Well, a comeback of sorts; perhaps a resurgence, or maybea second wave. Blogging won’t return to where it was, a few years ago, before the explosion of social media. The dynamics have changed. For some, Twitter ate their blog, for many of the rest, the rythmn of checking in on people’s blogs is broken,

“No, I’m not keeping up with your blog. Like a good friend said to me a couple of years ago, “Man, I don’t even have time to read the blogs of my good friends anymore.” Ditto with me. Heck, it’s hard enough keeping up with my good friends’ Twitter streams.”

In fact, Hugh’s thoughts on the state of the blogosphere today hold a key for the future. Creating good blog content is hard, which is why so many people have left the platform – unable to sustain the demand for content or find an audience for their writing.

However, Twitter and Facebook are very limited vehicles for holding content – that is not their strength.

If you have creative output, you need a place to host it, explain it and maybe invite comment on it. On that level blogging still makes sense. Content-specific platforms, like Flickr (photos) and Soundcloud (music) are great hosts but limited content and commentary platforms. If you have a story to tell, about your life, or work or product, a sustained story, then blogging is still a compelling platform.

Because, as I’ve always said, blogging is ultimately all about self-publishing.

But, blogging is not for everyone – this drive is not part of everyone’s personality. Blogging is a public art and in a way social media has cleared the path for it to become more elite. I’m saving some thoughts on the pros and cons of this for later posts. But, for now, I wanted to focus on two ways I see blogging changing fast.

Comments

Back in 02-05, comments were the fuel that drove a lot of bloggers. Today, comment-traffic is way down and I don’t see this trend being reversed anytime soon.

Reflecting on the death of blog comments, Binary Bonsai wrote,

“Twitter killed a lot of blogs, and I’m beginning to think that it’s killed even more comments. I love Twitter, but I do miss the old days of the blogosphere, back when blogs where as common as opinions (I was traversing my archives earlier; it was like visiting a graveyard, with URLs for headstones). Back when even a half-assed entry would garner comments from near and far, and people would link to each other and the sense of community was in-between people and their writing, rather than in-between 140-character quips.

Those days are gone, and a new batch have arrived, where if I write that I’m eating a strawberry pie on Facebook, it’ll get more replies than if I dig up a super-rare interview with George Lucas and write about it on my blog… What’s a man to do?”

There appear to be no elegant solutions for pulling comments into blogs from other platforms and creating active, cross-platform conversations. Maybe this will change in the future, but for now, as bloggers, we should just focus on our content and accept that comments in the old sense, are a gift when they come.

Technology

Part of why I am bullish about blogs, is because I’m bullish about the iPad and the future of tablet computers. Facebook and Twitter got a huge shot in the arm from advanced mobile phone technology.

Portability sparked the growth in social media, because it allowed us to post from anywhere and 140 characters doesn’t feel like much of a limitation when writing from a phone. In an interesting reversal of trend, the tablet provides portability but the ability to handle the richer and deeper content that blogs require.

There you have it – in 2010 blogs will rise again, without comments and fuelled by tablets like the iPad.

“…they might call that the Music Industry, but that has nothing to do with what I do as a working musician. I have been a professional musician for 15 years, and it’s been my sole job for 9 of those years. But whatever that was on the TV tonight, that’s not even close to my world.”

It’s a point that bears repeating, over and over. For many, when they think of the music business, or the viability of music as a business or career their mind turns to events like the Grammys and the (very) small number of (highly publicised) celebrities that are showcased there. Amazingly, otherwise thoughtful adults still view the music business through this filter and still let this thinking influence what they say to young kids who are interested in following a musical future.

I’m fortunate to know a number of people my age or older who are serious musicians. These are not dropouts or loafers, but serious hardworking people with all the usual “adult” responsibilities (homes, families, mortgages, businesses, etc). Some have never written anything other than musician on their tax returns, others have held professional roles in music alongside other careers and some, like me, have returned to full-time music after exploring other vocations.

Whilst a few may be loosely connected to the kind of music we see at the Grammys (either as session players, engineers, or arrangers, or the like), that “industry” does not reflect our “industry.” Comparing the Grammys to the music business the rest of us participate in is like comparing McDonalds to your favourite local cafe or diner.

Moreover, it’s worth remembering that the big glossy end of the industry is changing fast. Consider Peter’s thoughts over at Create Digital Music – Sorry, Majors: “Indie” Artists, Labels Clean Up Again at Grammys. Even at this major label oriented event, independent and smaller labels triumphed. Moreover, one of the most lauded artists, Imogen Heap who although signed to major label operates almost totally with a DIY, small label approach to her music-making and marketing.

That bears remembering because the music industry has dramatically changed in ways that favour ordinary working musicians, be performers, session players, arrangers, copyists, educators or trainers. MusicPowerNetwork is a great example of how to learn about these changes.

So, whilst the Grammys represent a part of the music industry it is not the whole story. A lot of people are making a good living from music far away from the borrowed luxury and hype of those kinds of awards shows – remember that next time a friend or child talks to you about their musical dreams.

As the article on the buzz put it (Does Anyone Still Care About The Grammys?)

“…it’s interesting, from a cultural studies / celebrity gossip sort of perspective, but not only is it stale musicially, it’s downright offensive to working musicians everywhere.”

Purely for fun, I’ve been taking photos with my iPhone and posting them on twitter, at the rate of about one a day. Chase Jarvis’s work on the The Best Camera project, together with his handy iPhone app, inspired me.

Of course, these photos have technical limitations. The iPhone camera can’t compare to a DLSR; but that isn’t the point. Every photo helps you frame the world and work on your composition, so it is all good practice.

That said, it is amazing how moody and atmospheric iPhone photos can be. Moreover, it is impressive how much ouy can do with an application running on the iPhone to do basic developing of the images.

And, if you have no other camera with you, there’s no reason not to use the iPhone and take the most creative image you can to remember an important day, or occasion.

You can see more of my iPhone photos here.

Whilst I appreciate that not being actively connected to a church and expressing some thoughts that could be considered “doubts” in public goes against the grain of a lot of the culture of contemporary evangelicalism I am, right now, a long way from being unhappy.

Sure, I could catalogue a number of things in my life that I wish were different. I live in a city where I have few friends, small networks and my career is not really “appreciated.” But compared to last year, things are better on every count. I’ve stuck with some changes and plans and they have paid off. I can’t say I love Hong Kong, but I don’t feel as alienated as I did this time last year.

Whilst I am not, as a writer or academic where I thought I would be ten years ago, I am writing regularly. My blog readership is slowly growing again (not that raw numbers ever meant much to me anyway). I finished a surprising good draft of a novella late last year and I’m finally enthusiastic again about some long term writing projects.

I’m also thrilled, on an almost daily basis by my renewed involvement in photography. I’m being asked to take photos and encouraged to think about doing more with the photos I take.

As for the question of faith, well I think that is a lot more humble and less oriented on happiness and safety. In a way, I think this recent post from Donald Miller reflects a lot of where I am at on that score right now.

All of which is my way of saying that Sunday’s post was not about how bad my life is, rather about how differently it has turned out compared to what I expected.

Last week they released a brief (free) tutorial explaining the benefits of Logic’s shift to 64 bit processing, in terms of memory handling. They demonstrated how many instansiations of the Sylus RMX plugin would crash Logic in 32 bit mode and now many more could be run on the same system in 64 bit mode.

The difference was staggering. If you are interested, I’ll leave you watch the video yourself here.

For those of us who run large projects in Logic, this is a significant development. Most top orchestrators run multiple computers in order to be able to effectively stream the vast number of samples required to simulate a real orchestra. With 64 bit and enough RAM, you can now bring that within a single high powered machine running multiple drives.

Whilst my bank manager is probably not excited by my new-found excuse to buy an extra 16GB of RAM, I’m thrilled that a software update has, in effect, made my Mac Pro far more powerful than it was a few weeks ago!

The iPad, in its current configuration, is not revolutionary. Much like the iMac, iPod and iPhone when they were released, the iPad is a beautifully formed product that repackages existing technologies. That said I do believe the iPad will define the Tablet platform and I expect to buy one – eventually.

Obviously the iPad is an exciting device for consuming media. I love the kinds of games being developed for the iPhone/ITouch and the idea of playing those games on a bigger, but still portable screen is thrilling. Same goes for watching video podcasts, reading news websites and perhaps even TV/Film content. I blogged some time back about the potential of an iTunes-like format for distribution and organisation of journals and academic papers and the iPad seems perfectly suited for that.

However, what really excites me about the iPad is its potential not just for consuming content, but for creating it.

As a writer, my most productive period was when I lived in London. Although I owned a PowerBook G3 back then, my day to day writing tool was a Palm II with a folding keyboard – far less computing power than an iPad.

Although the PowerBook G3 was sleek for its day, it was heavy. By contrast, the Palm plus folding keyboard rig was super light – so light in fact that I never thought twice about packing into my shoulder bag, or messenger.

That experience has always stayed with me. The Palm II was basic; no colour screen, no cool finger swipe gestures, no multimedia. But, that extreme portability encouraged me to write, take notes and edit anywhere. And, not having to retype hand-written notes or worry about weight or battery life was liberating.

