Lonely Planet Band Images

Flickrfeed from Matt Cashmore




Stills by Venessa Paech

Stupid goofy smile from man having too much fun with a Fender!


Nicked these off VP's Facebook, but I'd rather send you to her erudite blog instead for some good reading on the subject of online communities.

Lesley Melody - resident artist

When we finally get back to our new home in Melbourne (a renovation project of Grand Designs scale), I am looking forward to being immersed in the creativity that comes with living with an artist.

A sampler of Lesley's work is above - she trained in the USA using the time when she had no visa for working, and we had Noah arrive. Since then she has gone on to study further in New Zealand and Australia. Her blog can be found here: http://lesleymelody.blogspot.com

Reflections on Working in a Multimedia World

I love crappy graphs. Here's one of mine reflecting on working at Lonely Planet, who are building a multi-media business out of the long-time successful travel guidebook publishing business.

It's a bit like having more than one heart and thus multiple pulse rates. There is such a temptation to just surgically bludgeon the rhythms together, to slow down the internet (like you could!) to match the cycles that it takes to make physical, high quality book product - at best you risk becoming irrelevant.

Perhaps worse, to try to speed up book production into some frantic rhythm that reflects the web today ("this is so last Thursday" is one of my favourite quotes from dot com times).

LP's success has been in bridging across these rhythms - pipes that funnel content between the media, or enable new ways of working in long-standing processes like book production. And then embrace the new media with products like iPhone City Guides and Phrase Books. It's a fun place to work as a result.

The King Boys, a short film by the Clark Brothers, 2006

I have a favourite song by a collective of Wellington musicians who call themselves 'Fly My Pretties' that goes:

"Wellington's just a small town but it packs a lot of punch,

There's talent oozing from the walls and they eat ideas for lunch."

Some of that talent makes films. And I'm actually in one of them. A whole 11 seconds of fame.

I guess that last factoid makes me biased, but Fraser and Chris Clark are people I greatly admire for their film-making and story-telling talents.

Waiting interminably for a green light and a critical co-finance deal from the NZ Film Commission, they were challenged to make a short film that would show off the essence of their feature film idea, and test their resolve as film-makers by giving them 1/5 of the money actually needed to make a 15 minute short film.

They gathered favours, friends and emerging kiwi talent, tapped the Wellington film community for studios, costumes, make-up, cameras, set constructors and actors; as well as the artistic and design community for poster designs, music, printers, photography, web designers, and the result is something else.

Geoff Clark (the boys' Dad) took the role as referee, Fraser's father-in-law was a ringside judge. Costumes came from the recently completed King Kong courtesy of Peter Jackson. A couple of dozen enthusiastic extras combined with Adam Clark's camera wizardy made up a whole stadium full of wrestling fans.

It featured on the opening night of the Wellington Film Festival in 2006, as a prequel to Tommy Lee Jones' tour de force The 3 Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Sadly, I missed my own debut on one of the biggest screens in the Southern Hemisphere owing to a work commitment in Auckland that evening that could not be escaped.

It went on to do a round of pretty good film festivals, was bought by Rialto channel and won an Air NZ screen award. Only recently Fraser made a high resolution edition of the film available on YouTube in 2 parts:





My role was to play the gelatinous man-mountain of a wrestler who the hero, returning from war and recovering from shell-shock finds himself facing for the 1947 NZ Wrestling crown. An actual bona fide actor had stepped up for the role, but was called away to paying work just a filming was scheduled.

Needless to say it was great fun, despite hanging around a cold warehouse shooting the finale for a weekend in nothing more than black-painted basketball boots and shorts that were pulled up so high I looked like an alien with no belly button. Mike Clare's great still photography from the shoot captured me with a clarity that made me question the sensibility of that extra slice of R+R pizza at lunch on Fridays.

Wrestling was a huge deal in NZ in the pre and post-war periods. Wellington had weekly bouts in the town hall, several gyms where people trained, and the great Lofty Blomfield reached a World Championship final bout where his famous Octopus Clamp earned him a draw.

Drawing on this as background, The King Boys paints a rich psychological, sporting and family landscape in the post-war period, with the acting talents of Rangi Ngamoki, Karlos Drinkwater and Grant Tilly at the fore.

The boys have now put the feature on the back-burner and have another project cooking with strong interest in all the right places. Watch out for it. Hope they're writing a part for a 6'3 slightly graying wrestler in there somewhere - I'm owed another 4 seconds of fame.

Fraser, Chris and Adam (no relation) Clark on set during filming.

Chris and Rangi on set

A - G - D - E : learning to play in a band

Well, joining a band didn't prove to be quite as impossible as I'd imagined. Helps that it's the Lonely Planet Band, and that they must be the most welcoming bunch of talented musicians on the planet.

The set-list, with the objective of a charity gig at the Espy on June 18th is a yet-to-be finalised range of rock to blues-rock to some more poppy-jazzy numbers to ensure the Ministry of Fenders gets a break at some stage in the evening.

What have I learned in 3 weeks of Band Pressure Cooker?

• Led Zeppelin were geniuses of the simple arrangement that makes 1+1=4, and that it is fun to play loud.
  
• You can easily turn down your guitar when you just can't quickly locate C#m (and your fingers just won't stretch to it yet). God help learner drummers.
• That learning = failing, then repeating. Which is why the natural thing to do is to give up learning in life as soon as you can, because failure sucks. I'd forgotten that.
  
• That the 'failing' part of learning is more than balanced out by the joy of mastering something - even as simple as strumming the A G D E combination.
• That you don't have to play all the notes in a complex chord to get a result (bit of Eoin philosophy there) - wonder how that can be applied in life?
  
• That listening makes contributing a helluva lot more logical (where is that beat again - listen for Tad!).
• That a lesson or 2 from someone who has the mojo and the patience goes a long way to accelerating learning (thanks Rich). There was no 'how' or 'why' when I learned classical guitar as a boy - yet I've relied on those curiosities to get me through life (especially work).
  
• That I wish I could sing.
• And finally that maybe you can have too many guitars playing at once.
  

Then again, that last point isn't proven beyond all doubt just yet.