Jerk Jam Soundclash - Palmerston Park

This is probably the slowest post I've ever finally got round to. 

On Friday the 24th of September last year (2021), I was walking home through Palmerston Park and a sound stage was being erected (excuse the pun) for the next day, by the old fashioned bandstand, which leaks quite a bit when it's raining. I know because I've taken shelter there and been joined by all sorts of interesting people ducking for cover in a downpour. That's my electric bike on the right, I want to come back to that subject because as some of you know, I had two electric bikes when I lived in Beijing, during the 2008 Olympics. and there's an obnoxious scam going on with electric bikes in the EU. Let's park that and come back to it another day. Keep the vibes nice because on Saturday 25th, there was music in the park I've previously mentioned right near my gaff, and indeed all over the city centre which was hosting a reclaim the streets day. Art, Music, Culture, Festivities and loads of stuff for children and parents to do. Southampton is close to winning the bid for cultural city of 2025, and as I've mentioned previously, the city has transformed since my years abroad living and working in foreign countries.

When I left Southampton, nobody smoked a joint outside. We had to sneak around and be careful as well as paranoid. But on my return I was blown away when my old mate Chris, who along with his missus, generously put me up (when I returned to be  with my terminally ill mother), lit a joint up walking to Common People Bestival festival on Southampton Common, 2017. I thought I was in Amsterdam for a moment, but the reason I mention it, is that by 2021 I was comfortable having a doobie before I joined the crowd dancing at Jerk Jam. The music was reggae and the weather was a bit iffy at one point, but one of the London MCs, literally predicted that the clouds would part and the sun would come beaming through and lo, it happened as he prophesied.

Probably one of the best feelings I've had, or at least up there in the top 20. It was memorable and awesome. 

I was so happy for Southampton.

It's come a long way, and there's more to go.

Aye

It's not how it seems. 

2019 - Year Of The Cripple

2019, January and I was bed-bound for six weeks as the most crippling of pains burnt, pierced, scraped, smashed, needled and electrocuted their way through the path from my neck to my left arm and finally my hand, leaving me with a half-paralysed grasp when it finally subsided after a chiropractic visit that took away the perma-pain.

This was my welcome into a brand new year.

6 weeks in bed, ditching the complex-care work I was doing and now up to my neck in bills with no occupation.

The neurologist was succinct. 

Half an hour of electric needle tests and he said you've got brachial neuritis and we don't know what causes it.

Six fucking weeks and I got a name to call it by, and nothing else except bouts of pain for the rest of my life and a gammy typing hand after decades of effortless writing.

That's when I realised I'd fucked up and not written the book I'd mulled over for half a century, while I could still touch-type.

Too late buster.

Had it...

Lost it...

Serves you right. 

Som nom naa (gala hua jok) as the Thais say. 

Anyway, that's why I haven't written anything substantive for a long time.

So here I am, 2019... year of the cripple and bashing something out before I throw an iMac through the window to keep the neighbours entertained.

Ya hear me?

Good. 

I'm just beginning.

Neil Sanders | Musicians, Mobsters & Spooks

Neil Sanders has a wealth of information on cultural creation, manipulation and cessation by the usual suspects.

@JoeRogan - Recombinant 99%

It's a great piece of recombinant culture video making. Check out my earlier posts on Joe Rogan. He gets it. Corporations don't.

Update 11-12-2023 - Original Video removed. Substitute video he now disavows.

Chinese Pensioners Trivialise Lady Gaga's Sexual Violence Glorification

It's hard to take the white-trash icons of smut-pop and sleaze-agenda seriously when Chinese pensioners are ripping it to shreds with grandma and grandpa mash-ups. 

My prediction? 

Lady Gaga's reputation is taking a last few swirls around the toilet bowl before disappearing with the turds where her corrosive imagery belongs. I have nothing against the woman (my suspect she's Monarch mind control) but everything against the system that deliberately tries to subvert young minds by pumping out 24/7 MTV sexualised-violence-glorification-trash like her videos.

