Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Rain and a Lonely Stylus in Dar

Blimey, what a surprise. I'm on the flight back from sleepy Dar Es Salaam and I wasn't bitten once! I can't wait to get back and get off the up to nine tablets I've been waking up to every morning. I've been adding chloraquin, prognaguil, probiotics and vitamin C to my regular medication. The anti-malarials always drive me slightly mad.

In the evening on the way from the airport to sleepy Dar, a less than sleepy young man stole my mobile. It was my own stupid fault. I was in the back of a taxi on the way to the Kempinski Hotel with another person who was sharing the cab and sitting in the front seat. He had the a/c turned up to 11, so I opened the window to let some warm air in while I absent mindedly played solitaire on my phone. At the first junction we stopped at, a hand came through the window and grabbed my phone out of my lap. I managed to grab his wrist, but it happened so fast. All the cars at the junction were leaning on their horns, but the hand shook free and was gone. I was left sitting there holding my phone's stylus. It was all over in around 30 seconds. After I'd checked in, I went straight to the local police station to report the "lobberly" (as it's pronounced in these parts). While the duty officer took my statement (including asking my tribe - I said "English". I wanted to say my usual: "the Lost Tribe of "PortoStralia", but no one likes a smart arse) a plain clothes policemen, who MUST have watched Serpico - he had the look down, including the beanie hat - brought in three sullen looking boys who were selling counterfeit DVDs - so that's African anti-piracy in action.

Anyway, the whole process was done as neatly and maybe even more quickly than if I'd reported it in London.

The Kempinski's really beautiful, if slightly anonymous, in the style that could be called Quality International Hotel (Muted) - sanded bamboo floors, lots of dark wood and outsized cream tiled walls. The view's beautiful too, and in no way anonymous, overlooking the sea and the port, with a swimming pool on the mezzanine roof.

I went to WaPi at the British Council in Dar. The graffiti's the best of any of the WaPi's I've been to yet, and the Council allowed one of the walls outside their compound to be painted so instead of their logo standing dark blue on a plain white wall, it's kind of hidden amongst a riot of colours. It looks great. Self assured and confident (like the BA tailfins of the late 90, which I loved, but some railed against - like when Mrs Thatcher theatrically covered one with handkerchief). I met the WaPi board and we talked about their ambitions and plans. Then the rain started. I've never ever seen rain like it. It CHUCKED it down. Within an hour, the garden and walkway to the side of the building (which was due to be decorated by the graffiti artists) was around six inches deep in water. The board took the decision to move the whole even inside, into the British Council's auditorium. By the time the event was due to start at 3pm, only around 50 people had come, with lots of music performers and costumes and models for the fashion show still missing. I had a chat with the board and we decided to squeeze what we had into an hour, and see if more people, performers and costumes managed to battle through the (by now) choked, flooded roads. If they came, we'd tack them onto the end of the programme, and run the event for as long as we had material. If they didn't, we'd stop after what we had had gone on. But people came. By around 5pm, there must have been around 600 people packed into the auditorium and outside. The graffiti artists took their shoes and socks off and painted the wall ankle deep in water, the fashion show snaked through the auditorium and kept going until all the costumes that kept coming throughout the afternoon had been shown. The organisers: Evans (logistics), Kemi (fashion), Kate (BC Director) and Zavara (er, kind of feel good vibesman) were pleased. I thought they pulled off a great event. I really enjoyed it. I suppose I was also struck that an audience (I'd guess with turnover, more than 800 people had come in the end) came at all. People seem to really love the event.

So that's it for a bit round Africa. I've had a really great time. I think that the offices in Nairobi, Accra, Lagos, Kampala and Dar Es Salaam are set up to crack on with Creative Lives (which at the moment is going to be called "The Creative Entrepreneurs' Programme", but we'll see if that sticks!). I'm really looking forward to helping secure some great partners for the project in the UK. Chris Smith's already agreed to meet me to talk about the Clore programme being involved, and I'm meeting the Royal College of Art and London School of Economics, and I'm due another meeting with Somerset House. If the project goes the way it's supposed to, a lot of people's lives will have been improved - with more people making money doing the things they love. And that can't be bad.

