Jez Kemp

AUDIOBOOK: Jesus and the All-Stars Episode 1

2012-01-12T09:52:00.000Z

From the realms of "so awful it's awesome", here is my first audiobook - Jesus and the All-Stars Episode 1: Massive Squid Attack! All writing, bad recording and terrible voices are done by me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQEaph9FWo8

Download the audiobook free at Bandcamp and Reverbnation (for free)
Read the short story here: http://jezkemp.blogspot.com/2010/09/jesus-and-all-stars.html

Yes, this is a short comedy story starring Jesus, Mohammed, David, Buddha and Vishnu fighting crime and saving the planet. In a spaceship!

If I wasn't already fearing for my life by painting Mohammed in an amusing light*, I really should be shot** for the awful impressions and accents in this audiobook.

*‘Yeah man,’ agreed Buddha, ‘even Mohammed wears his seatbelt, and he’s the most uptight guy ever.’
‘Yes!’ declared Mohammed. ‘I dislike your derogatory remarks and I may behead you later, but your support for seatbelts is to be commended!’
**This is not a serious invitation. Please don't shoot me.

Flashes: The Guvnor

2012-01-10T05:28:00.000Z

‘I’m here to see the Governor.’

‘Oozat then?’

‘What?’

‘Oo – iz – zat?’

‘The Governor.’ Mark wasn’t sure what he was doing wrong. He tried again. ‘The Governor?’

The Chavzart guard – no older than a teenager – looked up at him, a blank look on his spotty little face.

‘The Governor!’ snapped Mark. ‘You know exactly who I mean! Your leader!’

‘No idea oo yor talkin’ abaaaat.’

‘Look you little nob-end,’ said Mark, ‘I haven’t got time for this-’

‘No need to be rude, you facking arse’ole!’

‘Just tell me how I can speak to the Governor!’

‘I keep telling yoo, I ain’t ‘eard of dis “goff-earn-orr” persun! Be a bit more descriptive, innit, or fack orf.’

Ahh, thought Mark, grinding his teeth a little. So that’s how it goes.

‘I’s got to see da Guvnor, innit bruv!’ he exclaimed.

‘Oh da Guvnor!’ The Chavzart beamed in understanding, having led Mark into enlightenment. ‘Why din’t you say so you facking monkey. Wot are yoo, a forrinna? Yoo look a bit forrin. Talking all gobble-de-gook an’ gobshite weren’t yoo! Come in bruv, wipe yor feet aaaaaiiight.’

Mark grinned to himself. Innit.

Photoblog: My Wellington Running Route

2012-01-07T04:52:00.000Z

Today it is raining like a mofo here in Wellington, so here are some pics I took on a beautiful sunny day on my running route - it goes up over Mount Vic, then back round the bays to the city.

I was inspired by the film Yes Man* where Quirky Zooey Deschanel** takes a regular class in "jogging photography" - since then I've always thought about taking shots of my totally awesome running route in Wellington that is totally beautiful and amazing (when it's sunny). Finally on a gorgeous day in 2011 I took the opportunity, and here they are - there's even a little video of a Tui singing. (You'll be glad to know I didn't actually take blurry jogging photos.) These pics show off some of the awesome views from Mount Victoria, one of the many reasons I love this little city.

Enough with the talking, more with the pictures!

One last look through the trees at Wellington city

Onwards and upwards! And upwards...

Glimpsing the top

Little bit breathless on Alexandra Road, at the foot of the summit climb

View out over the airport through the trees

The sun, it shines!

The moon (on the left) and the Admiral Byrd memorial poking over the hill

Fresh clear sky, hills over to the East

Nice little shot showing the water, then Miramar peninsula, then water (out to Cook Strait), then the Rimutakas to the East

Cruising along the road, look back out over Miramar

Another view of the airport

Yet another shot of Miramar and the airport

And now for the downhill!

Saw a tui singing it's robot vocoder song. I stopped to take a little video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBsjjWUh1kM

Looking out over the airport

Lots more down

Out towards Soames Island

And suddenly, the Iranian Embassy. Where else. (This was the closest picture I dared take, I assume embassies aren't keen on photographers!)

Approaching the last downhill bit

Dropping out of the sunlight - for now

Dreamy blue colours

Giant lazy ripples on the harbour, and a guy on a kayak

Tip of Miramar peninsula and Soames Island, Lower Hutt in the distance

Look, the road! One last windy windy downhill bit. (Amazingly, this is an actual street. Houses are built on this slope and people live in them.)

Back on the flat. Cyclists are a regular feature on the bays

Some guy fishing, sails in the harbour

Round these parts, many people have their own little cablecar to get to their house

Sailing out on the water

Shag! Or cormorant. Hehehe...

Little plane coming into the airport

This sign about penguins is totally normal round here.

Another cablecar!

Shag and the beautiful water

Took a little detour - on this day, the tide was out and the water was still

Lovely view.

Same lovely view, bit closer to the ground.

Found the largest mussel shell I've ever seen

I like these shots where you can see the reflection and also what's under the water. Plus there's a bird!

Reflection #1

By the way, I totally stopped running for these pics so I could show you lovely things on my running route. So yes, it wasn't a proper run.

One last shot along the road

Sunlight!

The little sailing club house, before...

Sunshine again!

Wellington is totally like Venice, only not

Another guy fishing

This is my kind of traffic problem

Blazing sun, sailing yacht

Oriental Beach

The jogging/cycling/rollerblading path along Oriental Bay

If I can, I like to run down on the beach through the surf. Live a little!

The sand isn't that great on Oriental Beach (they truck it in), and the harbour water is cold 11 months of the year. But it is pretty cool having a beach 5mins walk from the middle of town.

Footprints

People enjoying the water

The whale tail sculpture

Freyburg beach

The cool little mural along the pathway

The grassy verges with pohutukawa trees - they remind me of platform games like Sonic and/or Mario.

The climbing wall/skate ramps, Waitangi Park is through the foliage to the right

And back to the city! Bats Theatre is on your left, straight ahead is Base backpackers, straight in front is the Welsh Dragon Bar, and the funny shaped building is Downstage theatre.

* This doesn't happen in the more awesome and hilarious book by Danny Wallace which you should read. You will die laughing, with urine-sodden underwear, at some of the pages in this book. Which is somehow a good thing.

** Let's face it, when is she not quirky.

Summer Solstice Sunrise December 2011

2012-01-04T08:25:00.000Z

Happy new year! To kick off 2012, I'll start with a photo-post I meant to put up a couple of weeks ago - summer solstice sunrise from Mount Victoria summit in Wellington.

My friend Daniil and I have been climbing Mount Victoria to watch the sunrise every solstice, summer and winter, for 3 years running (that's 6 solstices). It doesn't get any more sane, but we are more used to the cold.

Thankfully this summer was the best yet - clear, bright and glorious. Click for larger versions and enjoy.

The trek up Mount Victoria usually looks like this - dawn has already begun, but sunrise is a little way off yet.

A shot of the Admiral Byrd memorial just down from the summit (and the moon)

And the cannon on the final steps up. Why not. (Plus moon again)

View of the cannon, car park and Pacific to the south. You can see the airport off to the left.

On the way up I found a huhu beetle, NZ's largest native beetle.

I think this fellow was on his last legs, but we had a quick photoshoot before returning him to get eaten by ants or a bird or something, circle of life etc.

Wellington pre-sunrise, wonderfully reddish sky.

Tony B catching that flat cloud out to the East.

You could have drawn the cloud with a spirit level - very flat, just below the tips of the hills thankfully.

Panoramic shot #1, pre-sunrise

The sky, it glows

Wispy clouds over Brooklyn hilltop turbines

The view out over the Miramar peninsula and Wellington airport

Sunlight on the hills!

The first rays creep through...

...slowly...

...the sun creeps up...

...and behold, the new season is upon us

Flooding the upper reaches with light

Another sun photo

And in portrait this time

Panoramic shot #2, post-sunrise

Dewdrops

With the communications mast

The mast/pylon standing tall in front of the eastern cloud

The sun, it blazes

No solstice sunrise is complete without a spot of pinot noir, winter or summer

Me sporting my handmade scarf from Ethiopia (much thanks to my cousin's husband) and DIY unicorn jeans

Muggins

A plane!

Wellington creeps into a new solar year

The Bluebridge ferry cutting through a very calm, still harbour surface

The sun is risen

Wellington encased in sunlight

Blogposts to come, but right now, I'm on holiday

2011-12-25T20:32:00.000Z

And a happy winter/summer festival to you, sir/madam/Cousin It. Hope you are well and this year has been good to you.It's around this time I do my contemplative look back at the year and sign off, etc. etc. However right now I'm in stage 1 of a 3-part holiday - so blogposts like "2011 - what was that all about then?", "Projects I have lined up for 2012" and "Summer Christmas & New Year - Benefits and Drawbacks" will have to wait until I get back to windy Wellington in January.This year has been quite stressful, and the last 4 weeks especially so, so I am making it Holiday Priority Number 1 to chill the hell out. Maybe I can poach a massage off someone.Wherever you are and whatever season it is, I hope you're well and wish you a happy 2012. May the world not end like the Mayans may or may not have predicted; may the Olympics not be nearly as annoying as they promise to be; and may Christchurch finally see the end of these motherfucking quakes on this motherfucking plain.Ta ra for nowJezmarelda

#Occupy: My heart is with you but where is your head?

2011-12-20T05:32:00.002Z

Alternatively: "The blogpost where I briefly articulate why Occupy makes me ratty"

The thing that annoys me about the Occupy movement is its woolliness. Here are the new hippies - people who want peace and love and equality, but beyond that either can't agree on what they want or don't want anything else at all.

When I was 19 I went on a massive anti-war rally in London (Sat February 15th February 2003) against the invasion of Iraq - up to 2 million people, certainly over 1 million.* Afterwards, my mother looked at the pictures and news footage of people holding signs like "No war!" and "Peace" and, always wonderfully cynical, told me it was hard to take them seriously with such empty, catch-all slogans. Being 19 I said I couldn't understand what her problem was - everyone wants peace right? Nobody wants war, right?

The Occupy movement makes that anti-war rally look like a 10,000 word essay. The primary difference in my mind is that the anti-war rally, like many that took place all over the world over that day, had an aim. It was loose and populist and woolly, sure, but the unifying aim of everyone who went on those marches was that the US and UK should not unilaterally invade Iraq on the basis of lies. Beyond that - deposing Hussein, involvement of the UN - was a mess of different opinions, but everybody was expressing their opposition to the Iraqi invasion in the manner it was done.

What does the Occupy movement stand for? Equality, fairness, corporations and the rich to pay their fair share - but does it get any more specific? Well yes, in a way, but no, if you mean the whole movement. Naomi Wolf bemoaned the mainstream media's assertion that the Occupy movement "doesn't have a message", because if you just actually ask them, Occupiers will give you hundreds of messages. Well - that's kind of my point. Occupy only exists as a worldwide movement because of its flimsy lack of specific concrete demands. The more particular and specific your demands are, the less popular it is; Occupy is barely even a "movement" in the sense it's held together by little more than well-meaning ideals and a Twitter #hashtag.

When it comes to actually making changes, there is a worrying dismissal - even a touch of arrogance - of the mainstream political channels of making laws and changing the world. "The SYSTEM doesn't work for us", they say. "Why should WE deal with a SYSTEM that's given us these problems in the first place?" Well, maybe have a care for the Labour Movement at the start of the 20th century which brought maximum working hours and humane working conditions to the working class. Or the Suffragette movement which brought women the vote. These were achieved, after long struggle and sacrifice, by people who achieved radical change within the democratic system of their nation states. Is democracy broken? Is politics corrupt? Well they certainly aren't perfect, but compare the UK to Iran or the US to DR Congo, and you might find that actually yes, we have functional liberal democracies which allow public opinion to change the law and the way our countries are governed.

I wouldn't describe Michael Moore as an arrogant man - I like him, his work and his role as a social commentator. But it was dismaying to watch him give this arrogant dismissal of the mainstream system of politics, democracy and government in an interview with Jeremy Paxman on BBC's Newsnight. Paxman asked him if the movement just wanted individual fixes to our capitalist system, or wholesale rejection of the capitalist system. Moore replied that Occupy doesn't want to tinker, it's not interested in minor fixes to a flawed system - Occupy wants to get rid of capitalism as we know it.

Really?

I expect if you ask all those people camping in the Occupy protests what they want - specific changes in order to make the world a better place - and you collated them and worked out what they all had in common, you'd find that actually, what Occupy wants are very ordinary, mundane fixes to our current capitalist system of monetary exchange. They want big corporations to pay higher taxes, and loopholes closed for the super rich (1%). They want a transparent system of funding for political parties and a fairer more representative system of government (I'm just assuming here, given the US's electoral system is even more diabolical than the UK's). They want government-funded healthcare for the poorest (well, except in Europe where we already have it) and for a stop to continual privatisation of state-owned assets and services, particularly those which provide cheaper services for the poor.

These are not exceptional demands, and they are certainly not things you can only achieve by killing the grass in public spaces.

I really want to want to be out there with Occupy. Even the nice people in Occupy Wellington, who've holed themselves up in the tiny grassy section by Civic Square - possibly the only place they can stay for any length of time and without getting into trouble with the law, because hardly anyone usually hangs out there and it's not a major thoroughfare for the public.

I'm not pleased by the violent forced eviction of Occupiers we've seen in the US, or anywhere really, and no-one should be - but the sympathy lies in these people being well-meaning pacifists subjected to unnecessary over-the-top violence, not that they are being removed from a public place they have no democratic mandate or public permission to take over.

The whole purpose of Occupy - as it started with Occupy Wall Street in September - was a sit-in protest of the financial institutions that seem to control our lives more than the democratic processes which should do. Now, the Occupy camps have moved to parks, squares and spaces outside local/city authorities - why? Because if they actually occupied financial institutions or property they'd be turfed out in 5mins flat. What on earth does St. Paul's Cathedral and the Church of England have to do with the Occupy movement? Nothing, except that a) it forced the Church of England to take a political viewpoint in full glare of the media, and b) the Church of England and St. Paul's Cathedral, like civic authorities, are both too woolly and fearful of public opinion to actually enforce trespass notices without fear of negative reaction. Financial institutions, banks, stock exchanges - they don't have to worry about it and they wouldn't wait 5 minutes before calling the lawyers in, if not the police. This is partly why I'm cynical of the Occupy "protest" - if it really was a protest, shouldn't people be physically occupying stock exchanges and the IMF rather than camping out indefinitely making DIY "universities" and "finding solutions" in whatever public spaces they won't get chucked out of?

Occupy has achieved some things. The speed of its spread as a global "movement" has been astonishing (arguably the start of truly global protests that begin and spread by social media**), and the spectacle has broken into the mainstream news and media where isolated protests could/would have been ignored. European leaders are also considering a tax on financial transactions - the "Robin Hood Tax" - which has been broached as a campaign for well over a year (in England at least) but failed to make any political traction until now. Of course you could say it's easy for European leaders (as in, non-UK leaders) to be happy about this since most European transactions occur in London. But it's a tangible change, and for me a welcome one.

However. Occupy as a political/social "movement" with aims and ideals has a lot to live up to if it actually wants to change anything, rather than camping out and avoiding the Normal Real World(tm).

To tie it up, a final, related note:

The recent NZ general election didn't deliver a shocking result, but it did shock me. Without even asking anybody, I saw 3 completely separate people express how they weren't going to vote because "there's no real choice", "no-one represents me", "it won't change anything" etc. etc. Not only are these largely bogus arguments in New Zealand which has an excellent MMP voting system, far better than the typical "democracies" of the UK and US (and actually free and fair elections unlike the shoddy farces we see in Russia, Iran, many African countries, etc.). I was shocked because these are liberal, left-leaning, outspoken, intelligent and educated people. I expect apathy and ignorance from a certain section of society when it comes to politics, whether it's the UK or NZ or anywhere really. But to have these people, who genuinely had everything to vote for against a National-led government which wants to sell off state-owned assets and mine conservation land (not to mention all the rest, e.g. rising inequality in tough economic times etc. etc.), to have these people turn around and say "the SYSTEM doesn't give ME what I want, I'M not going to vote until the system changes for ME" was very distressing. And this is the attitude I see coming from the Occupy movement, which doesn't want to engage with the political process, and doesn't want to stoop to the level of taking the fight to politicians, left or right, and thus achieve real practical gains for the poor and less well-off through our democratic processes.