Amy Winehouse feat. Linda Ronstadt

The story for Amy Winehouse's death doesn't add up. Look into the coroner. It's a signature move for the network. I've lost count over the years, but my heart and gut were the same for Amy and Princess Diana. I loved Amy's music but knew nothing about her except she was clean when she was murdered, no drug paraphernalia found till the next day. It's not impossible to overdose on heroin and nobody notices the syringes or the smack but if the diagnosis is provided before the evidence is presented, they're lying.

I found her attractive. I found her even more attractive when I learned she was 'Jewish'. 

It took me longer to understand Philip's role that made the decision, while Charles and queeny gusset kept their distance organising embalming fluids to shipped in order to cover the evidence, though I did check with Alastair Campbell, who confirmed with me that Diana went to Paris and the royal cowards want to be as far away as possible. 

Buckingham was too close, so they hid in Balmoral.

This mix is impeccable for an old school adjust and splice.

Information DJ

I was talking to Fabio the other day who gave me an idea that requires outright and blatant theft. Any thoughts on me having Information DJ on a business card? That's basically all I do.


 Commercial Via Famous Rob

Dengue Fever

I read about these guys a while back and loved the description of Pschedelic Khmer surf rock. Cambodia is quite special to me as most of my close Thai friends are Khmer in ethnic origin living close to the border and speak Khmer around me. It's also quite timely  after the border dispute over what is obviously a Khmer temple (the architecture speaks for itself) with Thailand bullying Cambodia and flexing its nationalistic muscles (when involving weaker neighbours) over the disputed territory.

Anyway I  was just awoken from a jet lag catch up sleep to the track 'Seeing Hands' and was catapulted back into some amazing nights in Phnom Penh and road trips to Angor Wat in Siem Reap. Khmer Culture is still such a mystery in many ways but here's a bit of recombinant music culture from Dengue Fever on Myspace that stretches from the surfing coast of Los Angeles to the Heart of Darkness. Click on the track called Singing Hands.

It's so good to hear that this music is also connecting in Cambodia with a generation that haven't heard this genre since the late sixites as both the music and the people  were all obliterated in the genocide and insanity of Pol Pot's ultra communist agrarian revolution with the Khmer Rouge. I feel I need to stop off in Phnom Penh sooner than I realised on long delayed trip I need to make to Vietnam. It's on the way I guess. Read about Dengue Fever over here if the music grabs you.

Tenuous link picture of me struggling with a surf board last week ;)

Recombinant Christmas Culture

Across Asia the desire to get into the Western tradition of Christmas spirit is quite notable. There are variations from country to country. Thailand as a Buddhist country or Indonesia as an practioners of Islam for instance don't celebrate the day itself. Thus Santa Claus (mashed up with Minnie Mouse above) are ubiquitous right across the continent at this time of the year, but often references to biblical characters such as Jesus or characters from the Nativity are erased. Worth a mention was the countdown on Christmas Eve at midnight. The crowd at the nightclub we visited, really went for it with more gusto than I've seen in many European capitals. Its fair to say that Christmas celebrations are beginning to transcend culture as a period of celebration that city dwellers (in the main) can find accessible.

This young lady was hamming up a little at the bar and shortly after left as if nothing had happened. A sort of faux intoxiqué if you like. I've experienced this behaviour across different cultures, genders and age groups and concluded that reasoning with these folk is the same as trying to reason with a drunk - completely unpredictable. Although they know what they are doing, they can play oblivious at any point. I do like the face in bar action going on here. Its the little touches that can convince. Merry Christmas Everyone.

White Swans

I've been borderline garrulous recently about a potential new model for the marketing communications business which is classic recombinant culture theory that I nicked off Faris. It would take some balls from an agency and even more from their respective clients to seriously implement but in principle it's about mixing and remixing some transmedia planning along with fair chunks of the book, The Black Swan which I talked about at length here.

To save a wee bit on time I want to cut and paste from that post:

"Our view of history is always explaining backwards as best we can. This is a linear approach that cauterizes the true story. Even more breathtaking is the idea that viewing history by working backwards is a fallacy, because history is actually always moving forward."