I see that kind of potential in the iPad. Right now, I’m writing this on a PowerBook G4 running Scrivener. This is my rig for writing prose, handling email, personal planning (with OmniFocus), Twitter and blogging. I can do all of that with an iPad, with longer battery life, less footprint, lighter weight and more connectivity (thanks to 3G).

The iPad won’t have the power to run Lightroom or the new version of Aperture (if Apple ever release one) anytime soon. But, maybe that doesn’t matter. There are some amazing photo apps already out there for the iPhone (check today’s pic from Chase Jarvis as an example). On the road the iPad could easily back up photos from my DSLR and do basic editing and proofing on the fly.

The explosion of music apps for the iPhone is equally exciting. There are already apps that allow you to use the iPhone as a controller for a DAW like Logic and I expect those to grow with the iPad. There are also apps that let you create beats, generate synth sounds and record basic songs. There is an enormous potential in the iPad for a portable sheet-music library and for music notation software.

What the iPad’s release does, for me, is knock out the ground between the tablet form and the MacBook Pro. If I want to seriously run image programmes like Lightroom and Photoshop, or music programmes like Logic then I need the MacBook Pro (and even then, I would want to wait for the next iteration with more RAM and processors).

But, the honest truth is that right now, I seldom need that power when I’m on the road. Most of what I do while away from my home studio, either in terms of music or photography really amounts to note-taking, sharing and very basic editing.

And, I can do that on an iPad!

In late 1999 my “day-job” was writing and researching in the Centre for Theology and Culture at King’s College London. I was also involved with Bloomsbury Baptist Church in London while working part-time as a Chaplain in King’s. My life was set to a rythmn of research seminars, worship services, film sceenings, library research and cafe conversation – not to mention long afternoons in the college library. I was the archetypal post-modern academic – wearing black, quoting recent cinema and current European philosophy in the same breath and so on.

Cut to late 2009 and I am no longer an academic, haven’t been to church in a long time, have no local faith “community” to speak of and rarely write or blog about theology. While I still watch a lot of films, I’m more likely to talk about their soundtrack than use them in an exposition of post-structuralist thought. In short, I have virtually no connection left to the life I lived in 1999.

So what happened?

Well, perhaps the most ironic thing is that between 1999 and 2009 I had a dramatic rise and fall as a faith-oriented blogger. My first blogs, in 2001-2003 were focussed on spirituality and also on the research I was doing at King’s; hermeneutics, ethics and portrayals of faith in popular films.

Then, from 2004-2007 I blogged quite a bit about theology and globalisation and became tangentially involved in the emerging church “conversation.” Although my blog never attracted a lot of comments, it did at its peak attract quite a bit of traffic (today bloggers seem to boast about much smaller numbers) and kept my email and chat conversations with fellow thinkers alive. I was sent books to review, invited to submit papers for conferences and generally engaged in a global community of thought.

Then I ran out of steam.

I suspect there were a few reasons for that. First, I didn’t live near any of my interlocutors. Blogging allowed me to interact with people from the four corners of the globe. But, that is not the same as face-face exchange. I found that my ideas about faith and culture were not growing. Blogs are like books, reading them will only profit you up to a point, beyond that you need human interaction.

In Delhi and then in Hong Kong, the human element in churches was fraught. In Delhi I had a real crisis, not so much of faith as of vocation. It was one of those rare occasions where I really needed church. Sadly, the help wasn’t there. Here in Hong Kong church “shopping” was a soul-destroying experience, but worse still was attending a church for nearly two years, only to realise that no-one was even interested in learning my name.

Back in 2004-2005 I still harboured the dream of returning to academia, even as I made the move back to being a full-time musician. But, by the time I settled in Hong Kong in 2006 that door was closed for good. With no physical audience for my theological ideas, apart from long distance connections via the blog, I lost momentum.

Supervening upon on all this was a growing disillusionment with church as a concept. I struggled for quite sometime with feelings of being let down – by my home denomination, by fellow academics and friends, by the churches I attended through that decade. Moreover, I was somewhat ashamed by my own failure to cope better with the challenges and changes the decade brought up.

I wouldn’t say I have lost my faith, but I have lost interest in a lot of the debates and conversations that once animated me. This year I will return to writing about faith and globalisation and will be taking some photos in support of that. But, this new body of work will quite different from what I did in the past, with a very different vocabulary and, I anticipate a thoroughly different audience.

Soul destroying stuff, I know.

But, I haven’t done enough of this in the last few years. Which makes my feeling that I haven’t been as productive or fruitful as possible seem all the more acute.

These past two weeks, one question I keep bumping into is the role of free in my “business model.” Free has become such an integral part of current discussions about the state of music business – free downloads, free streaming, etc.

But, I’m contrasting that with what I’m learning in the photography world, where the loud and consistent advice is to not work for free. In the past few months I’ve been (perhaps wrongly) excited about the opportunities to get my work out there for free (with credit). As a musician in the current climate, that seems smart. Get published with a reputable and big name site or publisher, grow your CV and go from there.

But, smart photographers I meet and talk to advise anything from extreme caution to flat out rejection of this idea. I don’t like everything about the photography business, but I do respect that photographers have been doing this “small scale creative business” thing for longer (and better) than many musicians have.

That got me thinking what we mean by words like free, giving, gifting, sharing. Imagine leaving 50 CDs in a park somewhere? That’s free isn’t it? It’s also meaningless. I have no idea what will become of them – will someone pick one up and listen to it, or will they just end up in the council trash?

Now, imagine I give 50 CDs away to bloggers in exchange for reviews or comments. That’s also free, but something very different is happening. What about giving away 50 CDs to people who come hear me at a gig? That’s also free, but a different dynamic as well.

When we think about free, sharing or whatever, it’s important not to loose sight of the need for a transactions. What the last two examples had, over leaving a stack of CDs in the park was the transaction. Transactions are not always monetary, sometimes they can be other kinds of interaction. Whatever the transaction, it should play a role in supporting you as a creator of music.

When I was a kid, there was a crass way of describing what you wanted from a music label – to get played, paid and laid. Of course these days, the musician takes that responsibly upon themselves (in, perhaps, a less juvenile way) than relying on a label to do it for them.

This is a big “why, what, how” question we should put in front of all our approaches to sharing music. Why are we doing this? What is the transaction we are looking for? How will this help sustain our craft, our lives and our families?

Because somehow, somewhere and in some way the piper has to be paid. You can choose not to set a financial price on a piece of work, but as long as you have some plan, some idea, some sense of how that will bring something tangible back to you that can be worked into a business model, or sense of vocation, or some such long term ideal, you can make more solid decisions about where you aim your creative output.

“I love his blog, because it is 100% pure. He simply does it for the enjoyment of sharing and connecting with people. I am not sure what he does, but he looks like he does very well in his chosen career and just does this blog for the love of the subject matter. I am not against blogs that make money (I make a full-time income from FBB)…I just love these little “pure” blogs.”

The phrase, “pure blogs” caught my eye. Of course, back when blogging started, everyone was a “pure blogger.” The idea that blogging could be a career, or a primarily financial enterprise had not been developed. Only later did the pro-bloggers, consultants and marketers came along (together with rankings, A-lists, paid linkage) and the rest, as they say, is history.

2009 was the year when something similar happened to social media, especially Twitter. The rise of the gurus and consultants, with their growth strategies and loosely conceived ideas on “monetisation” have changed that game as well.

Using online media to make money isn’t the problem. I happen to agree with the notion that every small business really should have a blog and a twitter account and that blogging about what you do, your work and vocation, is potentially a good thing. I guess it’s more a question of transparency and honesty.

Perhaps it’s this whole idea that we think of ourselves as a “brand” that has me troubled.

One of the most damming judgements I’ve heard about Hong Kong is that it’s very hard to find “straight” people. The suggestion was that too many people here have ulterior motives; they just want to turn every human interaction into an opportunity to make cash. I’m not sure it’s a Hong Kong specific problem, but in an expensive city, which little diversity in businesses or cultural backgrounds, snobbery and opportunism are bound to over-breed.

I see a connection here to the idea of “pure blogging,” or to broaden the subject, “pure” social media. How upfront are we about our reasons for being in this game?

If we blog about our work, does that make our blog un-pure? Maybe the issue is honest blogging. Or maybe it’s blogging that flows from work, rather than towards it? Maybe it’s about being upfront for our reasons to blog. Going back to my critic of Hong Kong, what irked him was people who appear interested in being friends, but in reality they want to sell a service, exploit your connections, or in some other way “use” you.

Perhaps the danger here is collapsing two different ideas – socialising and networking. In fact, I’ve come to think that social networking may be a lazy descriptor for what happens social media.

When we socialise, we are interacting with people in a general and open sense. In fact, the idea of “being social” implies gathering and relating in entertaining and pleasurable ways. Moreover, our capacity to be “social” is connected to our ability to be “civil,” which is a building-block of a human community.

Networking, by contrast is specific to a purpose. Hence a social gathering, and a networking gathering carry different implications, suggest different topics of conversation and even different modes of relating.

Call me old fashioned if you must, but I still hold that opening a conversation at a social gathering with the question – “what do you do?” is a vulgar faux pas. However, in a networking gathering, it is not only appropriate, it is probably the best opening available.