[I've written this post largely without proofing it, and I've largely given up searching for links and sources like proper blogs do - think of it as an opinion piece rather than journalism. So hey, if you disagree and want to say so please do, but don't get too angry. Likewise if you agree, try not to take the side that all the Occupiers are jobless smelly scum, because that's clearly not what I've written nor what I think.]

*The week after, a regular in the pub I worked in said - and I quote - "I bet they're all fucking vegetarians!". I hate that ignorant man, whose name I never knew, even to this day.

**There are similarities with the Slutwalk movement, which really is a movement, but noticeable differences too - Slutwalk spread largely because of the mainstream media which covered its birth in Toronto, whereas Occupy has spread in spite of the mainstream media. I remember seeing Twitter updates and even watching largely uneventful live video of Occupy Wall Street in early September, and scratching my head as to why major news organisations weren't covering a major sit-in protest in the US's financial centre. By the time they were finally covering it, Occupy movements in major cities around the world were already gearing up.

I've Got A Plan. And It's As Hot As My Pants

2011-12-16T11:22:00.002Z

In an earlier post, I mentioned having a cunning plan. This plan involves T-shirts.

http://www.redbubble.com/people/
jezkemp/works/7876688-ive-got-a-plan
-and-its-as-hot-as-my-pants-blackadder

This year I've got stuck into designing T-shirts for fun and profit, and I'm now celebrating my 300th T-shirt design on the internet.

As usual, I am a little behind the curve - print-on-demand sites like Redbubble and Cafepress have been letting people upload their designs and make money for several years. But I'm onboard now, and I'm excited. Not just because I'm making a bit of money, but also because I believe this is part of a fundamental shift in the future of human media. But largely because I'm making a bit of money.

For those who are new to print-on-demand, here's a quick run-down:

You make a pretty design (or just think up a trashy slogan)
You upload it to a website like Redbubble, and attach a bunch of keywords
People searching the internet find this design and say "hey! I want that T-shirt!"
They order 1/2/60,000 T-shirts, you get some money (eventually). Sweeeeeeeet

Okay that's the simple version, and yes I realise I might be buying myself more competitors by excitedly explaining how it works, but hey, I'm open like that. More importantly, it's a global market - more people are getting online around the world all the time, and more people want to buy T-shirts. Okay, more people are uploading their own designs, but even more people are buying T-shirts too.

It's exciting for me for a number of reasons. Take fact I'm a musician: I've made more money from T-shirt designs in 9 months than I have from music in 12 years. Not just that though; I got into it because I was looking for a place to sell T-shirts for my books and music, but the difference is that these designs can be searched online. I'm not just trying to flog them to my friends and family (as I do with my books, unsuccessfully) - they are being found and bought by people who have no idea who I am. In a weird way, some of my T-shirt designs are promoting my music and books.

Anyway. What does this mean to me? Well, at the moment I have 300 designs, and while I'm not going to share all the gory details, I can say that it's easily covering my phone/internet & power bills. So naturally I'm thinking, what about 400 designs, or 500, or 1000, or 2000? The magic potential here is not just that I could make the same money from this as I do in my office job, but that I could make it without doing any work at all - giving me the time to record music and write books, and sleep properly, and exercise every day, and wake up when I want, whether it's late from a party or to watch the sun rise.

Am I even close to that? No.
Is it secure? No.
Is it a replacement for a job? No, because even if I made the same money as my current 40hr/week job, there is no career progression, no pension, and you don't meet people. So if this was to happen, if I really was to pack in my day job and become a full-time travelling musician-author, I would have to be making a vast amount of money and saving a shedload for if/when the bubble bursts.

At the moment, it's supplementary income, like my life modelling and occasional web stuff, and that's just fine with me.

In his amazing book Snow Crash, introduced to me by the dazzling @desdrata, Neal Stephenson's main character Hiro Protagonist (amazing name) makes some money on the side by submitting ideas for novels and stories to the central information marketplace that the US Library of Congress has become. So, as a big sci-fi fan and a fan of the potential of both mankind and technology, it's especially exciting for me to feel I am living in the future, or at least part of one person's version of it.

And this is just the beginning. There's more options out there already, and more ways to engage and make something out of ideas, and all I have to do is find them. I am an ideas generator after all.

Me on Redbubble:
http://www.redbubble.com/people/jezkemp

Wellington, Parallels & Feeling Good

2011-12-01T08:36:00.001Z

The last week and a bit has had a surreal feel to it. Coming back to Wellington felt amazing, partly because I was coming back to the city I know, and my friends, and my flat and my flatmates, and the life I've set up here.

The only real difference is that I've got a job ready and waiting for me, and this week has been very busy. There is a lot to do, but it's fantastic not only to have a job at this time of year (when the entire country is shutting down for summer, and work is very hard to come by), it's great to be at a job where I have colleagues who I know and who know me.

Yet all this has, weirdly, given me a sense of deja vu. 3 years ago I arrived in Wellington in the spring time with a general election, and here I am now, back in Welly, in the spring, with an election. And having a job now gives me the same sense of optimism as when I first arrived full of hope and expectation. National is still in power, the Eurozone is breaking up, the world economy is in the toilet - but somehow things seem okay. Life seems okay.

I feel pretty good.

So here is to hope, and Wellington, and the coming summer, and friends and whanau (family) on both sides of the world.

#NZ #Elections - Vote Labour, Green, MMP

2011-11-25T06:52:00.001Z

Yes, this is a blogpost where I - a foreigner who can't vote - tell you, NZ citizens and residents, who to vote for in tomorrow's general election and referendum.

Party vote Green
Candidate vote Labour
...and of course, keep MMP

To be fair, I've lived here for 3 years, work and pay tax, and I'm not a million miles from being a resident, so I feel it's okay to have and share an opinion. That's what I do on this blog anyway.

To be brief:

National are almost certain to win this election, i.e. be the biggest party (but probably not a majority, for you foreigners - NZ hasn't had since a majority govt since introducing MMP. More on that below.) Labour are extremely unlikely to win, also I'm not even sure they're ready to govern again yet, and I'm not convinced Phil Goff is Labour leader material, never mind prime minister material.
However, having a strong opposition in Labour and the Green Party is not only healthy for democracy, it is the best hope for a check on National's "drill it, mine it, sell it" approach to New Zealand's future.
The Green Party will not win any electoral seats but they already have a significant presence in parliament. A party vote will help give them a strong presence in parliament, whether in opposition to the government or (less likely, but possible) working as coalition partners with National.
MMP is a great voting system, by which I mean, it's much less rubbish than the other ones. It represents the wishes of the country fairly, and gives smaller parties a place in parliament, and both of these things give voters a much greater choice. It also means parties have to agree and make decisions consensually, in agreement, rather than through argument and confrontation which the public don't need. MMP is a huge improvement on the shoddy outdated first-past-the-post system my country uses, and I urge everyone to vote to keep it.

Some issues:

State-owned assets - economic times are very tough, but they look set to be tough for years to come. National's policy of selling state-owned assets which provide income for the NZ state is worringly short-sighted, because you can only sell assets once - yet National's policy, like all right-wing parties, will always be to sell, even in 15 years when they've already sold everything.
Environment, drilling, mining - National have a similar short-sighted attitude to the environment - they've already tried selling off conservation land for mining, despite the fact that you can only mine land once. Not only that, but you cannot turn mined land back into pristine native bush, and it seems beyond belief that after BP & the Deepwater Horizon last year and the Rena wreck and oil spill this year, National want to drill for oil in the sea. For a country that relies and trades on its clean green reputation and its environment, these are short-term decisions with unnecessary risks which dump New Zealand with a poorer future.
Rivers - New Zealand's rivers and lakes are in a shocking state. It seems obvious that the Green Party has made it one of their policies, and maybe it's not a pressing issue for the country. But again, it seems insane that a country which trades and relies heavily on its clean green image has 1/3 of rivers too polluted to swim in. 1/3! It's not anti-business to get farms and industry to act faster in reducing pollution into natural waterways, it's responsibility.

There's way more than that to the election and New Zealand's next 3 years, but that's a brief summary of my verdict.

After being a fairly poor opposition party the last 3 years without Helen Clarke, Labour have run a surprisingly good campaign, and the issue of state-owned assets by itself gives a stark choice between the 2 main parties. Having seen a huge amount of privatisation in my lifetime, even under the British Labour party, I can happily say the only time to sell national assets is if it is right in principle and right in practice. Selling off New Zealand's assets at a time when it needs all the income it can get to provide for New Zealanders is a stupid decision - among other cheesy metaphors I could use, when you are in a hole, you don't sell your ladder - and something I sincerely hope National are not able to achieve.

Good luck progressives, and good luck New Zealand.

So long England, and thanks for all the Belgian trance

2011-11-18T21:15:00.001Z

Once again, I am waiting for another mega-long haul flight to New Zealand in a faceless international airport.

This time however, I have a job waiting for me when I get there. And, as is the way with the fair people of New Zealand, I am pretty stoked about it.

See you in the Spring.

Poppy madness is now out of control

2011-11-10T20:45:00.001Z

The UK has officially lost the plot. It seems as though no-one is allowed to do anything or go anywhere without wearing a poppy. The BBC physically stitches one on to anyone who appears on television, and has been for over 2 weeks before today, Armistice Day.

Similarly the madness over footballers wearing poppies during matches and the furious bile directed at FIFA seems insane, considering it's never been a problem before now. It's not just about wearing them - players are having poppies stitched in to the shirts and even their boots. The worst thing about this issue is how it is driven by the British public - oh the Great British Public.

I have already described my feelings about poppies, white poppies, and never-ending silences, and that's not really changed. But I feel it is worth commenting on the sinister atmosphere and fears of being "unpatriotic", and the accusers who drive this fear. Not Sinister with a capital S like a government conspiracy or a secret plan to invade another country, but sinister in the low, ugly, uncomfortable sense.

I was glad to see a collection tin on a cafe counter the other day, rather than around someone's neck - I put in a pound, because the poppy appeal is a worthy cause regardless of what our soliders do and are sent to do. But I did not take a poppy, because I do not wish to wear one. That is a choice and a freedom - that we are so often reminded about - that our military men and women died to protect.*

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
[Samuel Johnson]

*This is a nonsense in regard to wars like Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, The Falklands etc. - these soldiers fought and died because of politics and because their political leaders demanded it. But I will accept it is the case in World War II and possibly World War I.

"Time and Light" Free EP Download - Background, info, personal stuff

2011-11-10T15:11:00.001Z

So, after some badgering, I finally got some of you blaggards to download this here new free 6-track acoustic EP called "Time and Light". It's still free, so if you don't have it, please do download and share!

&lt;p&gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a target="_blank" href="http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/time-and-light"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Time and Light by Jez Kemp&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/time-and-light

But actually this EP is not new at all - it's the result of my acoustic recording sessions with Matthew Langley, AKA Captain What (@thecaptainwhat), AKA the beard-wielding tabourine-wearing bassist in amazing band The Library Suits (@thelibrarysuits).

My very first session was towards the end of 2007, while F451 was still coming to a close. I went over and decided my first song was going to be "Lighten Up, No Thanks", possibly the worst song choice because it had (and still has in the Without Fear recording) no less than 6,000 time signature changes. After getting not very far, we tried some other stuff. It was all very low key, and I was still getting used to playing by myself with an acoustic guitar, both for recording and live performances. These experimental sessions went on occasionally through 2008, and while they didn't yield any fruit, they were definitely useful.

Wind forward a year: September 2009, my first visit back to the UK from New Zealand. I was already gearing up to record "Without Fear" and while I had my own experimental agenda for those tracks, I wanted to do something proper - quality recordings with good equipment and a good producer. In exchange for quality real ales and the odd Chinese takeaway, Matt had me round and we recorded "Animals", "Sunshine", "The Future" and "Lighthouses" - almost entirely acoustic, with a couple of electric parts, and the same energy I put into live sets.

I think it was early 2010 when Matt sent me a package online with a surprise present - not only had he mixed all 4 tracks, he'd salvaged 2 from our original sessions: "The Tsunami, The Tank And The Barcode" and an original version of "One Last Parting Shot" which has an extra chorus and a middle bit and comes out about 6mins (unlike the Without Fear version, which I cut down). You can tell these 2 aren't exactly polished, but it is nice to have them, and I've included them as bonus tracks.

However, for some reason I'd forgotten to record all the vocal bits for Sunshine. Fail. Wind forward to later that year, August 2010, my second visit back. I popped over again, we finished those last vocal bits, but for some reason didn't render the track - Matt would do it later. What ensued was a very long period of me badgering Matt to finish it and Matt being very busy doing other things. I say this genuinely: the last couple of years Matt has been part of The Library Suits going from strength to strength, he's started his own solo project Captain What and now turned it into a band, he's worked a demanding full time, and faced all the tribulations we all have in our lives. He's a productive lad.

Wind forward to now. Over very pleasant ciders from the Essex Cider Shop, we got "Sunshine" finished and I am very pleased to present the EP as a glimpse into a past time in my own solo music project, as well as a recording in its own right.

My highlight, in a peculiar way, is "One Last Parting Shot". I'm reminded that it's possibly the last track on "Without Fear" that I haven't blogged with a description/explanation, and that it possibly deserves one the most - maybe if I get round to it I'll do a proper one, but here's some burble about the song, this recording, and me:

"One Last Parting Shot" functioned as partly me signing off from Essex in 2008, before going to New Zealand and wherever after that, but also as a personal lament about life in general. I don't think I've told anyone that when I came back in August 2003 from travelling, just before starting university, I turned 20 and imposed a deadline on myself of 5 years to "get somewhere" (whatever the hell that meant, or still means), and if I didn't, then I'd run away or do something else grand and/or stupid. I remember it was an abstract thought at the time, and I virtually forgot about it after that. Making the decision in April 2008 to go to New Zealand for a year was far more accidental than anything, but the song was written after the slow and sad collapse of F451, and came out as an account of self-perceived failure ("This is a song, about personal failure, I don't meant to deceive you...") and frustration, mixed up with my existing less-than-glowing feelings about my home town and county.

Listening to it now, it does have some fairly clunking and ridiculous lines: "I never belonged on all those drunken nights" is self-evidently stupid, because I enjoy drinking and sometimes getting drunk and always have done. Also, the "lost" middle section where I yelp "I meant everything I said" is bizarre, because I've said a lot of things in my time - publicly, privately, sincerely, sarcastically, loudly, softly - and like everyone in the world, I certainly didn't mean every single one of them. These lines are the victims of trying to get across meanings while constrained by the tune, rhythm and time limit of song. They also represent one of only 2 songs that I would call "personal", the other one being "Lighthouses", because even doing a solo project I still believe there are too many songs in the world with people singing about themselves.

But what it does have is heart, and amongst all the self-absorbed emo lamenting there is hope, and the sound and spirit of this recording certainly carry these through - even more than my own recording on "Without Fear" I would say. So anyway, while the other tracks are most excellent (thank you once again Mr. Captain) and certainly more enjoyable, this is an oddity that stands out and a personal marker, and I thought I'd mention.

Anyway, please download and enjoy the EP, and if you do enjoy please share the link and tell other people.
Muchos thanks
Jezmond Tutu

http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/time-and-light

And then I just released a free acoustic EP, because I'm like that

2011-11-03T12:28:00.000Z

First things first: here's a new 6-track EP that's absolutely free to download (or pay what you like). Go!

Time and Light by Jez Kemp
More info to follow, but for now, please click download and share. Thanks :)

To Monetise Or Not To Monetise? Advertising, Youtube & Dinosaurs

2011-11-02T14:06:00.000Z

"The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket."

