We had a 5.2 magnitude earthquake nearby this evening. It was pretty scary, the whole building shook and wobbled a lot. Some of my CDs and DVDs fell over. This was the largest tremor I've experienced in two and a half years of living in an earthquake zone.
Hapilly it seems that not much damage or disruption has been caused. One of the local TV channels is asking people to e-mail photos of damage to them. Although I think captioning this one "Bathroom Mayhem" may imply they are struggling for dramatic pictures. Hope we will always be this lucky.
For my further education after school, I did a course called "HND Communication Studies" at Kirkcaldy College of Technology. I didn't really have the faintest idea what I wanted to do with my life at the age of 17 when I had to make some key decisions about my future. But this course appealed to me, as it was about a subject I was interested in; the media, journalism, television and marketing. Going for an HND course instead of going to University also meant an easier life in my 6th year at high school as I got most of the grades required to make this course in my 5th year at school.
One of the more exciting things we got to do at college was to practice a potential career in television, both behind and in front of the cameras. I can recall this practice was in two parts. The first was just reading a piece to camera to see how you came over. I think I read a piece about Star Trek - arrgh, I was only 17 I suppose! I remember the lecturer said I may have a problem getting a career as a TV presenter as I had the kind of face that was "naturally vague". This comment caused enduring hilarity among my fellow potential TV stars.
The second exercise was much more ambitions, we were supposed to make our own TV programme. This course requirement caused us much angst in advance as I remember. The class split up into about 4 different teams and the team of people I did this with were just the people I chose to sit around on day one of the course.
Our team was - Lorraine Rennie (main presenter), me and Mark Deas (first interview), Ewan Croal and Susan Neilson (second interview), Barbara Penman and Dave Radford (third interview).
I remember doing endless preparation for this exercise. We split our little team into sub groups who would interview each other for the programme. Mark would become a good mate in the coming months, but I don't remember him being at college much around this time and he dropped out in year 2. I think this video was made towards the latter half of year one and Mark's enthusiasm for the course was really fading.
Our group had a few sessions to get the programme ready, but I don't remember Mark being there much. So our section is pretty scripted, you can see the piece of paper pretty obviously on my lap. It was so scripted, that I think I wrote the questions and the answers for our piece. Mark's one great contribution was the title - "Retirement at 16", we all loved that.
Mark was a big socialist at the time, I first met him at a meeting of the Militant Tendency (of all places), so the parts of the piece where he is talking about the final end of capitalism is the only bit I didn't script. I think he is improvising here.
Owing to Mark and I being a little under prepared, our piece ran short by mistake, so we asked Ewan and Susie to pad their piece out a bit. This didn't seem an issue for them. Ewan was the guy I sat next to in the whole of my second year of college and he was a real nice guy, never short of a word or two.
There are some great little period touches in this piece. Ewan's references to "Bentleys" and a "Nick Kershaw haircut" are priceless. I remember Susie came from a particularly rough part of Fife that I didn't know well and some of her experiences may have helped her talk so knowledgeably about heroin abuse and alcoholism. Most of us, except Mark and I, tried to make an effort to look smart for this show. Susie used to call this her "social worker look". I think Mark and I's look make us look more like genuine socialists though.
Ewan looks a bit uncomfortable in his tie too. With 22 years hindsight, one of the things that shocks me about this video are the number of technical mistakes. The programme was made by a guy called Don who was the college's resident technician, but I don't think he could have been taking this too seriously. There's obviously a problem with Susie's mic that didn't get corrected and the crackles are left in. You can actually hear Don coughing behind the camera. I remember all the equipment looked ancient to me, even in 1985. The video system was a huge clunky Umatic system. I remember the Umatic tapes seemed enormous.
Barbara the body builder is wonderful here. She was always so softly spoken that I struggled with the thought of her being a body builder. Dave was the oldest of our little group, he was an ancient 23 or 24 at the time and that seemed a large age gap. As he was the oldest, he tended to take control of our little group. He looks nervous as hell in this piece too.
