Year: 2005

Posted on

Campaigner against violence or shamless media whore?

There’s an ad campaign running at the moment on the London Underground, for Reebok, the sports clothing manufacturers. The slogan across all of them is ‘I Am What I Am’, and various loser celebs are spouting nonsense about their free spirited approach to life, grabbing life by the nads etc… All rubbish.

What’s particularly odious is the Jamelia ad – TSP came in the other day fuming about it, which piqued my interest – The Small Person is v. intelligent and a fine culture watcher and observer of gross inconsistencies in celeb behaviour – so next time I was on the tube, I looked out for said ad.

Here it is –

and this is the close up of the text –

it reads, “I’ll speak out against violence whenever I can. in interviews, in songs, in my life. If you stay silent you’re part of the problem”

However, surely staying silent is preferable to becoming the poster-puppet of a company with a seriously dubious human rights record, helping them to green-wash their reputation, and gloss over the human rights abuses that the factories where Reebok stuff is made have been guilty of. Hey, Jamelia, I got your violence, RIGHT HERE!

If you are reading this, Jam (don’t mind if I call you Jam, do you?), I’d suggest having a nose around Corporation Watch website before you agree to stick your well intentioned by deeply crass and misplaced anti-violence waffle on the posters of a company like Reebok again.

If you want more info, here’s one article you might like to read – a very enlightening read in light of your stance on ‘violence’.

And if you want to know more, here’s a link to a search of the corpwatch site for mentioned of Reebok. I think you’ll find quite a lot of them, dear girl.

you can click here for some crass greenwash from the Reebok Human Rights Award – which is up there with the News Of The World ‘truth in journalism award’ and the McDonalds ‘animal rights activist of the year award’. the only difference being that these other two laughably crass notions don’t actually exist.

Here’s a quote from the ‘non-acceptance speech’ of one of the people Reebok attempted to award their greenwash award to, Dita Sari, a campaigner for Independent Trade Unions in Indonesia –

“I have taken this award into a very deep consideration. We finally decide not to accept this…. In Indonesia, there are five Reebok companies; 80% of the workers are women. All companies are subcontracted, often by South Korean companies…. Since the workers can only get around $1.50 a day, they then have to live in a slum area, surrounded by poor and unhealthy conditions, especially for their children. At the same time, Reebok collected millions of dollars of profit every year, directly contributed by these workers. The low pay and exploitation of the workers of Indonesia, Mexico and Vietnam are the main reasons why we will not accept this award.”

Now, Jamelia, do the decent thing, recant, and do some ads for No Sweat trainers or Ethical Threads clothing.

TAGS – , , , , , .

Posted on

New musical challenge

Had a fun day today, working on a track with Baba Brinkman – the rapper/poet behind The Rap Canterbury Tales, one of my favourite shows from this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Having met at the show, and heard a fantastic rap he’d written for his brother, Erik. After they came to see my show, we decided it’d be cool to try a track together, and as the one for Erik had no track yet, I was offered the chance to take it on.

So Baba came round today to record the vocal – we took a few passes at it, with just a drum loop from the Kaoss pad as a click track. First challenge was finding a working XLR cable – did that eventually – then got the mic wired into the computer. It’s amazing how fast you can forget the shortcuts for a particular programme – I’ve not used Audition for a couple of months, so was a little rusty navigating it, but we got three takes, the last one of which is going to make up most of the track.

And now I’ve got to construct a track around it. challenge number one was when I came to sync up the drums from FL Studio, I’d looped the Kaoss drums slightly out tune. 5 minutes of calculator crunching and some good ole fashioned trial and error, and I’ve found the proper tempo for the track (89.68bpm, if you’re taking notes), and we’re all set, with FL Studio running as a Rewire plugin in Audition so I can do all the audio recording in Audition, and all the sequencing in FLS.

So at the moment, I’ve knocked up a basic drum track to work to, and have been getting an inspiring vocal sound (which, though I say it myself, I’m doing rather a good job of).

This is going to be a really fun project – I do so little beat-related stuff, and I really ought to do more, so we’ll see how we get on. I might even try and MIDI up the Echoplex to the computer so that I can record a load of looping stuff along with it and see how we get on…

Soundtrack – Bruce Cockburn, ‘You’ve Never Seen Everything’ (was reading a review of this from an old copy of Third Way Magazine, written by Martyn Joseph, and had forgotten just how good it is.)

Posted on

diminishing returns?

The law of diminishing returns suggests that the closer you get to the very top end of the pricing for any item, the less extra quality you get for your money. It’s something I often remind people of when they are looking for new basses and ask me ‘which is better brand A or brand B’. As a general rule, there are very very few basses beyond the 2 grand mark that aren’t any good. The companies wouldn’t stay in business for long if there were. There are some who charge a lot more for their name, and each of them have differences, for sure, but in terms of measurable quality, the differences are pretty minute.

