Going off piste on a trip to somewhere like South Sudan, it’s pretty difficult to re-acclimatise to being back.  Out there every day is a whirlwind.   Back here it’s the same old.   Working and learning a craft is particularly repetitive – there’s no way round it, you’ve got to do it thousands of time to get good at it!  I must say though, the last few weeks, during which I’ve started designing a few new keys of MKs, have been excellent – working with a head full of new ideas and mulling over events in South Sudan, the workshop remains one of my favourite places to be.  Any slack moment though and I do start wondering if I could be back in there.

As Bamako Boom boom starts: ‘There should always be times for shutting the eyes, jumping in and worrying about the consequences later’.  It’s fair to say South Sudan was just one of those, not so much in terms of travelling through challenging terrain, which I’ve done to a similar level before, but more in terms of realising how to go about documenting something like the independence of South Sudan.

The compulsion to record it in the first place might be difficult to tie down – perhaps it is best summed up by Joao Silva and Greg Marinovich in their book The Bang Bang Club, in saying: The camera becomes an excuse to explore a curiosity in the world.    That compulsion will surely take you into uncharted territory.  While it should never have been unobvious, making a good job of it is very committing.  If taking a picture is easy, getting yourself into the place of recording something insightful is a skill that needs to be honed, and the risks, al-be-it minimised through experience, can not be avoided completely.  I  learned a lot about this in South Sudan which will surely stand me in better stead should I decide to push out any further.  Even if I don’t, which I doubt, South Sudan will have burned itself onto my mind indelibly as a once in a lifetime experience on the flip side, a time when I learned a lot about the world.

Pictures to follow…

RSS basically goes round any websites, forums or blogs you pick out and collects any new content posted on them, bringing it all back to one place – your RSS reader (e.g. google reader, ). Any time you visit your RSS reader (I have it as my homepage so my browser opens up on it), it tells you which of the websites you are watching have new content on them.

It’s a simple idea which saves a lot of time.  You could even say it’s revolutionising the way people get information on the internet – checking websites and forums endlessly just in case they’ve got any new info on them should be a thing of the past.   But it remains a little surprising to me how few people are making use of it, and I wonder if it might be more readily adopted if it had a nice simple name.  It is, after all, a nice simple idea.

I’ve made so many mistakes in the last few years.  The costs have been financial and emotional.  But looking back, I think the times I’ve been making the most mistakes are the times I’ve been learning the most.  I’ve come to think the people who have gone the furthest are the people who have been most prepared to keep making mistakes.

The pursuit of making beautiful and exciting things can turn you into a boring geek. Think about the person who had to work out what beam goes where on the Forth Rail Bridge, the meticulous production work that went into Fitzcaraldo (see the film Burden of dreams), or Einstein’s theory of relativity.   Being on the edge, means being on the edge.

Photo by John Carroll @ John Carroll photography

It’s Saturday evening and a phone round friends to see who I could raise for Balkanarama and everyone’s couped up in their cabins working away on new stuff – from a twisted 13/8 tune to storyboarding a short film, to working out how the hell OpenERP works.  Fortunately we’ve called a break tonight to watch Peter Mullens latest NEDS and then Jive to some hot Balkan-beat before we return to our respective cabins.  Happy Days

This last weekend we opened up a project on one of Scotland’s remote bothies.   As a regular visitor to bothies, it’s always on the back of my mind how a contribution can be made to keep the bothy culture alive and functioning for the future.

This particular building, perched spectacularly on the edge of a loch in one of Scotland’s most fantastic landscapes, has been in need of face-lift for some time having been abused by a very small number of the travellers passing through –  a handful of people who decided to leave rubbish rather than carry it out.  So a small team of us set out to tidy the space for anyone that might want to stay.  The plot thickened however – as we tidied an [almost] blank canvas appeared where the rubbish had been.

In case you feel you might have anything to contribute to a creative outpost in Scotland’s Bothy Culture get in touch through High-8.

I remain utterly convinced that it is possible to maintain a ‘balanced life’ and not do anything in moderation.  In my opinion doing everything ‘in moderation’ will lead to an entirely unremarkable and dull life.  It’s all the things that we don’t do in moderation that make us interesting and human.

So my sister was saying how useful it was when she got a book out the library at art school and someone had underlined all the important bits – took the hard work out of writing assignments she said.  I’ve always been a little precious about writing on books, but of late I’ve been forcing myself to scribble as I’ve been madly trying to cram in as much info as possible to my brain.  It feels a bit like trying to get your suitcase to shut before you go on Holiday.

So a few weeks ago I began an offensive on Sales & Marketing.  I say an offensive because this isn’t the kind of thing that comes naturally to me.  Six books later however, and I do feel slightly wiser.