All of Dave's "taking charge" meant that we got voted the best programme by our classmates in other groups. We sat through all the programmes in class one day, and I got the impression that other groups didn't manage to take the exercise as seriously as we did. The only major errors on ours were technical, other teams seemed to be taking the piss a bit. The lecturer felt I transcended my "vague look" from the earlier video and Lorraine got special praise as our anchor woman.
What really amazes me now is the sheer earnestness of the programme. I suppose these were grim time in Fife, the miners strike was still on and unemployment was around 3 million. But I have such wonderful memories of my life around this time, the earnestness of the programme seems to conflict with this memory. I think the truth is we were all a bit nervous and Dave was being pretty bossy throughout the preparation and making of this.
The letteraset titles took bloody ages to do and it still looks crap. We got this final one the wrong shape too and Don the technician / cameraman had to pan around it to make it work. Our backdrops don't really work either, they are too small in relation to the rest of the "set". Mark and I's is particularly poor.
The beginning music was my idea, it's a Song called "Leisure" from XTC's "English Settlement" album. It seemed to fit Mark's "Retirement at 16" title perfectly. "My Generation" at the end was Dave's idea. I played the music from my sister's portable cassette player into the studio mic while Don filmed the leteraset.
I happened to know a guy who had just started at the college as a junior technician, working for Don. He was in the year below me at High School and was a really nice guy called John Wishart. I persuaded him to strike a copy of our programme. I think he took this straight from Umatic to Betamax, which was the format of the video recorder we had at home. Betamax was a much better format than VHS at the time, shame it didn't catch on, the picture quality was a lot better.
I rented a VHS machine when I moved just behind the college tho 2 Sang Place Kirkcaldy a few months later. I remember this cost 11 pounds a month and this seemed an incredible expense as my whole income was only 70 pounds a month. I quickly transfered some of my favorite Beta tapes to VHS in the Summer of 1985 and this was one of them.
This survived on the same VHS tape from 1985 to 2005, when it was transfered to DVD. The faint white lines that scroll up and down the screen are a result of decay on the original VHS tape, it seems I was able to digitise this at just the right time before the VHS became unplayable. The Beta tape still exists, but I'm not sure if I will ever get my hands on a beta machine to play it.
As far as I know, this is the only one of the programmes from our year of HND Communication Studies that got copied. Certainly, I'd be very surprised if any other programmes survived this long, copied or not. It's really funny think that, thanks to 21st century technology, this little student programme may now be seen by more people than anyone ever intended.
Due to the 10 minute per video restriction on Youtube, this is split into two parts.
We did go on to make some more impressive videos in our second year.
This time we had a more professional set up in the college assembly rooms. The college had asked for volunteers from our course to make some educational videos for the council. Our part was the technical side - production, direction, sound, camera, floor manager, etc. I was the sound engineer, you can see me poised over the 4 track porta studio that doubled as a mixer. The Drama Studies course provided the people in front of camera this time.
Next to me is Kim Marr who was the vision mixer and nearest the camera is Madeline Fyfe who was the producer (she was always a bossy sort!). Don didn't get too involved this time, although I'm pretty sure I remember him taking this picture.
Looking back on it, this was just a way for the council to get educational videos for free, although we had good fun doing this and the college was very grateful. Left to right above is Donna Hodgkinson and Lynn Williamson on camera, Andy Gyle the floor manager and Neil Renton also on camera. There are two drama students who's names I have long forgotten in front of camera. I love the way the cameras have "KCT TV Colour" written on them.
I didn't get a copy of these videos, I think my enthusiasm was less this time as we were not in front of camera. Also our final exams were looming, so I guess I had other things on my mind.
