thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

John Cooper Clarke was like some wordy icarus who flew too close to the sun & got sucked in by a blackhole Never mind the metaphors – on Thursday he was back, better than ever in Auckland town live at the Kings Arms.

“People all ask me the same question  -John – How did you get here? I tell them – In a Hirecar baby“

Cue an avalanche of free association poetry all about the things we may have done to a hire car, then it’s on to the next story; chuckling all the way. John seemed very much like Sam Hunts funnier twin brother –  at ease with the world and its ambiguities and evidently pleased to be here.

“Marine Biology is to our decade what media studies was in in the ’90s. Are there any marine biologists in the audience ? Apparently its all because of David Attenborough’s Blue Planet. So the question for all marine biologists is – What would the real sea level be  if there weren’t a whole lot 0f sponges down there (under the waves.)”

And so it went. Or as close as I can remember it. Photos below courtesy of Jonathan Ganley from  http://www.pointthatthing.com

John Cooper Clarke at the Kings Arms, Auckland, March 22 2012

Something very delicious about hearing a poet in freeflow and especially one who is obviously having such an excellent time of it.

Looking around the audience I spotted a few people who I haven’t seen since the early ’80′s. Good on them for getting off the couch for the night . There is obvious comedy just looking around at an average age 50 something audience. For Cooper Clarke this was a cue for a joke about Easter eggs and Alzheimer’s. So there we were – a whole crowd full of musical time travellers from an age when music really meant something.

The audience all had great stories. One woman told me all about her first year at uni and when I asked her what she studied – it was medicine but it was the music she remembered best. My first year at uni was ’77 and the shock and thrill of watching the birth of punk rock was truly a moment in time worthy of legend. Even if we couldn’t get any of it (the music) right then we felt the seismic shockwave from 12,000 km? miles away.

Johnny Green at the Kings Arms, Auckland, March 22 2012 © jonathan ganley 2012

As Johnny Green said on Thursday “It was all about attitude” it didn’t matter that no one could play or sing. Green who was road manager for the Clash ( Topper Headon story here)  wrote a book about this. He read a few pages from “A Riot of Our Own: Night and Day with the Clash“ as the warm-up for Cooper Clarke. Green talked about the “London Calling” album – how the record company didn’t want to release it and what do you do after working with the Clash. In his case he went to Texas. Thought I heard Townes van Zandt mentioned here as one of those Johnny worked with but I could be wrong (anyone know?)

When I was a student one big luxury was reading as much poetry as I could get my hands on. I even used to write a few lines. What I loved then and still do now – is the idea that a few words and ideas can resonate in a way that is concise but at the very same time open to multiple flights of fancy.

The closest most of us get to poetry are songs that like some kind of incantation recall a time and a place in our memory. A great song/poem  becomes a stepping off place for the imagination to lift the spirit and move us in a day and age when nothing much else has that kind of cut through. Daniel Levitin is the music and memory guy, but Thursday was all about being there and making a new memory.

It’s a cliche but I can remember whole blocks of life by remembering where I was when I first heard a certain song. Some songs are way better than others at rinsing out every colour and capturing every aspect of their life pulse. Cooper Clarke for me was a master then and clearly still has it in 2012.

Here is one of those songs that for me captures a certain time in 1980 when music reconnected with the street. I still remember it vividly like it was yesterday…

“Spend a year in a couple of hrs, Where the action isn’t , That’s where it is…”

“The rats have all got rickets
They spit through broken teeth
The name of the game is not cricket
Caught out on Beasley Street

..cars collide, colours clash..” *

These lines come from John Cooper Clarke’s song Beasley St off the Snap, Crackle and Bop album. For a time there, Clarke single-handedly re-introduced poetry into the culture of the day. So much so that I used his poems to teach high school students cramming for English exams (in 1982.) At the time It was fun and a respite from the official curriculum. Now apparently in the UK Twat is on the official syllabus but we did it here first. Best of all – my students all flew through their English exams.

Clarke’s rapid fire spoken word delivery is still striking even after more than 30 years. A couple of years ago (2009) he gave this interview – a life of rhyme – his first in 20 years.

