Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Only rock 'n' roll | Nov 17, 2006 09:50

A couple of mornings ago, I got a text from Brent Hansen: "CHECKS are great - 70s Stones trash rock … more 70s than 60s style now. @ THE GIG NOW."

"Lucky bugger," I texted back.

Yes, The Checks have recorded their debut album with Ian Broudie at RAK Studios (now there's some pop pedigree) and are at the presenting-it-to-the-record-label stage. They have a website and a MySpace page with pics from the sessions and a demo of one of the album tracks.

Readers who attended this year's Rolling Stones concert will probably regretfully recall a bag-of-shite support band called Nickelback. David Slack pointed out this thread on Digg, about a clip showing Nickelback departing the stage after being pelted with rocks at a gig in Portugal. I like it when the singer says "Do we have any Nickelback fans in Portugal?!" and the answer appears to be "no". Turns out it's from 2002, but whatever. A pwning's a pwning.

Now, if you were at that Stones show, you may have found yourself listening to Nickelback and thinking - as did I - this shit all sounds the fscking same. Oh lordy, that ain't the half of it. Check out this work of public service. Absolutely stunning.

My eMusic find of the month: Jamaica To Toronto: Soul Funk & Reggae 1967-1974. It consists of recordings from Jamaican émigrés in Toronto, and is perhaps the best slab of funkyreggaesoul it has been my pleasure to own. It's contemporaneous with Jackie Mittoo's Champion of the Arena set, and it sounds like he's on a few of the tracks.

Anyway, drop me a line if that (or eMusic in general - legal, DRM-free MP3 downloads) sounds like your thing. Monthly subs start at $US20 for 30 downloads. I can take advantage of their current tell-a-friend offer which nets me 50 free downloads for the tip, and you 25 free ones as an introductory offer.

Any user reports yet on the Vodafone Music Store? It sells DRM-trussed WMA files, won't work with a Mac or iPod, so it's no use to me. It seems heavily oriented towards single tracks: you can't buy the new Dimmer album for example - just "radio versions" of four old songs. I still like our friends at Amplifier a lot better.

Oh, and there's a date floating around for the iTunes Store launch: November 28.

PS: Still keen for more discussion on the Draft Digital Content Strategy Discussion Document. Read here, talk here.

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Uncapturing Content | Nov 16, 2006 12:16

The Draft Digital Content Strategy Discussion Document is online now. Having been involved in a part of the process of creating it (the Imagineers' Group, under the auspices of the National Library), I've been very interested to see what emerged. On a quick read, there's both good and not-so-good.

The definition of three kinds of content - Formal, Informal and Commercial - came out of our group, and it's there front-and-centre in the paper, which is good. The definition seems sound enough too:

Informal content: digital content that lives and grows on the web, including blogs, emails, wikis, podcasts, home movies, digital stories. Individuals and communities, anyone with access to an internet-connected computer and some tools and the skills to do so, can immediately publish to the web and create their own tags or "folksonomies" to their and others' content. Informal content generally does not convey the "official truth" and may contradict or contest other content or views. Increasingly this is the space that is creating our social history on the fly – it is a space where the stories of ordinary and extraordinary New Zealanders are being created, yet it is by its nature ephemeral and often not preserved for future use.

Public Address is among the examples of informal content listed in the end-notes, which is gratifying.

What's missing is a real sense of connection between the informal and formal worlds; between the community and the establishment. The paper acknowledges the issue of heritage digitisation:

Research is showing that if content is not online, it is invisible to searchers, and the thoughts and knowledge contained are lost for many practical purposes. Internationally, governments are responding by funding mass digitisation programmes for their nation's heritage, thus making film, sound, texts, photographs, manuscripts, video and other media available on the Web. Cooperative undertakings include the Memory.of.the.Netherlands.project, which is making a major foray into digitising important sources of Dutch cultural heritage, and the European Union Digital Libraries Initiative, which aims at making Europe's diverse cultural and scientific heritage (books, films, maps, photographs, music, etc.) easier and more interesting to use online for work, commerce, study and leisure.

New Zealand's efforts to date in putting such public content online have been sporadic and tend to take a less strategic approach than overseas digitisation programmes. If digitisation of public content in New Zealand were to continue at the current rate, it would be many years before we caught up with where many of our OECD and trading partners are in 2006.