The deeper issue here, relates to our human development. The art of being social carried with it the notion of being well versed in the affairs of day and the ability to extend hospitality to a breadth of people – it is a challenge to find common ground, to be broadly read and educated and to retain the “common” touch.

But, if all we do is network, then there is no challenge to expand out scope of interest and understanding beyond our work, or more specifically, beyond the needs and present demands of our work. There are many fields, from politics to finance and even church, where the failure of leaders to understand their lack of popularity is directly related to the narrowness of their networks.

Instead of the awkward idea of social networking, could a metaphor closer to the idea of the “parlour” help us? Fashionable at the turn of the last century, the parlour stood for regular meetings organised to discuss ideas (and politics). They were invitation-only, frequently socially prestigious, but more broad than the business-only notion of networking.

Interestingly, their origin traces back to the monastic movement, to spaces in the monastery set aside for conversation, discussion and debate (as well as hospitality). I say interestingly, because my feeling is such a need is what social media meets for many people. It’s about legitimating a space to meet people and talk, share and discuss.

That’s the purity that appeals to me – discussion that exists whether or not money becomes part of the transaction, discussion that flows from hospitality. The professionals I most admire, will talk about what they do regardless of whether they get paid to do so, regardless of whether it brings them more prestige. That they don’t have time to stand around and talk all day (or blog or tweet) does not mean they don’t love what they do.

I’m not a fan of blog-for-a-job strategies (even more pernicious are tweet-for-a-jobbers). This is where people start a blog with the sole purpose of trying to land a job. They create content, develop a following, then dump it once a “real” job comes through. It’s a cynical move that has often left me wondering how much of the content was really just fluff and BS.

Perhaps purity is not the end, as much as love. To do something for the love of it, means, in part to do it regardless of the reward. I’m not suggesting we should work for nothing. But, when we blog (or tweet, or just talk) for nothing, there is a transparency there that is appealing and rewarding. Not having to second-guess people’s motivations, or their honesty is integral to trust and community.

I’m throwing those big heavy ideas around because, in the end, human needs don’t change just because we are online, if anything they accelerate. The old questions, “who can you trust,” “how do I choose friends wisely,” still remain. By accelerating the number of people we can “meet” blogging and social media simply challenge us to ask those questions more often, every day.

Of course, the best gifts are the ones that keep being used or remembered for the rest of the year, but that’s something for another blogpost.

It was great to head down under to Adelaide to visit family. I didn’t grow up in Adelaide, but sucessive holidays there, together with my family have resettled there means it feels sort of like home, or at least familiar.

This was my first summer Christmas in many years. It was great to enjoy my mum’s cooking again for the season, to go for long bike rides and walks along the beach and try and adjust to Adelaide’s small town friendliness.

However, I did not enjoy that feeling that once the 25th had past, Christmas was somehow over. I’ve become accustomed to the sense that Christmas really runs right through to Epiphany and that the music, food and reflection are not something to be dispensed with as soon as the wrapping paper comes off the gifts.

In a way that’s all background to the start of 2010. I’m rebranding and relaunching my studio business, taking more photos every week (and planning some great photographic trips) and doing the everyday stuff that keeps life moving forward.

So, in a way, I’m not down in the depths of up on the mountain-top, I’m just out in a field, working a plow…

I tend to write music in a program called Sibelius. It is one of a number of programs that allow you to write stave music, much as you would have done with paper and pencil, expect harnessing the power of modern computing. Sibelius plays back the music you compose and whilst the results from this get better with each new version of the programme, they aren’t really good enough (in my hands) as a final product. The real power of scoring programs like Sibelius is their ability to jot down ideas, to edit and arrange musical parts and to create visually beautiful and easy to read printed sheet music.

In Sibelius I can write and arrange really well, but the quality of the music I output is not compelling.

When it comes to recording, and recreating the music I’ve written in final form, I use a program called Logic, which is one of the major Digital Audio Workstations. In conjunction with Logic I use a number of sample players and sample libraries that hold hundreds of Gigabytes of files – recordings of real instruments played by real musicians. Programs like Logic are computerised recording studios; tremendously powerful and able to reproduce music with stunning authenticity and realism, as well as combing programmed and automated parts with real life recordings. Whilst I can create music in Logic and improvise with the software instruments, the interface is not as good, for me, when it comes to arranging. I like to look at staves of music and the notation editor in Logic always feels clumsy and slow compared to Sibelius. Moreover, the printed output from Logic, whilst useable, is simply not on a par with the output from Sibelius, which rises to the level of professional engraving and publishing.

In Logic I create great sounding music, but, as things become more complex, writing and arranging gets slow and the quality of the sheet music Logic creates is nowhere near as good as what Sibelius delivers.

So, I write in Sibelius, producing great looking, well worked arrangements, then I create music in Logic. Typically, I export a MIDI sequence from Logic (an automated collection of notes for each instrument). In a perfect world, you could use one program to cover both tasks. But we don’t live in a perfect world. As Ben summarises it,

creating the best possible score and the best possible audio recording are two different processes. While it would be nice to do them simultaneously, doing so inevitably compromises one or the other…and you end up with the perfect recording and a less-than-perfect notated score, or the perfect notated score and a less-than-perfect recording.

What does that mean for me? Well, it means that to improve from where I am now I will have to make two changes.

First, on some smaller projects I will just have to learn to do the whole job in Logic. For a lot of jobs I don’t need to have professional quality sheet music, if no-one else is going to play on the project or see the score. If I need to create a bunch of short, punchy cues for a game developer, then skipping the Sibelius stage would save a substantial amount of time.

Second, on larger projects I need to get better at playing the parts into the sample players in Logic, rather than working from a MIDI file. This means on a project with, say 60 tracks of sample instruments, playing each instrument in as a live MIDI performance, rather working from programmed parts. This means creating a stage that interprets the score, much like an orchestra does.

This sounds like a lot of extra work, but really it is a disciple and workflow issue. Right now I still spend a lot time cleaning up and tweaking the MIDI that Sibelius exports to make it sounds as good as possible in Logic.

Right now the challenge I’m facing is to sound better and get good results faster. In music, as in most creative fields, once you have good skills the improvements only really come with great efficiency and better workflows. Embracing this difference between what I can and should do in Sibelius and what I can and should do in Logic is an essential step forward in the next few months.

Rituals of rebirth: planning some 2010 reading – Back when I was in the academic/theology/philosophy world, I would always set adventurous and formidable reading lists every year. I agree with the quote from Alberto Manguel, that reading is a “…ritual of rebirth” (and with Twyla Tharp that who we become is a function of the books we read and the people we meet). Moreover, musicians need to attend to what they listen to as well, not just for pleasure, but for growth. Time for some list-making.

Creating Guitar Tabs with Logic Pro 9 – Confession time: I’m not a fan of scoring in Logic Pro, even with the recent enhancements. But, it is good to know how to create scores in Logic and this great little tutorial show you how to create TAB, which is really important when working with self taught guitarists.

If Rip Van Winkle had slept for 20 years and woken up today… – Nice visual comparison of technology (and polar ice caps) in 1989 and 2009. Try saying “lightning fast 20MHz processor” without laughing!

A Thousand Kitchen Years Ago – What I admire about great chefs (and great musicians and photographers as well), is not just their ability to do something that is amazing on occasion, but to do it consistently night after night. A restaurant is a room full of people all waiting to be dazzled, surprised and satisfied. This lovely, honest and revealing blogpost from longtime favourite foodblogger lets us in on what it looks like in kitchen as cooks and chefs strive to reproduce excellence.

The best of aromasysabores 2009 – And, from one of my new favourite foodbloggers, a wonderful summary of best blogposts and recipes. Inspiring stuff and great photography.

is this theology (is) a dead end – The Emerging Church conversation remains significant for me on the level of ideas, but I never really saw much of it in terms of personal experience. This post points to a current discussion about whether or not this movement has been “revolutionary.” Personally, I fee that big aggressive terms like revolution, exile, piracy and the like undermine and obfuscate what has been an important and significant part of long term trend in church history.

In Defense of 1,000 True Fans – Part IV – Kelly Richey – A great interview around new realities in music marketing and running your career as an independent musician. Whilst it is getting harder to sell conventional records and book gigs (in many countries), it is also getting easier for good musicians with a good work ethic, to build a fanbase and build relationships with their fans.

Sustaining The Practice of Art – Something that is often missed in work/life balance conversations is role that our work plays in inspiring and energising us. Sure, for many people, their work is toil and drudgery. But, if you love what you do, then doesn’t your work actually sustain and invigorate you as well? I love taking breaks, but more and more, I love making time to really work, dig into projects in a deep and pure way. Blogposts like this, from perhaps my favourite blogger of 2009, inspire me down that path.

The Parlour @ Hullett House – Hong Kong has some great food bloggers. This is a real boon for food lovers in this city, because the general standard of food journalism here is poor and although there are many great restaurants and eateries, there are also some really dire ones that defy logic in staying open and charging outrageous prices for borderline inedible trash.

Planning for 2010 – I don’t do New Year’s resolutions anymore, simply because I believe we should let our work and commitments write our resolutions. Of course, auditing that does involve looking at our time commitments, which this blogpost highlights fantastically well. For me, I expect that in 2010 I will spend even more cooking than in 2009, which is trend for the last five years really. The more time I spend in the kitchen, the happier and healthier the whole family is – everytime.