[George Orwell, Keep The Aspidistra Flying]

I received a lovely little email from Youtube this morning. It asked me if I wanted to "monetize" my videos, by adding adverts to them and sharing in the profits from the fees that Youtube charges advertisers. I assume this is largely due to that there Dinosaurs video, which after reaching a peak of 500 views in a day earlier this year has now settled down to about 150 per day, which is better than a kick in the teeth.

I am glad for the invitation but I am not sure I want to.

I detest advertising. The sole purpose of advertising is to make money, and my generation has seen advertising at its ugliest, its worst, and most invasive. We are now more surrounded by advertising than we ever were, and it plays a particularly gross part in the lives of teenagers and children in trying to control their desires, their social lives, and their status. It's easy to say "just don't play the game" if you're not a teenager ostracised for not buying the right brands, and corporations spend billions of dollars every year around the world with exactly this damaging aim in mind.

Advertising is not creative. Ad agencies spend time and money believing they are creating "art", but at its core, advertising wants to sell the product no matter what the cost - the only limits on it are legal and moral. And the reason we only see ambiguous lies in advertising ("This man is wearing Deodorant Brand X and he has thousands of women crawling over him. Buy this and you will too!") instead of bare-faced ones is more down to legal reasons than the morality of companies involved.

Finally, what I also dislike about advertising is its management. Corporations and, in turn, billboard companies like ClearChannel pay vast sums of money to ensure their advertising in communities regardless of how meaningless or irrelevant the product is. No-one has a choice walking down a street what they have to look at and which massive ugly signs are placed where they live. But the same can hardly be said if a local band wants to advertise their gig, or an independent shop wants to promote itself. There is very often no space set aside for communities to advertise relevant products and services in their local area, by businesses which keep money in their local area.

However. Having said all that, I have come to accept some functional purposes of advertising, and we have seen changes in the way advertising is managed - primarily online, sadly, but still. Advertising now funds many of the free services on the internet that we take for granted, such as maps and search engines and social networking sites.

Also, while the topic of private information is a dicey one, we now have the ability to target advertising so that it is relevant to the viewer - for example, if you're a vegan you probably might appreciate not being shown adverts for Ye Greasy Dead Animal Fast Foode Chain. We're not quite at the optimal place with advertising as simply the honest notification of the right product to the right person that they might find enriches their lives, but it's a start.

The thing about Youtube is that this is entirely my call. Some sites have advertising regardless - many people have called their bluff, on the grounds it is user content which gives the advertisers a platform, meaning users deserve a cut or even majority of the advertising revenue - and in which case I would ask to be signed up immediately. But no, currently you can watch the Dinosaurs video on Youtube without any adverts on the side of the screen, and without any of those pop-up ads that we're now used to, and thankfully without any video clips, which run before your chosen video, which are becoming increasingly and uncomfortably more common. So it's definitely my choice if I have adverts on the video or not.

For now, I am going to leave it. I'm not sure of the going rate per impressions or clicks, but I have a feeling that for 150 views a day, I wouldn't be retiring to the Bahamas any time soon. If things were to pick up dramatically, I might come back and give it a go - thankfully it does appear you can turn it on and off, and I'd be happy to turn it off if I wasn't happy or couldn't control the way ads appeared. (While the pop-up transparent ads are not that intrusive, I definitely would not have the video clip ads.)

Having accepted a place and function for advertising in our economy and society, it's still up to us to decide how we control advertising and what its limits are. Personally I think the with proliferation and flexibility of online advertising, we should now be able to reduce or even remove altogether advertising from our streets and squares and public spaces. It's a dream, right?

Incidentally, I highly recommend reading or watching "99 Francs" (also known under different currencies e.g. "£6.99"). It offers scathing and hilarious insights into the global advertising industry by someone who saw it all. Of course, it's entirely fictional, but considering it revolves around an international yoghurt company called "Damione" who have a new yoghurt product called "Yoplite", it's only fictional if you've never heard of the real life references. I haven't seen the film but judging by the trailer, it expresses the story very well.
The final irony is that I had to watch an advert to see it.

Britain, NZ, Customer Service and Product Variety (or a lack of)

2011-10-29T10:08:00.000+01:00

I've been back in the motherland for a whole week, but it's been rather busy, and normal life has resumed only over the last couple of days. So it was only yesterday going shopping in town that I was struck by a couple of differences between here, the UK, and New Zealand.

The thing is, Britain does seem like the Land That Customer Service Forgot. On our visit last year, Kiwi Ex-Girlf was a little shocked at how poor the customer service was - you go into a shop, and there's usually no-one around to help, and even if there is they don't offer any anyway. It's a far cry from New Zealand and/or Wellington, where within the first 120 seconds of entering a shop/store, you'll be ambushed by someone asking if they can help you at all. They're cosy like that, New Zealanders.

As far as I know it's a personal space thing. In Britain, we've evolved over decades to be wary and cautious of others' personal space - in Tesco for instance, the woman at the deli counter didn't even acknowledge me until she was sure I had finished looking at the types of ham and wanted to talk to her. What comes across as being rude or dismissive (and in the case of surly teenage shop assistants, it can genuinely be these things) is actually just the instinct to give a respectful amount of personal space.

I can see both sides of the coin. For most of my life, I was always annoyed if anyone approached or talked to me in a shop - I'm just doing my thing, leave me alone, aaargh! - but have now learned to cope in the same way as with chuggers* ("no thanks, I'm okay ta" covers it 9 times out of 10). And every now and again, as happened yesterday in Boots, I wanted to ask someone for help and there were no shop assistants anywhere to be seen.

While it's not all about personal space, I do find it ironic - one topic of discussion amongst our international friends is about exactly that in NZ, and how Kiwis feel much more comfortable if you talk at a distance of a few feet (or, preferably, metres). Yet NZ is a country with customer service by a human being deeply ingrained in its culture still.***

The other difference is that of product variety. Again, what I've found is quite counter-intuitive - you would expect Britain and Europe, with their huge markets, to have a vast array of product choice, and little old New Zealand that has to import everything to have not much. For the most part this is correct.

So imagine my bafflement when I went out to the supermarket and tried looking for a sliced loaf of soy linseed bread, or dark rye bread, or even any actual type of bread. Britain doesn't have them. What Britain has is a) white, b) brown/wholemeal, c) rather spurious "best of both" varieties which are brand products invented by the manufacturer.

Now, this is on one visit to the supermarket (Tesco****) in Chelmsford, on the back of 3 years shopping mostly in Wellington New World supermarkets. So it's not very scientific. However, my reasoning is a) From memory, both Chelmsford Tescos and Wellington New Worlds are representative of their chains around their countries, and b) Tesco and Chelmsford occupy very similar spaces in their respective markets (I wouldn't be surprised if Tesco gobbles up New World in 20 or 30 years).

Also it fits with other products, like chocolate and beer. While the UK obviously has more producers and outlets for products, and thus a large variety in the market as a whole, the average choices by the main manufacturers on a supermarket shelf are actually smaller. New Zealand's primary chocolate makers, Cadbury's and Whittaker's, have far more varieties of chocolate than Britain's standard choices of white, milk and dark.

Similarly for beer: what you have in the UK is that Carlsberg make Carlsberg lager, Carling make Carling lager, Stella make Stella lager, and so on and so on. Whereas on most NZ supermarket shelves you'll find Mac's and Monteith's each make a red beer, white beer, black beer, pilsner etc. In Wellington, we have thankfully have access to many more smaller breweries like Tuatara who also have 5 or 6 different types of beer. Even the lager-only breweries like Tui, Speight's and Steinlager have more varieties of their lager than British lager brands.

Having said that, no country - not even New Zealand - has the same real ale culture that Britain does, which I intend to make full use of while I'm here. Good day!

*Eurgh. Chuggers seem to inhabit both the UK and NZ. I'm sure there are worse crimes, like being a mime in pubic, but they still definitely deserve to be dropped in the scorpion pit.**

** Except you T, if you're reading this! I'll spare you ;)

*** Even to the point where there are no photobooths in the entire country, as far as I can work out. I still think getting a human being to physically take your passport photo is quite quite unnecessary.

**** I agree with my mother's view that Tesco is Evil and Trying To Take Over The World, and yet here we are after all these years, still shopping at Tesco - fail.

CHC Airport

2011-10-21T09:52:00.005+01:00

So here I am, in transit again, waiting for another international flight to take me back to the motherland for another visit. This has been my longest time away from “home” (UK home, i.e. Essex/friends/whanau) ever, 13 months. The circumstances are quite quite different since the last visit, but then, aren’t they always.

In some ways, I’m very glad to be here. This week … let’s just say, if you’d had the week I’d had, you would have wished you’d had a different week. I might talk about it once things have settled.

In fact it’s not even over yet – 36hr flight (4 hours down!), stag party the next day, not to mention THE RUGBY. I’m not a sport person but you’d have to be cruel not to want the All Blacks to win. Apart from the French simply playing badly this tournament, NZ has had a shocker of a year and deserves something to cheer it up.* I wonder if Prime Minister John Key is having very serious discussions with the French rugby board.

Christchurch airport is as artificial and soulless as any international airport, but for some reason I don’t mind it so much – perhaps it’s part of becoming used to waiting. This is the 7th mega long-haul flight**, i.e. 28-40hrs, that I’ve made in my life, and while they don’t get any less exhausting, coping with boredom does become easier. Also modern airports have shops and if you sacrifice enough money to the Airport Gods, you can keep yourself watered and fed nicely and pick up some essential items you forgot. (Personally I wouldn’t waste money in the gift shops though.)

I was here once before in April 2003, leaving New Zealand after 31 days. I think I’d overdosed on scenery and was fairly happy to be moving on. Can’t remember anything about the airport – I assume there were less flat screens around then. At the time, SARS was scaring the shit out of everyone, and the US and UK were busy blowing up Iraq. There’s no particular travel scare at the moment, yet security measures are tighter now I think.

Edit – I wrote this entire blog post out before remembering this city has had not 1 but 2 massive earthquakes in the last year or so (along with all the 7000ish medium and little ones). Needless to say, the fact I hadn’t even thought about it illustrates how reassuringly normal everything seems. In fact the only clue was a very large construction area which I hadn’t even considered was to do with the earthquake.

I have a lot of hopes and goals in the next few weeks. The biggest one is just being there for my brother’s wedding next week. Then there’s seeing friends and family, including some I didn’t manage to catch last year. Another one is just chilling the hell out – it’s been a pretty stressful month. I’m keen to see people, but if I don’t respond well to being ordered to meet up somewhere, that’s why.

However, right here, right now, my wish is simply that AirAsia are on time and that I catch my connecting flight in KL – particularly after last years’s debacle with Aeroflot and Fortress Moscow Airport. Given the number of Russian women employed to shout “take off your shoes!” at passengers, it’s not a high bar!

Over and out for now
Jezmond

*I realise it’s just a game, and my cynical self would laugh at the idea of a nation’s entire mood being dependent on a sports result. That’s what Australians do. But NZ winning the rugby world cup would be a damn sight more important than the royal bloody wedding.

**March 2003: Heathrow -> LAX -> Tahiti -> Rarotonga
October 2008: Heathrow -> Hong Kong -> Auckland
September 2009: Auckland -> Hong Kong -> Heathrow
October 2009: Heathrow -> Hong Kong -> Auckland
August 2010: Wellington -> Auckland -> Shanghai -> Moscow -> Heathrow
September 2010: Heathrow -> Moscow -> Shanghai -> Auckland -> Wellington
October 2011: Wellington -> Christchurch (right now) -> Kuala Lumpur -> Stansted

Changing priorities - stepping back from the music, for now

2011-10-17T08:46:00.000+01:00

I tried writing this blog without letting it turn into an emo whinge-fest, then it turned into an emo whinge-fest. I am very good at them but what do they achieve?

Anyway this is a brief note to say I am going to ease up on the music for the foreseeable future to focus on other things.

I jokingly call myself an "ideas generator", but it's with good reason, and it is just as much a boon as a curse. As an example, here's a farcical list of creative things, in no particular order, I want to do:

Record album "Airfix Democracies"
Release the raw audio of the entire album as part of "Project Airfix"
Write and record album "To The Greater Glory Of"
Write and record EP "The Great British Public"
Record untitled straight-up rock EP (featuring "Alchemy" and "The Hype Of Yesteryear")
Write and record album "Cultuur Sugoi"
Record Acoustic Warrior dance-rock EP "BELIEVE IT OR PERISH, BITCHES"
Record "Without Fear" with full band production
Write and self-publish novel "HYPER"
Write and self-publish follow-up novel to "HYPER"
Write series of short stories about time travel in the South Pacific
Write more short stories featuring Sir Ralph Beef Wellington
Make a short animated video for Jimmy The Dolphin And The Metric Squid
Make a short animated video for Jesus And The All-Stars Episode 1
Write more short stories for Jesus And The All-Stars
Record audiobooks for NO UP, NO LIES and NO NEVER
Create graphic novels for NO UP, NO LIES and NO NEVER
Work towards animated feature films for NO UP, NO LIES and NO NEVER

Every single one of these things will take a lot of time and effort to make and do properly. None of them will make me any money in the short term, and probably not in the long term either. And there is no way in hell I am slogging my guts out trying to get signed/published etc. by the mainstream recording and publishing industries - not when:

those industries are about as welcoming as a castle with the drawbridge up
my books are too weird to be commercial, and my music isn't even being downloaded for free, and
especially not when both of those industries are in complete disarray in the age of downloads. The established industry did nothing for people like me before downloads, and now downloads are here there seems to be no reliable business models for the future.

Okay that got a bit emo whinge-festy. What can I say, I'm a pom. It comes naturally.

If I was to be cynical and self-critical, I could say that all the time I've spent/wasted on music and books the last few years I could have dedicated to gaining proper employment and progressing some kind of career. I think considering the overall scheme of things that might not have been a bad idea. Hell, maybe a real human being would have been able to do both.

It's not that I haven't spent a large amount of time in these 3 years applying for and getting rejected from jobs. I just have a feeling a lot of my friends and family wanted to tell me all along that perhaps my priorities were wrong, but being kind and generous people, they didn't say it and supported me in my teenage adventures in writing and music. Oh well.

Music is my passion first and foremost. I will continue to make music, or at least write songs with drums, bass and rock guitars, and the one thing I still really really want to do is record and release Airfix Democracies - it'll be my first full-length full-production album ever after 12 years of being in music. I'm hoping I can make this happen in 2012 - maybe there'll be a music video to go with it, maybe not; probably with some kind of album launch party, although not necessarily.

Beyond this I'll definitely continue to write, make and record music, but probably not in the pattern I've done so far. Maybe I'll record stuff and just pump it out there to the internet - as you can see from the list, I've got more than enough songs to be getting on with, and maybe without the pressure of official releases I can actually be more productive.

What I need to focus on in the near-to-mid future are 2 things:

1) My web skills, which are not quite up-to-scratch in terms of employability. I have admittedly not been spending time on it and this shows. I also get laughed at by web people when I mention my website has an iFrame - quite unfairly in my view, because I think it's suitable in terms of layout and function, but I accept I need to revamp the site into something a bit more modern.

2) Something completely different. I may just have a cunning plan...

Not leaving twice, coming home twice

2011-10-14T22:52:00.000+01:00

I was thinking about the fact that I'm leaving NZ next week, and that after originally planning to leave for good in June, I had actually moved my flight to October - but kept my plan to leave permanently. It was around May or June I think I realised I could stay and that I wanted to stay here in Wellington (the details and time stamps are probably in one of these messy anxious blog posts here).

But still, the concept of leaving stuck in my head. Then of course it occurred to me that I am leaving the UK as well, 4 weeks after I land. Both of these things are not only sad, they are meaningful - symptomatic of how uncertain my situation has been and still is, and that even temporary moves mean leaving things behind.

When I came over to NZ originally, and knew more about what I was doing on my return to the UK in 2009 than what the hell I was going to do in Wellington for 11 months, I had in my head the idea of signing off with the video for "London Calling". (Imaginative, because that's where I was going next. So so clever.)