Sales and Marketing are two words that send shivers down the spine of most creatives, be they painters, musicians, photographers, writers, film makers or whatever.  I think it’s fair to say that most creatives like the idea that the world will come to them – for a band that might be the hope that one day they’ll be ‘discovered’ and catapulted into a parallel universe of fame and fortune.  Indeed it does happen, if there’s an established market out there for what you do then someone might just pick you up and slot you into that gap like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle.  But the more creative you are, the chances of there being an established network or scene to hang your jacket on becomes less and less.  That’s the nature of creativity – if there were lots of other people doing it then it wouldn’t be creative.   So when you make a bold move towards doing something that no-one else in your town, country or even the world is doing, that’s when you need to carve out your own market and form your own scene: that’s when you need good marketing.  Alternatively you could of course get a regular job or chop off your ear and spend the rest of your days in an asylum, just like Van Gough, but it might be better to try something else out first.

I can speak from experience, I’ve been party  for more than my fair share of bad marketing.  In fact I think I could say that I can now see simple mistakes being made by people all around me – exactly the same people that consider marketing and sales to be some kind of sect of the dark side.  When I played in a band we often failed to mention what we were called when we were on stage – so people might go home thinking ‘my god, what a great band!  But what were they called?’.  A this was was just the tip of the ice berg.  On so many levels marketing is just about good communication – it could be called communication with your market, or, in this particular context, communication with people that might like your music.  The lovely thing is that it’s a creative process too – you’re probably just conjuring up ways of reaching out to people that like the same things that you do.

Before there were four TV stations, there was only your next door neighbour.   Four channels became twenty became three hundred became youtube, wikipedia, twitter and world wide discussion.  Not only can we get news from almost anywhere, but no longer is our news filtered by some editor, broadcasting corporation or media tycoon – the King Pins of mass media can’t find a place in this new world.  It’s back to the folk.

This is a short story by the French exporer Alexandra David-Neel (1869-1968), [taken from 'a book of travellers tales' assembled by Eric Newby].   She made a series of extraordinary journeys in Central Asia in the 19th century.  Disguising herself as a Tibetan beggar woman she is thought to have been the first European to enter Lhasa.

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The Lung-gom-pa runners of Tibet

Under the collective term of lung-gom Tibetans include a large number of practises which combine mental concentration with various breathing gymnastics and aim at different results either spiritual or physical…

Though the effects ascribed to lung-gom training vary considerably, the term lung-gom is especially used for a kind of training which is said to develop uncommon nimbleness and especially enables it’s adepts to take extraordinarily long tramps with amazing rapidity….It should be explained that the feat expected from the lung-gom-pa is one of a wonderful endurance rather than of momentary fleetness.  In this case, the performance does not consist in racing at full speed over a short distance as is done in our sporting matches, but of tramping at a rapid pace and without stopping during several successive days and nights….

I met the first lung-gom-pa in the Chang thang of Northern Tibet.

Towards the the end of the afternoon, Yongden, our servants and I were riding leisurely across a wide tableland, when I noticed, far away in front of us, a moving black spot which my field-glasses showed to be a man.  I felt astonished.  Meetings are not frequent in the region, for the last seven days we had not seen a human being.  Moreover, men on foot and alone do not, as a rule, wander in these solitudes.  Who could the strange traveller be?

…As I continued to observe him through the glasses, I noticed that the man proceeded at an unusual gait and, especially, with an extraordinary swiftness.  Though, with the naked eyes, my men could hardly see anything but a black speck moving over the grassy ground, they too were not long in remarking the quickness of it’s advance.  I handed them the glasses and one of them, having observed the traveller for a while, muttered:

‘Lama lung-gom-pa da.’ (It looks like a lama lung-gom-pa.)…

The man continued to advance towards us and his curious speed became more and more evident.  What was to bo done if he really was a lung-gom-pa? I wanted to observe him at close quarters, I also wished to have a talk with him, to put him some questions , to photograph him….I wanted many things.  But at the very first words I said about it, the man who had recognised him as a Lama lung-gom-pa exclaimed:

‘Your reverence will not stop the lama, nor speak to him.  This would certainly kill him.  The Lamas when travelling must not break their meditation.  The god who is in them escapes if they cease to repeat the ngags, and when thus leaving them before the proper time, he shakes them so hard that they die.’…

By that time he had reached us; I could clearly see his perfectly calm impassive face and wide-open eyes with their gaze fixed on some invisible far-distant object situated somewhere high up in space.  The man did not run.  He seemed to lift himself from the ground, proceeding by leaps.  It looked as if he had been endowed with the elasticity and rebounded each time his feet touched the ground.  His steps had the regularity of a pendulum.  He wore the usual monastic robe and toga, both rather ragged.  His left hand gripped a fold of the toga, both rather ragged.  His right hand held a phurba (magic dagger).  His right arm moved slightly at each step as if leaning on a stick, just as though the phurba, whose pointed extremity was far above the ground, had touched it and were actually a support.

My servants dismounted and bowed their heads to the ground as the Lama passed before us, but he went his way apparently unaware of our presence….

We followed him for about two miles and then he left the track, climbed a steep slope and disappeared in the mountain range that edged the steppe.  Riders could not follow that way and our observations came to an end.  We could only turn back and continue our journey.