I guess some people will be sick of hearing this from me, but you can spend years strategising and still be stuck with a basically top-down model that institutionalises all decisions and fails to capture the dynamism that drives the Internet community. The emphasis here remains on the institutional capture of both content and decisions about content. This, for example, doesn't do it for me as an action point:

Review the institutional form of organisations involved in the preservation of, and public access to, film, video and sound content.

Here's my proposed action point(s):

Establish and develop links and synergies between the formal and informal spheres.

Develop a simple, contestable fund to allow individuals and groups to have public archive content digitised on request, thus extending decision-making power to the people who will actually use the content. Make all such content available under a Creative Commons licence, thus developing an on-demand archive in parallel with any archive developed as part of an official strategy.

Make public digital content as easy to share and re-use as any clip on YouTube is. Assume that not all such content will be consumed within institutional boundaries, and neither should it be.

Require archive organisations to actively engage with the community, to deepen their own knowledge about the content they hold.

I'm thinking here of people like Jonathan Ah Kit, and the many New Zealanders who edit Wikipedia (which gets a mention in the glossary, but that's it). It would be nice if there was a smoother process for the likes of our Great New Zealand Argument project too.

Jonathan, you may recall, likes to obtain, scan and publish the kind of documents - like the Mazengarb Report - that are of interest and value to the rest of us, but are unlikely to emerge any time soon in official histories. I acknowledge the need for authority, but Te Ara's separation from its users still bugs me. We need a better balance here, and to be fair, this paragraph hints at it:

Government funding for creation and digitisation of content is dispersed across agencies and largely for one off initiatives Government is not extracting maximum value by connecting creation with sharing and preservation.

I'm also on the advisory board of Sound Archives Nga Taonga Korero, which met last Friday in Wellington. Like all archive organisations - and more so than most - Sound Archives has imperfect knowledge about the content it holds. My advice - paid for in muffins - is that the planned new Sound Archives website should develop that knowledge by encouraging its users to contribute information about specific recordings. Researchers often search the archives for recordings they know something about, and there's a nice quid pro quo in having them leave a little knowledge for the next person through. The contestable fund for digitisation would also work very well for Sound Archives - I'd see it operating on a cost-recovery basis.

Anyway, Creative Commons, which first got a mention in the Digital Strategy, is namechecked again here:

New Zealand has strong intellectual and cultural property law. It gives New Zealanders the confidence to continue creating and sharing digital content, knowing their intellectual and cultural property rights are protected. But we need tools to make the benefits of intellectual and cultural property law more accessible to New Zealanders.

One such tool, which is already available in many developed countries, is the Creative Commons licence. The creative commons licence allows cultural, educational, and scientific works to be freely shared and re-use while protecting intellectual and cultural property rights in content. This is a means of ensuring that the rights associated with individual pieces of content can be identified easily by creators and users. We have the opportunity to promote the Creative Commons and increase understanding of New Zealand's intellectual and cultural property law for digital content creators.

Still a bit vague. I'd like to know how a New Zealand Creative Commons licence will interact with the generally obstructive practice of Crown Copyright, for one thing.

Anyway, I'm out the door soon, so I'll have to save a close reading for later, but I'm very interested in what our readers think. Please discuss …

(I'm still interested in what people think of TVNZ's Freeview announcements too.)

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In other news, the Techsploder looks at what was always going to be the achilles heel of Microsoft's Zune player: the goddamn software. A dozen or more installation screens, unwarranted demands for personal information, and - in Endgadget's case - really bad crashes. The tryhard hipness of it all is unappealing too. I know iTunes has been pretty poor lately too, but it sometimes seems that Apple is the only company that can write this sort of software competently. One thing I do quite like: the brown Zune. It's quite funky.

The Kiwi animation I posted in the OurTube section of Public Address System has become a global hit, and is closing in on two million views (and 9000 comments!) on YouTube. There's an interview with its New York creator, Dony Permedi, and you can download a QuickTime version from his website.

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Aiming for mediocrity. Again. | Nov 15, 2006 10:12

Has Keith Locke actually seen the area he describes as "Auckland's beautiful waterfront"? And when 3 News's Tony Field declared that "hundreds of people" living near the proposed stadium site would be affected, should he not have also interviewed some of the thousands of people who'd live around an enlarged Eden Park?

