Sicilia, Video

v i d e o : t r a p a n i

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[ 22:56 monday 16 november – haggerston road, london ]

i’ve compiled a five minute edit of the film i recorded in trapani at the end of september. following the pattern of the previous few clips it consists of a succession of brief snippets keeping strictly to the sequence in which they were recorded and retaining the original audio. the only innovation this time is a few captions to provide contextual details. there’s not much narrative, my aim is simply to capture some vignettes of the trip and convey an impression of the whole.

in retrospect animals feature quite strongly. the beautifully-plumed but ill-mannered blue parakeet which attacked me repeatedly at sergio’s family home. the similarly aggressive crab with which sergio did combat. the prawn which alessandro pretended to eat then miraculously brought back to life (it was fine). the giant cricket sergio and i found ricocheting between houses in confusion. the rat we chased and cornered. in between there are glimpses of the sea, of trapani’s crumbling palaces and of the bizarre weather which mystified people through the whole of september.

: c :

Italy, Photography

p h o t o s : sardegna & asinara v 2009

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[ 18:28 saturday 24 october – haggerston road ]

i finally got round to uploading two sets of photos from my trip in may to sardegna and the abandoned prison island of asinara which i wrote about at the time. there are thirteen photos from alghero and the stintino peninsular, then eighty-four pictures from asinara exploring the crumbling prison buildings, the abandoned village at cala d’oliva and the breathtakingly wild coastline where it feels like no human foot treads for months at a time.

: c :

London, Video

v i d e o : c a r n i v al

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[ 21:52 monday 12 october – haggerston road, london ]

i’ve finally edited the film i recorded at the notting hill carnival at the end of august. i spent twelve hours with jan, eric, antonella and martin spanning the parade, sound systems, an illicit steel band session after curfew, revels on the post-carnival streets, a drum circle in tavistock gardens, an after-party at a friend’s house and the slowest bus journey ever back to east london. carnival is the best thing that happens in london.

: c :

In transit, Sicilia, Stromboli, Wanderer

f a c c i e

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[ 08:58 monday 28 september – bus from central palermo to punta raisi airport, sicilia ]

it’s touch and go whether i’ll make my flight back to london. i got to the station quarter of an hour early for my 8:09 train. after twenty minutes it struck me as odd that the station was swarming with people, predominantly school children, but i hadn’t seen a single train. this seemed ominous for peak time on a monday morning. arrivals were being announced and passengers advised to stand back from the edge of the platform but no trains were materialising.

i asked an old man on the platform who said “if the train doesn’t come, maybe the next one will” which was admirably philosophical but not exactly reassuring. 8:09 came and went. then the indicator board mysteriously went blank and details for the 8:39 appeared on the next platform. i searched out an official who apologised that there was a strike and all trains were cancelled.

once i would have felt irritated that no signs had been put out, no announcements made, to warn travelers of the situation. but my relationship with sicily has reached a point where i accept her foibles, perhaps even feel affection for them. so i simply rushed outside and got a seat in the half-hourly bus which runs from the station to the airport.

that was half an hour ago. this is the peak of the morning rush hour and we’re still battling through the palermo streets towards the autostrada. my chances of reaching the airport before check-in closes are evenly balanced.

i flew into trapani last saturday with sergio and spent several days there with his family. then on tuesday i journeyed to milazzo and took wednesday morning’s first hydrofoil to stromboli. the crew told me a scirocco was rising from the south-east and they were uncertain if they’d be able to dock. indeed there was a large sea running by the time we reached the island three hours later. but they managed to come alongside just long enough for me to leap off.

that was the last boat to dock until saturday. within an hour the waves were crashing down on the quay. there’s a special atmosphere on the island when it’s cut off like this. nobody arrives, nobody leaves. then after two days the wind and sea shifted ninety degrees and a maestrale came up from the north-east. now the waves pounded spiaggia lunga whilst scari and the quay fell into the lea of the island. stromboli was re-connected to the outside world.

yesterday afternoon as i was packing my bags the wind shifted back to the south-east and waves began to lick the sides of the quay again. one of the two companies running hydrofoils to stromboli cancelled their services. but my boat managed to come alongside. the hydrofoil was pitching and lurching alarmingly as we ran up the gangplank. it was the roughest i’ve seen anyone dock there.