Many of those at the concert heard the excellent Radio NZ interview on the Kim Hill radio show Sat 3rd Mar.

Full link below if this one doesn’t work for you.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2511667/john-cooper-clarke-poetry-and-punk

Another recent NZ interview by Marty Duda on 13th Floor

Thank you John Cooper Clarke. Now if only I could remember the rest of the concert – I’m off to hide my own Easter eggs just now.

Note: I wrote the second part of this about Beasley St back in April 2011- just never published it and so the concert was an extra delight to be able to hear Cooper Clarke live and dangerous and seemed the perfect time to refresh my memory.

* For some reason this line connects me straight back to Bruce Cockburn’s Tokyo song from Humans 1980

“pachinko jingle and space torpedo beams. Comic book violence and escaping steam”

Great music makes time travel easy, but that is from another master songwriter and another story for another day.

There is an old myth that Eskimo have a very large number of words for snow.

At first that seems like it could be true given the apparent lack of change in the Northern landscape. Its a nice idea though.

For me I like the idea of precision and being able to cut through to the core significance of whatever the subject matter is. And yet..

sometimes we find we just have no words to describe what is happening around us.

Truth is we interpret everything based on out own frameworks and vocabulary : yet shared experiences can be richer when there are no words or when words fail to capture that depth of experience.

Not so long ago I went for a walk with a friend who was very sick. We’d already talked that one out and walking was just a simple pleasure and enough by itself.

I never saw him again (as it happened -RIP) but there was a kind of shared communion in that walk.

Just recently I made time to be with a friend and to consciously just sit and watch the sunset together.

We talked about everything and nothing and yet there is a kind of alignment that comes with being present and making to time to share. Not easy to timetable but important to do.

Technology has exploded the natural limits of friendship and how we can be together.

When you also work in a technology sector that means tuning into both physical and virtual spaces which can be very different but rewarding when you do.

Chris Brogan wrote back in 2007

“I need more words for “friend.” What do you call that person you really like a lot, but have only met in person once? What do you call that person you wish you spent more time with, but who you connect with every time you’re together?”

He was talking about the kind of new connection that is more easily possible in a world of twitter, skype and facebook where the context between us has changed in new and interesting ways.

The Bogardus Social Distance Scale asks people the extent to which they would be accepting of each group and attempts to measure the context.

The scale starts at close relatives by marriage ( would you marry this person, live next door or work with them etc.) ranging down via close personal friends, neighbours, co-workers, citizens, visitors and eventually to a group of people you would want to exclude from your country.

As a scale it has been around since 1925 and as you might expect more recent measurements show closer relationship patterns than when the theory was first proposed.

What I’ve been thinking about is – how different my world is to my parents and how it is possible to have close friends who may start as colleagues and friends but mean much, much more.

This is due to the frequency and ease of communications may even rate above the top tier (or pretty close to it) somewhere between close friends and family.

I call this the “who do I most want to share Christmas with test”.

This year has been another exciting year of journey and discovery. I got to work on a project in Africa (small beginnings but big plans – FirstSpaceFiber) a number of non-profits I like ( Cycle Action , TEDxAuckland, WordcampNZ , Arts Therapy et ors.) and some pathfinding ( OperationHQ) with clever, clever people just to name a few.

I also got to spend more time with people I like, love and want to spend my Christmas with.

In the words of the song

” I once lived for the future, every day was one day closer..greener on the other side.. I can give you the present… “

Stuff & Nonsense – Split Enz. (love the version by Missy Higgins)

Happy Christmas people. Love & affection.

One of the recurring themes in online marketing is how balance the demands of creative content generation with the imperatives of structure and management thinking including what is known as the managers timetable.

Paul Graham understands the dilemma very well and writes about this in a recent essay Makers Schedule, Managers Schedule. It is worth reading the whole essay (and as many of Paul’s other essays as you can. )

This paragraph captures the essential conflict between the two timetables.

“When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I’d sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called “business stuff.”

I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager’s schedule and one on the maker’s.”

