some of the very real and deep problems that the world is facing, such as the ending of the ongoing war in Iraq (which is strictly speaking an occupation rather than a war, and it remains to be seen to what extent Obama will pull out all troops) and the threats posed by climate change.

Of course, as with Enoch Powell's famous edict, Obama will fail in the end, as all leaders do. He may manage to implement programmes of economic revival, take decisive action on limiting carbon emissions from the biggest polluter and thus set a good example for other nations, and at least make it look like Iraq can finally turn a page from decades of horror stories, even make some sort of meaningful contribution towards a semblance of peace between the peoples of Israel and Palestine.

My prediction here is that Afghanistan will be his undoing. He appears determined to ramp up operations there and encourage others to do the same. The British failed there three times. The Soviet Union's occupation was their undoing. History tells us that Afghanistan is a country that will not be subjugated by foreign force.

Without wishing to rain on the parade though, it will make a remarkable difference to have a new American President with his ample intelligence, his cultural background and such a mandate for progressive change.

I confess that, like many others around the globe, I've been hooked up to news from the election all year. Now that it's over and I can unhook myself, it's like opening the curtains and having the bright sunshine of a new day streaming in through the window.


The ending of the race and Obama's victory inspired me to put together a new Control K song, marking the passing of the election cycle. Titled 'Change', the track is an overview of the key moments of the election and culminating in his victory address at Chicago's Grant Park. It's the fastest time I've managed in getting a tune together and putting it up on the Net, five days compared to the nine months that the last Control K track took me.

I also have a video in mind for it and have started a rough draft of it, but that's going to take a little longer to sort out as I do have a few other more pressing things going on in my life too. Hopefully, I'll be able to knock it together fairly swiftly though.

Check the song out at the Control K page or download it from here. Any comments or feedback are welcomed, even if you think that Obama's no better than any of the rest of the crooks that purport to be 'leaders'. Feel free to pass the song around too, if you like it.

Sarah Palin gets caught out by 'Nicolas Sarkozy' (WN0013)

Unbelievable but also highly amusing, Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin has just been caught out by a Canadian radio prank call. Purporting to be Nicolas Sarkozy, Palin runs along with the whole thing before her advisers finally tell her to hang up, after she's been told that she's been pranked.

A 'heartbeat away from the presidency' indeed!

The end to leftist conspiracy theories? Then organise.

Was BushCo responsible for the attacks of 9/11? Is there going to be an attack on Iran that'll lead to World War III? Is Obama a stooge for the corporate-military-industrial complex?

In such troubled times as those we've been living through for the past eight years, it's been very easy to come up with all manner of theories as to what's behind it all, and that there's a grand right wing design emanating from the US led by the neocons who are bent on embedding American Empire across the planet for generations to come.

The 9/11 conspiracy theories, for example, occasionally seem deliciously plausible when told that controlled explosions brought down Building Seven or that there was no evidence of a plane found at the Pentagon.

Although it's sometimes been difficult to deny the possibility of the existence of such conspiracies, I've always preferred to take such theories with a pinch of salt.

Yes, it was evident to millions of people across the world that the Bush administration was hell-bent on invading Iraq and that Saddam Hussein didn't have the famed 'weapons of mass destruction' that were used to justify the invasion. Had it not been so obvious, it's unlikely that so many millions of people across the planet would have taken to the streets in protest a month before the 'campaign' began.

However, I've always felt that the march of history has not been one of grand design but rather one of stumbling accident. Could anyone have predicted or even planned that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand would have ended up being felt so forcefully in the ash and bones of the people of Hiroshima? Not a question that I feel requires an answer.

In every example of despotism stamped upon a people or peoples, those with the grand designs have eventually come undone. Rather than establishing a nation 'pure' for the Aryan races, Hitler ended up shooting himself in a bunker. As Martin Luther King famously said, 'the arc of a moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice'. In other words, bad shit happens, but it all comes good in the end.

I came across an interesting article by Philadelphia-based writer Dave Lindorff on Common Dreams today that chimed with my thinking on these matters, which can be found here. It reminds people that if (as is looking increasingly likely) Barack Obama becomes President Obama next week and as the man himself has said, the work really begins.

The evidence provided so far through the long, dark night of the first 'world US election campaign' suggests that he is a good man with great potential who may well prove to have a genuinely historic presidency. The reality, however, is that even cleaning up after Bush is an insurmountable task for any man, let alone a nation. That's before even beginning to deal with the multiple challenges facing the planet at this juncture in our history.

It would not be enough to simply prepare to be disappointed by yet another world leader that showed early promise and then turned out to be as rotten as the rest. Now, more than ever, it the time to organise, to take action, to get educated, and for people across the world to come together and find common cause in orders to solve our collective problems together. Whether economic, environmental, cultural or political, the peoples of this earth have more in common with each other than not.

We can all do our bit, however small.

W endorses McCain (WN0011)

I've been getting so bad at blogging these days! Whereas my wife seems to manage at least a post a day, I've not put anything up for about seven weeks - terrible behaviour.

In the past, I've tended to have so many consecutive projects on the go that things don't really get completed except at a very slow pace. Nowadays, I'm trying to actually finish things before I pick up something else.

The blog is an ongoing activity, so this is an attempt to throw a little something out there from time to time, so I don't completely get out of the habit.

I've been away from this blog for so long as I've had my head down in a large project - my first book. It's almost ready to go public, and I hope to launch it soon. There's also the Shelf Life UK tour to report on, which is heavily overdue.

With 10 days to go before the election that is probably going to decide the direction that the world is going to take over the next four years, I throw in here a clip from 'Saturday Night Live' (SNL).

SNL's Tina Fey has spoofed McCain's VP candidate Sarah Palin so well. In the above clip, Will Ferrell joins her with a pretty good Bush too.

Wordle takes on US party conventions (WN0010)

Barak Obama's acceptance speech, in a 'Wordle cloud'

John McCain's acceptance speech, in a 'Wordle cloud'

Nine months since the last 'Web Nuggets' post - this is a blog that's been rather off the boil recently! Just to show that it's not been completely neglected, here's another little nugget from the Web today.

I discovered Wordle a couple of months ago, a fun tool created by a former IBM engineer. Paste text into a box and it generates word clouds, like the above examples taken from the acceptance speeches of the two American presidential candidates. It has rather a nice way of demonstrating the key themes of a text, whilst also being rather attractive graphically.

Other example convention speeches can be found at the original Wired.com post.