Am loving this at the moment:
You need the sound on to appreciate it, however.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Thursday, November 4, 2010
And They Wonder Why the Rest of the World Doesn't Like Them!
I am flabbergasted. It is beyond my comprehension that this should have occured.
Have you heard about it?
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has congratulated Tonga on its celebrating 40 years of independence, despite Tonga never being a colony. AHHHHHH!
I mean, don't these people have advisers? Or even fact checkers? Even if they don't know these things themselves - and being in a position of authority, you'd think they would have a little general knowledge - you'd think at least ONE person somewhere in their vicinity would at least have an inkling of an idea about the rest of the world? Or at least check before letting some idiot open her mouth on a subject!
This is like an exercise in How to Offend Other Nations. Tonga is a kingdom, and proudly so, and never ever allowed itself to become a colony, so the fact Clinton didn't know this about them is such a slap in their face!
And to confuse Tonga and Fiji? Two nations with several thousand years of rivalry, raiding parties and war between them! BIG ERROR!!!
We all know she meant Fiji! It's our beloved vanualoma that's just turned 40. And we also all know that Fiji became a colony because it was under threat from America, who wanted it so to grow cotton and had already begun slaughtering entire villages of Fijians to make way for planations, and so gave itself to Queen Victoria for one hundred years to protect it from spurious American interests.
And thus it is WE who have been Independent for 40 years.
And to think America doesn't even remember what it did to us back then! Do they really think that intending genocide of another sovereign people is something so ho hum that they can simply FORGET!
And have they also forgotten they are currently trying to get a piece of Fiji to build themselves a naval base? (Please, please, please Fiji, don't let them do this!!!)
And besides every other consideration, do you know what this stupid mix-up has just done? By amply demonstrating how little these people know about us, it's alienated the entire Pacific! And right at the moment in history when China is attempting to woo our islands for their own possibly nefarious purposes! Bad, bad, bad timing, Hillary!!!!
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
The Ghosts of Diwali Past.
Happy Diwali everyone. And here's wishing the Goddess Lakshmi finds your home sparkling clean and so showers you with abundant blessings for the next year.
I love Diwali. In Fiji, it's a major festival and, frankly, so much fun that everyone, regardless of religion or race, celebrates it. And seriously, what's the harm in spring-cleaning your entire world, making sure that there's not a speck of dust, dirt or untidiness in a single part, even those parts you don't normally see, because the Goddess sees all.
And because it's a celebration shared by everyone, it's taken on a range of different features and thus evolved into a real Fiji-bhat hybrid probably unrecognisable back in India. The Fiji bamboo cannons for example. Every year, Fijian villagers make cannons out of bamboo and, down on the beaches and hills, use ghee and kerosine - I think - to make explosions that boom and echo all over our fair land. And they throw flour and water over everyone, which you have to wash off as soon as possible because it quickly turns into rock-hard cement. Good fun, but certainly not part of the festival as it was originally.
And the lights. Whoever can forget those lights.
When we were little, every Diwali we'd all put on our sweet frilly white party dresses and mum would pack us into the car and we'd drive around all our Indian friends where they'd give us wonderful sweets - jelabi and gulagula and lakri and bharfi and those wonderful Turkish Delight-like things only I've forgotten what they're called - and then, after dark, we'd drive around Suva to see all the lights.
When I was very young, everyone used simple clay lamps lining every inch of their house and garden - Lakshmi must be able to see everywhere properly - but as Fiji got richer, the wealthy Gudjaratis decked out their homes in Christmas lights, while among the poor the clay lamps evolved into these truly beautiful crepe paper lanterns ...
... four bamboo spikes wrapped with different coloured paper with a candle in the middle - which always looked amazing. Or the brown paper bag lamps which I continued to use every Diwali when I lived in Australia.
These are exquisite. And so simple too. To make them, you just get a few dozen of those old fashioned, delicious smelling brown paper shopping bags, quarter-fill them with sand, line them up in a row someplace where they won't burn down your house, stick a lit candle in the middle and VOILA!!! I promise, this is the most beautiful gentle light-show imaginable, and an idea stolen from the poorest of the poor in Fiji.
