Great white, where?

I was floating around in the ocean yesterday when my mate Damo asked me if I'd seen the Gold Coast Bulletin this weekend. I hadn't of course, because I don't live on the Goldie. He smirked, out of the side of his mouth, and then asked why I thought there were so many jet skis driving up and down the beach, outside of the lineup? I thought that this was reasonably normal, though there were more skis than you get on your average day at the beach.

By now my appetite for information on what was behind these questions had been whet. Ususally when you're out having a surf with your mates, the talk centres on football or cricket results, what happened during the week, and other such subjects. Finally, Damo says, "They caught a great white, right here, at lunch time on Friday. And they caught another one last week down at Rainbow".

I burst out laughing.

I spent most of my youth in Western Australia going surfing every weekend, and I spent heaps of time swimming and snorkelling along most of the coast from Warroorra Station north of Carnarvon down to Esperance in the Bight. WA is renowned for it's sharks, and particularly its Whites thanks to the rich waters full of aquatic life that the Leeuwin current brings down from Indonesia. As a person who likes to spend time in the ocean, I've come to an understanding that there are fast fish with big teeth that may want to nibble on your extremities from time to time, if for no other reason than to check you out. Sometimes they want to eat you, but not often. So I'm resiled to the possibility, the potential, of a shark encounter every time I go into the water. I've seen a few out there too, but not many. You can mitigate the risk significantly by staying out of the water at night, at dusk and at dawn, and I do this as a matter of policy. But that is a mitigation only. The risk is never fully diminished.

Sharks draw a primal fear in almost everyone. Their appearance and skill in the water puts we humans many rungs below them in the food chain and there is nothing that can be done should they choose to bite you. Motor cars and aeroplanes provide far more compelling statistics for people to meet an early death, however these machines are so workaday that we barely give them much of a thought. Cars and planes don't look like this either:



So I burst out laughing. And then I caught another wave and it didn't enter my mind again until this morning. If your time's up, well what can you do but accept it and enjoy the waves?

The story from the Bulletin is here: http://www.goldcoast.com.au/article/2008/10/18/17657_gold-coast-lead-story.html

Some new entries

It took me a bit of time to get going, but I've penned my first proper entry for the Elite Force's Tech Funk Manifesto, which can be seen here.

The Dan F piece is on there too.

Big

We surfed and surfed and surfed, last year in Brasil. Every day. We had the tide charts and revolved our existence around when it was low or when it was high, or whenever it would give us the best waves. We crammed ourselves and our 7'2" board into the mini-bus to take us to the Praia de Madeiro, and descended the huge stair case down the sand cliff every morning, peering through the foliage to catch a first glimpse of the swell, and listening all the time to try discern the size of the waves from the impact of the lip upon breaking over the sand bottom. When we moved from Pipa to Morro de Sao Paulo, off the coast of Salvador, it was the same. This break was the rocky reef kind, with heads of coral that poked through the face of the small sets, daring you to take off deeper inside, to run the gauntlet. And it wrapped beautifully in towards you on the right-hander, so that if you positioned yourself just so, you could sit in the pocket of the wave, with the spinning whitewater at your right heel, and the green face peaking and open in front of your face.

I can't explain why, but upon returning to Australia, there was so much stuff to do. There were gigs to play, birthdays, engagements and weddings to attend, those pesky five days a week at the office, rebuilding after the fire and who knows what else. Only twice in a year did we make it to a beach with board in hand, and with the fitness required to paddle, duckdive and push your body into the standing position mostly gone, the surfing was difficult and a little unsatisfying. Because to know what you are capable of, and to have lost it for reasons and activities that you can't remember as being that important, and in remembering the joy and thrill of surfing, well it hangs a gloom over the motivations for this life in 2008.

So we made a pact: To make the effort to get down to the beach and paddle, and duckdive and push ourselves into that riding position and have more of the joy and thrill that surfing provides in its unique way. To feel the wiry spring of the salt in your hair, and the crust of it on your skin. The fear as a big one looms overhead, breaking. And the yes! of making it through the bottom turn while your body is pulled and stretched as gravity takes your feet downwards and you keep your arms upwards.

I s'pose the guys who tow in to cliffs of water at 60km/h know that feeling well, and are as addicted as any person could possibly be. Why else would a guy like Mike Parsons do what he does?

More blogging

Possibly the most overused word in internet parlance today is blogging. Fast becoming a synonym for rubbish-speak, crap and waffle, I no doubt have made my own contribution to the piles of bullshit bytes gathering in little-visited web pages all over the world.

And so, miraculously, a fellow of some repute in the music stakes reckons that when I concentrate on my writing, it's pretty good. The subject of that recent bit of concentration said that he owes me beer for my efforts (I have that in writing, and I always collect).

So my name will shortly be listed next to some other people who write well on a blog that a large number of people actually read. That might be because there's a bunch of free music being posted on it. Or maybe not. Whichever the reason, I am assured of an audience. Check it out at http://techfunkmanifesto.blogspot.com

I expected far less of this Monday.

Jazzman Records

I've been accidentally buying records from the UK's Jazzman label for a few years now. And thinking about it, I reckon I a decent part of my music education (thanks Mum) contained if not these exact sounds, then sounds closely related to them.

So I received a compilation on BGP Records this afternoon called Superfunk 2. It's old school, down home, FUNK. I wonder if this kind of music will die out as a form of tunes that are created by folks in the 2000s? Of the groups I'm aware of (and I'm no aficionado) there are Quantic, The Bamboos, and Breakestra all doing the business. And there's a certain Alice Russell who kills it on the mic too. She's good. And there was some band from Finland I heard recently too, but their name escapes me right now. Hmmm.

I caught this quote on Jazzman's site tonight, and I thought I should share it with the people who read this page, which to my knowledge is currently nobody:

It’s hard to make good music without drawing upon good influence, and we at Jazzman worry about the rubbish that kids today are listening to - it doesn’t bode well for the future of music in this world.

Amen my brothers and sisters. I worry about the rubbish the kidlets are listening too as well. If you were to ask me what sort of music I like, it'd give you a non-committal answer that goes, "Well, I like a lot of different music". I admire producers like Dan F, Elite Force and Meat Katie who are so incredibly dedicated to their sound. I just don't have that single mindedness.

These days I get booked to pay funk, rare groove, hip hop and assorted mid-tempo funkiness, and this makes me happy. I like collecting vinyl too - I get the majority of these types of tunes on wax you see, it makes the gigging easier. So here I am, writing about Jazzman, and funk music, and recalling the Motown music I heard so much of in my youth, unable to focus on one sound, yet exploring decades of recorded output and being satisfied by that. At least I'm honest.