I ran this by Johnnie Moore the other night (you should check out his ace podcasts) at The Endurance pub in Soho while Piers was in town, and without even ruminating for a second, Johnnie cheerfully fired back that Kierkegaard wrote something similar as follows:

"Life is understood backwards, but is lived forwards"

This was the first seductive simplification that knocked me for six, and I scribbled it down quick on my hand because I knew it was, as are many of Johnnie's thoughts and occasional silences on lots of stuff, really important. It was lovely to see the ink on my skin the next day to remind me to give him a shout about it. I just did. Thanks Johnnie :)

So it's not like I've really discovered anything new, or I'm responsible for inventing anything seminal, but earlier today, as once again I ran the thoughts I've been bundling together on "transmedia-planning-meets-black-swan-mashup" by a generously attentive listener who works in the strategy game, she encapsulated the bit about The Black Swan that takes ages to explain. Describing narrative fallacy and how it leads to the illusion of predicatability that many draw from so called dependable data is not easy, and is actually probably just me trying to be too smart for my own good, but in essence Tania my listener, chipped in and captured the thrust of my long monologue with a lovely expression which she and her colleagues call 'the upside of risk'.

That made for two very seductive simplifications.

That'll do for the time being as I've still got lots of things about China that I'm practically bursting to blog about. So in the spirit of some timely recombinant culture media here is that White Swan I saw walking down the road in Marlow. The file wouldn't open from the Sony mobile phone when transfered to a Sony Vaio PC which Rob has nothing to do with, so instead, I've squirted a Nokia N95 mobile phone video on to it. I may come back and rotate it to portrait, if I find someone who can actually do important stuff like that, but in the meantime here's a White Swan doing a 'Black Swan'. Or put another way, a bird walking down a street that is right up mine.

Bank Holiday Special

Paul over at life in the middle is giving away his old bike which is still in good working shape but needs a little love, care and the wheels turning more frequently since he got a new one. All you have to do is leave a comment and say how you would pay it forward which is a very nice gesture I think. Sustainability, environmental concerns, recycling, health and ethics all in one fell swoop so if you don't need a bike yourself let someone know. I'd be pitching for it myself but I'm probably not going to be in London long enough to be a deserving recipient.

I also just came across this Hip-Hopera (its not Hip Hop, more Afro American culture) called 'Trapped in the closet' which still doesn't quite describe how cheese TV and Soul by R Kelly can transform a well worn narrative structure into something quite spectacular. Its a seminal recombinant-culture art form in the making. Like Noah who tipped me off about it, I would have thought this could never appeal to me, but it does.


One last picture because I love the way that Second Life (now that its passe) is still developing really good avatar art like this. There's something ethereal about the bling that just floats a little in the air. I've lost the original exhibition where this example is on display, I think it's in New York but if anyone knows I'd love to link to them.

flickrvision

The latest mashup between Flickr and Googlemaps by Dave Troy, the inventor of twittervision is here. It's called flickrvision. Twitter is all about why short messages have a depth and resonance all of their own. Location now adds an important layer of context to many types of data.

This is why flickrvision is so great. The concept of geographically tagged pictures being uploaded to flickr in real time is a lot easier to grasp . Check it out for yourself. If you can't think of a few applications for this, go have a strong cup of coffee for inspiration. I've said it before, so forgive me for saying it again, these are exciting times we live in. Dave Troy created the original twittervision over a few spare hours on a Sunday and was in no time at all being flown to London to talk business opportunities. One of the issues that is emerging out of this recombinant culture as Faris puts it so well, is the compelling nature of the data streams now gathering momentum from geo tagging. It's almost as if the flat two dimensional digital world is spilling over into the real world by giving the data it holds coordinates. A great example is the project for ancient literature texts being given modern geographic locations. A bit like reading Homer's Oddysey or Chaucer's Canterbury tales with references to modern-day towns and cities. Much more easier and a lot more fun, don't you think?