Yeah, I continued to celebrate Diwali when we lived in Australia, if only so my house always got a much-needed yearly scrub-down, however, after we moved to Townsville, those paper bag lanterns were also brought out every Christmas. Had to. We lived on Christmas Light Street - the nickname - because we were the street where, every year, everyone went overboard with the Christmas decorations and thus we had our street blocked off to become a pedestrian mall so families could walk around seeing our neighbourhood light show. Except for us.
I refused to go all competitive and commercial - but mainly to that much trouble - and when the neighbourhood pressure got too great, I broke out the Diwali paper bag lanterns and left it at that. Everyone thought of us as "the poor house" but that was fine by me!
You know, I think I've told you all this before. Let me check.
Oh dear, yes I have. So, if you're interested, last year's memories of Diwali are here, but what do you know, this year's memories are pretty much the same.
But nonetheless, Happy Diwali everyone, and may your house be so sparkling Lakshmi is pleased with you!
I love Diwali. In Fiji, it's a major festival and, frankly, so much fun that everyone, regardless of religion or race, celebrates it. And seriously, what's the harm in spring-cleaning your entire world, making sure that there's not a speck of dust, dirt or untidiness in a single part, even those parts you don't normally see, because the Goddess sees all.
And because it's a celebration shared by everyone, it's taken on a range of different features and thus evolved into a real Fiji-bhat hybrid probably unrecognisable back in India. The Fiji bamboo cannons for example. Every year, Fijian villagers make cannons out of bamboo and, down on the beaches and hills, use ghee and kerosine - I think - to make explosions that boom and echo all over our fair land. And they throw flour and water over everyone, which you have to wash off as soon as possible because it quickly turns into rock-hard cement. Good fun, but certainly not part of the festival as it was originally.
And the lights. Whoever can forget those lights.
When we were little, every Diwali we'd all put on our sweet frilly white party dresses and mum would pack us into the car and we'd drive around all our Indian friends where they'd give us wonderful sweets - jelabi and gulagula and lakri and bharfi and those wonderful Turkish Delight-like things only I've forgotten what they're called - and then, after dark, we'd drive around Suva to see all the lights.
When I was very young, everyone used simple clay lamps lining every inch of their house and garden - Lakshmi must be able to see everywhere properly - but as Fiji got richer, the wealthy Gudjaratis decked out their homes in Christmas lights, while among the poor the clay lamps evolved into these truly beautiful crepe paper lanterns ...
Thanks Maria!
... four bamboo spikes wrapped with different coloured paper with a candle in the middle - which always looked amazing. Or the brown paper bag lamps which I continued to use every Diwali when I lived in Australia.
These are exquisite. And so simple too. To make them, you just get a few dozen of those old fashioned, delicious smelling brown paper shopping bags, quarter-fill them with sand, line them up in a row someplace where they won't burn down your house, stick a lit candle in the middle and VOILA!!! I promise, this is the most beautiful gentle light-show imaginable, and an idea stolen from the poorest of the poor in Fiji.
Yeah, I continued to celebrate Diwali when we lived in Australia, if only so my house always got a much-needed yearly scrub-down, however, after we moved to Townsville, those paper bag lanterns were also brought out every Christmas. Had to. We lived on Christmas Light Street - the nickname - because we were the street where, every year, everyone went overboard with the Christmas decorations and thus we had our street blocked off to become a pedestrian mall so families could walk around seeing our neighbourhood light show. Except for us.
Not our house!
I refused to go all competitive and commercial - but mainly to that much trouble - and when the neighbourhood pressure got too great, I broke out the Diwali paper bag lanterns and left it at that. Everyone thought of us as "the poor house" but that was fine by me!
You know, I think I've told you all this before. Let me check.
Oh dear, yes I have. So, if you're interested, last year's memories of Diwali are here, but what do you know, this year's memories are pretty much the same.
But nonetheless, Happy Diwali everyone, and may your house be so sparkling Lakshmi is pleased with you!
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Stomping on the Hand of God!
