Monthly Archives: November 2009

David Byrne and Brian Eno in a new collaboration, how cool is that.  When I was in college I fell into a crowd of hyper-cool musical aficionados who one night, under the influence of some musical-appreciation substance, spun for me three licorice pizzas under a memorably full moon that shaped my tastes forever:  Robert Fripp’s Exposure, Peter Gabriel’s first solo album, and Brian Eno’s Before and After Science. David Byrne was already one of my musical polestars. At some point, I was staring at the album notes for  Eno’s album and listening to a voice I found familiar, when the title of the cut, “King’s Lead Hat” anagrammed spontaneously before my eyes to  “Talking Heads.”  Ever since that night, I’ve been hooked on everything that constellation of artists have done.  Eno and Byrne’s collaboration on  My Life in the Bush of Ghosts — with its exploration of the crossovers between musical and religious ecstasy — was a way-out wonder.

Byrne sez:

On these live shows I decided to use the connection of Brian Eno– as a collaborator, producer or musician– as the thread that links some material from the past with a group of songs done last year. Most of the time music listeners are blissfully unaware of the contributions of a record producer, and sometimes even of which musicians who play on a record as well…so the Eno linking device might not be as self evident as I imagine. However, the device also allowed me to include a fair number of songs in the live set that people are somewhat familiar with, which wasn’t exactly accidental.

Now, when I hop over to Peter Gabriel’s website, to remember which of his self-titled albums I listened to that night, and what have we here… He’s releasing an album in January of covers called “Scratch my back” which will include the utterly fantastic Talking Heads cut “Listening Wind” — a song I first learned to appreciate while driving across the Nevada desert in Saul Bloom’s beat-up Econoline Van, scouting nuclear weapons test facilities.

Fripp’s Exposure and Gabriel’s first album contained a track in comon: “Here Comes the Flood” — a truly prescient piece of artistry.  On Exposure, the song opens with a simple Frippetronics guitar line and a voice over from J.G. Bennet:

From the scientist’s study it seems likely that we should soon begin to have a discreet change in the earth’s climate so people will not be able to live where they have, and the oceans will rise, and many cities will be flooded, like London, and Calcutta, and so on. These things, they say, will happen, according to scientific theories, in about forty years at the most, but maybe even quicker.

It was recorded in 1979.

Downloads of some of the songs on Everything That Happens will Happen Today benefit Amnesty International.

A little test of my mighty iPhone. Found the script which generates the map above in a tweet from Astrobabes, captured it, got into the admin here and created this post — without leaving the cozy couch.

The mini-Safari browser on the phone didn’t like the text input box in WordPress, (no keyboard popup) but a tap of the HTML tab and all is well.

I used to think the SonyEricsson P1 was a highly evolved phone, but since graduating to the iPhone 3gs those days look like the dark ages.

Now, let’s see if I can register a December 12th event with this thing, to counter the prospect of a return of the real dark ages by getting a fair ambitious binding climate deal in Copenhagen. After all what good is an iPhone if it can’t save the world?

There’s a funny thing we’ve noticed in the Digital communications department at Greenpeace about the relationship between campaign funding and creativity, and I wonder if it holds in other organisations as well. It runs like this: the smaller a campaign is, the less budget it has, and the fewer people it employs, the more creative, generally, their output. Makes sense of course — to raise yourself above the noise of things wrong with this world that need addressing, without a lot of money to spend, you have to stand out. Sure was the case with our friends in the tiny F-Gas unit. Frustrated with trying to call attention to what really is a massive problem, with an easy solution, they went to extremes to get, umm, literally, some exposure.

Here’s a tale from below the decks about this one. About midway through the video you’ll see a wide shot of Dave in the studio, his shed shoes on the floor. Well, in the version that was scheduled for release two days ago, there was a highly recognizable shoe-brand logo on that trainer. Greenpeace isn’t in the biz of promoting shoe brands, of course, and when one of our eagle-eyed video folks spotted it, the question became do we need to get it out. It would cost money and time to do so.

I went to my boss with the question for a judgment call, which I figured would be perfunctory. I was ready to greenlight it — plenty of our activists appear on camera with brands of one kind or another on a t-shirt or a shoe, and these don’t get read as organisational endorsements of the product they’re wearing. So as our Comms Director looked at the still frame, I asked what I thought was a rhetorical question: “Would the brand in question have paid for this as a product placement?”