One Take On the Importance of the Quaker Practice of “Open Worship” – There are a lot of things about Quaker practice that I find compelling. This blogpost is a good summary of that interest, especially the idea that “…open worship trusts the spirituality of people.” Fear and mistrust play a vast, almost structural role in many of the church cultures I’ve experienced.

Apple buy music streaming service Lala – Apple’s purchase of Lala could well turn out to the big music business story of 2010, especially as mobile platforms continue to grow and Apple moves to release some sort of Tablet computer in the next months.

When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like “Avatar”? (via Tensegrities) – I’ve yet to see Avatar, though all reports seem to suggest it is well worth catching on the big screen. However, this analysis resonates with my initial impression of the plot-line as garnered from trailers and early comments.

Real for Reel: The Amazing Sherlock Holmes Experibass, and More Winter Cinema Sounds – Sherlock Holmes was a surprisingly good film and a big part of that was down to Hans Zimmer’s inventive score. This post has some great comments and interviews on the scoring process, including the work of sound designer Diego Stocco, who developed the Experibass, which played a big role in the score.

10 non-PowerPoint books that can help you create better presentations – Great reading list, not just for creating presentations with slideware, but for any situation where you represent information visually (including blogs and web design!).

don’t worry if you don’t know “absolutely everything” before starting out – The great thing about the internet is the way you can research a project or business opportunity before launching it. Of course, the bane of the internet is that research can soon drown you before you even start. That’s why this advice is so timely and something I wish I’d understood six or seven years ago.

Just arrived home from Holidays in Adelaide, Australia and when I get my feet under the desk I’ll posting some photos, experiences and thoughts for the year ahead.

Before anyone posts comments about the films that were originally released before 2009, let me remind you that I live in Hong Kong, which means some films only open here long, long after they opened in their home markets. Moreover many of the films making other writer’s lists (like The Road, The Hurt Locker and Broken Embraces) have yet to open here.

There are no documentaries on this list because, to be fair, I haven’t seen that many during 2009. Food Inc stands out, because it’s a topic that I’m very passionate about and it’s a documentary you can share with kids. However, it isn’t really a breakthrough as a film.

Finally, I should add that this year I haven’t been to the cinema as much as in previous years and so my sample is a little low. Anyway, enough with the caveats, here’s the list.

10. Up – I’m a huge Pixar fan. Most years, their films become my favourite animated feature of the year and get close to my top five. Not this time. Up is still a compelling film, with a really moving opening and a solid storyline. All the craft and humour is there, but not the magic. Will this be the first PIxar DVD I don’t buy?

9. Inglourious Basterds – At the risk of losing all credibility let me explain this choice. Yes, the movie is too long and in parts poorly edited. Yes, it creaks badly in the final act. But, the opening scene and, in fact, just about every scene with Christoph Waltz captivated me. Colonel Hans Landa will be remembered as one of the great villains of cinema history.

8. In The Loop – I didn’t include a documentary this year, but not including a straight-up comedy feels like a step too far. In The Loop is patchy, sub-cinematic (it’s really an extension of the TV comedy, In The Thick Of It) and not for everyone. But, the sharp, acidic wit held captivated me and left me wishing I was quick enough (and smart enough) to remember more of the lines and put-downs.

7. Rwanda: The Day God Walked Away – Breathtaking, thoughtful and beautifully constructed cinema. This is a tightly focussed story of one woman’s fight for survival during the genocide. That unrelenting focus demands that we meditate on the genocide in a way that other films haven’t managed. Evocative and discomforting.

6. Slumdog Millioniare – Yes, it only opened locally in February! The soundtrack alone would tempt me to put this in my top ten – A.R. Rahman is such a powerful and original composer. This film has everything – drama, love, action, humour, fantastic cinematography, solid scripting, great cast and inspired use of location. Deserved every accolade it received.

5. Coraline – Many great children’s stories are simultaneously cute and dark, which is where the genius of Coraline begins. This really is a film for kids of a certain age, who still the world with very childlike eyes, but are starting to realise the inconsistencies and contradictions of adult life. Of course, it helps that Coraline has a bold and original animated vision, great sound editing and a solid narrative arc.

4. Tony Manero – A film about serial killer who dresses like the lead character from Saturday Night Fever, during the Pinochet regime in Chile. Amazingly, this concept works, held together by very dark humour, brooding camera work and a political and cultural critique that never reaches the level of being preachy or overt.

3. Dev D – Devdas, is classic Indian novel that has spawned many film adaptions. What sets this version apart is the way it breaks from a lot of Bollywood conventions in search of a more modern voice. Dev D is a visually rich, stunning and original film, very well acted and rounded off with a killer soundtrack. Moreover, the film is the psychologically sophisticated (with rich symbolism) and at times quite dark and bleak. Not your typical Bollywood fare at all.

2. Black Ice – This dark and at times bleak romantic drama from Finland is not without some faults. But, the overall impression is very solid and the way the story of infidelity is explored is fresh and engaging. Could have done with a better soundtrack and maybe a few less scenes. However, it deserves recognition as one of the best, recent films in the “Hitchcock” style of film-making.

1. Un Prophète – A serious contender for one of the best films of the decade, this menacing drama, set in a Corsican prison (with dialogue in French, Italian and Arabic) is also worthy of consideration as one of the best prison dramas of all time. Meticulously constructed, rich in the breadth of human emotion and depravity and with a meaningful storyline, Un Prophète is the kind of film that stays with you for quite some time after you’ve left the cinema.

Therefore, it is unusual for me to dissent from the Magazine’s editorial perspective – as I do right now, over Twitter.

Monocle is no fan of Twitter, the latest edition makes that point clear, adding it to their “most unwanted” list (which also includes cliché ridden language, Larry King and Joseph Kony). Their claim is that large media organisations are using Twitter as “cheap filler to replace meaningful content,” and that companies are using Twitter in a way that suggests poor cosmetic rebranding.

The criticisms are valid. I don’t believe news organisations should be creating Twitter-specific content. The medium is not a good fit for anything other than links to breaking stories and the occasional editorial nicety. Moreover, the way some companies use Twitter is embarrassing to watch (“…like seeing some old guy walk down the road with a young bimbo on his arm…”).

I’m no expert (although social media experts do appear to be sprouting like mushrooms after a rainy day), but I wonder if Twitter has much value at all to the top end of broadcasting or big business. I’ve yet to hear a compelling argument there. The only exception being guerilla-marketing campaigns for niche brands.

However, Monocle’s focus is not solely on big business or the top of the publishing tree. They consistently champion smaller, high value businesses – both global micro-brands and local examples of excellence in service and design. It’s here that I think Twitter has a value Monocle has missed. Consider their “verdict” on Twitter.

“There is a kind of social media that really works for business and play. It’s called having a glass of wine.”

I couldn’t agree more. We are not going to get very far, perpetually hidden behind the safe, embryonic glow of our computer screens and mobile devices. If you are a successful brand, or key identity in your field, this is not problematic. You reputation becomes your business card and people will either come to you, or your introduction will carry some weight.

But for new businesses, smaller players and people with niche skills, finding the right people to share wine with, or finding anyone at all, can be a challenge. Here in Hong Kong I’ve met plenty of people with “networking burnout.” The city is replete with such events and they work for some people (consultants, headhunters, etc), but for the rest of us they can be like finding a needle in a haystack – especially if your industry doesn’t really have a large presence in the city (e,g., you don’t work in finance, retail, tourism or logistics).

“…what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.” Twyla Tharp

That quote hit me hard some months back. I made a decision, to refocus on my locality, make more contacts and improve my social network. Much to my surprise, Twitter played a key role in that. The people I’m actively connected to on Twitter are mostly musicians, photographers, advertisers, artists, game-designers, writers, publicists – in a nutshell, the kind of people I’ve struggled to meet in my three years in Hong Kong.

Moreover, Twitter is an amazing recommendation-engine. The common criticism of Twitter is that’s full of inane, “what I had for breakfast,” type comments. Sure. But, part of what I love about Monocle, is exactly that sort of thing – reliable recommendations from trusted sources (filters still matter, online and at the news-stand). An under-appreciated point is social media’s potential to make urban living more manageable – which is, after all, a key commitment of Monocle itself – and more social. In many ways, Twitter works, on a local level, the way Dopplr has tried to work on an international level.

As a musician, Twitter is only one component in what should be broader approach to online publicity. That won’t just include MySpace, Amazon, iTunes and Facebook, but also sites like SoundCloud, Blip, LastFM, Beatport, Bandcamp, AWAL and Topspin. That said, Twitter is an active space, right now, for conversation and musicians, like any business people, should be paying attention to “word of mouth.”

I can understand why Monocle are not active on Twitter and in their position I might not be either (at least at an editorial level). But, I would be a little alarmed if they were no at least researching the way smaller and niche businesses were using it grow their brands and the way sophisticated urbanites were interacting with it to make living in their cities more liveable and enjoyable.

And, as for my recommendations on the best places in Hong Kong to share a wine with new contacts and potential collaborators? Well, you’ll only find that, on Twitter.