And alongside this story of a violin worth 3.5 million pounds, 8 grand for a top end bass seems pretty reasonable. I mean, you can pay more for a bass – I’ve seen them for up to about 25,000 dollars, but normally that’s cos they are covered in hideous mother-of-pearl inlays, or made with some really rare wood that shouldn’t have been harvested in the first place, not because they actually sound any good.

I wonder what the most expensive bass guitar of all time is? Probably one of the ones said to have been owned by Jaco… I think his classic beaten up Jazz fretless went on sale at some point, but I can’t remember what it fetched at auction… tens rather than hundreds of thousands, I think… Some of the very early Fenders are of similar value…

So we’ve a long way to go to catch up with orchestral musicians, where even rank ‘n’ file section players will take out a mortgage on a new fiddle. I’ve heard a couple of great violins up close, and the difference is marked from a run of the mill 5K one, but we’re back to the diminishing returns. How much better would it have to sound for 3.5 million?

I guess the other big difference is that with any electric bass, you’re factoring in the electronics side of things – if your electronics are running on one or more 9V batteries, there’s a glass ceiling on the kind of quality you’re going to get… Maybe we can convince SSL or Neve to start making phantom powered onboard preamps for basses…

I’ve yet to hear a bass with a sound I like more than my 6 string Moduli, or one that plays as well, in any price range. I feel very fortunate to have such delicious instruments to make noises with.

Posted on

Boris Pontificates on Booze

Boris Johnson holds a rather unique place in my heart, largely just by being a Tory MP that doesn’t make me physically sick. He seems like a sweet soul, though I’m certain that he’s way more together than his bungling public persona would suggest – he’s an MP and a magazine editor and I doubt he could function too well as either if he were as scatter brained as he makes out… well, at least not as a magazine editor (it seems like there are several MPs with quite severe learning difficulties, if their policy decisions are anything to go by).

Anyway, Boris has a blog – sadly, it’s not updated as often as it would need to be to be truly interesting and marvellous, but there is this great article about the changes in licencing laws – he has a lovely turn of phrase.

Soundtrack – Finley Quaye, ‘Maverick A Strike’.

Posted on

Hey, moron, what took you so long??

I guess it had to happen eventually, Right wing ‘christian’ extremists blame the Hurricane on New Orleans’ party people – apparently New Orleans is the worst place in the world right now for sin, as they allow Gay Pride parades and Mardi Gras celebrations. As a result, according to the dickheads at ‘repent america’, God has punished them with the Hurricane.

Interesting that there’s no mention of global warming in their report, nor have they chastised God for punishing the poor and ignoring the manifold sins of the rich and powerful. No, because as we all know, on the Sin-hit-parade, being Gay is far worse than robbing the poor to fund your classic car collection. So long as it’s ‘legal’, it’s fine for the wealthy to keep twisting international trade laws to destroy the lives of the poor. All the world’s problems can be blamed on gay people. Thanks for making it so simple.

This reminds me of a very wise quote from a friend of mine about George Bush – ‘the problem with Bush isn’t that he’s a conservative evangelical Christian, it’s that he isn’t conservative evangelical enough’ – the culture of conservative evangelicalism in the US have utterly dispensed with their supposed respect for The Bible as the authority in deciding what’s right and wrong. The entire Biblical narrative follows the story of God holding leaders to account for their mistreatment of the poor. All the way through, ‘disobedience’ is as much about justice, about failing the poor and the marginalised as it is about personal piety.

And what about Grace? At what point will these so-called christians get down of their soap-box and acknowledge that the Christian story is one of God’s grace towards the entire created order. We fail, we get it wrong, and we look to God and she says ‘don’t do it again’.

I have two conflicting responses that immediately spring to mind – the first is to disown myself from anything labeled as ‘christian’, in the hope that I’m never going to be tagged as anything to do with these psycotic fuckwits pretending to speak on behalf of God. The other is to put more energy into reclaiming the concept of ‘christianity’ from the madmen… I guess this post falls into the latter category, but tomorrow I’ll be back to calling myself a messianic taoist and disowning the fascists… :o)

Soundtrack – The Rough Guide To Franco (After playing with Duncan and Rise at Greenbelt, I’m going to be hitting the African CDs pretty hard, trying to get myself comfortable with all these marvellous rhythms!)

Posted on

Those groovy Scandinavians do it again…

In an idea nicked from a library in Sweden, Almelo library in Holland has set up a ‘living library’ – yes, you can actually book time with “gay men and women, “non-criminal” drug addicts, disabled people, asylum seekers or Gypsies.”

The idea is to allow conversations with people that are often misunderstood, victimised or marginalised, to spead understanding and tolerance.