Yesterday, I made a stab at getting Jay and Reuben together, thinking that, since they both want to head out in the same direction, that they'd be great partners on an interesting and idiosyncratic journey. But then, last night, I remembered I've been promising myself for years to STOP DOING THAT because it so often ends up with screaming, and, worse, with Well-Meaning Denise being The Bad Guy!
However, that's only because other people are so endlessly, abjectly and infinitely STUPID!
The magnificent and incomparable Carl Jung once said "It is in co-incidence and synchronicity that one sees the hand of god.", and I seem to have spent most of my life in god's hands because co-incidence and synchronicity appear as constant visitors in my life. And when they turn up, I always go along because most of my life's great journeys have started with the hair rising on the back of my neck!
However let me tell you only a few of the stories of what's transpired when I've introduced other people to these Old Friends during their visits:
* Like the time at a friend's wedding, when the young man sitting next to me started telling me about the clothing design degree he'd just got and ended with the line "But my real dream is to design costumes for the opera!"
Oh wow! The hair rose on the back of my neck because only ten minutes earlier I'd been chatting with another guest, a director on the board of one of the world's great opera companies, who'd been telling me that they had just got funding for a trainee costume designer and were about to start looking for a suitable candidate. And here's this little boy telling me ...?
Hand of God, yes?
Anyway, I immediately grab his hand and race him across the room saying "Here's someone you really MUST meet!" I introduce them and while I'm telling her about the young man ... he steals the cocaine stash from her open purse and races off to the bathroom.
Very fraught half an hour with much screaming and abuse and me being The Bad Guy, and after it's sorted, I take the boy out onto the balcony for a ciggie and a long angry rant about the opportunity he's so callously stomped on. And that's when the screaming really started "But you didn't explain! I had no idea. This is all your fault." says the enormously stupid young man!
Yup, I'm The Bad Guy!
* And then there's the time I'm sitting in a cafe with a casting agent who's talking about the trouble she's having casting a certain kiddy role in a film ... when, right at that moment, one of my students passes by. The hair rises on the back of my neck because he was the cleverest little actor who'd often told me how much he wanted to work in films and, best of all, he had exactly the right look she was after. So I call out to him, get him over and introduce them. "Oh my!" says the casting agent. "I see distinct possibilities here. And you say he can act too?"
"He's a great actor." I promise her.
"I'd like to get something on film." she says to him. "Can you come along this afternoon to audition?"
And the boy replies - and I still can't get over this! - with a hair toss, his nose in the air and a voice heavy with the utmost arrogance "I'm a star. Stars don't audition. If you want me for the role, just give it to me."
And this from a simple high school boy who'd never been in a film before!
Casting agent instantly cold shoulders him and me as well and I realise I've just lost a useful friend.
And back at school, several days later, I take the boy aside for a long angry rant about the opportunity he's so callously stomped on. And, yup, that's when the screaming really started "But you didn't explain! I had no idea. This is all your fault." says another enormously stupid young man!
And again, yup, I'm The Bad Guy!
* And then there's the time Marilyn asked me to proofread her PhD thesis on different types of learning remediation from around the world. I'm near the end and reading about how, in Russia, she learned an amazing "unscrambling the synapses" technique for a very rare learning disorder wherein the brain scrambles words into numbers, except she can't put it to the test because it's so rare - 1 in 6 million - and thus she's never found someone to practice it on.
The hair rose on the back of my neck because I had one. Yup, 1 in 6 million and in my classroom at that exact point in time I actually had one. The dearest sweetest little boy and so very clever ... except he had this profound problem with the written word I had never seen before. And here's Marilyn exactly describing it, and then talking about a technique not previously known outside Russia to realign the synapses to sort it out forever. And she can do it in only 6 one hour sessions.
Hand of God?
Instantly I'm on the phone to her and she's so excited "My thesis is due in a month. I just have time to do it." she says. Beautiful, right? Yes, it's so all hand-of-godish and amazing ... until I actually try to organise getting the two of them together.
"No!" says the principal. "We already have remediation in place."
"But regular remediation doesn't work with these kids. It's a problem in their synapses. This is the only chance this boy has to sort it out." I plead with him.