London is apparently at the moment a wasteland of rioters and jobless hopelessness(-ess-ess), according to this year, so I'm not sure I'll be signing up to some box flat in Brixton or Highbury any time soon. But in melodramatic moments (much like this blog post) I've pondered about appropriate songs to leave on.

"Leave This Town" by the Levellers is a song that's stuck with me, being on the notable British mid-90s folk-rock-punk album "Zeitgeist". But while the sentiments are indeed about the need to move and move on, they are also primarily about being glad to go, being glad to leave some fictional grey and dismal town - i.e. far more appropriate for when I left Chelmsford, Essex* in the first place, than leaving vibrant and cultural Wellington. (In case it needs saying, I am never talking about my friends or family when I mention my dislike of Chelmsford or Essex.) I will have to move on from Wellington permanently at some point, and it's very unlikely that I will be glad to do so.

Anyway. This is all getting very tedious and dull isn't it?

The gist is: I realised that I am not leaving twice, I am coming home twice, which is something even fortunate people don't get to do. In setting up semi-permanent shop here in New Zealand, yet being denied residency (for now) by those cold vampires and call-centre morons in Immigration NZ, I can't say the word "home" without having to check myself - do I mean the UK? Or do I mean Wellington? The answer is both. The word has become as truly ambiguous for me as the word "can" (tin can? or I can I can't?) and other examples of appalling administrative laziness in the English language.

So here are 2 songs which come to mind for these coming weeks, which I am glad to share with you: "Welcome Home" by Scottish indie-rock band Idlewild, and "Welcome Home" by New Zealand singer/songwriter Dave Dobbyn.

I know that Kiwis will be facepalming right now, having probably heard this song X zillion times and probably thinking it's highly overrated and mediocre cheese. But I guarantee that my most of my friends in the UK, Europe, America and elsewhere will not have heard it, and while it's a little bit cheesy, I like it. Even if you aren't a Kiwi, and you don't get the notion of leaving somewhere (as many Kiwis do at some point or other) and knowing that your own country - whatever it is, and whatever it means, whichever peoples live there, a tiny pair of islands in the corner of the world - is waiting for you, and you don't get the line about a woman whose hands are trembling singing "haere mai", even if you don't get all of that, it's still a nice song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQlVmvXAGLI

The other song is less nostalgic but more personal to me, being by Idlewild, a band I grew up with and still love to this day. Singer & lyricist Roody Woomble has a wonderful way with words, poetic but simple and understandable, and while some die-hard early-years Idlewild fans might deride it as a pedestrian song on what is definitely not their best album, I really like it. It's simple and honest and happy, and that's what any welcome home should be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSXt2er7Zso

So there we go. See you soon, and see you soon.
Jez

*Chelmsford has, according to my brief visits and my Facebook feed, improved a lot since I left. The cultural scene is more diverse and now visibly supported by the same borough council which once seemed to shit on live music. I'm not sure they've got rid of all the chavs, thugs, racists, homophobes and meatheads yet, but it does sound like there is more to occupy intelligent interesting people than there was.

Damn you Rena for delaying my music video

2011-10-12T01:26:00.000+01:00

Oil spills are never fun, and the only good use the wreck of the Rena might have is possibly to deter more deep sea drilling which the current NZ governing party National are so keen on. Hopefully the scars on some of the world's most pristine, magazine-cover beaches in the Bay of Plenty will mean public outcry to any planned deep sea drilling in NZ is that much louder.

However, after the single launch last Saturday and my previous blog post, I am sad to say that the music video premiere has had to be postponed until probably early December.

You may remember in the Lighthouses music video, we all got to go in an actual lighthouse - this was down to our good friends working at Maritime NZ and very kindly borrowing the keys. Totally awesome.

Less awesome is that now some idiot crashed a tanker on a well-known reef, one of those friends has been called up to help out with the oil spill situation up North, and they are a key person on the Sunshine music video which is not finished yet. To them I say go forth, help save New Zealand!

Hopefully with the aid of modern technology we can finish it while I'm in the UK, meaning that when I get back to NZ late November, it'll be polished and perfect and fit for a premiere.

And that was a single launch.

2011-10-11T01:13:00.001+01:00

This blog is essentially a vast list of thank yous to wonderful people.

I don't think the word "symmetry" covers things that come in threes, but to hell with it, there was a sense of symmetry with the SUNSHINE single launch on Saturday. I fly off to the UK soon, with 3 years in NZ under my belt and not a huge amount of certainty what happens after that, so it felt especially good to have a 3rd single launch party, playing with the same 3 guys, with a huge bunch of friends, at Bar Medusa.

Here is a list of thank yous in no particular order (with helpful titles)

THE HOLOGRAMS
Tod, Gareth and Danny are 3 legendary fellows and I love them very much. Once again they stepped up to play a gig with me for little more than a case of Double Brown and the promise of a sweaty hug onstage. Without fail they played like the blinding musicians they are, and without them this gig would not have happened. Cheers guys.
Most of the time they play in an amazing band called "Throw It To The Fire" - think indie-jazz-rock you can dance to, played by Eddie Vedder/Queen, and you're somewhere close. Worth clicking like on Facebook and also hanging out for their awesome debut EP in the pipeline.
http://www.facebook.com/throwittothefire
http://www.throwittothefire.co.nz/

BANDS BANDS BANDS

The Lucid Effect is more of a human being called Declan than an effect, and what a wonderful musician he is. I once considered looping and abandoned the idea on the grounds that you can't create full flowing songs with it, then I met this guy and he absolutely trashes that concept to the ground. See him, hear him, enjoy him aurally.
http://www.facebook.com/thelucideffect

Snap Crackle & Pop are like pop, rock and punk all mixed together, except unlike Blink182 they have the rights bits of each one. It was a pleasure to have them on the bill and play a full-on hydraulic pumping set of noise-rock-dance-tunes. Catch them soon.
http://www.facebook.com/snapcracklepoprock

Then of course there is Sophie and the Realistic Expectations. These intrepid musical bastards are colleagues and friends in the world of Wellington music and it's startingly awesome to have them play - not just one set, but a 2nd at the end of the evening. Despite thinking I'd trashed my lungs in our set, somehow I found them again to scream along the high notes of "Tenderness" and was even ordered up onstage to sing the 2nd verse of "Easy". All I wanted to do was show I knew the second verse!
http://www.facebook.com/SophieAndTheRealisticExpectations

JAY, WEBCAM WIZARD
Just as he did at the Lighthouses launch party, our friend Jay manned the webcam without question the entire night, checking & tweaking, ensuring everything was going out live on the interwebs. I first got the idea for doing this after watching The Library Suits playing at Barhouse (now Hooga) in Chelmsford, Essex, while sitting in bed with breakfast here in Wellington. I genuinely believe this is part of the future of live music. If or how there's any money in it, and whether or not it will be venues or bands, I cannot say. But we have the technology, kids, to let people all over the world watch awesome live rock music, and I think it's awesome. Without Jay, our friends and family in UK, around NZ and all over the world (well, not sure if anyone was watching on the US East coast at 6am, but still...) would not have been able to watch it online - thank you so much sir.

VELI, LIVE VIDEO SORCERER
Veli (@HoccusFoccus) is a tall Finnish chap who is responsible for recording every single song from both previous launch parties, and now for recording footage from this launch party as well. One of the biggest things I regret about my former band F451 is not getting enough live footage as a record to show what we were like and how much we rocked (there is one video here, actually). It's much easier now, with every camera having some kind of video mode (as my friends know full well!), but there is still no substitute for quality and Veli is a master at what he does. I can't promise when, but at some point in the next few weeks, live clips from this gig will be going up on the interweb - hopefully all 12 tracks - so keep an eye out, and thank you once again Veli.
http://www.twitter.com/hoccusfoccus

BAR MEDUSA & TAMARA
Tamara is a legend who puts 6000% of herself into this little music venue and has made it the awesome place that it is. Tamara's put up with my nonsense for ages and was kind enough to give me a Saturday night for the launch. Go there, enjoy live bands, support Tamara and the bar by drinking vast amounts, and order a Flaming Moe. Just avoid the Jager, or you might end up on the bar grinding like a no-good hooker. Unless of course you like that kind of thing. Cheers Tam.
http://www.facebook.com/barmedusa

CHARLIE, SOUND
Charlie is a wicked sound guy, and put up with us having 4 completely different bands with completely different needs in 1 night and mixed everyone perfectly. I even asked for 6000 fucktonnes of myself in the monitors - like any self-respecting egotistical singer would - and to my absolute surprise he actually found it. Very talented man and legend.

CHIARA, SINGER, BANDMATE, CUTTER-OUTER
Along with those Holograms, I now am bandmates with this wonderful girl who wrote the magical song "Winter Boyfriend" without being a singer or playing an instrument. Chiara spent about 89 hours cutting out dinosaur decorations for me and even, when I was stressed out and cried "My kingdom for a shoulder rub!", helped me out knowing full well I don't have a kingdom or even any kind of real estate at all. Expect magical musical things from this awesome wonderful lady.

BEX, FACE PAINT
It was a party, and lo, did the wonderful Bex provide awesome face painting. I wanted face painting and I'd totally do it again!

KNIGHTS OF BAKING
Once again I put out the call for cake, and once again the Knights of Baking came to the rescue - huge thanks to all of you guys, particularly Ms. Hilaire and (again) Chiaratown for her death-by-mocha cake. I am indebted to you, knights.

ALL MY FRIENDS WHO CAME ALONG
...and I guess everyone else, but I'll be honest - I spent an ungodly amount of money on posters for this night, and as far as I know, they didn't actually bring anyone. Which may be dispiriting to some, until you think about this: the entire crowd was made up of people I know who had told other people I know and who were singing and dancing and jumping around with people I know. So I don't think I am any more famous in Wellington than I was and I don't think I gained any new fans from the night, but I did spend one of my most enjoyable gigs ever with people I care about and who apparently care about me, which is WAY awesome.

PRE-EMPTIVE THANKS...
There is another person and group of people I would like to thank on here, but I can't - because the music video for SUNSHINE is not quite finished yet, and it is not out. But it will be soon. Friends & chums, you'll get a note about a (probably low-key) premiere in the next week or so, everyone else watch this space and you might be able to catch it live on the internet. Rest assured people, you will get a shout out!

Anyway I think that's about all for this blog post, sorry if I missed anyone. What a great night. If any of you would like to do me a favour, download the track free and tell your friends to download it too. Making money from my music isn't important to me, but I do like people to hear it.

Until next time, you sexy sexy people.
Jezariah

http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/sunshine

Image pinched from Ed's Twitter stream. Hope he doesn't mind. Thanks Ed!

Test #4zillion

2011-10-09T01:59:00.000+01:00

Testy testy testy testy test. Test test. 1 2 tree. Etc. etc. Apologies!

SUNSHINE out now. I'm going onstage.

2011-10-08T10:58:00.000+01:00

The single SUNSHINE is now available for download, free or pay as you like. Win!Sunshine by Jez Kemp http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/sunshineSnap Crackle & Pop have just finished a heroic set. I'm going onstage. See you on this here player right now!http://www.ustream.tv/channel/jez-kemp

#Sunshinesingle LIVE video now

2011-10-08T09:52:00.001+01:00

We are live on the internet right now!http://www.ustream.tv/channel/jez-kempCurrently The Lucid Effect just finished his awesome set, Sophie REX up now! Cake lollies balloons and all the rest of it. Huzzah for the internet!

Why I'm proud of "Sunshine"

2011-10-05T11:24:00.001+01:00

The recorded song "Sunshine" is finally here. It has light, power, energy and space.

I am sitting here 3 days out from the Sunshine single launch party, worrying this and that and the other: about finishing the b-side "It's Not The Wine...", about getting decorations sorted, about buying things I need for the night, about why I haven't done enough promotion, about why I haven't worked hard enough on anything, etc. etc. So I thought I would take a (short) break from worrying and write about why I am very proud of this song that I have recorded and what I like about it.

Drums - There is no real substitute for recording real drums played by a real drummer, but I feel I've the drums on Sunshine are my best yet. In an ideal world I would have a whole day in a studio with Jon from The Library Suits or Tod from Throw It To The Fire pounding the crap out of an awesome kit, and get Neak Menter to record and produce it all. However, back in the real world of getting stuff done in a solo project, I've spent time and energy tweaking almost every single one of those drums hits to make it sound fresh, dynamic and powerful. (Well, I may have pinched some of the instrumental fills from Dinosaurs. But they still sound great.) I think I've done a good job.
Bass - The basslines in the verse and the chorus are two of my favourite basslines I've ever written. There are flicks and riffs and chunky progressions. There is funk, and soul, and life. Those high notes in the chorus are one of the best parts of the whole song.
I've used all the tricks I've learnt from producing music in the last 2 years (with some good advice from good friends) - from manually plotting the pitch to make those weird noises in the musical breaks (stuff you can hear back in "Without Fear"), to adding that awesome spaced-out synth in the post-chorus, to using EQ and compression to master the track so that it sounds loud enough and acceptable enough on anything from a large 70s stereo to an mp3 player headphones. Real producers and people who know music will be shaking their heads but this is my best effort so far and I like it.
Backing vocals - this song has the awesome backing vocals of Tod Robertson and Danny Droutsos (from Throw It To The Fire) and Chiara LaRotonda (@allchiara and singer of "Winter Boyfriend") and it sounds amazing. Those choruses are meant to sound massive, and - particularly with that harmony provided by Chiara - these good people make something that I never could or would have on my own. Cheers guys.
It is an EPIC POP SONG. Seriously, it's 5mins long, and while it's not quite the Lord Of The Rings of indie-rock, it's big and complicated enough that despite being one of my most radio-friendly songs, it would never be played on the radio even if I was bothered enough to try. And I like that. This song is not original, but it is individual. It is bold and big and fun and ridiculous and catchy and it is mine.

Right. Time to stop being emo, get some sleep, and get shit done in 72 hours. Challenge Anneka anyone?

The song is available for free/pay-as-you-like download this Saturday 8th October 2011 (NZ evening time). But you can hit that share button, if you like the song, any time you like.

&lt;p&gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a target="_blank" href="http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/sunshine"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Sunshine by Jez Kemp&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;

Another test...

2011-10-05T10:24:00.003+01:00

Test test test!

Sunshine single now online

2011-10-04T12:47:00.000+01:00

Huzzah! The recording of "Sunshine" is now online at my Bandcamp for you to have a listen to before the release on Saturday. Result! Get in! More sport-related "win" expressions!

&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;a href="http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/sunshine"&amp;gt;Sunshine by Jez Kemp&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;

I Believe In Dinosaurs LIVE at Lighthouses single launch

2011-10-04T12:07:00.000+01:00

FINALLY! You can tell I've been rushing through these before uploading the "Sunshine" single ahead of this Saturday's launch party. Live video of the wonderful I Believe In Dinosaurs from the Lighthouses launch night. This is one of the most fun times in my 12 years playing music - as you can see we had a good time. Naturally, epic thanks to @HoccusFoccus for filming and those awesome awesome guys Tod, Gareth and Danny from Throw It To The Fire playing. Cheers!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9VrB_onz_Y

Free downloads of the Lighthouses single

http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/lighthouses

The Magnificent 20 LIVE at Lighthouses single launch

2011-10-04T12:03:00.000+01:00

Live video of the encore, The Magnificent 20 from the Lighthouses launch night. It's a nice, fun, cheeky little rockout instrumental. As always, huge thanks to @HoccusFoccus for filming and Tod, Gareth and Danny from Throw It To The Fire playing. Cheers guys!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XJ3EVxDTcQ

Free downloads of the Lighthouses single

http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/lighthouses

Lighthouses video LIVE at Lighthouses launch

2011-10-04T00:52:00.000+01:00

Live video of the single itself LIGHTHOUSES from the Lighthouses launch night. It's a great song and it's always a pleasure to play it live rocked up with the guys. As always, huge thanks to @HoccusFoccus for filming and Tod, Gareth and Danny from Throw It To The Fire playing. Cheers guys!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaOOyHR7kW8

Free downloads of the Lighthouses single and Without Fear album (including the first version of Lighthouses):

http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/lighthouses

http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/without-fear

International webcast times for #sunshinesingle

2011-10-03T01:18:00.000+01:00

It gives me great pleasure in these modern electronic times to broadcast this here SUNSHINE single launch at Bar Medusa, Wellington Saturday 8th October to the whole world via the internet.