Empty Your Head

I always start my weekly reviews going through the inboxes and asking “what’s missing here.” That could mean things that need repair, presents that need to be bought, calls that need to be returned, skills that need to be acquired, vacations that need to be taken. Whatever it is, it needs to get out of my head and into Omnifocus.

Part of this step is looking forward to my calendar for 2010 and asking what each of things that are already in there will ask of me, in terms of preparation and work. Moreover, for a big review like this, it means going through each project and area of responsibility in my life and reviewing them as well.

In a normal week, this stage takes me fifteen minutes to half an hour (if I’m focussed and uninterrupted. However, for this review it took just over an hour. That’s not processing – just pure mind-dump.

What Is This?

Now I moved to the boardroom I mentioned in the last post, armed with a big physical inbox, my powerbook, a notepad and pencils and another large box, that holds my brought forward files and physical project folders.

I had to do something with all this collected stuff. What I’ve learnt in the last year is that this often involves an abstract question – “what is this thing?”

Sometimes the answer to that is simple and sometimes it isn’t. A bill for a magazine subscription might be easy to process – fill the form, write the cheque mail it off. But, why is that magazine in my life? Is it pure entertainment or connected to some goal or project? And, is that goal or project even relevant or active anymore? Moreover, can I afford that magazine, either as a financial cost, or time commitment, or possible distraction?

Is It Actionable?

What something is relates to what we can do with it. Sometimes things will have obvious next actions, sometimes the next action is to set aside some to think about how to action it and sometimes a thing just needs to be filed away, or thrown out.

Clutter and stress often develops when we can’t decide if something is actionable, or we keep things that have a clear next action (like bills we need to pay), in amongst things that are not immediately actionable (like reference material or stuff that should in a archive, or the trash).

These two processes, what is this and is it actionable normally take me about fifteen minutes in a normal week and sometimes less than five. However, this time it took me close to two hours, partly because I had a lot of completed or near completed projects floating around that I had to think about. Moreover, there were some unfinished or failed projects that I have to address.

What Is The Next Action?

David Allen makes the claim (in several places) that there really is no such thing as a long term project. Every project is being completed “as soon as possible.” It’s just that, in some cases, “as soon as possible” might be six months, or two years. Often when we classify a project as long term, we create an ambiguous relationship to the steps needed to keep the project moving, especially in relation to other, smaller and shinier projects.

Having a clear sense of what the next action is, for any project or commitment, makes it easier to keep things moving on projects and also to recover from interruptions or setbacks. The advantage of a periodic mega-review like this one is it helps me see which of the projects I haven’t been acting on and maybe, if the next actions were too vague or just not right.

After lunch I moved back to my study and started to go assign and rethink next actions. This took the better part of three hours.

Assign a Context

One way of thinking about the what is this question is to ask, who or what or where is connected to this? Contexts help you group actions together, be it things you can find/buy online, or jobs related to a space in your home or office, or to a particular tool or piece of software.

Go Watch a movie

A day like that can be really, really draining. I worked 7-5 just going through the fine detail of my life and work asking some really hard questions and facing some personal limitations I don’t much like admitting.

That’s why I like to set myself a finishing time for these reviews and some sort of “reward.” Sometimes it is a dinner, this time it was a good french film (Un Prophete).

Of course, all this organisation and reflection is only one step in planning for 2010. There’s some more thinking required, in terms of commitments that need to be cut, resources that need to be acquired, skills I need to develop and so on. Moreover, it’s always worth giving yourself sometime to consider what “success” might look and feel like.

However, I’m leaving those for my upcoming holiday. After all, that’s the thinking that is best done during bike rides, long walks on the beach and lazy conversations with family and friends.

Anyway, if you are still reading, you may be interested in some more GTD related posts along this journey.

Intellectual Compost (Aug 2007)
What Getting Things Done Has Taught Me (Apr 2008)
Attention, Distraction And Interruption (Jun 2008)
Writing, Time And Creative Space (Aug 2008)
This Week, OmniFocus and GTD (Jan 2009)
Being Honest About Disorganisation, Confusion And Success (Sep 2009)

That’s not to say that reflection and planning are not important. But, unless you have a system for organising your ideas into projects, or a sense of where your work is already taking you, all the dreams and resolutions you come up will be washed away the moment the tide of life comes rolling in.

That’s why in so many years, once the high of Christmas and New Year is past, February ends up looking a lot like November and, if we are not careful, each year just starts to feel like and older and slower version of the last.

The Day

So, on Friday I blocked out the whole day to go through my projects, plans and obligations. These past six months have seen an explosion of new commitments, relationships and opportunities. That has been forcing me to reassess some long standing ways of working.

As I’ve written before, I’m committed to the GTD, or Getting Things Done. This involves weekly reviews of outstanding commitments. Sometimes, however you need a more substantial review.

Collect

A critical part of the GTD approach is to have a single collection point for all the stuff that comes into your life. For me, that means a big physical box (from G.O.D. in Hong Kong) and Omnifocus, as an electronic notepad.

Collection means all the stuff in your life that is unprocessed. That could be emails, or camera memory cards, or broken clocks, or newspaper clippings, or bills, or uninstalled software. It all gets collected and made ready for review and processing.

To be honest, this is a tough process. I habitually leave stuff all around the house, create piles of unread magazines or, worse still, mix up stuff I need to process with stuff that is ready to be filed (or just thrown out).

In fact, the last point – mixing up things that are at different stages of being processing – is one of the major causes of home and work clutter. For me, it has been a common cause of stress.

For this review day, I took extra care to gather every loose and new thing up and inbox it, either physically or on the computer. In fact, that was a few hours work before the day itself.

With all that stuff collected the night before, I booked a meeting room in the building I live in, for a 7am start. Tomorrow I’ll outline that review day in more detail.

As happens at this time of year my thoughts have been turning to 2010. One thing I’ve realised is that I really don’t need to write any New Year’s resolutions. The bottom line is that I either want to just keep doing what I’m doing, or the commitments I’ve made for 2010 are, in effect, their own resolutions.

For example, later in 2010 I’ll be going on a challenging photo tour. For that I will need to be be a little fitter than I am now, be carrying a new laptop and have done a little background reading. In another year those could be resolutions, but actually, they are commitments.

There’s something in there that I will come back to, closer to Christmas.

I love blogging about music, music making and music technology, but professionally, I need to have a clearer space for clips, examples of my work and also for details about my studio and services. Right now, that’s one of the one of the big frustrations with this blog and trying to incorporate what I need for a studio website into the blog is, well, a headache.

Secondly, I’m going to move, later in 2010 to a dedicated photographic gallery. I still dig Flickr, but I need something sharper for where my photography is going. There’s a decent chance I’ll be shooting in some pretty exciting locations over the next two years and I’d like to be ready to showcase that work.

Where does that leave this blog? Well, what I don’t want to do is over-professionalise this space, or become obsessed with “monetising” it either. This will remain as a personal space, and the home of my online connections. I’ll still post discussions on music and images here, but hopefully with less angst, since the other sites will be able to do their more focussed work as well.

One interesting thing about journalling (or blogging) is that you can look back through the years and remember how you felt and where you were on specific days.

I had three birthdays in India. If I had blogged my birthday in 2003, I doubt it would have made cheery reading. That was a difficult month in a difficult season and the climax of a difficult year.

2004 wasn’t a lot better, judging from this post. I could describe that year as one of existential angst, but that would be an understatement. It was also, as I recall, one of a number of years where my partner was absent overseas, through work, on my Birthday. Not something I lament too much, but tough nonetheless.

2005 was a much better year and I recall a lot of things about that birthday. I had found my way in India and was developing my musical voice. I also remember spending most of that birthday stuck in Delhi traffic, what with it being wedding season and all. Why wasn’t I more into photography back then?

2006 the retail nirvana of Hong Kong was still flush with was still captivating me. Being a Saturday night, I stayed home but I remember it being a good day and I also remember that, way back then, I had some friends and a social circle in this city.

2007 was another year flying solo on my birthday and my thoughts really were elsewhere. I also remember that, my initial enthusiasm for Hong Kong had really waned. In fact almost all of the initial glow over being in Hong Kong had faded.

2008 was a tough year and although I had a marvelous pre-birthday trip to Copenhagen, the day itself was quiet. Although those key years do tend to make one more philosophical, I was also in that mood because 2008 had been a very tough year: draining, emotional, lonely and repetetive. I was getting better at many things, but with little to show for it. I was meeting people, but with no real sense of developing new friendships.

Which brings us to today, flying solo again, but generally feeling better about life; with a growing social circle, a better (if more circumspect) feeling about this city and the sense that some real big creative milestones are now within grasp.

For example, I’m a musician. If someone asks me to play guitar, or arrange some music, or mix a project, I would expect to be paid and in return would deliver a professional service to the best of my ability. Even though that’s fairly black and white, there are some exceptions, which I’ll come to in a minute.

Moving away from music, things get messy. Lately, there’s been a bit of buzz around my photography. Though I’ve taken pictures for years, I’ve really only started to take it seriously this year. Interestingly, I’ve had a few opportunities in the past weeks that could have become paid gigs, though I’ve negotiated them in a more casual direction.

