chris caines

25th anniversary the other day of the french secret service bombing of the greenpeace boat Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour. I can still remember the outrage people felt, how obviously french products disappeared from  the shops (cigarettes, cheeses, wines). Certainly Gitanes and Gauloises never returned though the wine and cheese certainly did and I wonder how many people alive at the time remember it at all, I’d certainly forgotten all about it, though I think it formed a lot of my underlying attitudes about France. In retrospect it also   seems like the last gasp of the french flexing old colonial muscle in the pacific.

I was looking through the fantastic archive of Australian music videos on youtube and was reminded of what a blossoming of indigenous rock/pop there was in the 1980s. Seems to have ended with the Yothu Yindi hit in 91 and nothing like it has resurfaced since.

This is No Fixed Address from the 1980 film Wrong Side of the Road that gave them some profile.

This is Coloured Stone from 1984 – Black Boy.

Them also doing Dancing in the Moonlight from 86.

The fabulous Warumpi Band doing Black Fella, White Fella from 87.

And the original of My Island Home from 88.

Kev Carmody with Thou Shall Not Steal from 89.

Archie Roach, Down City Streets from 91.

I can well understand the motivation for building this DVI mixing box that Toby Spark outlines the making of in his presentation below. You can hear the battle scars in his voice when he talks about the terror of relying on a small laptop in front of a huge audience. The simple lack of tools to fade to black or mix between two hi-res (computer screen) sources in live visuals is bewildering considering how cheap and ubiquitous these tools are in the audio world. Even though I have access to a Edirol 440HD I’d still like one of these, primarily because of how small it is. But also how simple. I love that it is built form an arduino too.

*spark d-fuser: dvi mixer project presentation [2010] from toby*spark on Vimeo.

Extraordinary 24hr Metafilter odyssey crowdsourcing a human trafficking rescue. Here.

What do you think of Treme so far? We’ve been enjoying it, a change of pace from The Wire certainly (and strewn with Wire references if you care to trainspot). I found it hard to believe someone wasn’t about to get killed in the first couple of eps. Used to the slow character building now, only 4 eps in but looking forward to it each week. Doesn’t have the air of a series made by some people given a blank cheque after the success of a hit, though on the other hand you can’t imagine anyone being given the opportunity to make something like this in many other circumstances.

Saw that movie from last year “Gamer” last night rugged up on the couch supping herbal tea treating my cold with hearty chicken stew and TV time. I didn’t think they made B movie scifi flicks like this anymore, films like Escape From New York and Videodrome. Usually a collection of earnest alternate scifi ideas cribbed from literary scifi of the previous decades and done with trashy intensity and a sense of fun. I for one am glad these films are still around and Gamer is a pretty decent example helped along by the Gladiatoresque looks and performance of its star Gerard Butler and the first person shooter aesthetics of the camera and cgi work.

The novelty of having a Hollywood film deal with social networks and gaming as a setting alone makes it worth a look. But there are also good performances and pyrotechnic pacing to enjoy amongst the schlock. Trailer:

Here is a little fragment from wandering around the streets of Marrickville last friday night.

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The wealth of music making apps being launched all around the place for the iPad this week has reminded me to post the next in my most beloved apps series. This one being about songwriting tools, I’m not talking about actual audio creation tools or instruments, but more tools for coming up with chord progression ideas. The best of these is called ProChords and whichever starting chord you choose to begin with it gives you a series of chord choices to continue with based on a huge song database ranging from the most common to least common following chords from your starting point.

You can then save combinations and sequences for refining later on the keyboard or fretboard of your choice. Unfortunately all of the samples used to play the chords are of big acoustic piano sounds so it can feel like you are writing a 90s house anthem. Nonetheless it is a great way to tinker around with sequences you might not come up with otherwise. Simple Songwriter uses the same idea but restricted to a smaller pool of chords, the LE version is however free.

The only instrument I have enough fluency on to then start fleshing something out is the guitar, and I’ve found this Chordmaster app invaluable as a chord lookup dictionary. Again there is a free LE version, I eventually moved on to the pay one for the wide range of different voicings up and down the fretboard for trying out the progressions I’d made.

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I’ve only had an iPhone now for a month, but already other computing devices I own are gathering dust and it has cemented itself so completely into my day to day I fear the time is coming when I will inevitably drop it into the ocean from a moving ferry. I was an early adopter of smartphones as they were called back in the early windows mobile days, but of course the difference is the apps. In the interest of sharing navigation tips through the dark forest of the app store, here begins an occasional series on little programs I’ve found useful, addictive or fun.

First category: Traffic apps.

Sydney teeters on the edge of traffic chaos most days and knowing there is a breakdown or accident on your route is the type of foreknowledge you want to have. Snarl pulls data from the RTA website about reported incidents and combined with the traffic overlay on google maps it will usually prove useful, if it also gave info about roadworks & closures it would be hard to beat.

Just to make sure before you leave the house or office, look through the relevant traffic cameras just to be certain the reports aren’t lagging with SydTraffic.

There is a project in western Sydney at Blacktown Arts Centre that I’ve been involved with for a while called CODED, a series of projects loosely based around contemporary art approaches to coding, tagging and writing in place. There was a Sydney Writers Festival panel back in June last year that I participated in & now there is an exhibition to which I’ve contributed an audio installation piece called Orbital.

Orbital consists of four train of thought monologues by drivers on the Sydney orbital motorway network, visitors walk the floor map of the network a camera sensor system triggering playback of the audio pieces around the space.

Installations are not my usual thing & thanks go to the curator Sophia Kouyoumdjian and the installing team at BAC Tim & Bo for the fantastic help they gave. The show is there until the end of march and all the artists involved have done great work, so please drop in if you are in the area. It opens next Thursday the 4th at 6pm. I’ll post video and audio here after the documentation shoot happens.