It's just deceptive to dedicate an alarming report to Quay Street residents agonising over construction noise (lady, you did move in across the road from a container port …) without acknowledging that life in Mt Eden, where residential housing sits 10 metres from the perimeter of Eden Park, won't be very nice if the money goes there. But it is, I guess, in keeping with the current hysterical atmosphere around the issue.

Politics have come into play: the Herald has been daily running its dumb, self-selecting mail-in polls but not bothering to put the work in and try and answer the question I want answered: is it do-able?

There appears to be an informal competition to come up with the most unflattering word for the proposed waterfront stadium. "Monstrosity" is getting a bit old, as are "bedpan" and "toilet seat". Yesterday, Don Brash grandly suggested "mausoleum". How about "abattoir"? It doesn't really make any sense, but it sounds deranged enough to catch on the current climate.

But let's look at what's actually proposed: the wharf around the stadium will be a public concourse; there will be bars and restaurants lining the area. At the end of the wharf, I would think, you'd feel like you were actually out on the harbour. Viewed from Devonport, all lit up at night, I imagine the structure would look stunning. Like Eden Park, it would house function rooms and venues, its glass walls opening up a harbour vista. Unlike Eden Park, the facilities could be used as often as anyone wanted them.

Outside, Quay Street is wide enough to be closed off as a pedestrian boulevard for major events, and still have room for a dedicated bus and taxi lane. There are 20,000-odd carparks within walking distance, a bus depot and a railway station. Any transit investment made in the area will also work for the Vector Arena and the Viaduct.

Unlike many of the people campaigning for Eden Park, I have actually been there many times. It's quite convenient for me to get to, but, then, I don't have to try and get there from any motorway. I know people whose windows shake on weeknights as buses idle outside for an hour, waiting to collect crowds using the function rooms. It will simply not be possible to eke any more use of the ground without seriously affecting the quality of life of the residents. And when it's not in use, it will, literally, be useless. It's not public space and the gates will be locked. There'll be nothing there.

If the stadium does not gain approval, the alternative plan for the waterfront is a vague, unplanned promise that the area will be "opened up". Given that we've heard that for years (while the most abysmal commercial development - a sodding strip mall! - has been permitted on the city side of Quay Street) and that any redevelopment will be competing against both a much larger project in the tank farm area and the economic claims of Ports of Auckland, I don't believe it. If the stadium doesn't go ahead, I will lay you odds that in 10 years, "Auckland's beautiful waterfront" will look just as ugly as it does now.

I know there are unsatisfactory aspects with regard to process here, but as Fran O'Sullivan says this morning, it's the chance to actually do something bold.

The irony is that the rest of the country seems to have been inclined to cut us some slack on this - they actually think it's fitting that we host a national stadium. And they're now wondering what the hell is going on.

Anyway, feel free to chip in on the discussions ensuing from my original post (largely pro-stadium) and David's (largely anti). Note that clicking "last post" takes you direct to the last post in a thread. Or, if you like, hit "discuss" and kick off a new thread.

I hope Yamis isn't right when he says in my thread:

But does anybody get the feeling this is done and dusted and Eden Park will get its absolutely absurd upgrade in its absolutely absurd location and in a couple of decades we will be having the same discussion once again with the only difference being the price tags being quadrupled??!!

But, yes, I do. It looks like we're aiming for mediocrity. Again.

PS: Please read Keith Ng's post on Deborah Coddington's nouveau yellow-peril story for North & South. It's an idictment of incompetence, appalling bad faith, or both, on the part of the author. I think there's easily enough in in his post to warrant a serious apology from N&S editor Robyn Langwell.

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The God Thing | Nov 14, 2006 11:14

Time magazine's Science vs God debate between Richard Dawkins and Christian geneticist Francis Collins was interesting. I've noticed a bit of blog comment claiming that Dawkins was skewered on this or that philosophical point, but I think he handles that stuff quite well, in the sense that there are much bigger holes in Collins' argument than Dawkins' by the end of it.

I thought this passage was quite good:

DAWKINS: Yes. For centuries the most powerful argument for God's existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design: Living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer. But Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is a gradual, incremental improvement starting from very simple beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, more adaptive perfection. Each step is not too improbable for us to countenance, but when you add them up cumulatively over millions of years, you get these monsters of improbability, like the human brain and the rain forest. It should warn us against ever again assuming that because something is complicated, God must have done it.

