The more things change, the more they stay the same

Back in the day I used to sing in Wellington Youth Choir and then NZ Secondary Students' Choir. Every so often when I was singing in these choirs, we would get a piece of music with the stamp 'National Youth Choir - authorised copy when in colour'. Sometimes the stamp was in colour, sometimes it wasn't. Every time I got one of these copies I would imagine that it had previously been handled by some singing deity, and I had to slavishly follow any written directions even if they were in another part.

Then I joined National Youth Choir, and discovered that the singing deities were in fact human. Very human.

I joined a choir in London a few months back, and one of the pieces we received for our upcoming Christmas concert is embossed with the stamp 'Harry Christopher - The Sixteen'.

Serious deja vu.

Frustration is:

Trying to follow US presidential results with an internet connection which suddenly develops an aversion to US based websites. Like the ones reporting US presidential results.

Luckily BBC has streaming coverage, so I don't have to wait for results more than my artificially shortened attention span can handle. However I do have to sit through the presenters trying to explain the US electoral college system to BBC viewers - bear in mind that I have yet to find a British person who understands MMP, so complex voting systems are not easily understood here.

The next question is whether TVNZ will be offering streaming of the NZ elections this weekend, I hope so. If not I may phone home. Frequently.

Homesickness at unexpected moments

I realised the other day that it has been over a year since I left NZ.

In that time I have had a few pangs of homesickness, but they have not come when I was expecting them. Which I guess is the point. When my cousin got married, it wasn’t not being at the wedding which triggered pangs of homesickness, it was hearing stories afterward about (mundane to non-family) shenanigans.

Shapeshifter played a concert a few months back. We got in just as they were starting up, and my first thought was “Yeah, this could be a pretty good concert. Lots of bright lights – check. Amped crowd – check. Thick NZ accents everywhere – check.” That turned out to be a slight understatement…

Their second song was New Day Come (audio above), and the moment it started all I could think of was my old walk to work, from Newtown all the way down Cuba St and then along the waterfront. On a crisp winter morning the sun would be nicely framed in the hills beyond the Hutt, rising on a slowly wakening city. Why did this song trigger such a strong reaction in me? I don’t know, but when the bass kicked in I was riding a wave of pure emotion – part musical ecstasy, part homesickness, a very potent mix.

It is not that I am having a crap time, far from it. Also, there are a number of travel and work opportunities possible in London which are simply not possible in NZ. But, and this is a 100% guaranteed but, I don't think I could live here permanently.
To put it another way: I am sure I will move back to Wellington in x years time. Currently x is undetermined.

U can't touch my low budget recording

Just because...

















My latest toy is a pair of headphones replacing my trusty old pair, which were slowly sinking into obsolescence. This has both good and bad consequences.

On the plus side, I can now hear minor details in recordings which have been engineered to include these, such as bluegrass or dense electronica.
On the minus side, I can now hear minor details in recordings which were were not engineered to include these. A prime example of this is MC Hammer. I had previously enjoyed U can't touch this in ignorance of the chorus vocals. I can't be entirely sure, but the backing vocals in the chorus cut off so sharply that it is either:
a) played on a synthesiser set to 'vocal'- I kid you not, or
b) the vocals have been artificially clipped in the post recording process, which would only be done if the singers couldn't come off in unison.
I am leaning toward explanation (a), which is seriously budget. The interesting (to me, anyway) thing is that Pray has much better production values, and that is off the same album.

Serves me right for listening to early 1990s cheese I guess.

Bilbao & San Sebastian

Guggenheim museum, Bilbao, side profile.










Marie and I took advantage of a recent bank holiday weekend to go to Spain. I really enjoyed the Tudor Consort trip to Tolosa a few years back, and wanted to show Marie this Basque area of Spain, so we went to Bilbao & San Sebastian with a mate Rachael.