Friday, May 9, 2008

Notes on Kampala (from Nairobi in transit)

After a brief trip back to London to chair the BBC Performing Arts Fund Urban Bursary auditions (the best so far - really great, impressive people. The nominators did us proud!) I'm back in Africa, but East this time.

I first went to Kampala in 1999 for the British Council. At that time I'd visited around half a dozen African countries. Although the trip came to nothing (the BC pendulum was swinging in the "no arts" direction that year), I was really struck by the beauty of the city. It's built on hills - 7 apparently, like Rome, Lisbon or Sheffield(!). It's a really verdant place. Maribou Storks hang around like gangsters in the trees that line the streets of red red earth. On my short visit in '99 I thought it was my favourite African city. Nine years and another half dozen countries later, I think it still is. It's not just the surroundings, it the people. Friendly, confident, proud. I was in the city to work with the team to identify who should be on the WaPi advisory board for events that are due to start in July or August. I met some really impressive people: designer and music entrepreneur Geoffrey Ekongot; singer songwriter Tshila; and, probably the person who impressed me most, Abramz of the Uganda Breakdance project. We went to one of his regular classes held in the open air one evening. There was around 80 to 100 young people divided into 4 or so "classes" of different levels. One was working on up-rock, one on foot-rock, another on floor work (learning windmills). It wasn't only the level of the "students" that was impressive, it was Abramz as a teacher. He's a really good dancer (but didn't seem to be a "pace-setting" type of teacher) - infinitely patient and good humoured. He'll definitely be a key part of WaPi in Kampala. I was accompanied by the artistic force behind WaPi in Dar Es Salaam - Zavara. Zavara's a Tanzanian rasta who (like Blaze) is a natural people-person. He's got time for everyone. All too often, too much time. We had to drag him out of every meeting we had as he wanted to talk and talk and we literally had to push him into the car to catch his flight home. James, our driver, later told me that Zavara had not only missed his flight, but had wanted to stop to take pictures of the lake on the way to Entebbe. James told me Zavara didn't seem bothered in the slightest. He left him in the check-in area, talking to four new friends that he'd picked up in the queue.

So Dar Es Salaam next, to see WaPi in action tomorrow. I'm really looking forward to it, though not the mosquitos (pronounced "mos-kwee-toes" in these parts) they bit me to ribbons the last time I was in Dar - they're vicious. The bite you through your jeans!

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Getting Creative in West Africa

Greetings from Lagos, Nigeria. I'm in West Africa until Wednesday continuing to work on the Creative Lives project that I've designed to develop the creative industries across East and West Africa for my client, The British Council.

The project's really interesting. The British Council are looking to make connections with many more young Africans (aged between around 18 and 30) and have identified creativity and the so-called "creative industries" (although, I might have a rant later about that particular piece of jargon) as their means to do this. Their first move was smart: starting in Nairobi, they instigated a project called WaPi designed to get lots of young creative people through the doors of the British Council premises - plural, because the project now happens in Dar Es Salaam, Zanzibar and Lagos. I was in Accra to help the team there to start their first WaPi event in June. Once these events have started and lots of young people(sometimes as many as two to three thousand per event) are known by the British Council, the question is how do they activate this relationship and develop their creativity?

To answer this question, they got me in to develop a project that works over three years to give training, networking and mentoring opportunities. I went to Nairobi to meet the participating countries' "WaPi Boards" late last year (each country's WaPi events are co-ordinated by a team of people drawn from the local creative sector) to get their ideas about what their needs might be from this sort of programme. Although I called a lot on my experience from working at LIPA and on Goldsmiths' Interactive Media and Arts Admin/Cultural Policy Post Graduate courses. But mostly, I called on my experience of designing and overseeing the BBC Performing Arts Fund. The business plan that I came up with, for a project that we've provisionally titled "Creative Lives" features training, mentoring and networking over the next three years. So, as well as working with the team in Accra to start WaPi, I've come to Lagos (where WaPi has been going around a year) to see their incarnation of this event in action and to work with the Lagos team to make the transition between the WaPi and Creative Lives project. I'm travelling with the undeniable expert of WaPi: Buddha Blaze - the lynchpin of WaPi in Nairobi, and the nearest person I've met to the embodiment of a Malcolm Gladwell style connector
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I haven't been to Lagos since 2000, when I produced the Femi Kuti and Instrumental shows, recorded for Gilles Peterson's show on BBC Radio 1. Landing on the stupidly early flight from Accra (dep: 5.35am!) Murtallah Mohammed airport was so much quieter than I remembered it. And the famous "go-slows" on the flyover between Ikeja and Ikoyi were non-existent. In fact, even though it was barely 8am, the streets were eerily quiet. Kids were even playing football on the highway! When I asked my driver what was going on, he told me that the last Saturday of the month is "Environment Day", when it's illegal to drive a car in the city, and people are encouraged to spend their time cleaning and tidying their homes. We'd got special dispensation thanks to the British Council's diplomatic plates (and the police escort that followed the Land Cruiser that me and Blaze were in).