the journey back to milazzo was quite an adventure. every few minutes the forward foils would catch a wave and the bow would slam down sending torrents of water over the cabin. i have the greatest admiration for the siremar crews. they continue to operate these machines masterfully under conditions in which most would stay in port. we reached milazzo right on time and i caught the last train to palermo.

it was eleven in the evening when i arrived in palermo. after my time on stromboli and with sergio in trapani i was expecting palermo to be the anti-climax of the trip. but sicily blessed me with one last surprise and i found myself in the chaos of a religious festival in the quarter where i was staying. a huge statue of the madonna was being carried through the streets by young men with priests and white-robed women carrying candles in front and two fifty-piece brass bands following behind. every twenty metres a handbell would ring, the statue would be set down and one of the bearers would shout invocations at the statue at the top of his voice to be affirmed by the rest of the bearers with an impassioned cry of “viva maria!”. all the while the bands kept playing, one alternating with the other to save the musicians from complete exhaustion. it was incredibly moving, there were moments when i had tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat.

dangling my camera, video camera and audio recorder from various limbs i threw myself into the thick of the procession. it took an hour passing down via roma before pausing and turning into piazza sant’anna. the piazza was blazing with ornate festal arches studded with coloured lights. as the procession entered a welter of fireworks commenced which rose to a deafening crescendo. fragments of burning carboard began to rain down and people started retreating nervously before a series of huge explosions marked its finale. the statue passed into the small plain church of maria of the mercede. there was an awkward moment when it came off the ramp to its resting place at the alter, triggering a thrill of terror that some harbinger of bad fortune was about to transpire, then a final heave restored her to her resting place and everyone relaxed.

i ate a carton of panelli on the street, drank a few glasses of rum at the tiny bar “monkey” on the piazza where i met some friendly musicians, then it was time for me to retire and get a few hours’ sleep.

thus sicily continually tests me and shows me her different faces. it is a place, a people, where i find a vividness and intensity of life that raises me above myself.

we are on the autostrada now. i think i will reach the airport in time.

: c :

Italy, London, Video

s a r d e g n a

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[ 02:24 tuesday 25 august – haggerston road, london ]

a couple of weeks ago i made a last-minute escape to sardegna with henry. it’s more than a decade since we last went traveling together so it was high time. we were only there four days but it felt like a couple of weeks. mostly we were far from civilisation scrambling around the rocky coastline, swimming in the clear water, or walking in the interior where few tourists tread.

rather than write about the journey i’ve put together a montage of film clips taken while we were traveling. this is a medium where i still feel like a child with little grasp of grammar or rhythm. but i shall only learn by making things. i welcome any comments.

: c :

London, Video

s c r u m p i n g

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[ 17:39 Friday 21 August – The Trampery, London ]

on wednesday evening sergio and i went out to scrump apples from several burgeoning trees in an islington square. people had already taken all the fruit from the lower branches so we needed a way to reach the higher ones. sergio proposed we should take a ladder but i suggested he use his jumping stilts. this worked a treat and we came home with seven kilograms of delicious crunchy pink-fleshed apples.

i filmed the whole escapade on my new video camera. last night i edited it and uploaded it. apologies for the rampant wind noise. it appears i need to obtain a baffle. i hope you enjoy the clip anyway. may it inspire you to harvest urban fruit!

: c :

London, Wanderer

c r o w d f u n d i n g

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[ 23:33 wednesday 19 august – haggerston road, london ]

when trampoline raised three million pounds in 2007 the business plan anticipated raising further investment at the start of 2009. i duly started speaking to venture capital firms this spring. trampoline is widely respected and the field of social analytics is gaining attention. but the financial crisis has led firms to cut back on investing, allocate more money to their existing portfolios and focus new investment on ventures that are either tiny or close to profitability. businesses like trampoline which have completed product development but are just starting commercialisation are finding it impossible to raise finance from conventional sources. one fund after another turned us away.

