I absolutely love this. Afer a few thousand hours of watching MTV in the 90's I'm pretty much burned out with chicks shaking their booty to tell me that something is hot, cool or sexy. Also I find putting myself out to listen to new music is tough in a Youtube format even if it's excellent content from people I trust to click through. 

I want to listen to new stuff with people, to get their opinion, feel some context and that's difficult if nobody is around or has time to spare. These three elderly music reviewers are just great. Joe on the right is open minded and thoughtful for an old codger. Ann seems a bit uncouth and lacks real depth but she is sparky and everybody's opinion counts. Bill is a bit in between and I guess balances things out a bit.

What's great for me is that they take an easy to click away format through to proper engagement. Of course that's because it's me we're talking about and maybe a lot of young people will find it a tortuous way to listen to music. I'm just glad that the elderly get a crack at the whip in a way that isn't charitably forced. It just works for me. What do you think?

I read about these guys a while back and loved the description of Pschedelic Khmer surf rock. Cambodia is quite special to me as most of my close Thai friends are Khmer in ethnic origin living close to the border and speak Khmer around me. It's also quite timely  after the border dispute over what is obviously a Khmer temple (the architecture speaks for itself) with Thailand bullying Cambodia and flexing its nationalistic muscles (when involving weaker neighbours) over the disputed territory.

Anyway I  was just awoken from a jet lag catch up sleep to the track 'Seeing Hands' and was catapulted back into some amazing nights in Phnom Penh and road trips to Angor Wat in Siem Reap. Khmer Culture is still such a mystery in many ways but here's a bit of recombinant music culture from Dengue Fever on Myspace that stretches from the surfing coast of Los Angeles to the Heart of Darkness. Click on the track called Singing Hands.

It's so good to hear that this music is also connecting in Cambodia with a generation that haven't heard this genre since the late sixites as both the music and the people  were all obliterated in the genocide and insanity of Pol Pot's ultra communist agrarian revolution with the Khmer Rouge. I feel I need to stop off in Phnom Penh sooner than I realised on long delayed trip I need to make to Vietnam. It's on the way I guess. Read about Dengue Fever over here if the music grabs you.

Tenuous link picture of me struggling with a surf board last week ;)

We're very lucky to have this building barely two minutes away from my house here in Beijing . I've been making the most of it and dropping-by on my electric bike and buying random tickets for the Ballet, Pianists and Orchestras. It's called 'The Egg' locally for reasons I can't figure out.

Last Monday a colleague and I went to see the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and they were seamless. A real transportation away from the outside world, conducted by the hugely talented Yannick Nézet-Séguin from Montreal. A classical superstar in the making , along with a sublime performance by the pianist from Shanghai called Yundi Li who was definitely on another level when he played a Prokofiev piece, Piano Concerto No. 2 in g minor, OP. 16 which is hideously dark, complex and confrontational. I loved it.

Just in case you've got loads of time on your hands there's an expression I picked up in Thailand from a P.R. professional, that also applies here in China. Do it first and ask for forgiveness afterwards. This is how we roll as Sam might say.

Late in the afternoon last week for no apparent reason the phone started ringing off the hook with work things. So I dragged my sorry rear into the West End mainly to get off my well honed reclining-position as earlier I'd been sucked into responding to Robs post to cover my partially exposed butt on brand values. Frankly I was close to bailing out Stateside for an overdue meetup, but a combination of a delayed reply that I've been waiting on, filed in 'the dog ate my emails' folder, and a sudden offer to get stuck into some charity rebranding tipped me over to taking on a gig on that meant a 4am start the next day up in Glasgow doing groups. These included in the afternoon, some young men who don't necessarily think too much about being electronically tagged while keeping a curfew - yeah Punk Planning my friends.

So far its been an exhausting but eyeopening experience and since the kickoff I've also covered Cardiff, a small mining village in the county borough of Caerphilly as well as Sutton Coldfield near Birmingham and Gloucester today. I should wrap up in a few days time but until then I've started to ask myself if the idea of an open source C.I development methodology might be an effective way to meet the objectives of keeping a very disparate bunch of people that range from local government, charity workers and young folk in need of a helping hand onboard and 'buying into' a process which one guy memorably articulated as 'reeking of insincerity' when referring to the the way 'brand' talks.

Here's the deal; most of the people that I've spoken to are really sceptical of anything that relates to marketing and the reason for that is they actually do stuff rather than waffle on about it like a lot of us ad tossers do. Its also increasingly evident that as with any change management a shiny new badge can be a reasonably useful point to coalesce around for a new direction. The reality is that unlike that rare and mythical beast called a proper brand (people getting mugged for Levis in 80's Moscow and ditto for iPods in the 3rd millennium) they probably will never be more famous than say top of mind prompted-recall within a specific charity segment, even if as I have discovered time and again since last Thursday they are off-the-richter-scale for complexity in stakeholders and financial solutions. Not to mention diversity of projects and doing a lot of hands on work.

I'm probing some architecture, platform and proposition dimensions that are not far removed from interrogation of (deep breath) third party projection of the meaning-of-meaning for say deprived young'uns with low attention spans - you get my drift? OK I'm exaggerating a tad, but that whole brand personality malarkey isn't moving mountains for me if people have to think about it. I mean personality is surely something people can spontaneously remark on and unwittingly have, acquire and possibly nurture. Surely its not something that can be scored from the nearest council estate corner gathering, and falls neatly between say a "chav" brand and one that "tells you what to do" as one group earlier today outlined when discussing those "Just do it" people. I guess I'm taking shots at some of the FMCG navel-gazing research gigs I've had to oversea in my time. But there is some overlap with whats going on here.

So in the interests of suggesting a kick-ass methodology for a participatory media process that embraces uncertainty and welcomes the digitalocracy of the web I thought I'd run the idea past you folk in case anyone else has thought about the idea of opening up the development of identity architecture real-time on the web. The immediate pluses for this method are that everyone gets a say and feels that they have been part of the consultation process, one or two egos/agendas don't hijack the process as invariably happens when settling on a least contentious communication platforms. Any thoughts? Is this taking 2.0 a bit far? Could it all go peaches up or as I really suspect, the P.R from the process could be worth considerably more than a years communication budget, given that nobody has ever done it before and that somebody will surely be extremely upset about the loss of control - which is a good thing in my book.

Other than that there are a quite a few other things kicking off and I'll leave you with the best post for ages. If any of you wannabes want to know what planning is about then check out this slice of action that absorbs people of our stargazing ilk who can't ever help stop thinking - albeit in my case pretty uselessly. It also gives me a chance to use that picture of ChinaD0II that has been lurking on my desktop before I dig out some of the great podcasts I'm still gagging to tip y'all off about.