The WaPi event in Lagos couldn't have been more different to the bustle and mayhem of Nairobi. Security is a big issue in Lagos. The British Council have moved from their old premises in Alfred Renawe Road, to the compound where the UK appointed British Council staff live. The place feels like a cross between Ramsey Street, a municipal library and a South African gated compound. WaPi happens in the garden behind, so from the street, you'd barely know there was anything going on inside apart from the steady stream of young men (and a few young women) entering through the narrow security gates all afternoon. In the garden were two aisles of white plastic garden seating (for around 150 people), sat under hired gazebos. The event was emceed by Fusy and Emem. As a double act, they did a great job keeping the atmosphere up at the event, but it looked like hard work. I went back to the hotel after around an hour to wake Blaze up (he'd got no sleep as he'd stayed on the night before at the Ghana Music Awards until the very end). When I returned with Blaze, it was a lot, lot more lively. Not only were most people standing, but there were customers at the stalls that local makers had set up at the back. The lady selling her own designed slippers had sold a couple, the T-Shirt stall seemed to be doing a roaring trade. I'm going to buy a print on Monday by a cartoonist I met there. There were SO MANY people with creative ideas and creative hunger who wanted to meet people, share what they do, and sell their wares (photographers, writers, film-makers). I really hope our project can help at least some of them. The event was really relaxed on the whole. Nothing like Lagos normally is (on the days when the traffic's about, anyway), so maybe the tight security is a vital part of the mix - to make people feel safe and relax there.

Friday, February 29, 2008

Let's make this a little easier

It's early days for this blog (I haven't told anyone about it - I'm going to wait until there's a bit more stuff on it, before I let people know) but I'm going to add a SkypeMe button - it's got a call divert to my cell if I'm away too. I'll add it here, and to my profile on the right.

Skype Me™!

Friday, February 15, 2008

Selling music again (and again and again...)

So I ripped my CD of Crosby, Stills & Nash's eponymous debut album onto Rhythmbox. I only bought it recently as an audio accompaniment to Barney Hoskyns' Hotel California.

After I ripped it, I checked the default medium: OGG at 160kbs. In other words, as cruddy as an iTunes download (and only half as good as their "premier" range). That's no good - so I chose the FLAC format which was on offer and started again. FLAC is lossless and it can't hold DRM. It's the future (partly because Apple are starting to get behind it so they can sell their largest disk-size ipods) and it might even mean the end of the past.

How many times have Atlantic got the same person to buy the CSN album? Let's say you were 16 when the album came out in 1969. You bought the album and played it to death at home and at friends. You couldn't do without it even when your mum drove you around, so you bought it on compact cassette too. When you got your first car of your own it had a Stereo-8 machine in it. So you bought one in that format too.

The cassette knackered after a while from over playing, but that's okay because you'd bought a music centre with one of your first pay cheques when you graduated from college, and taped it from the (now crackly) record to play on your brand new walkman. This was your first and not last foray into the murky world of piracy.

You looked for the prerecorded MiniDisc version for your new player in 1993, but couldn't find one (glad you chose this over the Phillips Digital Compact Cassette you considered), so you plugged a phono to jack into the back of your brand new CD player and recorded your album (not the vinyl, which was now almost unlistenable, since someone told you that you could clean your vinyl with acetone, but the CD which you bought when it was re-released in 1992) onto your minidisc player.