Shame, as the drama students had someone that year who went on to become a genuine star. Sharon Small, who is now one of the two stars of The "Inspector Linley Mysteries" (a favorite here on US Public TV) was the anchor woman for all the videos. I remember her being professional, but of course no one realised she'd go on to have a genuine career in film and TV. One of the highlights of my whole college experience was getting to pin a contact mic on her blouse. Well I was the sound engineer after all.
Having watched "Retirement at 16", if there are any NBC, CBS, BBC executives out there watching Blogger or Youtube for potential television stars, just let me know. You'd only be 22 years late.
This is Geoff Lewis's, who is the man behind the Bay Area Friends of Europe, little video about the group. I think it is rather cool, although there is no interview with me as I wans't there that day. My friend Daphne is, from memory, the second interview - she is the one taking about what she misses most about the UK is British sarcasm.
In the summer of 2006 I had one of those magical holidays back in Scotland that I'll remember forever.
I managed to do so many things. Camping in the Highlands (the first time I'd camped since 1978!).
The world cup was on, so I was able to watch some of that in the pub and Travel Inn.
I was down my favourite pub, Robertsons in Rose Street in Edinburgh.
And I got to record some music with my old friends.
This was in Ian's house in Leith. He's sold his one now and is moving to a new flat next month.
I always thought I was so lucky to have friends who are such great musicians. For many years they have been able to amplify whatever microscopic musical talent I have and have been able to make sense of whatever odd, half-formed musical idea I happen to have in my head.
We managed two different sessions this holiday. Apart from the picture at the very top of this post, all these still pictures were taken at a session where we recorded a song I'm going to call "That's Why I Hate the Blues". I had the idea for the lyric around 20 years ago, in 1986.
At that time my Friend Ritchie put me up temporarily in his flat in York Place in Edinburgh, where he was staying at that time. It was my first real experience of staying in that exciting city across the water from Fife. The city I used to see every night from my bedroom in Fife. It's twinkly lights always seemed to alluring when I closed by bedroom curtains at night.
Ritchie was a huge blues fan, he later played harmonica with a number of them. The bar over the road at the top of Broughton Street, that later became "The Basement" at that time had just opened as "The Blues Basement" and live blues bands used to play there. We also used to go and see blues bands at those other long defunct Edinburgh venues, the Preservation Hall and the Jailhouse.
Never having been a huge blues fan (it all seemed to formulaic to me), but finding Ritchie's enthusiasm difficult to fight against, I began to imagine a song about a guy getting the blues about the blues. You know, having been forced to listen to so much blues music, he got the blues about the blues, real bad.
So the first session was an attempt to record the music for this song I had formulated in my head 20 years previously.
The other song that we did at the second session was called " I wish I could", which was a shorter punkier song. Darren couldn't make it to the second session, which is a shame as I love his bas playing. He always manages to play just the right thing, not too much, not to little, he has a great bass sound too.
However, Andy was on hand to do the bass too - he had a nice punky style on this song.
These video clips are great fun, they are all from the second session. We recorded "I Wish I Could" at this second session as well as changing some of "That's Why I Hate the Blues".
I wish we had the technology years ago. It would have been nice to have video of us recording our early material. I think it's really interesting to see us playing some of the material that ended up in the songs. Some of these clips are us just trying out bits and pieces for sound levels or just messing about. Other clips are first takes of pieces that didn't end up in the songs. Other clips are the actual takes that we used in the songs. The above clip is Ian trying out an idea that didn't get used for "That's Why I Hate The Blues".
This is Andy trying out a solo for "That's Why I Hate The Blues". Ian is doing his recording engineer bit here as usual. Andy is playing his beloved Gibson SG here, I think he was had it for about 25 years. You can see too in the "Tom's New Shoes" video that's in an earlier blog post here and also on my YouTube page.
This is Andy's main guitar solo for "I Wish I Could". Funny, it shows the benefit of little video clips of the recording, I had forgotten he was playing Ian's Telecaster here. This take is in the finished song.
This is Andy, on his SG again, doing a nice light little solo over my acoustic guitar at the end of "I Wish I Could". This take is in the finished song too.