Partly it is down to personal aesthetics – I don’t yet consider myself good enough to charge for photographic work. It’s not so much a qualitative issue, I’m being reminded (by others) on a regular basis that my photos compare very favourably with the work of some professionals. Rather, it has to do with my level of commitment to photography and the relatively short length of time I have been taking it seriously. Whilst I would love one day to be part of an exhibition, or maybe work on a coffee-table book, I’m not looking to become a working photographer in the traditional sense. I’m happy to be an amateur in the old sense – developing my craft for the love of it.

Robert Frost confronts this issue, in the poem, Two Tramps in Mud Time. Frost pictures himself out splitting wood, a chore that the poet suggests was both relaxing and rewarding. However, the two tramps, who offer to cut his wood for a modest pay, need the work – their life depends on these kinds of menial jobs. Frost presents it this way,

“As that I had no right to play
With what was another man’s work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right–agreed.”

Growing up, my mother often told stories about her grandmother’s generous hospitality – regularly cooking up huge quantities of Empanadas, for farm workers in her village. She always gave these away. One day my grandfather worked out how much each empanada was costing. He thought she could make a tidy side-business from her prodigious baking.

Apparently, it broke my great-grandmother’s heart. Put simply, she didn’t want to know what it cost. She wasn’t just happy to give her labour away as a gift, she saw it as a small little thing to make the world a little better, a little sunnier.

The moment we charge for doing something, we change our relationships – to the craft and to the people involved.

Charging signifies our commitment to be in a certain creative space (at least we are honest, or ethical about it), in a certain way. Every year I seem to get a few opportunities where I could charge for a service related to the internet. If I wanted to be cynical about it, I could claim to have a better pedigree than some “social media experts.” After all, I’ve been online and developing sites for over 15 years, I’ve actually been professionally trained in HTML and CSS, I’ve delivered paid content, managed international groups and blogged for over 8 years.

However, that’s not a space I want to be in, so it feels easy to pass on those fleeting opportunities to make some cash, instead offering free opinion, or referral to someone I believe can offer a more permanent and professional service.

I feel similarly about writing. I was once, as an academic, a professional writer. I still do the odd bit of writing, proof-reading and so on, but I don’t charge. Put simply, I’ve never seen myself as an editor or journalist and don’t want to be in that space either. That said, if someone wants to forward me a huge advance to write a novel, I’ll merrily rethink this whole blogpost…

“Enjoy present pleasures in such a way as not to injure future ones.”- Seneca

That classic Stoic quote explains a few situations in the music world where I’m currently looking to charge far below my normal expectations. I made a decision, earlier this year, to change my way of working, musically. After all, it’s not that long ago that I came back to music, as a full-time thing, so my sense of direction is still evolving.

Sometimes, to fine-tune in that way, you have to weigh up the potential of a short term gain, versus the longer benefits of building relationships and establishing a portfolio in a new area of work.

Which brings us back to the conclusion of Frost’s poem. My situation is one of relative comfort and that does change everything. For me, the goal in being creative has to do with quality of life for myself and those around me. I don’t think the most important question is how to make money from creativity, or which bits of creativity to charge for, but, rather, how to be in the world. It would be easier to always be black and white about these things, to draw hard edges, but I think that makes it harder to take people and situations as they come and creates a temptation to view everybody as a potential client, every introduction as a pitch. The moment we choose, as Frost says, to join our vocation with our avocation, we are forced to be a lot more honest about the ambiguities involved in charging for things that are not our primary area of focus and expertise. Personally, I think that is a wonderful thing.

“But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.”

Whilst I’m not looking to switch gears and become a journalist, it was a lot of fun to research that piece, do some writing and take some photos out on location around Hong Kong. In fact, it’s just one of a number of things that have made me realise how far my photography has come in the last few months and challenged me about what the future holds there.

Whilst thinking along those lines, David duChemin’s blogpost yesterday on Pixelatedimage really caught my eye. He was challenging those of us who are prone to describing ourselves as “…just an amateur photographer.” Commercialising our craft is only one of a number of decisions and ultimately not the most important one.

What really matters is whether we have embraced a desire to grow technically as photographers and more importantly, to grow as people who look at the world in a clear, open and honest way.

“We don’t take photographs with our cameras, we take them with our hearts and our minds. They are a reflection of ourselves, what we are, and what we think.” ~ Arnold Newman.

I love the technical side of photography, buying equipment and learning to use it, getting inside the software, that sort of thing. But, more importantly, I’m just starting to realise that the photos we take reflect the way we see the world. Finding your photographic style is not unlike finding your “voice” as a singer, or your “tone” as a guitarist or instrumentalist.

In particular, I’m interested in the idea of an ‘interlinked web presence’ as suggested in this thoughtful study. As a rough outline, these are some of the features I want to implement.

Easier access to Soundcloud, including the dropbox facility
More pages to provide examples of and details about my work
Faster and easier navigation around the blog
Simplification of the categories structure
Consistent design ethos
Better typography
Better use of images, either through flickr or embedded slideshows

That’s it for now. I’ve got quite a few things rolling around at the moment, so the amount of time I can dedicate to this is limited. Expect more changes in the coming weeks.

Just spent four memorable days in Beijing. It was my first visit to the city and I was captivated. The city revealed itself to be disarmingly friendly and creative, quite unlike some of the portrayals I have heard from other travellers. In particular it was a delight to walk around some of the Hutong districts, with their cool and funky cafes, bars and stores as well as taking in classic tourist features like the Great Wall and the Forbidden City.

The city was blanketed in thick fog, so most of my photos are of the “atmospheric” variety. Still, it was great to be shooting, writing, walking and thinking in a different city for a few days.

When I get my legs under the desk for a longer stretch, I’ll come back with some more thoughts and photos.

Playing solo guitar is extremely demanding, even in front of a warm and responsive crowd and Williams had chosen some challenging pieces for last night’s performance. Like a number of accomplished soloists, Williams often pauses before starting a piece and scans the audience, asking them to join his focus on the coming piece of music. Crowd noise is always an issue during a concert, but with a solo performer who needs the spaces in the music to be quiet, it becomes critical.

Last night, before one particularly tough piece, Torre Bermeja, by Isaac Albeniz, Williams paused, let the silence fall over the crowd, then launched into the music.

Barely into the second bar it happened – the loud, unrestrained cough. To be honest I don’t remember the next few bars of music and I am still in awe that it didn’t break Williams concentration. Then again, he was probably used to it by now, since the whole night must have made him wonder if Hong Kong had not caught a collective bought of bronchitis in the recent cold snap. Every piece was interrupted by loud and frequent coughing and for added percussive effect, the sound of programmes, bags (or maybe industrial equipment), being dropped onto the floor.

Actually, Williams was good humoured about the crowd noise. Partway through the post-interval set, he asked the crowd “…is someone dying out there,” and even pointed out that merely covering one’s mouth while coughing can dramatically reduce how far the noise carries. Williams entreaty to the crowd was met with round and solid applause. Clearly the cough at everyone else’s expense group were a loud minority.

Lack of crowd self-control aside, it was an extraordinary concert. Williams is really the elder statesman of classical guitar now and in a position to draw from a rich and varied repertoire, from Vivaldi to African folk. Some of my favourites are his interpretations of Latin American composers, so it was a real delight to hear him perform Mangore’s La Catedral and the old standard, Como Llora Una Estrella.

Williams continues to be an amazing guitarist, with a beautiful touch and sense of the guitar’s tonal possibilities. He is, also, a wonderful ambassador for the music he loves and performs. My hope is that the next time he comes to Hong Kong he will be met with the same kind of warm reception and maybe a little more respect and quiet from the whole audience, not just the silent majority.

Partly this is because the current layout was starting to feel a little tired and cluttered. I’m using the Atahualpa theme for Wordpress, which is really handy for fast control of the components of a blog layout. But, things are just a little too blocky and colourless right now. So, expect more changes over the coming weeks and maybe even the odd moment of crazyness, as I work towards a better design.

But, there’s something deeper going on. Since the summer I’ve felt that this site, as a blog has been improving. As I look forward over the coming months there are some pretty exciting developments and I’m happy to be a position to blog about them. Apart from some aesthetic concerns, this site – as a blog – doesn’t worry me right now.

However, this site as a showcase, or digital portfolio, is a problem. I need www.fernandogros.com to be more than just a blog. The site needs to work better as a portal for music and clips. I’ve come to realise that blogging clips, studio experiences and lessons might be cool, but for the casual visitor it doesn’t work – at least not the way I’m doing it now. I pull content from Flickr on the sidebars and have a little gallery on one of the pages, but as a digital portfolio of my images, the site is not great either. Same could be said of how the site showcases my studio work.

So, I’m working on a list of things I need the site to show visitors more easily and effectively and looking for good examples on the web of people doing this sort of thing. If you have any cool examples, please send them my way.

I haven’t reviewed every festival show I’ve attended, but regardless, managed to post a decent number of reviews – all of which are listed below.

2009
Chick Corea and John McLaughlin
Metamorphosis
Omar Sosa
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir
Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk
I/In
Karbido: The Table
Alice In Wonderland

2008
Ornette Coleman

2007
1984
Sacred Monsters
Chucho Valdes
Tango Buenos Aires
Soweto Gospel Choir

Technorati Tags: Hong Kong Arts Festival

…for someone who, in 2003, felt totally blocked as a writer, that’s quite staggering.