Being a problem solver in the online world requires all kind of creative and management skills and often the need to flick between different modes and experience sets. As a creative generalist I can switch from sales to business analysis to design to coding to project management and then account management all in the same day depending on the projects and clients.

That is not ideal but for many small to medium sized businesses that is the daily challenge.  If they are lucky they might have a core team of at least three people who can spend most of their time focussed in a particular quadrant.

As the business grows the challenge for business owners is to find people who can inhabit a skill-set and subject discipline in a way that brings out the best in them and their respective teams.

In adland this might be represented by a creative, a suit (sales – account manager /director) and a finance /admin team. There would also be a strategic planner who does much of the navigation between the creative (making) side and the management end of the scale. It is no accident that ad agencies are structured like this.

This type of approach makes sense for software development teams as well. However the creative element in programming is not as well understood as it is in advertising circles and it should be.

Flow State and What the Client really Wants

When working with programmers I often observe them meandering around the code universe in search of what – they are never quite sure  all the time. Certain types of programing  involves chaining functional units together in a sequence to complete several processes and perform an series of actions in a type of language and syntax so that it makes sense to co-workers and obeys certain rules and constraints.

There are different approaches of course but some variation on the simple sequencing of connected actions is built up over time to – lets say automate a business process. Once the basics are built there may be further refinements and testing against known user scenarios and other systems. There might also be optimisation and refactoring to make certain sequences run faster under expected load conditions and there might be a whole separate level of presentation design or user interface experience to consider.

Tech people sometimes talk about this in terms of layers or tiers. What most users see is the presentation layer and that might require a high level of design complexity and much more of a creative element.

The next layer might be the business process / rules engine where just like Chess pieces the code sets can only work in predetermined ways.  The bottom layer might be the data set where the database people talk about tables and fields and database integrity.

The thing is that when wearing our managers hat we often lump all those types of work into a discipline called programming when there are lots really different activities going on.

Every programmer seems to have a different routine for producing “the code”.  They all seem to involve some kind of elaborate warm up where they throw out most of the previous days “work” and start again (or it might be a co-workers code.)

On the makers schedule a programmer might spend an hour or two iterating very small but elaborate steps in a process until they get into more of a “flow state” where they are figuratively and mentally warmed up and can then perform at the peak of their powers.

What the manager wants to do is bill all hours used even if some hours are not as productive as others. From the programmers perspective becomes a little like like warming up to play a piece of music by doing scales and seeming random discursive activities around a “problem” piece.

Programming is like Musical Composition

What programmers and musicians don’t always know is that when they repeat a riff is exactly where it fits in the overall composition and sometimes they just have to code around pieces until the magic appears.

From experience I’ve found that many of the best programmers are also musicians.  I don’t believe that is a coincidence at all.

Anyway what the client really wants to pay for is the golden notes at the end of the second set when the magic pixie dust starts to hit and the dance floor lights up.  That section might be only a few minutes but to get those magic moments might have taken a day of programming or a day in the studio to capture if you were a musician.

As a manager the trick to to try and balance as much of the routine low level coding and making processes with as much of the magic output process to create the best environment for staff to do this.

As managers -we should try to not interrupt the makers flow so we can all get to those golden notes as soon as possible.

Lou Donaldson

This is also the difference between good and great.

Building a great website is a bit like putting on a jazz concert starting with swing, changing the style to bebop and then closing out the set with a magnificent free jazz blowout.

Programmers can be virtuosos in exactly the same way as musicians where mastery of several languages and idioms can give rise to a new art form. To complete the analogy, as managers we set up the the stage – make sure everything works; the makers practice, practice and practice some more.

We then throw open the curtains on opening night and the makers play a set of predefined musical riffs and hope it catches fire with the audiences feet.

We hope for the same thing when we post a blog or throw open the doors on a new web based community.

In the words of Lou Donaldson (alto Sax) from a 1970 Blue Note recording of the same name.

“Everything I play  gone be funky from now on…
Everything I play gone be funky from now on”

(Repeat with organ, break beats & horn section until it really flys.)

If only it was that easy.

Managers and makers – what do you think? – are we making it easy to produce the best results for clients?