When you got an iPod for Christmas 2001 you burned the CD onto it. But it sounded much worse than the minidisc version. Even though there was ATRAC compression on the minidisc, the combination of the low bit-rate and crappy iPod headphones thinned out Graham, Steven and David's tonsils a little. When you bought the album on iTunes in 2006 (on a whim - because you could) it didn't sound any better.

So will your FLAC version (when Apple start selling them - and when all the rest follow) be the last time you pay money for Suite: Judy Blue Eyes? And if the companies run out of old records to resell in new formats, will they have to start investing in A&R again, and signing and recording new artists?

Thursday, February 14, 2008

How I learned to love Ubuntu... (tales from a Linux newbie)

Okay, so it's not the most original start to a blog post, but I'm loving my Ubuntu at the moment. I've been researching distros and quietly trying them out for around a year. I was initially prompted to try them because of the onset of M$ Vista. I wrote this on my MySpace blog at the time. As this is password protected, I'll paste it here in full:

26 Nov 2006

Get ready for Linux... (I'm next in line)

Just read a really interesting article about Microsoft's new Vista operating system (replacing Windows and available to all from next January). One of its central wheezes is that you have to "activate" with their website to use it indefinitely. This is even if you've bought it legally. If you don't your whole computer (not just the program) will lock.

This post isn't about the freedom of information implications about this idea, although that might form the subject of another post. This post is to explore how wrong headed this kind of approach is in the 21st century.


In the old-school "Command & Control" model, you can see how this makes sense: make everyone register = wipe out of piracy in one fell swoop.


Right I suppose, but I don't think it'll take Microsoft where they want to go.

In today and tomorrow's web, to quote my friend Erich Ludwig at Calabash Music, "obscurity is more dangerous than piracy". Windows' easy-to-crack-and-circumvent security has made it THE choice of software everywhere I've been in the world – from Israel to South Africa, Nigeria and Senegal. How many of the copies of software I've worked on in these countries are kosher, I don't know. But what's for certain – most of these developing world countries' users won't be able to afford to pay Microsoft license fees unless they get a global pricing structure right. Getting this structure right would bring problems of its own – geographically splitting the world in a way that other industries (the recording industry for instance) is finding impossible.


So from Windows being a de facto "free" operating system (because of the prevalence of piracy), much of the world – including fast growing markets like India and China – will have to choose between paying for and "activating" Vista and finding an alternative.

I think this will open up people's appetite for free alternatives. Enter Linux.


I for one will be looking for free alternatives to Windows before January. I hope you'll join me.



From today I can finally say that (on desktops and laptops at least) I've kicked the Window$ habit. If I can remember rightly the steps went something like this:

1. Tried my ancient Gateway laptop (a.k.a. "The Tripewriter") with Dreamlinux. Wasn't much of a dream, more a bit of a nightmare. It didn't recognise the soundcard, wifi card or much else.

2. Tried with Xandros. This is kind of a half-way-house. It recognised everything, but partly because it was such a compromise (what's the point jumping in the deep end if you go in with water-wings?) and also because it wasn't free - therefore not community maintained, I decided against it. The search continued.

3. Dual booted The Tripewriter with Ubuntu Dapper Drake. Still no sound or wifi, but I was getting cocky, so I erased the windows side and stopped farting about with a live CD. There was method there - part of the reason why the machine was so-called was because it was basically a typewriter. I had a smaller laptop (a Vaio TX-3) for travelling, so this computer was going to stay at home and get acquainted with OpenOffice. So, although it was crippled, I had one of my two laptops running Linux only.

4. Dual booted the Vaio. This is how it is now.

5. Once Gutsy Gibbon came out, The Tripewriter recognised everything (after a little tweaking) - wifi card, soundcard, video the lot. It works faster than the Vaio running Windows XP Pro. The last problem was syncing to my phone.

6. Missed my iTunes for a bit, but got over it. The sound quality of downloads is generally dire. I now run RhythmBox.

7. Sorted the sync problem with ScheduleWorld running via Evolution and Google Calendar - visible with a button on the desktop via Prism

Sorted!!

So there you are. Not massively exciting if you know about Linux already, but hopefully useful if you're about to (or even tried to) dip your toe into the not-so-murky waters of the Open Source community.