A couple of years ago I went to a conference dinner in Melbourne at the 100 Mile Cafe (now sadly deceased) which had excellent fare & as the name may suggest to you, sourced all ingredients from a 100 mile radius (160 kms or so). This as you’ll probably be aware is an expression of a widespread slow food/eco/sustainable trend in cooking and eating that has been building steam for a couple of decades. I’ve been increasingly sensitive to food miles recently & just as a way of easing us into the idea the other night while grocery shopping we decided to at least stick to not buying any imported items.

We’d just come from a very long and hot dinner party and were a bit drunk & it sounded like a fun exercise. It ended up taking till supermarket closing time & required some changes, but not where I’d thought.

In fruit & veg the imported lemons (from the US) got substituted with local limes, but there was no way around the lack of local garlic. We got the spanish garlic (because the chinese stuff is pretty bad) just as a temp measure until I can find some australian garlic somewhere. For some reason non-imported garlic has been unavailable in supermarkets in Sydney for at least a few years now, the chinese stuff (or spanish or mexican) has become ubiquitous. China now makes 70% of world garlic amazingly & the garlic frenzy there is remarkable. The last time I had any australian garlic to my knowledge was on holiday in the NSW north coast last year, it was elephant garlic for roasting and well worth the $20 a kg we paid.

One place I thought we might find some problems was toiletries and sure enough all Colgate products are made in Thailand, happily though Macleans is local, so our dental hygiene regime will survive. Breads, rice, pasta, cereals were all OK (with the exception of risotto rice) and it took a few substitutions to get some tinned veges that weren’t from Italy.

There were a couple of major stumbling blocks, namely european tea, coffee & chocolate. The Italian coffee, English tea & Swiss chocolate we normally consume in copious amounts all contain double food miles having been grown in India, South America & South East Asia then shipped to europe for processing & packing and then re-shipped out to places like the Sydney supermarket we were looking at them in. We found substitutes, but not great ones, research will hopefully throw up some better options or tastes will have to change.

So, of course just restricting the shop to Australia is hardly radical (though still requiring compromise) and there are questions about whether its really better to be getting things from W.A and excluding N.Z which is quite a bit closer. I’m interested to see how hard it would be to restrict just to NSW/ACT & just how hard it might be to find out how to do that.

I was lying on the couch at the beach shack the yesterday, reading after having just had breakfast, when my phone rang. It was a journalist from Adelaide radio wanting comment on something related to mobile phones.

“You are a expert on mobile phone culture right?” he said.

I told him I was driving and would ring him back later, he gave me a number I didn’t write down. I felt a little ashamed to lie to him, but also a little self righteously glad and I realised then how my attitude to dealing with journalists and the media had changed over the past few years. Even though I’d worked at a few other Universities, after starting at UTS 5 years ago I came onto the media radar strongly, firstly around blogging and then around mobile cultures.

Even when these calls started running at five or six a week (and I felt like I had to spend time preparing for the radio and TV spots) I felt like this is what academics were supposed to do. Contribute to the public conversation, be a public resource in some small way speaking through the media. Which is how I ended up on 2UE during the Cronulla riots debating the content of the text messages flying back and forth. But also how I ended up in the Courier-Mail entertainment section before Christmas pontificating on the way young people interact with the world through mobile devices.

I’ve stopped returning the calls now, disillusioned with the idea that participating was doing anyone any good except for the media companies hungry for free content from “experts”. For a while I had an ABC-only policy to callbacks but even that got tired after a while. In short I was worn down by the ceaseless inanity of the requests and the conversations, the clueless journalists with no idea about what they are asking or who they are talking to, keyboards clattering away in the background as they soundbite your impromptu spray delivered from the office chair.

The guilt I still feel about having taken this attitude is related to two things, firstly if no-one participates in the endless spectacle for these reasons all you end up with is people with a particularly crazy axe to grind like Hetty Johnson. These people make great media fodder, always up for an outraged/combative quote. And the second reason is that media is of course a kind of public space, especially in terms of broadcast media where public airspace is used under publicly granted license. It feels wrong not to contribute in some small way if you have the opportunity, leaving it to the news pros and the axe grinders they feed on, but for me at least I’d prefer that feeling than opening the floodgates again.

Down here in the beach shack we do a lot of laying about on the couch. And when the weather and sunspots align right we can pick up 4 snowy channels on the old TV, we’ll watch whatever is most visible as a rule. So it came to be last night that we saw the first of a BBC doco series, “The Seven Ages of Rock”.

I realise that once having a great civilization or empire and then having it no longer can be hard for a society to process no matter how much time passes. Often you’ll see the more nationalist elements using the great legacy as a rallying call for a return to supremacy, Italy during the Mussolini years or Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge years for instance.

For Britain this tendency gets acted out most noticeably through the BBC, its world spanning ubiquity an echo of empire. The documentary productions especially follow the intrepid British explorer model bringing insight and a civilising influence to the world. Always the authoritative voice pronouncing whatever is before them as the biggest, oldest, deepest, hungriest, most dangerous thing in the known world.

And so it was with the 7 Ages program which proclaimed Rock to have started in 1965 and to be invented by English people by combining an African American legacy unknown to clueless Yanks with native British ingenuity. As well as ignoring every other part of the world, the only American featured as a bit player in the Rock story was Dylan, portrayed as a minor folkie until being galvanised by the electric sound of the British invasion.

It continued on with the Boomer history of the 60s we’ve seen thousands of times, intercutting Vietnam, etc. While trotting out the usual suspects as talking heads (though I’m always entertained by Keith Richards). I wonder where they go now from here constructing a British history of popular music, the next episode previews with Pink Floyd & Bowie featured heavily point the way forward, the sun never sets on the BBC.