I have decided that I am an essentially lazy planner, and am reluctant to do too much more forward planning than is necessary for a short holiday.
Flights - check.
Visas needed - not applicable.
Accommodation - check.
Flick through first few pages of guidebook to work out things which we absolutely have to do - check. The number one thing in all of Spain according to our guidebook was the Guggenheim in Bilbao, and number 22 was tapas in San Sebastian, so that was never going to be hard to cover.
Everything else - it will work out along the way.
This attitude is pretty much all you need for Spain. I was a little worried beforehand about the frequency of buses between Bilbao and San Sebastian, but they went on the hour even on Sundays so no need to worry there.





The Guggenheim in Bilbao was amazing, even before I went inside. My photos don't really do it justice, as the curves of the building are unlike anything I have seen before.
The contents were all modern art, with the permanent stuff being large scale installed pieces and the featured exhibition was on surrealism. It was nice, I liked it.

Apart from the Guggenheim, the other focus of our trip was the food. As you would expect, the tapas was great. The general idea of nightlife in Spain doesn't revolve around getting drunk (unlike NZ/UK), rather it is about socialising with friends/family, eating a little bit and as an afterthought having a few drinks.
On our first evening out I couldn't work out what was different about the vibe. I eventually realised that:
the groups of young men wandering around weren't as drunk as I was used to navigating, there was no hostility emanating from them, there were both elderly and infants out enjoying themselves in the crowd until quite late in the evening, and that guy crouched in the doorway over there? In London he would have been going for a pee, in Bilbao he was merely crouching over to hear his cellphone better.
A couple of things which slow down the speed of intoxication: you have something to eat with every drink, and the measures of wine are slightly smaller so you don't get drunk as fast.
Our first night in Bilbao we wandered around the old quarter eating tapas until we ended up in a seedy little dive chatting to some random guy who was propping up the bar. I didn't realise until I went to settle the tab that he had been surreptitiously paying for our drinks, it was one of those situations where instead of fully comprehending why you just pay the reduced bill, smile, and leave.

From Bilbao we went to the coast, to San Sebastian, which apparently has some of the best tapas in Spain. The pic below is at a dockside seafood restaurant, where we had a very tasty paella and some roast sardines. I never realised that sardines could taste better than they do from a tin, these ones were about four times the size and four times as tasty. Mmm seafood.






Lastly, I also found an advertisement for German beer which is a little more camp than I was expecting...

One Nation under CCTV

'One Nation Under CCTV', just off Oxford Street, picture lifted from Google Images. Note the camera on the right, and the barbed wire fence in the foreground. Quite impressive.













I came across the Banksy above when I out at lunch a couple of weeks back. Like any good bit of art, it made me think.
I am not this blog's expert on CCTV, given that Marie did a research project on it during her Honours year, so I can't expound on whether cctv is actually effective as a crime prevention or crime detection tool with anything to back my statements up. And if there is one thing you don't want to do, it is to contradict a crim geek in their area of expertise. What I can say is that Britain is the most heavily surveilled country in the world, and my personal experience is that there are cameras everywhere.

After admiring the Banksy for a while, I wondered exactly how many CCTV cameras capture my image; more specifically, how many cameras do I walk under on my daily walk to work.

The next morning I reached 17 cameras as a first count, which is quite high for an 18 minute walk. Nearly one a minute, that is pretty heavy surveillance I thought. But wait, it gets worse...

Once I began actively looking for them, I started to see cameras everywhere I looked. There are a couple of major reasons for this:
1) My walk to work is past Kings Cross, which as a major train station and past terrorism target is one of the most heavily surveilled public areas I have ever seen, and
2) I walk along the north eastern fringe of the London congestion zone, so there are cameras everywhere looking for congestion fee dodgers.
This meant that my number of cameras just kept going up, to the point where my initial tally of 17 appeared woefully inadequate. My revised tally is 48, comprising 27 in the first four minutes of my walk past kings cross) and the remainder down Euston.

That is one camera every 23 seconds. Unbelievable.

What happens to this camera footage? Does anyone look at it? Should I take more care in my appearance when I pop out for the paper in the morning?