This is my first attempt at the acoustic guitar for the end of "I Wish I Could". Bloody hopeless actually, the timing is very wayward and I forgot what I was doing half way through. Ian's comment that "I think the other one was a lot better" is curious, as I don't remember doing one before that.
This take is the one that we used in the final song. Only slightly better really, my timing is still pretty out. Ian cheered me up about it at the time though, by calling it "Syd Barrettesque"! It does sound a lot better on the mixed version with Andy's guitar on the top.
I just need to add vocals to these songs now and they will be finished. Hope I can get round it it one day soon. It's a good thing that there are no video clips of my plastic bucket percussion on "That's Why I Hate the Blues"!
After lazing around until about about 12 yesterday, we got up early today and headed to this place I had only heard about before. It's at 18th and Guerrero and their pastries are meant to be very special. But, especially on a weekend, the queuing is supposed to be very bad.
We tried to get in early, at 8.30 - but didn't realise that it didn't open until 9!
This was the queue and it was only 8.40, 20 minutes before it even was supposed to open.
This was the queue at 8.55, five minutes before it was supposed to open, we were at the front - hooray.
And there are even some left over to enjoy later. I'm glad we got their early after all.
I just came over these little video files taken with my Leica camera when I just bought it, so I thought I'd share them with You Tube and the world, as they bring back happy memories.
This was a really fun party. For a while Bay Area Link Up (www.bayarealinkup.com) had a number of musical events and people were asked to bring instruments along. This morphed into a band called the "Link Ups".
This was a party we had in San Francisco on the 16th of December 2006 at Fort Mason. I was there with my little Turkish friend, you can see her dancing around near the backing vocals mike in the videos. I had a beer or two and decided that I would sing backing vocals all night.
I remember a particularly dodgy solo version of "House of the Rising Sun", well the beginning of it, before I forgot the words. Hapilly, I can't easily sing and take video at the same time, so my performances are in the dustbin of history where they belong.
In case you are wondering what these songs are meant to be, they are "Happy Christmas, War is Over", well it was Christmas after all, and "Rocky Racoon".
Despite some of the frustrations, one of the reasons I stay with Sun Microsystems is the wonderful Openwork policy. As one of my old boss's explained to me once, if you have an internet connection and phone, you can work anywhere.
I like to collect bizarre places I have worked for Sun, this must top them all. I took my laptop along to the garage as they can often do oil changes while you wait. I took the laptop as something to keep me amused and, not unreasonably, to do some work as I think I was still there in what was technically a "work hour". I couldn't figure out where the waiting room was, so ended up sitting in the showroom. I clicked on the iBook's wireless settings, more in hope than expectation that a network would appear, and it did - and also in the name of Falore Nissan, the name of the garage dealership.
So - hooray for Falore Nissan who are actually a nice Nissan dealership (miles better than the shite service I got at San Jose's Capitol Nissan where I bought the car) and hooray for Sun's Openwork policy. My only minor disappointment is that no one approached me and asked me to sell them a car! I have also worked from an Edinburgh Laundrette and a Dutch motorway in the past, but I'm not sure if they count as neither had wireless internet.
I really love this photo, I've been looking at it a lot in the past day or so. My fondest memories of this amazing family were the time we spent together from my birth, to the mid 1980's. This is my Gran on my mother's side and all her brothers and sisters. I can't remember how I came to have this scan, but this photo is also up on the wall of my cousin's house.
I think this photo must have been taken around 1930. My Gran is on the far left, she would have been 19 then. Their lives were so different from ours. I remember my Gran being shocked at how many presents us children got in the 1970's and I remember being shocked to find out that they only got an apple and an orange at Christmas, if they were lucky! This was a very close family by modern standards, I think now maybe the hardships of their lives made them close. The family, in the old cliche, survived two world wars, and the poverty of their own childhoods. We were especially close to, in a word that used to amuse me when I was little because of it's potential double meaning, the "Aunts".