Earlier this week I posted two, somewhat lament filled posts, looking back over the last five years of this blog. I had another post drafted up, that made for equally depressing reading. I not to post that one. Enough with the negativity.

As I look back over the last five years of my life, as opposed to the last five years of blogging, it’s been a fairly extraordinary time. I’ve lived in China and India, not only the two largest countries in the world, but also two dynamic powerhouses that are coming into their own on the global stage. I’ve had the chance to travel, first from Delhi, then Hong Kong, to some great cities, in particular – Chiang Mai, Copenhagen, Dubai, HaNoi, LiJiang, London, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo and Washington. I’ve completed the transition from being an academic, back to being a full-time musician (soon to complete my third certificate with BerkleeMusic). In this time I’ve taken close to 15,000 photos and started to learn to craft meaningful images. My best estimate is that I’ve watched just under 800 feature films and made around a 1000 home cooked meals, most of them completely from scratch.

It’s been a remarkable period of transformation. The quality and texture of my life is very different now to what it was five years ago (when life felt very out of control). If I draw the line out further, ten years back, when I was fast settling into life in London, then the changes seem even more radical.

All of which makes me cautious about speculating about the next five years. The truth is, I don’t know what city, country, or continent I will live in, five years from now. However, I can think a little more clearly about what I plan to do over the next months and how I hope that will influence the coming years.

Evil Plans And Portable Studios

From now till Christmas, my days are pretty well mapped out. I’m taking photos 4-5 times and week and trying to record on most days as I finish my album and complete two final Berklee guitar courses. In fact, completion is my mantra.

But, next year poses some challenges that have been looming for some time. In order to move forward, I need to consolidate what I’ve been doing over the past few years. Not just studying, recording, writing and arranging, but also designing and building equipment. I don’t like talking about brands, but I do need some sort of identity for this business I’m in.

And, I need it to be portable.

Which is an interesting thing, because we don’t tend to think of studios as portable. But, the new musical reality makes that possible. My goal is to build a global collaborative studio environment, where I can work with people I like across geographies. In a way that already happens – I record guitars for a friend in the US, or book a session from an other friend in Australia, or pen arrangements for a friend in the UK.

That’s part of why I find Hugh Macleod’s Evil Plans Manifesto so inspiring. I’m right in the middle of that space now. This consolidation I’m facing next year is not about selling a product or service. It’s not about branding or marketing. It’s about explaining who I’ve become and why I might just be an interesting person to work with.

It’s about telling a good, compelling and truthful story.

Freemixing And Other Crazy Ideas

Consolidation is only part of the picture. I’m also thinking a lot about momentum. Not so much the work I want to do, but how I want to work.

See, after the first couple of months of 2010 are finished, I will have pretty much achieved what I set out to do back in 2004. So, I’m looking to challenge myself a little, to put myself in some uncomfortable positions. I want to explore the edges of my creativity again.

I’m thinking crazy thoughts, not just playing live, but taking on a new guerilla recording project. Who knows, I might even give some guitar lessons. I’m also toying (very seriously), with a limited, monthly, freemixing project – a small number of free remixes for artists who, well, turn me on but might not have been able to afford to book a remix of that kind.

The last one might even sound like exactly the thing I shouldn’t be doing. After all, it’s just so amateur. Well, maybe. But, in my experience so many of the good things I’ve done in my life grew out of acts of hospitality; of gifts, really. Gifts are like mini-revolutions. They can break existing patterns, change relationships and can even redefine what we think is possible.

There are other crazy ideas floating around, some related to photography, for example. But, as I write, they are just too insane to print.

It’s About Being Good, Not Being A Star

All of this crazyness is not random. There are some goals at work. Actually, they are not so much goals as understandings, about myself, about music and art and also about human interaction in this age of globalisation and digital media. It’s not about vision, it’s about memory.

I was a pretty typical teenager in a lot of ways. But, I had a passion for playing guitar and recording. I was still in my teens when I played my first gigs, undertook my first refret on a guitar (even wrote to luthiers seeking an apprenticeship), messed around with music electronics and made my first recordings. I couldn’t afford a multitrack back then, so I would record to one stereo tape deck, then run that through a mixer with the next input into another tape deck. The speeds were not sync’d, so I would have to re-tune guitars after every take.

There’s no real regrets when I look back on the detours I took between then and now. We all find our voice in different ways and for some it comes earlier than others. For me, I’m just thankful to be in the space I’m in right now and to be looking forward with hope.

I might not know where I will be in five years. But, I have a feeling about “how” I will be and that is a new and exciting feeling.

This is a graph of my blogposts per month, since 2004. You can probably see that 05 and 06 were my most active blogging years and that recently, I’ve been updates have become less frequent. Not surprisingly, 05 and 06 were the years when I had the most traffic, the most incoming links and probably the most buzz around my writing.

I wanted to understand this story a little more deeply, so I decided to take a look at each year in detail. Also, it seemed worthwhile to ask what I learned from each year of blogging and what, looking back from 2009 I might have done differently. It’s a fascinating exercise because my attitude to online content and social media has changed a lot since I started this blog.

2004 Starting Out

The big thing I got right was choosing the Wordpress software and using my own domain name. My previous attempts at blogging had failed because of purely technical reasons. Re-reading these early posts was surprisingly good fun. I was blogging about the everyday things, making and studying music, playing golf, music technology, faith and life in India. In a lot of ways, I wish I had held onto the balance of these early months and, if anything posted more about life in India.

I should have posted more of these kinds of pictures, talked more about everyday life and struggles, about the conversations I had in the markets, the people I met and the fine texture of daily life. I’m prone to lamenting that blogging didn’t open many doors to writing opportunities, but the truth is I had a great opportunity to write with a distinctive voice back then and I didn’t really take it.

2005 Getting Some Attention

In 2005 my blog started getting noticed and my style changed. I was posting less and less about what I was doing and who I was becoming and more about who I had been and what I had left behind. In a way, this made some sense, since the purpose of the blog back then was to reconcile my departure from academia and my move back into music. But reading back on the content from 05, it feels a little like a blog from anywhere. Maybe it was the frequent internet outages, or the sense of expat disconnection, but I seemed very focussed on big and abstract topics a lot of the time.

This sort of thing wasn’t making into onto the blog. Interestingly, when I think back to 2005, I was playing an awful lot of golf and wrote music everyday, but it there wasn’t much of it going online. This was a bad use of the medium. As a writer, my unique perspective was my location – I was one of the few expat bloggers in India at the time. Moreover, as a musician I should have been using the blog to build networks, to create interest in what a western jazz guitarist was doing in India.

2006 The Rot Sets In

Someone who was only interested in stats would say that 06 was my best year. I was getting a lot of traffic and some of my posts about faith and globalisation were getting mainstream attention. But, I was becoming very frustrated with blogging. At the time it didn’t make sense to me – yet now it is crystal clear – I was still stuck in the past, in who I used to be. The stuff I was actually doing in everyday life, my new work, wasn’t getting featured. Moreover, I was starting to see the world in a new way and not really making space for the that either.

I should have been taking more pictures like this, reflecting on life in this context and posting the music that this context was stirring me to create.

2007 and 2008 Becalmed In An Ocean Of Social Media

What’s interesting to me in these years is how much I was struggling with blogging, how much content I was posting about life in Hong Kong (especially reviews of cultural events) and how little local connection the blog had. In a way, I lost my voice as a blogger, lost my purpose and lost my sense of direction. I was drawn into Facebook and back into online forums, which were both really a waste of time and energy

In those years I was starting to see the world differently. I was deeply frustrated with life in Hong Kong and feeling socially quite alienated. I didn’t really want to blog too much about that. However, the resources that were helping through that, especially books, music and film would have been interesting to a lot of people and really should have been given more space here.

2009 Finding My Voice Again

Friends have commented on the renewed vigour in blogging this year. I’ve dropped any pretence to being an academic blogger and started writing more as musician. I’ve wanted to redesign the blog, but only got halfway there. I’m still frustrated that there isn’t more music on this site, or that I haven’t organised it better. This blog still doesn’t really reflect what I do, day to day, all that well. It’s still more about ideas than activity. In an odd way, I thin Twitter is helping me rethink what I do with the blog and clarify what I need to the blog to provide. More on that, next time around…

When I (re)started blogging in 2004 my life was a mess. I was in a strange country, struggling with a career change and generally feeling as though everything I did kind of sucked, in a deep and fundamental way. My hope was that blogging would, somehow, help me improve as a writer and establish some kind of foothold back in the publishing world, as an author, or contributor, or something. I mean, other people get published through blogs? Didn’t they?

Five years on, I’m in a different, but equally strange country, my new career isn’t quite setting the world on fire and I’m still prone to periodic bouts of acute self-doubt. Blogging not only didn’t bring me fame or fortune, it didn’t even bring me mediocrity and ridicule. It certainly didn’t help me get anything published.

All of which kind of begs the question? Why bother?

Partly it comes down to self-publishing. Having been in situations where I’ve felt pressured, censured, even abused for expressing what seemed to be reasonable and considered opinions, I find the ability to have an island on the internet that bears my name and exhibits my thoughts, music and images to be important and healthy. It’s part of why I created my first personal web pages back in 1995 and why I don’t think I’ll ever abandon having some kind of blog, or online presence.