COLLINS: I don't see that Professor Dawkins' basic account of evolution is incompatible with God's having designed it.

TIME: When would this have occurred?

COLLINS: By being outside of nature, God is also outside of space and time. Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable.

DAWKINS: I think that's a tremendous cop-out. If God wanted to create life and create humans, it would be slightly odd that he should choose the extraordinarily roundabout way of waiting for 10 billion years before life got started and then waiting for another 4 billion years until you got human beings capable of worshipping and sinning and all the other things religious people are interested in.

COLLINS: Who are we to say that that was an odd way to do it? I don't think that it is God's purpose to make his intention absolutely obvious to us. If it suits him to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation?

So all questions are moot because God is unknowable. Hmmmm. I do sometimes tire of Dawkins' militancy, but I appreciate his acknowledgement of the strangeness and mysterious of the universe:

DAWKINS: I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine.

COLLINS: My God is not improbable to me. He has no need of a creation story for himself or to be fine-tuned by something else. God is the answer to all of those "How must it have come to be" questions.

DAWKINS: I think that's the mother and father of all cop-outs. It's an honest scientific quest to discover where this apparent improbability comes from. Now Dr. Collins says, "Well, God did it. And God needs no explanation because God is outside all this." Well, what an incredible evasion of the responsibility to explain. Scientists don't do that. Scientists say, "We're working on it. We're struggling to understand."

TIME: Could the answer be God?

DAWKINS: There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.

COLLINS: That's God.

DAWKINS: Yes. But it could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small--at the least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that's the case.

At no point does Collins, for all the room he carefully makes for a God, give any hint of why God should be his Biblical God, and not anyone else's. As Dawkins concludes, if there is something resembling God - some being, some principle, some profound initial conditions for the Universe - it's likely to be a hell of a lot more interesting than the workaday representations presently on offer.

DAWKINS: My mind is not closed, as you have occasionally suggested, Francis. My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about, nor can you, nor can anybody else. What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up. When we started out and we were talking about the origins of the universe and the physical constants, I provided what I thought were cogent arguments against a supernatural intelligent designer. But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea. Refutable--but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect. I don't see the Olympian gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.

Dawkins is currently on a book tour of the US, which includes various lecture stops. Norm at OneGoodMove has been dishing out clips from a lecture at Lynchburg, Virginia, which was also attended by students and faculty from Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, rather adding to the atmosphere. I did like Dawkins' response to a question about Liberty's claim to be in possession of dinosaur bones a mere 3000 years old.

And, finally, more signs that American evangelicals are drifting away from political engagement, at least in the context of the "religious right". Jim Wallis suggests that evangelical Christians are moving on from the twin obsession with abortion and gay marriage, and "now care about a wider range of moral issues, such as poverty and economic justice, the environment, HIV/AIDS, genocide in Darfur, human rights, sex trafficking, and matters of war and peace, especially Iraq."

And the partisan "God gap" has halved since 2004. Newsweek is characterising it as a "war between the religious right and believers who want to go broader."

Interesting …

PS: Yesterday's discussion proved, unsurprisingly, to be not much about rugby and all about The Stadium. It's still quite lively, if you want to have your say. Then, at 10.15pm last night, I get a call from a Herald reporter wanting to know what I think about the waterfront proposal. She'd seen the blog, so I reiterated that I could certainly see the appeal, but I wanted to be assured it was deliverable.

Then I go around to the shop and get the paper this morning and blearily see that my picture is on the front page, along with those of various other media wankers and a politician. I guess they needed another "yes" vote to make it four-all, or possibly just to fill up the page. Thus have I been dragged into the Herald's debate. Yamis at Blogging It Real says Build the Fucking Thing! . And Justin Harwood has set up a Stadium Vote website.

Also, you need to see these two new entries in OurTube: A wonderful animation about kids and computers from a Massey University student, and a bittersweet cartoon about a Kiwi, created by an American.

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Because I am weak | Nov 13, 2006 10:27

There have been four great All Black performances in the professional era: the game against Australia at a drowning Athletic Park in 1996. The furious dismissal of France in Paris in 2004. The second test against the Lions at the Wellington Stadium last year. And France again, this past weekend.