What a fantastic idea! I love it. However, the best bits are a couple of the quotes in the article –

“We want to help people learn about all sorts of minority groups,” Mr Krol said. “We even have a politician people can borrow.”

The most popular request the library is currently receiving receives at the moment is for a gay Turkish man, but Mr Krol emphatically denies running a covert dating agency.

But read the whole article is great. The Dutch and the Scandinavians are often branded with the stereotype that they are PC to the point of lunacy, but I think this scheme really is marvellous. I’d love to go and book conversational time with interesting people I don’t understand at my local library. Maybe Mosques in London could just set it up as a way of letting the rest of Londoners understand a little more about muslims. I’m sure it’d be popular (though sadly I’m also sure that security would have to be fairly tight, as it’s the kind of scheme that parts of London’s scumbag populus would like to disrupt).

Anyway, for now I’ll keep hiring myself out for interesting conversations about bass guitar, with demonstrations thrown in, for just £25 an hour, or £40 for a two hour sesh!

Posted on

So, about this immigration thing then.

“they come over here, taking our jobs”, goes the familiar racist nonsense about ‘immigrants’. I wonder if any of the people using that argument refuse to buy cheap veggies from the supermarkets who employ immigrant workers in huge numbers at wages virtually no-one in the UK would work for.

This article in today’s Guardian contains a few fascinating bits of info from a report commisioned by DEFRA –

“The reports say that between 420,000 and 611,000 temporary workers are employed to harvest and pack produce in farm factories around Britain in the course of a year. Previous government estimates, based on a census in June 2002, said that 62,000 temporary workers were employed in the sector.”

and

“All the suppliers we interviewed said there had been a dramatic change from UK nationals to foreign workers in recent years and the reason was that they needed workers who were more desperate,”

and

“The significance of the study is that it shows the connection between concentration of retail power and deterioration of conditions for workers,”

So, the issue is one of supply and demand, it seems – people want cheap veg, the supermarkets want massive profits, a large number of people in the new EU countries want jobs, and are willing to work harder for less money than Brits, so a supply chain is established, in which the ones being ripped off are the immigrant workers and the farmers. The Supermarkets get their profits, the consumers get their cheap veg, but the workers get low wages and ever decreasing protection under law, and the farmers get lower and lower prices for their produce.

So what’s the answer? Well, as far as we can, avoiding supermarkets seems like plan. If you can, buy local, buy from the farm – that cuts out the middle man, and also takes the transport and related pollution figures out of the equation. If you can’t, try an organic box scheme. Some of the alternatives are pretty expensive, and will require some budget juggling, but buying less stuff is the best way to save money, rather than buying cheaper crappier versions of the stuff you were going to buy anyway. Buying food with no nutritional value doesn’t really help anyone, no matter how cheap it is.

We’ve got some changes to make round here to get our shopping habits to where they should be, but we’re on the way, step by step…

Posted on

Ah, 'proper' jazz.

Just in from a fine gig (getting sprayed with hot water in the car notwithstanding)

When I saw Jason Yarde at Greenbelt, he mentioned that he was playing at the Progress Bar in Tufnell Park tonight, so I thought I’d head down.

For some reason I thought Jason did some heavy electronics with his sax (dunno what lead to that assumption, but still). In fact, tonight’s was an almost entirely unamplified gig – only a little bit of reinforcement from a GK amp for the bassist. Drums and sax were both unmiked.

I’ve always has an affinity for trios, especially chordal-instrument-less trios, so Jason’s sax/bass/drums line-up had me hooked from the start. Stylistically, it was pretty free – tending to hover around a particular root, but not modally. Jason’s armoury of techniques on Alto and Soprano sax is pretty incredible, exploring lots of skronks and squawks and percussive noises as well as more note-based improv stuff.

Just before I left, Denis Baptiste joined for a tune, and played just about the free-est stuff I’ve ever heard from him too – full-on New Thing At Newport squealing for part of it. Fab stuff indeed!

Then had to leave, as I had a bin bag full of damp washing in the back of a broken car and really needed to get home.

But if you get a chance to hear Jason play, jump at it, he’s amazing.

Posted on

take these broken things…

as Mr Mister would have sung if they’d been round my house now. Washing machine, broked. Car, broked. Just waiting to see what’s next.

Washing machine is going to cost £65 plus parts and labour for lil’ man to come and fix it (despite it only being 18 months old, and therefor it ought not to break with normal use…)

Car is properly knackered. Lots of things wrong with it, the latest is that the coolant system is leaking into the blowers for the heating fans inside the car. End result, engine overheats, and fans blow hot water over the passengers when the heater is switched on. Not good.

The car’s far too old and crap to be worth fixing, sadly, so it’ll be off to the scrappies soon, and we’ll start trying to find a replacement.

Anyone in blog-world selling a car? :o)

© 2008 Steve Lawson and developed by Pretentia. | login

Top