Whether you live in the UK, Australia, US West coast, or even just somewhere else in New Zealand and would like to watch the gig, below are the line-up times for a few popular time zones: NZ, UK, AUS, US West + East coasts, Japan, India. Don't worry - I've worked out summer times so you don't have to!

Just go to http://www.ustream.tv/channel/jez-kemp and, all going to plan, it should be streaming live on there. I'll also post a player here on the blog on the night.

ALL times are for Saturday 8th October. How con-weee-nient!

New Zealand NZDST (UTC +13) - Evening

8:30pm DOORS
8:45pm The Lucid Effect
9:25pm Sophie & The Realistic Expectations
10:10pm Snap Crackle & Pop
11:00pm Jez Kemp & Holograms

British Summer Time BST (UTC +1) - Morning

8:30am DOORS
8:45am The Lucid Effect
9:25am Sophie & The Realistic Expectations
10:10am Snap Crackle & Pop
11:00am Jez Kemp & Holograms

Australian Eastern Summer Time (UTC +11) - Early evening6:30am DOORS
6:45am The Lucid Effect
7:25am Sophie & The Realistic Expectations
8:10am Snap Crackle & Pop
9:00am Jez Kemp & Holograms

European Summer Time CEST (UTC +2) - Late morning

9:30am DOORS
9:45am The Lucid Effect
10:25am Sophie & The Realistic Expectations
11:10am Snap Crackle & Pop
12:00pm Jez Kemp & Holograms

US Summer Time – West Coast (UTC -7) - Middle of the night before/very early morning12:30am DOORS
12:45am The Lucid Effect
1:25am Sophie & The Realistic Expectations
2:10am Snap Crackle & Pop
3:00am Jez Kemp & Holograms

US Summer Time – East Coast (UTC -4) - Very early morning

3:30am DOORS
3:45am The Lucid Effect
4:25am Sophie & The Realistic Expectations
5:10am Snap Crackle & Pop
6:00am Jez Kemp & Holograms

Japan Standard Time (UTC +9) - Late afternoon

4:30pm DOORS
4:45pm The Lucid Effect
5:25pm Sophie & The Realistic Expectations
6:10pm Snap Crackle & Pop
7:00pm Jez Kemp & Holograms

India Standard Time (UTC +5.5) - Early afternoon

1:00pm DOORS
1:15pm The Lucid Effect
1:55pm Sophie & The Realistic Expectations
2:40pm Snap Crackle & Pop
3:30pm Jez Kemp & Holograms

Posters for #sunshinesingle @BarMedusa

2011-09-26T11:03:00.000+01:00

Posters! Share them, print them, eat them if you like - here are the black/white and dazzling full colour posters for the Sunshine single launch next Saturday 8th October at Bar Medusa, Wellington. Click the pictures for links to full size A4 versions you can print off, share round and post up around town if you feel so inclined. Hurrah for visual promotion!

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jWUXbZ9j2YI/ToBIPN30zBI/AAAAAAAAAVU/J0WKDlFOEBk/s1600/sunshineBWposter.jpg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-pTO7FnNAQI4/ToBIiHwtFTI/AAAAAAAAAVY/kJLOjyhqTKw/s1600/Sunshine+Launch+Poster.jpg

The Future video LIVE at Lighthouses launch

2011-09-26T02:54:00.002+01:00

Live video of the smooth swinging song The Future from the Lighthouses launch night. This is one of my rare chilled out songs and it breaks up the set quite nicely. As always, huge thanks to @HoccusFoccus for filming and Tod, Gareth and Danny from Throw It To The Fire playing. Cheers guys!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irWn_l6Oz3E

Free downloads of the Lighthouses single and Without Fear album (including the Future):

http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/lighthouses

http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/without-fear

Lighten Up, No Thanks video LIVE at Lighthouses launch

2011-09-17T06:06:00.000+01:00

Live video of all-out rock song Lighten Up, No Thanks from the Lighthouses launch night. This is always a catchy bouncy song and great fun to play for all of us. Huge thanks to @HoccusFoccus for filming and Tod, Gareth and Danny from Throw It To The Fire playing too. Cheers guys!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D28vQ_dzInA

Free downloads of the Lighthouses single and Without Fear album (including Lighten Up, No Thanks):

http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/lighthouses

http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/without-fear

Birthday

2011-09-13T12:21:00.000+01:00

Ahoy. I've been away from the blog a little while - partly because dlvr.it has been failing at delivering my posts to Facebook and Twitter and I've been avoiding it, but also because I've just had lots and lots of stuff on. (Music video, single recording, extra-curricular work, hosting open mic, applying for jobs, other job stuff, real work, the list goes on.)

There's plenty of things I could and perhaps should have been blogging about: the Libyan conflict and the "fall" of Tripoli, the global economy and our leaders' bewildering inability to stabilise it, and of course the 10th anniversary of the most spectacular terrorist attacks ever. (On the latter, I do feel as I've made my point to the world several times - basically the morals of the story are, a) let's try and respect the dead of all wars, bombings, dictators and disasters equally, and b) we should fight extremism, whatever forms it takes.)

For now though, it's my 28th birthday - all 35hrs of it, from midnight NZ to midnight UK. I'm a bit miffed that I managed to fall sick, or "crook" as the Kiwis say, on my actual birthday, but apart from that everything is rather peachy. A huge thank you to all my friends & family who've been nice to me today.

And then I busted out a new music video, because I'm like that

2011-08-16T08:06:00.002+01:00

I could explain first, but that would spoil the fun. Just watch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK7wSPed-kA

This is "Boy With X-Ray Eyes", the b-side from Lighthouses (free download here). A week after the Lighthouses single launch at Bar Medusa back launch in March, I thought it'd be fun to do a photoshoot with my red hair (awesome pics here and here). Then I thought, hey, why not get some video footage of mucking around on the waterfront, make a video and chuck it up on the internet? And then LO! We had a great day out in the sun along the Wellington waterfront. Then it just took 5 months for me to get my arse in gear and make the video.

Huge thanks to everyone involved, including Tobi (@owner) for the footage on the day, Fran (@franfilmmaker) and Veli (@hoccusfoccus) for the live footage from the Lighthouses launch, and Chiara (@allchiara) and Daryn for taking pictures and helping out. Also Chiara lent me her wonderful scoop-neck octopus Tshirt, which combined with my grungey skirt (made from a pair of jeans in 2004), and my red hair and red guitar (still not technically mine), I think it all looks awesome. You and the rest of the internet may disagree. But don't worry, I'm ready for hatemail on Youtube :)

Finally big-ups to the wonderful chaps Danny Gareth and Tod from Throw It To The Fire who are in those live shots, and have been recording their new EP!

Some of my favourite moments:

The kid spinning round after I spin round
Singing with the kayak in the background
Sunglasses falling off my face from rocking out
Every last drop of sunshine. It is hailing HARD right now. Summer seems so far away!

Hope you like it!
Jezmond

http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/lighthouses

Reading Festival & #ukriots - Underclass? The middle class riots too

2011-08-13T04:18:00.007+01:00

If you think these are riots of the underclass, go to Reading/Leeds Festival in 2 weeks and watch middle class kids do the same thing - if you can afford it.

August 2007, Reading rock festival. It's 1:30am on Sunday night and I am crying my eyes out like a baby.

Reading and Leeds festivals are a big 3-day festival on the August bank holiday weekend featuring an immense line-up of rock music. They are also well-known for their regular riots which kick off about the time the last act finishes on the Sunday night.

I wasn't crying because the Smashing Pumpkins' comeback was distinctly mediocre, or because the Red Hot Chili Peppers played the worst headline performance I have ever seen at a festival. It was because I'd seen people nearly get killed for no more reason than kids wanting to cause havoc and destruction, for fun.

After the last band on Sunday I still wanted to go out and party, drink, meet people etc. - the whole festival site was still very busy. I found a wide area with some food vans and a small rave happening somewhere near the silent disco (which had closed). I remember not having much luck or fun. Some kids tried supergluing a pen to my Tshirt without me noticing. So far so harmless.

PRETTY MILD

The mayhem on the last night of every Reading festival - this link gives a very good description - is a mixture of fun, chaos, idiocy and vandalism. These ingredients are all as important as each other, and are very hard to separate. So, it includes people running and sliding along 50m of tarpaulin soaked in beer and urine, often half naked. It includes "barrel jousting", where 2 people stand on barrels and try to push each other off. It includes a LOT of fires - some big bonfires, some smaller bonfires, some people setting fire to their own tents or other people's. Lots of people blowing up used gas canisters too.

It also included a group of around 30 people ramming a 12+ foot fence (4 metres), trying to make it go over. The fences marked out a campsite from the open public area and were made of flat panel steel. The campsites were packed; I counted about 12 tents directly next to the fence.

I joined a few randoms behind the fence trying to push against each time the group rammed it, before realising that was even more stupid than the people ramming it in the first place. I checked a few tents, and found a some feet sticking out of one. A couple with ear plugs in gave me hassle for waking them up. I told them to get the fuck out.

In the end, the fence inevitably went over, and there was nothing anyone could do. You can't reason with those people at that time and there were no police and minimal security around. When it went down, a great cheer went up from the rammers, like they'd achieved something. The 12 or so tents under the fence were completely flattened. I just stood there on the other side with my middle finger up, screaming something like "What's the fucking point?". I was a bit emotional by this stage. What distressed me most about it was the absolute pointlessness.

This is pretty mild compared to the heavier violence at Reading and Leeds, including mobs pulling over toilet blocks, setting fire to vehicles, clashing with riot police, and so on.

RIOTERS WHO ARE NOT ANGRY

My point telling this story is that Reading Festival 2007 camping tickets cost about £150 ($240 USD, $300 NZD). Tickets for 2011 were approximately £200. These people involved in mayhem/chaos/riots are ordinary happy young people, from across all social classes - well, those who can afford £150+ for a weekend. They are not disaffected youth and they are not poor.

They are not even angry. The thing that really set me off crying was, as I wandered despondently back towards our tent, I passed a group of young people cheerily chanting "Angry mob! Angry mob! Angry mob!" I stood there and raged at them, quite pathetically through tears and barely able to say words properly, about people nearly getting killed because of "angry mobs". They immediately began cheerily chanting "Angry man! Angry man! Angry man!" and walked off.

These kids were not angry or upset - they were having a great time. And that's how many people see the riots and destruction at Reading and Leeds festivals, and occasionally other festivals including Download. You have fun at a festival for 3 days, then you watch it all burn like a mini end-of-the-world. It's exciting. Same again next year?

NOT NEW, NOT DESPERATE

Yes, the London riots spreading to towns and cities around England over the last week were a new phenomenon, but only in size and location, not in actions. People are talking about the "underclass" and the underprivileged as if they are automatically connected to the riots, even though we are now finding out that many are not from such an underclass - a 31-year-old primary school teacher, a 2nd year law student, people with jobs, children with decent parents.

What happened to all the other impoverished people in England who spectacularly failed to rise up and join the riots? Hell, what about Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, who had no riots yet have more poverty than England does?

These were not desperate people with nothing to lose. They were not even angry, with the exception of the Tottenham riot that followed the protest over Mark Duggan's shooting. From everything we've seen so far, the young people who joined in were - like the rioters at Reading and Leeds - actually having a great time, right down to "talented sportswoman" and Olympic ambassador Chelsea Ives who had the "best day ever" trashing shops and throwing bricks through a police car windshield. Like the rioters at Reading and Leeds, these people also cheered when a shop window shattered or a building went up in flames as though something had been achieved.

NOTHING TO SAY ABOUT WHY

To say these riots were young people just "having fun" is far too simplistic. But anyone who's camped at Reading/Leeds festival to the Monday morning will know the obvious parallels between the behaviour at those riots and the ones we've seen the last week, which contradict many things were are being told right now:

this not is an entirely new kind of behaviour
these people are not all poor and marginalised
these people are not rioting and looting because they are poor or marginalised
these people who rioted and looted are not all angry about the same thing, or even angry at all
these people have nothing to say about why they are rioting or looting

We should absolutely look at the long-term factors and short-term causes behind these riots. With any luck, we might see more funding for social sciences, and we might get a wider debate about criminology and our prison system that fails to prevent re-offending. We're already hearing people talk about white collar crime, and how the global financial crash caused far more damage to British people than these 4 days of physical destruction, looting and rioting. We might, just maybe, even get some more funding for facilities in impoverished neighbourhoods who really need it.

But the causes behind these riots are far more psychological and behavioural than simply a "backlash of the underclass". It's far more about human copycat / herd behaviour and opportunism than broken homes or police shootings or "not seeing enough positive stories about teenagers in the news". It may well be about lack of youth jobs, but more in the sense of young people being unoccupied than "in poverty".

I've been talking about this on Facebook and Twitter a lot already and this is the last I want to say for now.

It'll be interesting to watch the extra news coverage of Reading and Leeds festivals at the end of this month, 26th August 2011.

Flashes: Throne Room

2011-08-12T07:36:00.000+01:00

Another petrol bomb crashed through the high windows of the throne room, spewing flames up the wall and over another mighty tapestry. A couple of half-bricks quickly followed. The mob outside howled and raged.

‘Well, looks like Virnio really messed things up,’ said Elizaveta, looking down at the sprawled body in magisterial robes. They were surrounded by naked concubines, also dead. A ridiculous, unhealthy grin was fixed on the dead man’s face; he’d at least had the foresight to lace his poison with some enjoyable drugs.

‘How do you screw up your own world?’ Baxter shook his head. ‘It was his world. He could have just made things go away.’

Elizaveta shrugged. ‘We’ve seen it before. People don’t take precautions, lose their Lodestone, then realise they can’t control things.’ A slingshot whipped straight past her ear, flicking up her blue hair. The fire was spreading to the thick red carpet. ‘We should probably go.’

‘Sure. Who’s next on the list? Got the co-ordinates?’

She narrowed her eyes, and smiled. ‘I have a friend.’ She raised her hand, and drew an oval of light in the air. With a snap of her fingers, water began gushing into the room with great force.

Baxter rolled his eyes. ‘An ocean world? You’re kidding, right?’

Elizaveta just laughed. ‘Hope you brought your scuba gear!’

When the mob crashed through the mighty throne room doors, they just found a room full of bodies, floating in water already a foot deep.

I wish #londonriots were political, but they're not

2011-08-09T07:41:00.002+01:00

Several things piss me off about the riots in London and other UK cities.

People being destructive, violent and stealing
That anyone should feel the need to be destructive and steal
People in my own quarter of the political spectrum seeing politics in this where there is none.

Predictably over the last few days there's been calls for watercannon on the streets, and rioters to be hanged, or the army to come in and shoot them to save the time of a trial. That's fine, that's Daily Mail Britain, I wouldn't expect anything less.

More surprising, and I guess more frustrating, is hearing people I know, both here in NZ and back in the UK, from the liberal-left - the quarter of the political spectrum I live in - bleating about it being a "howl of rage from the underprivileged" or a protest against "globalisation and mass consumerism", or some other romantic nonsense.

I wish it was, I really do.

I too have been waiting for Something Big to happen. I too have been hanging out for The Revolution(tm), the one which we were told would be televised. I too have railed against mass consumerism and rising inequality, and waited anxiously for when The People(tm) would Take Notice(tm) and Rise Up(tm). Then we could all fight for equality! And justice! And freedom! Things the British poor really want, even if they don't actually know it!

Seeing what I've seen, and knowing what I know of British youth, it's nothing of the sort. It's not even close.

I'm not going to condone some sort of fascist fantasy where police patrol the streets every day, or better yet the aliens from Independence Day watch over every High Street with massive lasers in case a Yoof in a Hoodie picks his nose.