"I think you'll find that isn't the case." says the principal before turning his back on me. "This remediation team is very good."
The opportunity is too good to pass up so I ignore him and go straight to the remediation people.
"No." say the remediation people. "This is an insult to us. He's ours. You stay away from him."
So I ignore them and go straight to his parents. "No." say his parents. "You're not practicing some weird Russian brain technique on our son!"
I tell Marilyn what's happening and she says "Look, I'm not going to do it if it's this much trouble. I don't really have time to do it anyway. It's better we just leave it."
And so the years pass and, no, regular remediation never sorted out his problem, and so this darling little boy just got fatter and fatter and constantly more angry and confused, until, today, he's a no-hoper dropout who smokes a lot of dope and hates everyone. And Marilyn is a professor at an important university and well out of our reach, and to this day, I'm still so angry about all those filthy egos and abject stupidity, I too hate everyone on his behalf.
* There are so many different levels of illegal in this next story, I'll change all the names etc so you can't identify anyone.
Old friend, Penny, had a husband - let's call him Tom - who went barking mad and was dangerously violent too, so she divorced him. Then, right in the middle of the custody battle, he kidnapped their son Mac and vanished into thin air.
Then, about eight months later, Keith and I are traveling somewhere at the farthest ends of the earth when who should we see but ... Tom and Mac.
Hand of God?
Immediately, we're on the phone to Penny telling her and she's immediately on her way with the plan to kidnap him back again.
Keith-the-Straitlaced wants nothing to do with any of this, so I'm on my own, killing time while waiting for Penny to arrive by doing a bit of undercover work; information gathering etc.
With very little effort, I find out where Tom and Mac are living and am doing a lot of sinister lurking in a shop across the road, spying out through the window, trying to see what I can find out that will be useful for Penny when she arrives.
Then, as I'm lurking, I see a young woman come out of the flat below Tom and Mac's place and she heads straight for the shop; straight towards me. OK, she's not the most salubrious-looking soul since she's all butch, tattoos, piercings, shaved head, but when she gets close I notice that, as well as being tall, large and overweight, beneath the fat are great big muscles and, most importantly, she's got very kindly and intelligent eyes ... and so, when she's at the counter buying her cigarettes, I take a big chance and start casually chatting with her.
It's unbelievably wonderful. We have an instant rapport and she's all open and honest with me and starts telling me, with very little prompting, how she hates the guy upstairs because she thinks he's dangerously insane - see, I said she was clever! - and that she's very worried about the young boy he has with him and has tried to talk to him many times to find out his story, but he's forbidden to talk to anyone and too frightened of his father to disobey.
And because we have this trust between us, I tell her about Penny being on her way and the proposed kidnapping attempt ... and this lovely lady says "Count me in! I'm in the perfect place to be your inside man! Whatever you need! Whatever way, shape or form you think I can be useful, I'm in with you 100%."
Penny eventually arrives and I arrange for our new friend - who I actually explained to Penny as "our very own heaven-sent inside man" - to drop by to meet her. "I'd like to introduce you to our new best friend." I say to Penny ...
... Penny takes one look and her face fills with contempt and disgust, rakes her gaze up and down the length of the lovely lady's body and she says "Yuck! Why would we want to be friends with THAT!"
No, I'm not kidding. That's exactly what Penny said. Accompanied it with a lot of shuddering too.
And that's when our inside man, with great dignity, gets up and says "It was nice meeting you, Denise. But please never call me again!" and she stalks out!
Fury! Never have I ever felt such abject fury! In white hot rage, I tell Penny in no uncertain terms what she's done - the real heaven-sent gift she's so callously stomped on ... "But you didn't explain! I had no idea. This is all your fault." she whines at me.
I won't tell you any more about this proposed kidnapping attempt mainly since I don't know a lot since I too walked out, too incandescent with rage to want any part of it, but I do know it went horribly awry and it was Penny who ended up in a foreign mental institution!
Yup, again I'm The Bad Guy!
There are more stories, a great many more stories, along these lines. So many, many stories about the times in my richly blessed life, when I've tried to spread around the largess, everything goes horribly askew and always it's due to the achingly abstruse obtuse stupidity of other people.
