I have a new hero! There I was, hunting around on youtube for what's happening with the New Zealand Maori haka these days, which seems to be evolving into an entirely new worldwide phenomena, when I stumbled across the most amazing site:
Have always loved Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" so I clicked to listen for a while. Whoa!!! It was some little boy calling himself funtwo improvising TWICE over the top of the record. Totally awesome. Instantly went looking for more by him and found a wealth of material in there; in fact, I discovered he had nearly 80,000,000 hits for one of his numbers ...
I was so impressed I decided to attempt an experiment: how much could I find out about him just from a quick crawl through youtube? Yup! I did it! I did find enough information to put together a short bio and in less than an hour too, and all by trawling through on youtube.
Gosh, I love youtube.
Seems he's originally from South Korea and his name is Jay Lim, at least in New Zealand where he was sent to boarding school as a young boy. His story goes that he couldn't speak much English and felt very alienated, except in music class where he quickly realised the music communicated everything he wanted to say, and thus his guitar became very important to him.
Then, after boarding school, he returned to South Korea where he felt an entirely other sense of alienation - most likely that 'trapped between two worlds' thing - so stayed in his room practising his guitar ... until he finally wanted to finally know how good he actually was so filmed himself playing with the intention of showing a guitarist friend ... whose assessment was to promptly put the clip up on youtube where it went viral.
A shy little fellow, when he realised how popular he'd become, he posted a heap more clips, but all under the name funtwo and all wearing a hat to keep his identity secret. But then he got outed by Korean television ... and that clip is up there in youtube too. I'd post it for you only it's long and all in Korean and only occasionally funny.
Then, once outed, and, as youtube's fourth 'most often favourited' clip-poster, he was invited to play at youtube live with his hero:
Have you ever seen anyone look so happy? It's a Dreams Do Come True moment and I LOVE IT!!!
Now? What he's up to these days? Seems he's back in New Zealand at university studying IT and, for an outlet, busking on the streets of Auckland. Anonymously, naturally, since he's still the shyest and most humble little boy. And those youtube clips are hilarious because you can see all these obviously serious Kiwi musicians lurking in the doorways etc, watching him play and with looks on their faces of the greatest respect and fascination.
His plans for the future? Apparently he's hunting for some way to integrate music and technology ... which instantly made me think ...
As you know, our nephew in New Zealand, a way-gifted guitar legend/IT expert in his own right, is doing this sort of stuff these days and making a real name for himself in the field. So, yes, I sent Reuben a set of links to the boy, and I've just heard back that Reuben is very very interested in meeting him.
A meeting of two like minds? An entire new field waiting to be born? A garden waiting to be fertilised?
Yes indeed. Could this be the start of something great and grand which we'll all hear about one day in the not too distant future?
Only time will tell.
But, gosh, isn't this all so amazing! Youtube is amazing! Jay Lim is amazing! This technology is amazing! And I think the fact that all this took only a day is the most amazing part of all.
Makes me feel very stupid that I'm such a tecnno-phobe!
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