Yes, we need to ask ourselves what our society is, how it works, what its problems are. We need to question and criticise the causes of rising inequality and tackle them inside and outside of government. We need to question a prison system where 7 out of 10 prisoners go on to re-offend. We to ask all these questions.

But academics and lefties and liberals and - you know, decent people - have been asking these questions for a long time, and we've had violent dickheads here for a long time during the good times as well as the bad times. So I don't think we need to suddenly ask them any harder now. Hopefully politicians will listen a bit harder to the people who are already asking, although it's a Conservative government, so I doubt it.

This isn't the 70s with an openly institutionally-racist police force. This isn't the 80s with Thatcher's war on the miners and the working. (Incidentally, I think she won, because the British Working Class - with principles and ideals who organise to fight for the working poor - seem to have become extinct in my lifetime.)

Equating these riots with poverty is just as mindless as the vandalism and arson itself. "Poverty made me do it" is not an excuse that stands up in court and doesn't excuse individual actions. You're not a robot and your environment doesn't make you one.

"Fine," you say, "no-one's claiming that. But these are just the predictable consequences of a sick society!"

Bullcrap. British society IS sick and inequality IS a massive problem. But the people in the communities complaining about cuts in funding, poor facilities and poverty are not the same people as the teenagers smashing up independent shops and stealing branded sports wear from chain stores and setting fire to warehouses.

Yes, they may be affected by the same issues, but interview 100 rioters/looters/arsonists and you'll get 100 different answers. A few might have delusions about being Che Guevara. Some of them might talk about poverty in their local area. But I bet that most of them are male, between 15 and 25, and are there because they want to be part of Something Exciting, and because they like breaking stuff.

Off the top of my head, that's my explanation. It's not very detailed, but our young generation is the most pampered it's ever been in history, and the most wrapped up in cotton wool it's ever been too. Young people find excitement in breaking the rules through drugs or sex or staying out late or other conventional ways of breaking the rules. But some enjoy breaking things, or casual violence, or stealing, or all of them.

It would be a very strange human society where no young males at all wanted to break things and fight. And with the sneering, tribal mentality of a large part of British youth, maybe these riots aren't as surprising as people think.

NZ readers, yes, take this as proof that your young people have way more manners and respect than British young people. It may seem hard to believe that entire gangs of young people will see throwing petrol bombs at the police as a combination of some kind of game and a battle, but that's exactly what a lot of them will be thinking.

The Tottenham riot may have started from the wrong people taking over a peaceful protest over a man's killing by police. But all the rest are from young people seeing a moment, an atmosphere, an opportunity to break stuff and steal stuff and be part of Something Big.

[I wanted to keep this short and snappy and have failed spectacularly, mostly because I'm genuinely frustrated by the riots and the misguided emotional opinions coming from both left and right. I might write more later in the week if I have time.]

When Robots Cure Cancer video LIVE at Lighthouses launch

2011-08-03T10:29:00.001+01:00

Live video of all-out rock song When Robots Cure Cancer, We'll Talk from the Lighthouses launch night. It was the opening song and clearly I wasn't quite in the zone, although I think that kick-ass jump at the start makes up for a lot. Huge thanks to @HoccusFoccus for filming and Tod, Gareth and Danny from Throw It To The Fire playing too. Cheers guys!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVkTvHNvvas

Free downloads of the Lighthouses single and Dinosaurs single (including When Robots Cure Cancer, We'll Talk):

http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/lighthouses

&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;a href="http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/i-believe-in-dinosaurs"&amp;gt;I Believe In Dinosaurs by Jez Kemp&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;
http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/i-believe-in-dinosaurs

Shark In A Goldfish Bowl video LIVE at Lighthouses launch

2011-07-18T00:37:00.002+01:00

Live video of punk-rock-dance tune Shark In A Goldfish Bowl from the Lighthouses launch night. Huge thanks to @HoccusFoccus for filming and Tod, Gareth and Danny from Throw It To The Fire playing too. Cheers guys!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfrWvJ5xyak

Free downloads of the Lighthouses single and Without Fear album (including Shark In A Goldfish Bowl):

http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/lighthouses

http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/without-fear

"Sunshine" video LIVE at Lighthouses launch

2011-07-15T01:08:00.000+01:00

Live video of forthcoming single SUNSHINE from the Lighthouses launch night. At some point I took my shirt off, sadly/luckily there'll be a few more videos of me half-naked. Huge thanks to @HoccusFoccus for filming and Tod, Gareth and Danny from Throw It To The Fire playing too. Cheers guys!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmEfe18yzGI

Free download of the Lighthouses single (including "Boy With X-Ray Eyes"):

http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/lighthouses

Wellington Waterfront - Mobile Picture Gallery

2011-07-14T11:30:00.001+01:00

Well, it's mostly Wellington waterfront. Please do not touch this artwo.

Unexpectedly pleasurable gig

2011-07-14T08:57:00.001+01:00

Last night's gig was both ridiculous and marvellous.

My short acoustic set included the future pop hits "Paedophile Immigrants Selling Drugs To Our Kids" and "J-Lo Is A Rich Materialist Bitch And Represents The Block In No Way Whatsoever", songs I don't normally play
I kicked off at 11:50pm, possibly my latest performance ever (never mind on a Wednesday!)
My acoustic guitar got its anus pulled out (I would explain, but that would ruin the fun)
I got to wear my Interrobang design T-shirt (less rude than it sounds - buy it here, go on)
I was joined by Tod Gareth and Danny from Throw It To The Fire to play some full-band songs including "Animals", "Lighthouses", "Boy With X-Ray Eyes", "Lighten Up, No Thanks" and of course "I Believe In Dinosaurs" - completely unrehearsed and without knowing until last night. Rock and roll.

Had an amazing time rocking out and I'm very grateful to the TITTF boys for the experience, especially on the Bodega stage which has a great PA system. Incidentally, they had a marvellous gig too, playing with both parting bassist Aaron and new bassist Chris - check them out online and come see them live at Bar Medusa this Friday 15th (or next Saturday at Bar Medusa with one of my other favourite kiwi bands Decortica).

Hopefully some good photos coming. Sleep is on agenda tonight though!

Boy With X-Ray Eyes video LIVE at Lighthouses launch

2011-07-12T08:49:00.002+01:00

Next video from the Lighthouses launch night, the wonderfully bright and rocky "Boy With X-Ray Eyes". Huge thanks to @HoccusFoccus for filming and Tod, Gareth and Danny from Throw It To The Fire playing too. Cheers guys!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_OGfPMFefo

Free download of the Lighthouses single (including "Boy With X-Ray Eyes"):

http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/lighthouses

Animals video LIVE at Lighthouses launch

2011-07-10T12:01:00.001+01:00

Finally, videos from the Lighthouses launch night are here! Huge thanks to @HoccusFoccus for filming. This is "Animals", a cracking song from my album "Without Fear" - cranked up to 11 with Tod, Gareth and Danny from Throw It To The Fire playing too. Cheers guys!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcyR4HgJHRw

Free downloads of the Lighthouses single and Without Fear album:

<p>&amp;lt;a href="http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/lighthouses"&amp;gt;Lighthouses by Jez Kemp&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;</p>
http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/lighthouses

<p>&amp;lt;a href="http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/without-fear"&amp;gt;Without Fear by Jez Kemp&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;</p>
http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/without-fear

My Tshirt for @TheCaptainWhat

2011-06-27T02:45:00.001+01:00

My first Tshirt design for somebody else is for my fellow solo comrade in music and expert in the martial art of "bedroom pop", Mr. Captain What. Captain of what? you say. Yes, exactly. Behold!

http://www.reverbnation.com/store/store/artist_525980?item_type=merchandise

It's an idea I had from my possibly never-to-be-made fan video for Captain Of Nothing, which he has already made a FANTASTIC music video for thanks to help of a certain Rich Lyman. Behold again!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVeS7c4Ha70

Basically the ingredients for the Tshirt are:

Rocket ship
Stars
Purple & blue planet
The words "Captain What"
Cute
Fun

And so, I compel you to buy it! Musicians LOVE it when you give them money!

If you're a band or a musician and you'd like a Tshirt design done, ask me now before I'm famous and shit and I'll do it for free. Probably. Also if your name is Sophie Rex yes you are next on the list I'll do it when I can!

P.S. You can check out my wonderful Tshirts at http://www.redbubble.com/people/jezkemp. In fact please do.

Being a foreigner is quite annoying.

2011-06-22T06:58:00.001+01:00

Hello friends. This is just a mini rant with swearing where I validate myself and my life.

Regarding staying in NZ:

My temp position at Govt Dept X becomes permanent in October, and even if it's opened for applications, only citizens and residents will be able to apply.
My work experience is not considered "skilled" to apply under Skilled Migrants.
I have lots of family in NZ but none are immediate, so means nothing to Immigration.

So my only option to stay is applying under BUNAC, which would give me another 12 months, but

It's not guaranteed I'd get it (95% at a guess, but still)
Granted in October = finding a job from scratch upon my return
Spending 4+ weeks in the UK with no work
Trying to hold onto a flat here. (I like this flat. It's the best flat in a patchy record of flatting. Finding another flat - then moving all over again - does not excite me.)
Buying a flight now, when I may not be granted a visa

It would be very easy to throw in the towel and sail home to UKshire. I thought about jumping ship to the desert continent next door where all the jobs are, but their laws on employing foreigners are even stricter than New Zealand.

So. What. Do. I. Do.

Here is what I'm going to do.

I'm going to spend the next 3 months hammering away at agencies with my CV, and ONLY agencies, because applying directly for jobs with my CV as it is, in this economy, is a fool's game and a fucking waste of time. It's still a snowdrop's chance in hell that agencies will find me a job for 6+ months which an employer can sponsor me for - which a market analysis of the labour market would confirm that a NZer can't do (that's the rules, kids) - but it's still a chance.
I am NOT going to worry if I don't get a job by October because I know it's 99% not going to happen.
I'm going to go for BUNAC, because I don't want to leave Wellington yet. I like it here and the UK economy is in the toilet. I'm ready to go if I have to - I only came here originally for 11 months, and by October I'll have had 3 years, a shitload of friends and the only solid meaningful relationship with a woman in my life, so I can't complain. But I don't want to be pushed into leaving just because I'm being dictated to by Events (dear boy, Events).
I'm going work my arse off and find money from somewhere - whether it's life modelling or web work on the side or designing a zillion Tshirts - so I can pay my way through this bullshit and not continue relying on my parents who have both now retired.
I'm going to write my next book because I am a writer and I've put it off too long.
I'm going to record another single and have another video and another launch party to go with it, because I am a musician and I want to do another one before I go that's bigger and better than the last two. I'm already generating ideas for it, because that's what I do.

And I'm going to do a whole bunch of other things like eating breakfast and hanging out with friends and drinking pinot noir, because life isn't just about the big things and you don't get anywhere by being narrow and burning out.

I can trace a lot of this situation back to my decision after university to "focus on the band", rather than getting a "proper job". Do I regret it? No, in the sense I fucking loved that band and despite all the fuckups I made with it, it's the greatest thing I've ever done. But perhaps, because it turns out you can have a band as well as a proper job that provides a) money to be self-reliant and b) bankable CV experience when times predictably turn shitty like this. But hey, you make your bed, then you lie in it, then you stand back up and get on with your fucking day.

Onwards bitches.

Yes, this is a self-absorbed rant. But it's a blog about me, right?

Dinosaurs launch party audio free download

2011-06-20T11:52:00.000+01:00

It took 10 months but you can download all 9 tracks from the Dinosaurs launch party for free from the Bandcamp, Last.fm and Reverbnation widgets below. This is in highest to lowest order of quality, but I recommend downloading all of them, that way I get boosted in the Reverbnation charts (#2 for Rock in Wellington! Less good for Rock in NZ...) and I get some money from Last.fm (perhaps a penny to add to my £0.02 earnings so far). Did you know the Last.fm scrobbler also finds out you're playing my songs and tells the internet that I'm cool?

If you wish to watch the live tracks in the form of a moving visual Youtube thing, you can also see the whole set in a 9-video playlist (also below) thanks to the mad filming skillz of @hoccusfoccus.

LIVE at Dinosaurs single launch, Bar Medusa, Wellington by Jez Kemp
http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com

(Okay Last.fm don't appear to have a download widget. But I highly recommend visiting and downloading from their webby site.)
http://www.last.fm/music/Jez+Kemp/LIVE+at+Dinosaurs+single+launch%2C+Bar+Medusa%2C+Wellington

http://www.reverbnation.com/jezkemp

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?p=PLDC8F22A4E9935C06

New Library Suits music video

2011-06-19T22:53:00.001+01:00

"A Year Without Summer" is a sneak preview track by The Library Suits while they get their new album sorted. It's a lovely video for a lovely song, with more wonderful references (some well-known, some personal) than I could possibly list here. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN6paZ0Dpf0

Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

2011-06-02T02:00:00.001+01:00

Once again I’m using a Clash-related title for a blog post about my plans. I’m not really a huge fan of “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” – it’s one of their simplest and, for me, least interesting songs – but its generic and easy-to-apply theme is the reason it’s so well-known in the first place.

Back at the end of last year I Made A Decision with capital letters – I’d had enough of the insecurity of temping in NZ, and I had been planning to leave with Kiwi ex-Girlf anyway, so that was that. The Wellington project was over. London was, indeed, Calling.

Then at the end of January, I Made Another Decision with capital letters – the UK economy was/is in the toilet, NZ is a wonderful place, and it’s easier to stay than you think. Wellington is swimming in Brits, they are literally clogging up the pavements and dairies. So the Wellington Project was back on.

Last month I finally made an Expression Of Interest (more capital letters) for applying for residency under the Skilled Migrants category. This was a mistake, because it basically meant spending $440 to find out that my work experience is not skilled, and that being British, living in Wellington (not Dorkland) and having a degree aren’t enough on their own to apply. (Immigration, if you’re reading, I would quite like that $440 back. You could’ve just explained it to me verbally.)

So I’m in an interesting place. My heart is in Wellington, but my options are limited. I’ve broken my record with my current admin role for the longest time spent in one NZ job (the bar, at 3 months, was not high), which is great, but there’s a review going on and the National Party are gleefully cutting public sector jobs and there’s no guarantee this job could keep me here, even if I still have it in 6 months' time. I can, and may, start applying for Real Jobs (yep, ones with capital letters), but things aren’t much better now than the last 2.5 years and it’s a slim chance I’ll even get a job, let alone one with a visa attached.

So my last reliable way to stay in NZ is the 12-month BUNAC IEP programme. I know what you’re thinking – “Why, Jez, this is the same as the Working Holiday Visa you came to NZ on in the first place! You’re not allowed to apply for this one!”. Well, you’re wrong, and I was ready to have wrong opinions thrown at me because every Tom Dick and Sally seems to have advice when it comes to visas, and about half of them are wrong. (“You’re not allowed to work in one place more than X months!” No, that’s Fascist Australiatown. “You can’t extend your Working Holiday Visa!” I can and I did, because I’m British. “You need to be together 12 months to get a partnership work permit!” No, that’s – oh just shut up. If you hear someone talking about visas and immigration and you think you know something, start from the assumption that You Are Wrong, and work your way up from there with evidence and facts, not what you half-heard from some twat down the pub.)

The main question about the IEP is quotas and numbers; the eligibility criteria seems to be that you’re under 35, which should be pretty easy for me for the next 7 years. The only other thing is that you have to apply in the UK, which is a bit of a bugger, because instead of just popping back for my brother’s wedding (note – I am super proud of you Brother Kemp + fiancée), I’ll actually have to move back for 4-6 weeks, or perhaps longer.

My choices at the moment it seems are:

Back to UK

UK economy still in the doldrums (does anyone even have a job any more?)
Conservative party in power, with Lib Dems limiting their activities to flapping their arms about uselessly
Live with parents, find a job, find a flat, find a job in London, COMMUTE, find a flat in London. (Or perhaps just go straight to London and embrace immediate poverty.)