the realisation that we weren’t going to be able to raise more capital was terrifying. i’m responsible for a dozen people’s livelihoods and the trust that my friends placed in me when they invested at the beginning. it was particularly galling to think that six years’s effort would be thrown away just as we were on the cusp of seeing the payoff. the orthodox choices in this situation would be to sack most of the workforce or try to sell the business for anything we could get. i felt trapped at the centre of a dimishing set of choices.

then one evening, after dinner with my friend eric, i had a wild idea. i’d heard of a technique called “crowdfunding” where the internet is used to raise small sums (generally below a hundred thousand pounds) from thousands of people. it’s been used in the film and music industry, but never to finance a technology business. why shouldn’t trampoline be the first to do it?

the next morning i scribbled down a one-page outline describing my idea and sent it round the management team. i half expected people to tell me i was insane. but they didn’t. several days later, after thinking through the details, we assembled the whole company and told them we were setting out to raise one million pounds from up to a hundred investors with a minimum stake of ten thousand pounds.

i spent most of july with lawyers working out how to could operate the crowdfunding process within the regulations policed by britain’s financial services authority. a breach could result in criminal charges being brought against me and craig as directors so there was a strong incentive to get it right.

finally on the twenty-ninth of july we unveiled the scheme to the world and it immediately started attracting attention. the financial times wrote a feature when we made the announcement and quoted me in another article a few days later. the sunday telegraph published a feature examining the implications of what we were doing. last week the venture capital and start-up blog techcrunch posted a story about us which brought several thousand people to our website. most importantly we started to be contacted by people wanting to find out more about the company with a view to investing.

like any innovation it’s impossible to predict how the process will unfold. but we already have commitments for a third of the sum we’re seeking to raise. i’m hopeful we will be successful.

all the details of trampoline’s crowdfunding initiative are on the web at http://crowdfunding.trampolinesystems.com.

: c :

In transit, UK, Wanderer

r i v e r b o r n e

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[ 18:56 sunday 2 august – river stort, roydon, essex ]

sitting in the saloon of volker’s barge as the evening sun filters through the trees and sparkles on the river outside. it’s an old dutch barge to which a superstructure was added in the seventies. there’s lots of light and space. most of the time volker lives on a mooring at springfield marina on the river lea at clapton in east london. when he gets sick of london he just unties and takes the boat somewhere else for a week or two. in the nineteenth century railways were often built close to the routes of canals constucted in the eighteenth century. as a result it’s generally possible for volker to moor close to a station and commute back to london for his work lecturing at university college london. it’s an excellent way to accommodate elements of nomadism within the vicissitudes of urban life.

yesterday afternoon i took a train through the grimy north london suburbs and out to cheshunt in hertfordshire. from there a short bike ride brought me to the river and volker’s boat. we chugged upriver for the next few hours. the leaden sky became progressively heavier and heavier as we went. finally they opened and unleashed a downpour. volker sprang out on the foredeck and scrubbed it down in the rain, getting soaked in the process. i always loved to be by water in the rain.

near hoddesdon we turned onto the river stort which quickly became narrower and wilder. many of britain’s rivers were canalised in the late eighteenth century. in some cases the natural character of the river survives more or less intact. in others the imposition of man was more intense and the river feels like an artificial creation. we went a little way then moored under some trees. then we walked a little way to a secluded lake where we stripped and swam. it was bliss.

this morning we continued up to roydon in essex until a modern railway bridge thwarted us. the coach-house roof was just a couple of centimetres too high to pass beneath. we considered inviting some plump fellows from a pub to clamber aboard or opening the cocks and letting water into the bilge to lower the boat so we could pass beneath. but finally we admitted defeat, moored by the railway station and continued our exploration by bike. by this time the sky had cleared and the sun was shining so it was a pleasure to unhitch our bikes from the taffrail and set off across the fields.

we just returned to the boat and opened a couple of peronis. later this evening i’ll get the train back to london.

this trip marks my first outing with a new solid state video camera i had shipped from tokyo. it’s been interesting to use it in parallel with my stills camera. it will take a while for me to develop habits and style with it but already i find myself starting to parse subjects for still or moving capture. it will be interesting to see the results back in london.

: c :