But, being a “blogger” still causes some glitches in real world conversations. Moreover, it sometimes makes me uncomfortable, even in the quiet solitude of my own studio. There has been an explosion of communication and opinion online and I really do wonder what it has done for us, socially and culturally. Maybe that’s why, when thinking about this post, I kept coming back to this clip from the TV show Californication, where the novelist Hank Moody (played by David Duchovny), reflects on his social status as a blogger (strong language warning).

In 2004 Twitter did not exist and Facebook was in its infancy, while blogging was on the rise. There was a lot of hopeful stuff being written about this digital media “revolution” – a lot of buzz around every artist, every business and pretty much everybody having their own blog. Now blogging is, in many ways, a poorer second-cousin to the more fashionable forms of social media. No-one says “you have to start a blog,” anymore. Rather, it’s all about having a Facebook page over joining the Twitter conversation.

Over the next week, I’m going to reflect a little on these five years of blogging; what worked, what didn’t and what could have been done better. I’ll outline what I will continue to do with this blog and what I’ll probably drop from future content. I’ll be clarifying why I don’t have time for Facebook or Forums and why I’ve embraced Twitter. Finally, I’ll look at how the desk, in Fernando’s Desk, has come to meaning something totally different to me today than what it meant in 2004.

I hope you enjoy this week, it should be very “interesting.”

Tips; not the money you leave for waiters at restaurants, but the small, pithy hints that we look for instead of doing the hard graft of really learning how to do something, inside and out. My generation will be probably be judged harshly for buying into tipology as a lifestyle. At times it feels like the whole internet has become a giant tip factory. Or, just a giant tip!

It’s not that tips are always bad. Sometimes they can help us focus our mind, or remember truisms we may have forgetten. In fact, tips can be really useful when we are already close to mastering something.

But, the road to mastery is not paved with tips. Most tips go in one ear and out the other because reading them is not a real learning experience. It’s too abstract, especially when the tips relate to things we don’t do, or do well.

I don’t entertain much here in Hong Kong, but, I used to entertain, a lot, for friends and guests. I’d always receive compliments and usually be asked for some tip on becoming a better cook. I never liked the question – it’s one that should be directed to real chefs. After all, becoming a better cook involves nothing less than mastering basic techniques. There’s no tip to learning to saute well – it’s a technique that is aquired through trial and error, through doing it often, with commitment and patience and by learning from the experience.

Want to become a better cook? Grab a dozen eggs and make six omelettes, one after the other. Compare and taste all six and ask yourself what made each one different. Look for how each one comes out and cooks. Try cooking one with a little more heat and a little less, a little more butter or salt, or a little less. And, think about what is going on.

The downside of tips is they confuse shortcuts with improvements. What’s the point of looking for a tip on cooking omlettes if you’ve never cooked one? Do the exercise above and you’ll have some questions that arise from experience. Now go looking for answers to those specific questions and you’ll be doing something we might really call learning. But, you have to start by doing first, action, then reflection.

“Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.” Walter Lippmann

Does that sound like a lot of work? Good. Another troubling thing about tips is that they reinforce the (false) belief that creativity is not synonymous with hard work. I think the best chefs are great role models when it comes to creativity. We know, from observation and experience, that chefs work long hours, go through rigorous training, often have to overcome limitations in the ingredients they receive, adapt their dishes to meet the seasons and their customers and have aquired an array of skills.

But, sometimes we forget that similiar considerations apply to anyone who works in a creative field. I’ve been taking photos all my life and it pains me to admit that for most of that time, I’ve done little more than point my camera at interesting things and fumble for a setting that worked. I was a tip-dependent photographer, which is another way of saying I was subjecting myself to chance and disappointment, with no real hope of getting better. However, looking at David duChemin’s excellent podcast on photographing in Chandi Chowk made me think on the jounrey I’ve taken lately.

Did you catch the part where he talked about that great picture of the Chaiwallah being a sketch? What about the number of images he took, or how long he was willing to wait (and Chandi Chowk is not the easiest place to stand around and just wait), to get a good image? Even with some cool pics in the bag, he is already talking about going back and trying again, with a plan, to get a better image.

This year I’ve become a better photographer and the reasons are not rocket science. I’m taking a lot more pictures, I’ve engaged a fantastic teacher, I’m developing my photos properly, I’m thinking about what I’m doing when I shoot and looking back at the images to see if I was successful, I’m going back and re-shooting locations, I’m learning how the equipment works.

I could make the same sorts of points about music, whether it is writing, arranging, recording or just playing. I’ve known so many guitarists down the years who complain about not improving. But, they won’t engage a teacher, they don’t really understand and explore their gear, or they don’t expand repertoire, or learn songs in their entirety, or they can’t figure out how to record at home, or try writing some arrangments. All too often, they let days, maybe even weeks go by without playing (and noodling on the sofa while eating pizza and watching a movie does not qualify as playing).

If I had to distill my thinking on creativity and craft into one pithy phrase, dare I say, one tip, it would be this,

Do It Everyday, Over And Over, Again And Again And Think About It

Don’t “just do it,” but keep doing it and, importantly, think about it. You have to ride the line between loving what you do and being an honest critic of your work. Moreover, you have to make the time. Not just for the creative task itself, but the preparation, the maintenance and whatever it takes to get that out to the people you are trying to reach. Turn up, turn it on, tune it up and tune out the distractions.

Enrico Rava is a superstar of European Jazz, perhaps Italy’s best known jazz musician and long term stalwart of the ECM label. His quintet brings together Giovanni Guidi on piano, Pietro Leveratto on bass, Fbrizio Sferra on drums and superstar trombonist Gianluca Petrella.

It took a while for the audience to warm to the quintet’s music because – and there is no nice way to put this – the auditorium was barely more than half full. This is such a shame for two great bands that are really at the top of their game.

Rava and Petrella had a clear understanding and there was wonderful interplay between their lines and in their accompaniment of other soloists. Rava has such a rich a and wonderful tone, but the highlight for me was Petrella bold and confident soloing lines. Guidi played an important role not just as a soloist and accompanist, but also providing transition between songs and movements. The crowd really took to Leveratto’s inventive solos and Sferra displayed a wonderful mastery of dynamics in his playing throughout the set.

As we returned to our seat after the interval, the scrum around the stage indicated that Henderson, Berlin and Chambers were setting up. The boisterous reception they received confirmed my suspicion that most had turned up to the see the electric power trio. These fans were not disappointed. From the moment the group launched into their opening number, an incendiary rendition of All Blues, the connection with the crowd was made.

Scott Henderson has become a hero for many guitarists, not just because of his skill as a player, but also because of his commitment to extracting great tones from his instrument. Tonight he cajoled a rich palette of sounds, from straight-ahead jazz to hard rock, all without switching guitars. Tonight was Henderson’s show and really gave us a full display of his talents.

I’m always amazed that Jeff Berlin is not more well known – he really is an extraordinary bassist, with such a solid groove, wonderful articulation and control and a harmonic scope that fills so much space in a Trio format, yet never sounds contrived.

Dennis Chambers is one of my favourite drummers. It was interesting to hear him in this context, since I am more used to his playing in funkier contexts. HIs ability to lock on small details of Berlin’s grooves and Henderson’s fills was amazing, especially towards the end of the gig.

It was a great, challenging and entertaining night for the jazz fan.

Tonight reinforced a number of lessons I’ve been facing in photography. First of all, the importance of interacting with the subjects. Ellis was able to recount a lot of detail about his subjects, not just as musicians, but as people. Surely that is why so many of his portraits reveal not just a moment, but more importantly, tell us a story about the musician as a person.

One of Ellis’ most moving pictures, for me, was a recent backstage portrait of Tommy Emmanuel (you can find it in the portraits section of www.william-ellis.com ), that reveals not just the love Tommy has of playing, but for those who know his biography, the way the man has aged with his craft and journey of being a live musician.

Second, was the importance of really having a grasp of the artistic components, especially light and composition. All great photos are studies in light and the arragement of subjects in their space. I’m barely starting to understand how light works within the frame of a photograph. So, it is captivating to hear an established photographer of this calibre talk about the way light is moving in an image and also reference other great artists and photographers.

Finally, I was reminded how important it is, to just take a good shot. Very few of Ellis’ photos are cropped, which is really quite extraordinary. There’s such a temptation, with digtial cameras and software to settle for ordinary images and just “fix” it later. Now, I love digital, but there is so much to be said for getting as much quality as you can up front, in the camera itself.

Which is really where photography and music converge. As much as modern recording software allows us to do a great many wonderful and creative things, there is still not susbstitute for capturing a great performance, for getting it right before the mix.

I walked away from tonight buoyed and inspired, as a photographer and as a musician. Meeting people who are really on top of their game should always do that for us. My only regret was that there weren’t more people there. The Hong Kong Jazz Festival is very cool and I’m extremely thankful to them for putting this even on tonight. But it seems like a lot of people haven’t even heard the festival is on, let alone about tonight, which is such a shame. I hope next year the music “community” here can get the word around a bit better, especially for events like this – but, that’s a topic for another blogpost.

For now, if you haven’t already, take a look at some of the photos.