My sister and I came into the world when they were around their mid to late 50's. There weren't many other children our age around then and the Aunts really enjoyed our company, there are a huge number of cinie films of us with the aunts back in the 60's and 70's.
As I think about that period if my life again, I think the Aunts must have thought of the mid 60's to the mid 80's as being a golden period. They all retired around the early 70's, there was never much money around, but they had enough to have a comfortable life and they all had their health. Happily, this period of their lives coincided with my childhood. There seemed to be endless family get togethers, and the summer holidays did seem long, before I turned into that strange creature called a "teenager" and they, as it seemed to me at the time, turned into old people.
They all lived into their mid 80's or early '90's. I sometimes wonder if the difficult environment they grew up in helped give them a long life. I hope I got their genes though, and live as long as they did, despite living a very different Californian, air conditioned life.
But indeed, old father time is the most unforgiving parent of all, and Aunt Susan, the last of the Aunts, died yesterday at the age of 93 and a half. She is second from the left in the 1930 picture above and on the right beside my Gran in the photo below.
I remember a poignant moment around January of 2004. She was in hospital and was beginning to fade, mentally. She had just turned 90, but didn't realize it. My cousin told her she had just turned 90 and she seemed really startled by the news. She said "Oh Ron, what happened to all those years", Ron said "Well Susan, you lived them". Lets hope many of them were happy.
The more contemporary images were taken in the Summer of 1983 with a disc camera (remember them?), can you spot the grainy quality?
The wonderful Irish film, Once has now come out in the UK and it's been getting some great reviews. Some bits and pieces have shown up on youtube which I'm sure is not strictly legal, but it if encourages more people to go and see the whole film, then I suppose it's a good thing.
I saw this film and felt good all day after, what better recommendation?
Having uploaded all my images, many scanned very laboriously from badly cataloged prints, I've been a little nostalgic for the camera that took many of them.
This was it. A Praktica LTL3, bought second hand in Dixons Kirkcaldy in 1982. I was initially very hesitant about it's completely manual exposure and focus, but soon got used to it. I took soooo many pictures in the mid 80's, just at the time when I was getting a decent amount of pocket money and before I had discovered alcohol in any volume. As I think about it, particularly in 1984 when the photo taking seemed to reach its maximum, this rather bulky camera must have been with me all the time.
I was briefly seduced by the technological marvell that was the disc camera - remember them? My Aunt Nan could never take decent photos and these cameras were meant to be so easy to use that we even suggested she got one, I don't remember if she ever took that up. Disc cameras were meant to have virtually eliminated blur, but they did this by using very fast film, so the photos were always very grainy.
I never really knew how old the Praktica was as I bought it second hand. One of the websites I visited today said that they began production in Praktica's Plant in Dresden in the former East Germany in 1972, but anyway - it gave up on me around 1988 and I was advised that it'd be more money than it was worth to fix it. So I took to borrowing my Dad's Olympus OM10 and it became my favorite camera for many years.
I bought a little plastic Olympus compact in 1995, really just to have something small to put in my pocket for my friend Steve's wedding, that became my main camera before I left it, somewhere in Aberdeen on a rather drunken night in 2001. I then took to using a load of cardboard disposable cameras - well, it wouldn't matter if I lost one of them! The cardboard age lasted (with a brief departure with a very very cheap Boots own brand compact) from 2001 to 2004 when my Dad gave me his old compact digital camera, another Olympus and I was in the digital photography age.
I just realised that the Nikon digital SLR is therefore the first SLR I have bought for 25 years!
I'm really struggling to think what my favorite photo is that was taken with the Praktica, but this is pretty representative of the era. Taken by flatmate Nicci Vernolini, this is me and Inca the dog in the autumn of 1985. The Praktica being augmented by a flashgun, bought at great expense (or so it seemed at the time when I also had to buy Led Zeppelin and 10cc records!) the previous year.
