Recommended Media:
August Bank Holiday Weekend IS Greenbelt. Sometimes it feels like the banks are closed in honour of it. For 19 of the last 21 last-weekend-in-Augusts I’ve spent my time in a field (til ‘99) or racecourse (the fest has been in Cheltenham for 11 years) engaged in four simple pleasures:
It seems that one of the many obstructions to the balanced discussion about resourcing talent development is the semantic gulf between the (perfectly understandable) sense of entitlement that some artists have about their art, and their art-practice and the impartiality that has to be built into the structure of any resource body (whether its an arts centre, educational facility, funding body, collective or festival). The outworking of that impartiality can often seem like a personal affront to the artist’s sense that their own work is of huge significance (More …)
Today I’m in Edinburgh with Amplified, at the ‘Talent Development Symposium’, co-sponsored by Festivals Edinburgh and The Arts Council. The Amp stuff will be posted at http://www.amplified10.com/tds10/, and there’s already a post I’ve put up there with a series of questions that face The Arts Sector.
So one thing I thought it’d be good to chat about is funding, and experiences with funding thus far. So, as the title says, have you ever been funded? (More …)
Nope, this isn’t a brainstorm on the future of the music industry. Well, at least, not directly.
You’ve read my novel, right? If you haven’t, click here to read about it and download it for free. (probably best to go read it, then come back here to read the comments, as there may well be spoilers implicit within what people write…)
It’s about a band. They go through a bit of a crisis, and a change, and things happen.
I’m really proud of it, enjoyed writing it and enjoy reading it back. I like the characters, so am wondering what to do next with them.
So I thought it’d be fun to ask you lot what you think should happen in Vol II.
So, have at it – the comments are yours. If I end up using any of them in the book, I’ll send you a free CD. 
Just had a fabulous 3 part Audioboo chat with Mike Radcliffe, AKA @artbizness off of the internets. Mike is both a very skilled and thoughtful artists (mixed media visual art and poetry mainly, but also music and video) and a fascinating thinker about art and the artistic process.
We were joined at one point by another fabulous art thinker, Maggi Dawn, so that’s here as well, in the continuum of the conversation. Enjoy, and feel free to post your comments and thoughts on the conversation:
Ever been to something so great that mere words always felt inadequate to convey to those who hadn’t been there just how cool it was? Or had so many great experiences in a weekend that you bored the arse off anyone who dared to ask how it went?
If you have, you’re on the way to understanding the importance of social media in the context of an event like Greenbelt. Greenbelt’s strength and weakness are largely the same thing – it’s an utterly unique event. Unlike anything else that I’ve ever been to, and as such, impossibly difficult to do justice to when explaining it.
It’s also such a varied experience – from the program to the people, the food to the weather, the music to the art, the politics to the comedy… and the many overlaps between them…
So how does a story like that get told?
The more media we can throw out there that is in and of itself interesting, inspiring, funny, creative, the easier it is for people looking at that stuff to assemble a version of the Greenbelt story that makes sense to them. I can use other people’s photos and video to tell my story, and they can use my blog posts and audioboo recordings to tell theirs. We share, we talk about what interests us, we capture what we can, however we can, by being there and playing with gadgets.
It’s a wonderful addition to the festival experience, and will in coming years become an ever more vital part of the public face of Greenbelt – an event I can’t even begin to sum up adequately in a way that everyone who reads this will relate to. And now I don’t have to. I can point to specific things for specific people, I can tag the media to make it findable to those who might look for it, we can filter, stream, aggregate, embed, share and contextualise. And Greenbelt can aggregate it all to the front page of the website.
[EDIT] – here’s me talking to Jon Bounds (@ on twitter) about these same themes. He’s a very smart man:
Jon Bounds & Steve Lawson on social media, web technology & conversational psycho-geography from Greenbelt Festival on Vimeo.
I love living now.
This year is my 17th Greenbelt. At 4 days a year, that’s over 2 months of my life spent either in a field – or on Cheltenham Racecourse – listening to music (and most years playing it to), listening to talks, seminars and debates, hanging out with friends – and meeting loads of new ones – and failing to sleep uncomfortably in a tent.
As a 17 year old the importance of my first Greenbelt was almost entirely cultural – I saw 60 bands in 4 days in my first year here. The cultural importance was merely that they weren’t all shit, and some were even rather good. One or two were bands that my friends at school would’ve heard of. As a kid growing up with a huge social and cultural gulf between his school-life and his church-life in the late 80s, that was significant. It was the kind of place that I could’ve brought my friends, and not cringed at the supreme bogusness of everything that went on. It was also the kind of place where ‘bringing your friends’ wasn’t the aim. There was no clandestine intention to it, no need to proselytize, just ‘be’.
Over the next 10 years (’90-2000), Greenbelt, despite being one weekend a year, helped shape, inform and challenge my nascent political and spiritual development and exploration. The Evangelicalism of my youth was pulled apart and reconstructed without the mind-numbing anti-intellectualism and adolescent treatment of doubt and conformity. My innate discomfort with all kinds of fundamentalism – religious, anti-religious or that most vociferous of English fundamentalisms; football – was given a voice, a cogent argument and the reminder that the hatred of fundamentalists is its own kind of pernicious fundie-ism.
Everything was up for debate, but nothing was thrown away just because it wasn’t cool, or didn’t fit the latest intellectual fad. The debate was grown-up, the conclusions were almost always qualified with the terms of the ongoing debate, the route into a personal journey that could end anywhere, and the success or failure of that journey wasn’t defined by the desired outcome of any other ideological group.
The seminars I went to and the books I bought at Greenbelt were utterly pivotal to me ending up where I am now…
Where am I? That’s not really any of your business 
– it’s certainly not pivotal to whether or not Greenbelt’s role in my life has been overwhelmingly good. It has. And it has been in the lives of people whose conclusions about the questions they were encouraged to explore were completely different to mine.
It continues to occupy a place in my life that causes me to think, question, challenge and to lean ever more heavily on Grace, forgiveness and the ‘death of smug’.
A friend on twitter has the phrase on her avatar “Let’s Make Better Mistakes Tomorrow” – each of us is, as Wavy Gravy said, a temple of accumulated error, and Greenbelt is pretty much the only place I’ve able to consistently forgive my error-filled messed up self, and explore how to make better mistakes. Long may in continue.
Ornette Coleman’s Meltdown is well underway in London - the one downside of Lo and I heading of to Geneva this weekend was that we missed seeing The Roots at the Festival Hall, as part of the fest. Shame. (More …)