I fully expected the answer to be “No.” But Inge, who has actually done product placement in the corporate world, replied “Are you joking? Absolutely.”

And immediately, my mind was changed. If a brand is willing to pay for its logo to be in shot in a Greenpeace video, then there must be some endorsement value.

Back to the edit suite it went for a painstaking logo-ectomy, and I learned a valuable lesson about the lengths to which a global brand might go to make itself look good.

I already knew about the lengths to which we’ll go at Greenpeace to  get a message out, and this video, heh heh, is a fine example.

A cold November evening, and I have two causes for hope and — dare I say it? — joy this day.

One is the news which kept me up late last night and busy throughout the morning, that a committee appointed by the Japanese government to look into cutting wasteful programmes has recommended an end to Japanese taxpayer subsidies for whaling. If David McTaggart were alive today, he would be casting back-slapping expletives upon people in dozens of time zones: this is bigger than anything we’ve seen to date in the way of a move toward an end to Japanese whaling. Because without the artificial prop of no-interest loans and government marketing programmes and billions of yen in public money, whaling is doomed. And while the story here began its life late last night on a surer note than the facts in the morning light could sustain, and the whaling interests will fight this tooth and nail, it’s quite simply the most promising development in years.

And two people who I admire beyond my ability to describe, Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki, are the heroes of this moment. They have fought the whaling programme where it’s hardest to fight: in Japan itself, where their arrest for exposing government corruption made them pariahs in conformist Japanese society. They have suffered exile from social acceptance, the scorn of family and friends, accusations of betrayal of their children’s future — and they have continued to fight. When they first said that whaling was a waste of taxpayer’s money, they were alone in saying that. Then the business press began to take notice. Then, in the media frenzy of attention to the whale meat embezzlement scandal they exposed, mainstream society began to take notice. Now, at last, the newly elected government itself has not only taken notice, but taken action.

I’m proud to call these boys colleagues. I’m humbled by what they have done.

My second cause for celebration is a website called LoveLettersToTheFuture.com. I literally can’t tell you how much time and effort some very good people have put into making this a reality, but I spent a hour tonight in awe of the results, and the outpouring of human love and creativity you can see there.

Thomas Wallner and Adele Major, two of the most creative high-caliber artists I know, have been major players in making this project a reality, and I’m deeply proud of having connected the two of them.

Imagine the best 100 of these messages being unlocked from a time capsule in the year 2109. How cool is that, for an ephemeral medium that caters to modernist attention spans that flit from message to message composed of 140 characters of text?

I put my son to sleep this night with a story about time-traveling hamsters, from the “Hamster Liberation Army” story cycle that we invented together with his brother. And while it may have been a piece of improvisational fluff, it set me to thinking about time, and time travel, and I went to sleep imagining what it would be like if I could travel ahead in time to the date that the Love Letters time capsule is opened. I permit myself the fantasy that my great grandson will be there, curious to see what our generation has to say for itself.

And in my hopeful moments, I can hope that he looks forward to reading and hearing and seeing what we had to say — the generation that saw the threat of global warming and raised our voices loud and strong enough to make a change, so that he and all humanity to come were spared the worst of what we were told to expect.

The link between these tales is locked in a phrase I used to use back in 1985 when I was knocking on doors for Greenpeace. “If we cannot save the whales, what hope do we have for saving the entire Earth?”

There’s cause for hope on both those fronts tonight. Selah. And so to bed.

I love User Generated Content.  I’m really lucky to work with some extremely bright and creative folks, and we bend our talents every day to task of finding new ways to communicate the threat of climate change.  But every time we open up the door and invite visitors to our website to join the party, I’m gobsmacked by the cleverness you uncover when you crowd-source.

Last week we launched action-pact.org (thanks, Crina! Thanks, Circul8!), a different kind of virtual march, in which you upload your image onto a cardboard box character, slap your slogan across its chest, and pack  it off to Copenhagen with your message.   There’s a facebook connect element and your character stars in its own video that you can send to friends.

Here’s some of the truly wonderful, funny, inspiring, powerful, and creative reactions we’ve seen so far — 10,000 packages generated in the less than two weeks since launch!

The best slogan gets slapped on a banner and will get displayed Greenpeace-style at Copenhagen. So create your own, and  vote for your favorites, at action-pact.org