Stay in NZ

4-6 weeks in UK
Visa cost $1000ish + $3000 savings required
Flight back? $1000+. Book now and risk having to change it, or book near Christmas and spend $zillions
Lose flat and flat-hunt again
Lose job and job-hunt again (still crippled by the lack of permanent visa/residency)

These challenges aren’t insurmountable, but they are a big pain in the backside. A question for me is just how bad is the UK economy at the moment (clue: the exchange rate of $2.00 NZD to the British pound – yes, xe.com says it is less than $2.01 – shows very little confidence), versus just how bad is the economy in Wellington going to get with public sector jobs vanishing like mist in the sun. And if you’re working in Wellington, you’re in either the public sector, or film or hospitality – and I’ve got no experience in film, and no desire to work in the service industry ever again. A kiwi suggested looking for jobs down in Invercargill to get a visa. Sure I’d like to visit, but I’m not convinced I want to up sticks and move to the NZ equivalent of Inverness.

Anyway. That’s my situation, and I’m just babbling and sharing, because I like to share and I like to be unnecessarily honest with my friends and, in this case, the entire internet.

In terms of Making Another Big Decision, it could go either way. I’m tired of being a foreigner without residency; at least in the UK I am an ordinary citizen, and my job or lack of is entirely down to my abilities or lack of. But my heart is in Wellington. And I want to see a kiwi summer Christmas and new year, with beaches and barbecues and sunshine, at least once more.

I’ll let you know.

1 year of the Dinosaurs video

2011-06-01T10:53:00.001+01:00

It's been 1 year since the video premiere of "I Believe In Dinosaurs", and it's been good - 36,000 views makes Jez a happy boy.

It's been slow. Despite an initial surge from atheio-biologist PZ Myers posting on his much visited blog, it has gone from maybe 5-10 views a day in July 2010 to currently around 300-400 a day.

I can't confirm how many are real people, and how many are internet bots - I'm just reading off the Youtube stats. It's interesting to compare the likes/dislikes with my cover of Outkast's "Roses", which has had only 21,000 views but many more likes and dislikes. This could suggest more humans are actually watching "Roses", but Youtube is an organic beast, and people react differently to different videos depending on the content and the way they're watching.
Generally I'm confident lots of real people are watching "Dinosaurs". I doubt it will ever "go viral", but you could say it's becoming that mild flu bug that you can't stamp out of the office because it's being recycled by children at home. Or something. And hey, a video with 1 million bot hits still has a lot more weight on Youtube than a vid with 100 human views. Like I say, Youtube is organic.

In real terms, a video with 35,000 views barely registers on Youtube, so my satisfaction here might sound a bit hollow. But I'm excited by the potential. The views have been rising in a curve, rather than a straight line - which means potentially lots and lots of views in the future. It's not something I have any control over - I just have to hope people will continue to watch and enjoy me running round over Wellington chasing little plastic dinosaurs.

More relevant than the number of views, the video itself has actually changed my life. Before, I was a guy with a song about dinosaurs. Almost overnight, my friends started introducing me to other people as "the Dinosaur guy", which is a label I'm happy to have, because dinosaurs rock. Since the video, I've been doing a lot more dinosaur-related stuff (e.g. making Dinosaur T-shirts), which is partly connected to the song, but partly just me reconnecting with a childhood love of dinosaurs from 20 years ago. My friends send me dinosaur-related links on the internet. Some even bought me a vinyl disc cut in the shape of T-Rex from the amazing Dinosaur Comics. (You guys are amazing.) (By the way, I actually met the guy who made it at a gig. Random or what? That's Wellington I guess.)

So yeah, dinosaurs are a big part of my life again, and I like it.

As before, huge thanks to all the people who appeared in and helped make the video - they're in the credits at the end - without you guys it wouldn't have been possible.

100 Tshirt designs in 60 seconds

2011-05-27T10:28:00.000+01:00

I recently hit my 100th Tshirt design on the marvellous Redbubble. Here is an informational video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU0HcBInH9U

http://www.redbubble.com/people/jezkemp

http://www.redbubble.com/people/jezkemp/t-shirts/7048218-honey-badger-dont-give-a-shit

I Survived The Rapture Tshirts

2011-05-21T23:43:00.000+01:00

I thought I'd give one more internet plug to my Rapture Tshirts below. It's well into 22nd May here in NZ and no sign of the Rapture yet, however it's not reached 6pm on the 21st in some parts of the US (including Oakland where those Family Radio fruitloops are based), so I guess there could still be some people who want to check they survived it first before getting one.

http://www.redbubble.com/people/jezkemp/t-shirts/7155142-i-survived-the-rapture

http://www.redbubble.com/people/jezkemp/t-shirts/7172123-i-survived-the-rapture-but-not-the-raptors

http://www.redbubble.com/people/jezkemp/t-shirts/7205297-i-survived-the-rapture-again

Oh the joy of Tshirts mocking crazy people. The best thing is I know there's already another apocalypse prediction guaranteed for next year. Roll on 2012!

Vote YES to AV

2011-05-05T05:50:00.000+01:00

Today, Thurs 5th May, there is a UK referendum to change the way people elect MPs to Parliament. It's a very simple change, it will be better than the current system, and you should vote "yes".

In a nutshell:

Current system First Past The Post: The candidate with the most votes wins. Simple, but this is very often with just 30-40% of the votes, meaning most people are unrepresented.
Proposed system Alternative Vote (AV):

Voters list their preferences for candidates, e.g. 1, 2, 3 etc.
If no candidate gets 50% of all the "1" votes, the least popular candidate is knocked out
Their votes are given to other candidates according to the next preference
A candidate wins when they have 50% or more of the votes. This way, the winning candidate has the support of more than half the people that voted. Which means the government has support of more than half of the country.

There's even a handy chart on Wikipedia that shows how straightforward it is.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to change the way Britain votes to make it fairer, more representative, and more accountable.

It is not the perfect system, but it is certainly better than the current system which favours 2 parties and encourages divisive politics.

If you can vote in the referendum, please do, and vote YES.

Honey Badger Don't Give A Shit Tshirt

2011-04-30T00:51:00.000+01:00

This Tshirt has been quite popular since I put it online last week, so I thought I should blog it. You know, in case some more people out there go crazy and buy it. It's inspired by this wonderful hilarious video here - ooo nasty!

http://www.redbubble.com/people/jezkemp/t-shirts/7048218-honey-badger-dont-give-a-shit-tshirt

Proof, if proof be need be

2011-04-27T08:24:00.000+01:00

Well I did it, I got rid of all my hair and now look like a cancer victim/thug/fascist/all three. Thankfully I am none of these, but donations for the NZ Leukemia & Blood Foundation are still open, so if you haven't already done so please give some money here:
http://www.shaveforacure.co.nz/view_event_profile/5076
There wasn't an official "after" shot, so the second image is from the moustache party we already had planned that afternoon. Don't I look lovely?

"New atheism" and my accidental part in its uprise

2011-04-22T01:45:00.001+01:00

There's a lot of bad things being said about "new atheism", the recent global wave of godless people openly and vocally declaring their atheism and/or criticising religion. While there's always abrasive individuals in every movement, personally I don't like the label "new atheism" and I think most of the criticism is unjustified.

My contribution to this new world was accidental.

In 2005 I set up the University of Bristol Atheist, Agnostic and Secular Society. Actually there were 5 of us who set it up, but the reason it happened was because one day, after seeing the Christian Union preaching and Muslim society declaring the "truth", I thought it would be hilarious if there was an atheist society.

Can you imagine it? Hilarious!

Very rapidly, this bizarre daydream turned into a credible concept, and after a lot of DIY organising (and a fair bit of drinking) a genuine, credited, univeristy society was born. Sadly, right from the start - even when I was just putting up posters looking for people who'd be interested - I got a reaction which was by far mostly negative.

The responses I received then were similar to the backlash against "new atheism" today. It went from complete incomprehension, e.g.:

"You can't make a society for something you don't believe in"

"That's the most stupid thing I've heard"

to outright hostility, e.g.

"That's wrong, you shouldn't be allowed to do that!"

"That's so disrespectful. I'm not religious but I find that offensive"

and even more colourful language than that. (Incidentally that last quote always cracks me up - comedy gold.)

It seemed to me as a child, and still seems the case today, that it's fine to shout about your identity and opinions on ethics, fertilised embryos, the afterlife, angels/faeries/ghosts/elves etc. as long as you have a religion. I think the default opinion of society is that having religious beliefs is part of your culture and heritage, which must never be questionned, even if they're illogical (how many gods would you like on your mystical cosmology today?) or just plain wrong (sharia law anyone?). People who don't have religious beliefs are seen as apathetic and clearly don't have any convictions about spirituality, ethics, or, well, anything at all.

The identity of a conscious, deliberate, open atheist seems to scare and aggravate a lot of people.

Like all societies, the UOB AASS has taken on its own life and I haven't been part of it since leaving university in 2006. It's very tempting to still think of it as my baby, but the reality is it's now run by - and composed of - completely different people who have their own views on its role. But the aims I had at the time, and the ones we agreed on when setting it up, were simple:

A social group for atheists to meet, share activities, and basically hang out
A campaigning platform for secularism and secularist values

I see both of these as perfectly acceptable purposes. They differ, and I don't like the idea of them getting mixed up - I'm not a fan of evangelising atheism, as I don't see it as anyone's job to tell anyone what to believe (even if I sometimes think about standing on the street like a preacher and asking people politely if they've considered atheism). But it's not strange that they come under the same banner in the same organised group.

These purposes have been mirrored in the rise of "new atheism". Atheists around the world want to connect, organise and hang out in a global sense, and rationalists want connected groups to campaign on secular values. As I say they're not identical aims, but there is a healthy overlap.

Unfortunately this vocalness and organising has given rise to a backlash. It's even added strength to the comment "Isn't atheism just another religion?" No. Atheism is a religious choice, but it is far from a religion. People who don't believe in god organising and forming collectives to a) hang out and/or b) criticise religion is not even on the same page as refuting evolution as science or telling people what to do on which days of the week.

More specifically, you'll notice that Christians do not have 2 religions - one for believing in God, one for not believing in Allah.

Unlike many people's assumptions, atheists are not apathetic - we are people who have made a distinct choice. There are even agnostics who've made a deliberate, conscious decision to be agnostic. If you thought an atheist society was strange, just wait for the United People's Front of Agnosticism. It may only be a hardcore punk band's name now. But it's just a matter of time before it's a genuine militant organisation.

My mature, adult self is a secularist. We should all have the freedom to choose our religion, no matter how batshit crazy it is, because we don't deserve to have anyone else's batshit crazy religion forced on us by anyone, whether by government, corporations or through education. That includes the freedom to choose no religion, and the freedom to say so, even if ideally the world would be a calmer and better place if no-one shouted about it.

My mature self is also a calm, happy atheist, knowing that people of all religious choices are treated equally. Unfortunately this isn't the case.

It's hard to see the world's fundamentalist religious calming down any time soon, just like Catholics won't be endorsing condoms or accepting homosexuality, and Islamists in Somalia aren't going to stop stoning women for adultery, and Saudi Arabia isn't going to just give up imprisoning and lashing female victims of rape. It ain't going to happen, not any time soon, and certainly not by itself.
These are extreme examples, but not only are they real examples, there are many examples of petty religious privilege in countries all over the world, and these deserve challenging too.

For me, atheism is a positive, liberating choice, and organised atheism is a positive, progressive movement. But freedom to choose religion also comes with the freedom to criticise religion and criticise religious privilege. And when you get a loose movement of people expressing their identity, who don't have martyrs or rituals or hierarchy, it's inevitably going to involve criticism of religious nonsense.

For those people scared, disgusted, dismissive of, and angered by vocal, open atheism, I'm afraid we're just one new group hundreds of years late to the party.

Shaving my head for charity - 2 days left

2011-04-21T23:08:00.000+01:00

This weekend I'm shaving off my red/orange hair for charity! It's called Shave For A Cure, and it's a cunning plan to help cancer victims by looking like one. If you have any spare cash hanging around, please feel free to donate here:
http://www.shaveforacure.co.nz/view_event_profile/5076

Also I answered some questions of fellow Wellingtonian blogger @MissAnnaJane, you can see the mini-interview here:
http://missannajane.blogspot.com/2011/04/support-another-unicorn-fan-charity.html

Cheers!

This week in religious crazy

2011-04-18T23:32:00.001+01:00

NZ Immigration creates visas for religious workers
Suicide bomber in Pakistan fails to blow himself up
Richmond Council grants teenage counselling services to Catholic Children's Society
Pope talks nonsense about technology

What am I talking about, the Pope talks shit every week.

"The Catholic Church is welcoming the development of a special priest's visa, saying current immigration laws discriminate against religious workers for responding to a "calling", not a job advertisement."
http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/national/4902895/Church-welcomes-visas-for-religious-workers

""We had been taught that if the belt does not go off, we should kill ourselves with the grenade. There were three policemen standing close by, and I thought if I killed them too, I would still make it to heaven.""
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13111948

"A London Council has awarded a tender to provide counselling services to teenagers on issues including contraception, unwanted pregnancy and homophobic bullying, to the Catholic Children’s Society ... The Catholic Children’s Society famously gave up working with new adopters after the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations came into force in 2007, which meant that they would no longer be able to discriminate against gay couples wanting to adopt."
http://www.humanism.org.uk/news/view/790

"Pope Benedict led Roman Catholics into Holy Week celebrations, telling a Palm Sunday crowd that man will pay the price for his pride if he believes technology can give him the powers of God."
http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/4902545/Technology-can-t-replace-God-Pope

Gig time!

2011-04-17T10:23:00.000+01:00

Playing a free gig at @Bar Medusa this Wed20th with other wonderful Wellington musicians APRIL FISH, THE LUCID EFFECT, TOM CUNLIFFE, and PETER BAILLIE & MEGAN MCCARTHY.
Huzzah for free gigs!
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=136524076419223

If a Chinese company buys NZ land in the forest

2011-04-16T01:13:00.001+01:00

Here's a recent article in Stuff.co.nz/Dompost on Chinese company Shanghai Pengxin Group angling to buy a series of kiwi farms and, crucially, the land they are on.

Which begs the question - if a Chinese company buys kiwi land, and buys the farms on that land, and exports the milk produced by those farms to China, is it still New Zealand?

Save The Farms link: http://www.savethefarms.org.nz/

Photoshoot "official" pics

2011-04-13T11:08:00.000+01:00

I put the word "official" in quotation marks partly because they're not exactly official (it's just that they're the best quality cool pics), and partly because being an amateur musician/band and branding your website/online shop/logo-branded cock ring "official" is about as retarded as it gets.

Anyway, for one day we got out in the sun, me Tobi Chiara and Daryn, with me wearing my customised denim skirt, scoop-neck octopus top (cheers Chiara!), red hair and red guitar. No-one I know gets the skirt, and some actively hate it, but none of that matters to me because for one day I looked AWESOME.

Full(er) blog post and music video coming soon, but for now enjoy these. Hope you like!

Can you guess what it is yet?

2011-04-13T10:17:00.000+01:00

I'm doing a new Tshirt design based on a popular internet meme. Can you tell what it's going to be? I think you can.

Wedding?

2011-04-12T22:28:00.000+01:00

Apparently there's some wedding happening soon? It must be really important because whenever I turn on the TV or the radio or go on the internet, someone's talking about it. But I can't make out any details because all it sounds like is white noise. Can anyone fill me in?

Dear Uri Geller

2011-04-08T04:09:00.000+01:00

Video/photoshoot on the waterfront

2011-04-01T06:25:00.000+01:00

Fun times! I look great.

The Future Is Unwritten (AKA "Promises Promises")

2011-03-30T10:07:00.001+01:00

Well. It was barely a couple of months ago that I poured my hopes and dreams onto this blog, for 2011 and beyond. One of those myriad things was moving back to the UK - to London in particular. That is no longer the case.