Yes, Fitzy's team won a series in South Africa for the first time, and the Mitchell-era All Blacks ran up a couple of cricket scores before the rest of the world worked them out, but I'll argue that those four performances were of a different stripe.

The obvious point - obvious, but remarkable - is that three of the four have taken place on the watch of Graham Henry. Three things have characterised Henry's coaching. One is that his teams win a lot (let's leave his ill-fated Lions side out of it): remember the Blues coming out of nowhere to win the Super 12 with Henry on board as "defence coach" in 2003, and heading rapidly back to nowhere without him? Another is that he seems to be able to motivate maverick players: Carlos Spencer played his best rugby under Henry, and Ali Williams the All Black is light-years ahead of Ali Williams the provincial player. And, third: no player in a Henry team ever takes the field without knowing what is expected of him.

Michael Donaldson's Star Times backgrounder on technical and tactical preparation under the current coaching set-up was fascinating.

All Blacks attack coach Wayne Smith estimates this team, under coach Graham Henry, has used 70 set moves, or what he calls "set ups" over the past three years. Within each set-up there are four or five options as well as opportunities for improvisation. Fortunately for the players they go into each game with only two or three set-ups to remember.

This is the reality of rugby at the top level now. Flourishes of individual brilliance are enabled by a carefully designed pattern of play whose rhythmic execution creates the conditions in which brilliance might flourish. The players not only need to execute this pattern accurately, but at great pace and with unadulterated physical commitment. I fancied that the look on the faces of Richie McCaw and his pack, especially early in the game, was not simply one of fury, but of furious concentration.

I think this All Black team is already staking a claim to being one of the best in the history of the game. But that will all come to little if, again, the All Blacks come undone at the Rugby World Cup. It's no good being a sensation and reinventing the game - as the All Blacks did in 1995 - if you don't win the tournament. And the more capable the All Blacks looking of winning next year in France, the more nervous I get. Doubt, the misty cloud on the New Zealand psyche, gets the better of me. And if I'm like this now, god knows how I'll be next September.

I can only trust that the players who will contest the tournament in our name have conquered that doubt; have the confidence and the belief to play like champions. I need them to be strong, because I am weak.

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Meanwhile, back at the ranch, there's a lot of fussing about the next World Cup. Frankly, I think there's a lot of tosh talked about how an "ugly" and "monstrous" waterfront stadium will "block" Aucklanders from their waterfront. I'm sorry, but have you seen what's there now? It's a carpark for used Japanese vehicles and a mooring for the huge vessels that carry them there. It's behind a 10-foot iron fence, and offers no public view whatsoever of the harbour.

Yes, the area concerned has been targeted for redevelopment as public space, but for how long have we been hearing that promise? On the other side of Quay Street, the shambolic development permitted in a short few years by C&R councils has already destroyed all the sightlines around the new Vector Arena.

In this context, I don't think a waterfront stadium; its glass walls encasing bars and cafes and concourses and function rooms gazing over the harbour, its lights blazing at night, would be at all ugly. Remember the way people complained about the Sky Tower as that was being built?

I'm not worried about the money either. The funding model seems viable - and I'm hardly going to place much weight in Wellington newspaper columnists whining because this time a national investment isn't going to be a subsidy for the continued operation of Wellington. I think it's pointless to start totting up the number of hospitals or hip-ops forgone because a great public space has been built. The Australians, who make themselves great public spaces, understand this.

My sole concern is for practicality. I would like to be reassured that this can be built, and be built on time, because fluffing this thing - say, having a stadium, but having it six months late for the World Cup - would be hideously bad. In this context, the decision to anoint Fletcher Construction as the stadium builder without benefit of a tender is probably the only one. As the Vector Arena has shown, contestability does not necessarily get you a result.

The government has now handed Auckland local authorities a "choice": between pouring $300m to $400m into expanding Eden Park, which is a dead end, and the waterfront proposal. The alternative is to let Christchurch have the final. Not included in the choices is Carlaw Park, for reasons as various as they are unconvincing. I suspect Carlaw Park is off the menu not because it's not good enough, but because it's a little too good.

I think Trevor Mallard and the Cabinet really want the iconic waterfront stadium, and the National Party - mindful that it could well be in government by 2011 - likewise sees the appeal.

I see the appeal too. I would just like someone to tell me it can absolutely, positively be built in time to fulfil its purpose.

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