I rather like this photo also taken with the Praktica in the Summer of 1985 of Kirkcaldy band, The Crucified Brains.
I can't believe it's been a month since my last post. Well, actually I can. I've been trying to get round to this for ages. I like to think about the internet as a vast sea of content. I think that's a good metaphor - there used to be this great advert in the UK (I think it was for a search engine), of someone with all their bath and sink taps stuck on, drowning. The metaphor was that you could drown in the sea of content that is the internet. So, I've been drowning in all the material for Kirkcaldybands.com in the last few weeks - gots lots of exciting new stuff, posted most of it - many times whilst sitting on planes, in hotels and in cars.
I have had a great batch of material from Mark Nicol (ex Nationwide and Ghost Train, Nationwide are pictured above). Nationwide's original demo sounds great. I only got one track from it, which was "Dusty Bedrooms". Mark thinks this may have been recorded as long ago as 1980, imagine that, 27 years ago!
Since my last post I've also been back in the UK for a week.
I flew through Atlanta on my way to Scotland. I still think Atlanta is a rather strange place. The hotel bus driver took me past a pub on the way to the hotel. Great - I thought somewhere to have a beer and some food before bedtime. However, I went in the pub, having been warned "not to carry anything in the street by the hotel receptionist, as it is a bad area!" and was the only non "African American" person there. Despite a number of funny looks by the other customers, this didn't seem a big problem for anyone there, especially the staff, but it's a shame that 40 years after Martin Luther King died that there is still a form of self-created segregation in the southern states of the US. The pub I was in last year near the hotel was all white!
Some nice food I had in 'Frisco airport before I got the plane. Can you imagine that this was $17 though?
I took lots of nice pics with my new Nikon camera. This is Edinburgh coming into view! I went Continental, I like to support the airlines that fly direct to Scotland. However, having lost my luggage (then found it again 5 hours later) and neglected to deliver the vegetarian food I ordered, I'm not sure I'll use them again.
Scotland can look beautiful at this time of year. I got great weather when I was there in April, then amazingly good weather in October. I believe the bit in between that I missed was not so good.
I do love the kind of effects you can get shooting in the late afternoon light. This was Broughty Ferry looking particularly lovely.
Had a fun day with my sister (magnusmog.blogspot.com) photographing venues in Kirkcaldy for the website. This one, unlike three of the others that are now old people's homes, looks pretty much the same as I remember it when we played there in 1986.
Back down to Edinburgh later in the week, staying in a different Travel Inn this time. This one is in Lauriston place, sad to say I believe this may have been built on top of the classic Edinburgh goth pub, the Tap of Lauriston. At around 10.00 every morning I kept hearing voices.... The above was the answer, the tour buses outside my window, stuck at the traffic lights.
It was great to see the guys again. As a coincidence, my mate Andy of Tom's New Shoes (he's on the right in this pic, Craig who was the bass player of TNS is on the left) was playing with his new band "The Smallest Bones" in Leith on the Saturday when I was there.
Went on a little nostalgia tour of places I used to know. Some of my socialising was screwed up my my cool Sony Ericsson camera phone being no good as a phone in Scotland!
Back to the US via Atlanta Georgia for the Procuri conference.
We had to go up on the stage on the first day in front around 250 people. Good thing it was early on the first day - got it over with quick!
See what I mean, big hall!
My colleague Amit up on the stage.
It was nice to catch up with some of the team in Atlanta again.
They are building some impressive new buildings around where my hotel was in the Buckhead district. Some of these are doing for as much as $1M.
Back home to 'Frisco and is this not the most cliched image of someone in San Francisco you can imagine! Third time on a trolley car, but I'd never hung off the side before! I finally got my green card, having been approved for it back in May. I have a pic of me holding it, but I'm advised I may be a victim of identity fraud if I post that!
Tom's blog about life in America as a Scottish person, appreciating and making music, politics, travel, my own philosophy and other stuff not easy to categorise.