A combination of:

getting my longest temp job at Government Department X, with the potential of staying longer
friends convincing me I can indeed apply for residency, even without a skilled job
my Mum reminding me that the UK economy is still in the toilet, and finding a job in London would be harder than it has been here in Wellington

...have made me realise I really should apply for residency here in NZ. So I'm going to.

I've done a quick points calculation, and it looks good. There's every chance I will, some way or another, be able to continue working and living in New Zealand - either until I get my residency, or because I get my residency.

London will always be there, and - however long I am here in wonderful Kiwiland - I would like to live there at some time in my life. At least for a year or two.*

And all you people in Englandshire need not fear, because aside from my outrageous plans to come and tour Europe armed with an axe and backing tracks, I will definitely be coming back to visit some time this year: my brother is getting married, and apparently I am the best man, and apparently it's simply not done to miss out.

But for now, wish me luck. I battled with the Gods of Travel in 2003, against SARS and changing flights, and won. Now I face the Gods of Staying Put. Fingers crossed, eh.

*They say when you are sick of London, you are sick of life. But I feel confident in saying when you get sick of London, you are sick of noise, pollution, cars, crime, tube strikes, the Tories, chavs, and, over the next 15 months, the 2012 Fucking Olympics.

Yes please

No thanks Seb mate

Broken fish hook fixed.

2011-03-28T07:35:00.000+01:00

For the past few weeks, I’ve been walking around without my fish hook. I won’t tell the whole story, but in summary, here's some advice: if you’re a female visitor to this country, and you’re walking home with a guy (me) late on a Friday night, and 2 bogans across the road offer to “fight your boyfriend”, the answer is not “sure!”.*
I was lucky I checked afterwards, noticed it had gone, and went back to retrieve it from the pavement.

Fish hooks are a Maori tradition going way back, and are obviously a symbol connecting people and persons with water and fishing. Also, the fish hook apparently provides the wearer safe passage over water. Tradition also suggests that you give or bestow it upon someone meaningful some time in your life – maybe tomorrow, maybe in 50 years.

Obviously I don’t have a strong personal connection with Maori culture, and I don’t believe in charms or superstition, but when I had the opportunity to carve my own in a workshop in Whitianga many years ago I thought I would give it a go. The result was a pendant that has only left my neck (since putting it on in 2003) for massages and life modelling.

I am not a jewellery person. I am a big fan of the piercings that I have had (right eyebrow, top of left ear) and the piercings that I currently have (left nostril, left tragus), but I don’t really think they count as “jewellery” – more like punctuation. However, this fish hook has been special to me, in my own way. It doesn’t symbolise anything in a literal way, but it's something I made while abroad travelling, and it represents in a vague way who I was, where I’ve been, and who I am. I could live without it, but I am very attached to it.

So recently, finally, I got a new neck cord and attached it in a new way as the picture shows. It’s not pretty, and in time I might take it to a professional carver or restorer and have the original loop put back (I don’t mind if it’s a different material or whatever, I’m only a purist when it comes to guitars & amps, and even then I’m no connoisseur). But for now it’s fine, and – exactly 8 years after making it in the Coromandel – it’s back on my neck where it belongs. Perhaps even, in a way, the brokenness and makeshift fix are like scars: they help show where we’ve been, and they display a sense of resilience. Or maybe I’m talking nonsense.

*I have very strong feelings about drunken people being “different people” to how they are sober. No matter how drunk you are, it’s no excuse to be a twat, and it’s no excuse to be dangerous. Even when pissed out of my skull, I don’t feel the need to jump off cliffs, call strangers a cunt (as someone on drugs did to me in my own room recently), stand in the middle of the road waving at oncoming cars, or, indeed, invite violence on a friend.
I have also done irresponsible things while drunk, but these are things I would well have done sober; the point is, alcohol is no excuse.

Why Libya is not Iraq

2011-03-28T00:29:00.000+01:00

Just catching up on some overdue blogging while I've been busy with Lighthouses. This is a short post with bullet points:

The Iraq invasion was sold on the link between Saddam Hussein and terrorism, directly connected to 11th September 2001 terrorist attacks. Without that bogus fear, the invasion could not have happened.
No-one is invading Libya - yet, at least, but still. It's air strikes against clear military targets.
The action in Libya has UN approval.
Libya was (and still is) in a state of civil war for weeks before the action, such is the slow nature of the UN. Libyans lost their lives peacefully demonstrating, and have been losing their lives facing their government's own military.
Obama is not Bush. This may sound acadmic to some, but the approach to Libya has been huge: Obama is desperate to cede control to NATO, rather than the US military, and there hasn't even been an aircraft carrier stationed near Libya. The Bush administration hard out wanted a war and went to great lengths to deceive the world into getting one.

People may point out that in cases of moral intervention, the US gets involved only when there's oil involved, or when its "strategic partners" (e.g. Saudi Arabia) aren't the subject, or when its not impractical to do so (e.g. Iran). There certainly may be more background and circumstances than meets the eye. The history of US involvement around the world is quite ugly.

But I would suggest that Gadaffi is indeed a murderous despot, that Libyan lives are in danger, and that there is a case for nations to intervene in Libya.

Thank yous for Lighthouses launch

2011-03-27T10:49:00.002+01:00

There are too many people to thank fully for Friday's amazing single launch party, but I'm going to give it a good go:

Tod, Gareth, Danny: These were the fellows you saw onstage with me, and they performed like heroes. I'm in awe and in debt of these guys for helping me put on the performance that we did, and for all the work they put in. My hat is permanently off to them.

They also play in a superb band called Throw It To The Fire who are playing at Bodega and Mighty Mighty in the coming weeks. See them.
http://www.facebook.com/throwittothefire

The other bands: I only finalised the line-up a couple of weeks before the gig, but what a line-up it was. Massive thanks to these guys, check them out:

The Lucid Effect - amazing solo looper. This guy knows about looping, but also knows about rock, melody, and dynamics.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Lucid-Effect/124296100969028
The Placid Saints bring rock, soul, prog and grooves, and they bring it well - cracking set.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Placid-Saints/82102827212
Rock Raven Ninja are an awesome rock-metal-indie-thrash bunch who know how to fucking rock.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/RockRavenNinja/123226097716693

Bar Medusa and all ye who sail her - primarily Tamara who runs it, and Boyd and Wayne who worked the venue on the night. Medusa fulfills a part of Wellington that no other venue does, and it's always a pleasure to play there.
http://www.facebook.com/barmedusa

Jared for doing the sound - lo, for he did an amazing job on sound (and lights) the whole night for 4 acts. Superbly nice guy too.

Jay for manning the web stream. We worked out it was be a simple case of just setting up the equipment and leaving it to run - and yet Jay manned the laptop for the whole night, checking everything was okay and working it to get the best results. Legend.

Veli + Fran + others for taking video - Veli took the awesome videos of last year's Dinosaurs launch, while Fran provided superb footage for the Lighthouses video shoot. I can't wait to see footage and to get said footage on the interwebs for all you people.

Jay Capco + others for taking photos - similarly, it's awesome to have people taking great pictures of you at a gig. If you took any pics that night I would love to see them!

Bakers (Mel, Anna, Sophie, Chiara, Jo + more) - I put out the callout for bakers, not knowing that the Knights of Baking would ride in like the cavalry and provide more awesome treats than could be eaten the whole night. Hats off to you wonderful people, especially Mel for making this amazing shortbread lighthouse cake. Awesome.

Daniil - guitar tech, door wench, photographer ... he showed up at 7pm knowing I would need help before I knew it. And he helped out the whole night. I already owe this man a number of beers, than number has just increased a lot.

Everyone who came + People watching on the internet, you guys are brilliant. Having 30 people jumping up and down singing "Dinosaurs" is one of the highlights of my 10ish years performing. Also it was great to have so many people log in and watch on the interwebs around the world - including my mum in Englandshire - thanks guys.

I know there's more people than that, I always forget someone, so my apologies if you helped in any way on that night and I haven't mentioned you.

Basically, I put in a huge amount of time and energy into this release and the launch party, but none of the awesomeness that happened on Friday night could have happened without the help of so many people. So thank you, wonderful people, and may dinosaurs and lighthouses guide your way.

Lighthouses free download OUT NOW

2011-03-26T02:09:00.001Z

Get it now, name your price. Why not name it "free"?

Features the anthemic "Lighthouses" and brand new rocktastic song "Boy With X-Ray Eyes".
http://jezkemp.bandcamp.com/album/lighthouses

Live at the launch!

2011-03-25T08:11:00.000Z

Blogging from the venue! Is that rock'n'roll? The Lucid Effect have just started, I've heard myself talking on the live feed, it's all happening!
Here's the link for the live feed, I'll see if I can embed it too
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/jez-kemp

Live Broadcast by Ustream.TV

"Boy With X-Ray Eyes" Lighthouses b-side

2011-03-25T00:26:00.000Z

Finally, on the day of release, here's the ROCKTASTIC b-side to Lighthouses "Boy With X-Ray Eyes". Check out those solos! And the drums! And the rock! Like all tracks off the Lighthouses single, it will be free to download from later tonight. (Or possibly tomorrow.) Cheers!

Hair.

2011-03-23T01:06:00.001Z

It's been too long. And I feel great.

International webcast times for #lighthouseslaunch gig

2011-03-22T10:43:00.001Z

An exciting announcement! After some NASA-style testing, I can confirm there will be a webcast of the Lighthouses launch gig going out live on the internet for:
1) people who can't make it
2) friends and family overseas
3) complete strangers who want to watch an awesome live gig.

If everything goes according to plan, it will be going out on my Ustream channel here:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/jez-kemp

Below are some approximate international times - which is pretty cool I reckon :) But please remember they are APPROXIMATE times, the best way to to confirm is by texting or messaging the people in the band you want to see.

New Zealand is still on NZDT summer time (ie +13 hours from GMT).
If your timezone isn't listed you can find it here: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock

ALL times are for this Friday 25th March.
Of course, if you're in Wellington, see you down at the gig!

THE LUCID EFFECT - 8:30pm NZDT
6:30pm Sydney, Melbourne
8:30am Central European Time
7:30am UK (GMT)

THE PLACID SAINTS - 9:20pm NZDT
7:20pm Sydney, Melbourne
9:20am Central European Time
8:20am UK (GMT)

ROCK RAVEN NINJA - 10:10pm NZDT
8:10pm Melbourne, Sydney
10:10am Central European Time
9:10am UK (GMT)

JEZ KEMP - 11:00pm NZDT
9:00pm Sydney, Melbourne
11:00am Central European Time
10:00am UK (GMT)

Callout for #lighthouseslaunch- can you help?

2011-03-18T23:19:00.000Z

Next Friday 25th is the launch gig for my 2nd single "Lighthouses" and I am excited already. But this is a callout for some assistance in making it the most awesome gig party ever! Can you:

Take photos?
Take video on your camera?
Bake?
Help arrange live streaming on the web?

If so, please get in touch! Just leave a note on http://www.facebook.com/jezkemp or email info@jezkemp.co.uk and let me know.

(Baking is something I'm not very good at, and I'll be crazybusy doing other stuff during this week, hence asking...)

Here's the poster for the gig, in case you feel like spreading them around the web or even printing some off and doing some last minute postering round your uni/college/workplace/fire station/laser-powered brothel in Wellington.

Web:


High quality for printing:

We need exactly 500,000 to pray for Japan, nuclear prayers need not apply

2011-03-18T01:25:00.004Z

This is a post about Japan, prayer, “energy”, terrorism, Uri fucking Geller, and half of my freaking brain.

So there’s a Facebook event called “We need 500 000 Pray for the people of Japan”. The mind boggles.

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=172784892769008

First question: Why only half a million? Why not a whole million, or more? It sounds kind of like the Terry Pratchett concept of a million-to-one chance. I can see the organisers getting pretty upset too: “Oh no, if only we had precisely 500,000 people praying, then the radiation would disappear and there would be fluffy bunnies and everything would be okay”. 500,001 clearly won’t work.

Of course, this event is about as ludicrous as the idea of prayer itself. Who “needs” half a million praying for Japan? Certainly not the Japanese, who need food, water, shelter, heat, electricity, support for the economy, time to grieve for loved ones and destroyed communities, and maybe a time machine to go back and tell everyone to get the hell out of the northeast. Maybe the "we" are spirituo-religious quacks across the world, mostly in the Christian West, feeling the “need” to pretend to themselves they’re helping? I don’t know, like prayer it’s a complete mystery to me.

The event was mentioned by a friend on Facebook who rightly pointed out that it would be far more useful for half a million (or more) people to actually do something for Japan. For example, it’s been longer since the Christchurch earthquake, but the actual response across New Zealand has been phenomenal, and presumably the world too. Japan needs vital assistance and that assistance costs money. Initiate bakesale & charity gig sequence now.

What transpired was an 80+ comment thread on the subject of prayer and “energy” (and, bizarrely, animal welfare. I'm a big fan of animal welfare but when the tsunami hits the radioactive fan, I think humans are the priority). The friend made commendable efforts to explain she didn’t mean to offend anyone, which is fair enough – even when I’m laying into idiots about auras or homeopathy or religious bigotry, I don’t mean to offend anyone, it just happens by accident. (Okay with religious bigots I often mean to offend them, but anyway.) Unfortunately in my view she also backpedalled on the subject of prayer itself, very nearly or actually agreeing that it can be of practical use after all.

Let’s look at prayer simply. If prayer was actually effective – either in making atoms react a certain way for desired overall effect, or simply magicking aid helicopters out of the sky, fuck, I don’t know how these people’s minds work – what if it got into the wrong hands? I’m envisaging al-Qaeda recruiting armies of prayerrorists all “concentrating their energy” on summoning an Atlantic mega-tsnuami to wipe out Western Europe or the entire US Eastern Seaboard. And who is going to prevent prayer being obtained by rogue states like Iran and North Korea? Dear Kim Jong-Il, you’re an idiot – you should’ve been building secret underground cathedral facilities all this time.

And what the fuck is Uri Geller doing right now? He should be on TV and the internet calling on millions around the world, only instead of bending a fucking spoon, getting everyone to do something useful like demand the floodwaters retreat and that the Fukushima nuclear rods settle down in complete contrast to the laws of radioactive physics. Uri, your absence in this crisis exposes you as a selfish twat.

I pointed all this out on Facebook (in shortened comment form of course) – to be honest I think everyone had already had enough of the “discussion”, because the only reply I got was this:

" ' If the mind is open, satellite reception will be good. The mountains you put up should not be there in order to get satellite reception. When there are a lot of philosophical/scientific/rational, right-brain beliefs, there won't be any reception, whatsoever'. "

To be honest, that kind of comment doesn’t really deserve a reply – there’s not enough that even pretends to make sense that you can respond to. I’m sure it would be news to medical science that I am only using half of my freaking brain. I also think it’s laughable for people who dribble about “energy”, who clearly know nothing of science, to drop in the metaphor of “satellite reception”, which is wholly reliant on measurable physics.

But, being the stubborn/dogged/arrogant rationalist I am, I simply replied that this renders me invincible against prayer attacks. And thank fuck for that.

Watch out world, the terrorists are praying.

--------------------
UPDATE Friday 4:45pm
I completely forgot to refer to this morning's Dominion Post headline, which - in keeping with the Dom Post's values in quality journalism - read: "TIME TO PRAY, SAYS NUKE EXPERT". If the subject wasn't bad enough, the flaky quote they somehow derive this headline from is buried halfway through the entire front page article.

Lighthouses launch posters

2011-03-14T08:23:00.001Z

...now spotted on Lambton Quay

Dinosaurs is now free to download

2011-03-10T10:07:00.000Z

So I did it - "I Believe In Dinosaurs" is now FREE to download for whatever price you wish. Check out the nifty Bandcamp widget right here, and the awesome Wellington music video below that.

Please tell your friends, it would be awesome to see this song travel far and wide. DINOSAURS. SPREAD THE LOVE.

Gigs!

2011-03-08T10:23:00.002Z

For the first time since F451, I am excited about having a gigs page! And it's going to be right here on this blog entry. Behold the widget: