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’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.

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.

We watched Moon last night down here in the holiday shack, the surf a constant pounding white noise and the moths flying into the projector beam up onto the fibro wall. It was directed by Duncan Jones, famously the son of David Bowie & is his first feature. It is a weird collection of 70s sci-fi riffs joined together into what feels like an elegant though unadventurous cover version.

The look and feel is equal parts Silent Running, Dark Star, Solaris, 2001, Alien and the TV series Space 1999 and the later Star Trek series. It is also owes a lot to the stories of Phillip K Dick and Thomas Disch, even early Arthur C Clarke. It doesn’t do much with these ingredients except join them together and re-present them, though it does so with conviction and heart. One thing you can see them going for that doesn’t quite work is the tone of mystery and horror contained in some of these source films. Finding out what happens (which I won’t reveal in case you haven’t seen it) feels quite procedural, though gripping in a low key way.

Still, it is great to see someone trying to do something psychologically challenging with science fiction as it is rarely attempted in cinema post Star Wars with any of the depth you find in the written form. Clint Mansell did a fairly over the top score, heavy on complex synth textures which I enjoyed and was prominent in the mix filling lot of the space left by tracking shots across empty moonscapes.

The months leading up to this past new years it seemed everywhere you went people were compiling best of lists from the year & the decade. I always discover a bunch of new music & movies (book lists are not so good) trawling through these but rarely feel compelled to offer one of my own. Perhaps this is because in any given year my favourite bits of media weren’t released in that year or I find it difficult to apply any sort of hierarchy of devotion to the things I was absorbed by through a calendar year.

The other night we were at home watching Where The Wild Things Are and a little way in we realised that one of the central beastie characters was being voiced by James Gandolfini (Tony Soprano). Not only that, but the hairy big headed Wild Thing (called Carol) was acting exactly like a slightly more childish version of Tony and the Soprano element was the best thing in a fairly ordinary film.

Later browsing through best of cinema lists from the 2000s I realised that none of these films had the impact of the TV series I’d watched over past decade, particularly the past five years. Nothing had the power, humour or pure narrative immersion of shows like The Sopranos, Deadwood, 30 Rock, The Wire, Mad Men, Love My Way, The West Wing or Breaking Bad. For me no cinema of this period came close.

Partly this is because these series watched the way we and a lot of others watch them (as box sets or file collections) are in some ways a new form. Thirty sometimes forty hour feature films. Usually with multiple episodes watched back to back, disc after disc devoured in a sitting. Aside from epic theatre (Wagner’s Ring Cycle for instance or the Mahabharata) or the experience you can sometimes have with a novel this isn’t a common media consumption experience. Although it is becoming more common with gaming as games become larger and more fictionally immersive.

It took us six months to watch the Sopranos on DVD during the first half of this past year and nothing is as effective (or affective for that matter) as getting to know characters over that timespan in building narrative immersion. One of the other things that makes these story worlds so compulsively watchable is that unlike most cinema I can’t predict what is going to happen next. Partly this is the effect of the episodes being written in real time as production happens, but also the passage of time in world events and the simple fact that actors, writers, directors change, move on and in some cases die while a series is being made.
All of this is not to say that there weren’t great movies made during the past decade (I have a list of 30 or so I loved) but that it seemed increasingly less vital as a form. Some of my favourite cinema experiences from this time were so because they were large scale immersive spectacle blockbusters (Avatar being the most recent example) and massive size and seat shaking sound is one thing my loungeroom can’t do.

The wonderful Golden Live performers. Videos below in order or appearance on the night. Roger Mills & performers with Idea of South, Emily MacDaniel & Emma Ramsay as well as Alphabet Soup the first collaboration between Nick Wishart & Miguel Velenzuela.

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New short video piece just completed tonight. Its a collaboration with John Cheeseman who wrote a short text based around the title Flags of Convenience that I’d had laying around for a while. I used the text as a stimulus for some imagery and another text I wrote to animate in counterpoint to the spoken text from John. I recorded John & Jes Tyrrell reading his text over the phone and then spent an inordinately long time composing some sound to underpin an edit of the voice text. The sound didn’t fall into place for me until I used it as material for a performance at the launch of an issue of Runway magazine where somewhere in the live mix I worked out how to deal with the unruly textures. You can download a 1280 x 720 mpeg4 version of it here (just right click and save as), its 150mb. Or see a low res streaming version below.

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I’m doing a fair bit of sound design work recently, mostly soundtracking for some longish sound driven video pieces I’ve had percolating for a while and recently I’m very excited to be re-discovering the joys of the sampler. What I do sound design wise has been formed by the sampler as a tool/instrument to a large extent, when I first began experimenting with types of non-linear sequencing with tools like M.

I was working at ANU and in the wonderful studio at ACAT they had an early Akai S900 & I spent a lot of time squinting at the two line display finding loop points.

The last few years I’ve been much more into synthesis (especially on playing with things like this) and re-discovering sequencing through the wonderful Nodal developed by the Centre for Electronic Media Art at Monash.

And along the way I somehow lost touch with the simple joys of the sampler. Of just recording something in the world, mapping it across a keyboard and playing it. And so I’ve been spending most of my “sound time” recently in Kontakt, playing along to the images the projector throws onto my studio wall.

If you do get into Kontakt, don’t miss the Vimeo tutes from the Create Digital people, like this one with a great downloadable musicbox sample set at the original post.

Music-boxing in NI Kontakt from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

image by y-not?

My friend Maria is currently trying to do a outdoor locative project here in Victory Monument while the protest rages around. The flickr feed of recent images of the protests is as good a place as any if you want to see what is going on on the streets.

We went and did Rider Spoke at the MCA last night. A Blast Theory project where participants ride around leaving personal responses to questions in locations around the rocks. To then be listened to by other riders as they cruise about on bikes, wifi enabled PDA thing on the handlebars. Like a lot of Blast Theory work it was strong on the theatre of intimate personal confession and not that strong on the resonance of media delivered or created in place. What was most enjoyable though was simply riding a bicycle. Something I do so seldom do in the traffic maelstrom of the city.

I’ve waited a long time to have a platform for playing Grand Theft Auto 4. Until I got the newly released PC version for christmas & installed it using BootCamp on my new iMac. Where it just runs, but nevertheless I’ve been having the most engrossing game experience I’ve had for years with Niko driving like a crazy person through faux New York. I’m recognising streets and shops in Manhattan where I’ve haven’t been for ten years, hard to get used to driving on the right side of the road though.