Stomping on the hand of god!
Yup, I really have to stop doing this!
However, that's only because other people are so endlessly, abjectly and infinitely STUPID!
The magnificent and incomparable Carl Jung once said "It is in co-incidence and synchronicity that one sees the hand of god.", and I seem to have spent most of my life in god's hands because co-incidence and synchronicity appear as constant visitors in my life. And when they turn up, I always go along because most of my life's great journeys have started with the hair rising on the back of my neck!
However let me tell you only a few of the stories of what's transpired when I've introduced other people to these Old Friends during their visits:
* Like the time at a friend's wedding, when the young man sitting next to me started telling me about the clothing design degree he'd just got and ended with the line "But my real dream is to design costumes for the opera!"
Oh wow! The hair rose on the back of my neck because only ten minutes earlier I'd been chatting with another guest, a director on the board of one of the world's great opera companies, who'd been telling me that they had just got funding for a trainee costume designer and were about to start looking for a suitable candidate. And here's this little boy telling me ...?
Hand of God, yes?
Anyway, I immediately grab his hand and race him across the room saying "Here's someone you really MUST meet!" I introduce them and while I'm telling her about the young man ... he steals the cocaine stash from her open purse and races off to the bathroom.
Very fraught half an hour with much screaming and abuse and me being The Bad Guy, and after it's sorted, I take the boy out onto the balcony for a ciggie and a long angry rant about the opportunity he's so callously stomped on. And that's when the screaming really started "But you didn't explain! I had no idea. This is all your fault." says the enormously stupid young man!
Yup, I'm The Bad Guy!
* And then there's the time I'm sitting in a cafe with a casting agent who's talking about the trouble she's having casting a certain kiddy role in a film ... when, right at that moment, one of my students passes by. The hair rises on the back of my neck because he was the cleverest little actor who'd often told me how much he wanted to work in films and, best of all, he had exactly the right look she was after. So I call out to him, get him over and introduce them. "Oh my!" says the casting agent. "I see distinct possibilities here. And you say he can act too?"
"He's a great actor." I promise her.
"I'd like to get something on film." she says to him. "Can you come along this afternoon to audition?"
And the boy replies - and I still can't get over this! - with a hair toss, his nose in the air and a voice heavy with the utmost arrogance "I'm a star. Stars don't audition. If you want me for the role, just give it to me."
And this from a simple high school boy who'd never been in a film before!
Casting agent instantly cold shoulders him and me as well and I realise I've just lost a useful friend.
And back at school, several days later, I take the boy aside for a long angry rant about the opportunity he's so callously stomped on. And, yup, that's when the screaming really started "But you didn't explain! I had no idea. This is all your fault." says another enormously stupid young man!
And again, yup, I'm The Bad Guy!
* And then there's the time Marilyn asked me to proofread her PhD thesis on different types of learning remediation from around the world. I'm near the end and reading about how, in Russia, she learned an amazing "unscrambling the synapses" technique for a very rare learning disorder wherein the brain scrambles words into numbers, except she can't put it to the test because it's so rare - 1 in 6 million - and thus she's never found someone to practice it on.
The hair rose on the back of my neck because I had one. Yup, 1 in 6 million and in my classroom at that exact point in time I actually had one. The dearest sweetest little boy and so very clever ... except he had this profound problem with the written word I had never seen before. And here's Marilyn exactly describing it, and then talking about a technique not previously known outside Russia to realign the synapses to sort it out forever. And she can do it in only 6 one hour sessions.
Hand of God?
Instantly I'm on the phone to her and she's so excited "My thesis is due in a month. I just have time to do it." she says. Beautiful, right? Yes, it's so all hand-of-godish and amazing ... until I actually try to organise getting the two of them together.
"No!" says the principal. "We already have remediation in place."
"But regular remediation doesn't work with these kids. It's a problem in their synapses. This is the only chance this boy has to sort it out." I plead with him.
"I think you'll find that isn't the case." says the principal before turning his back on me. "This remediation team is very good."
The opportunity is too good to pass up so I ignore him and go straight to the remediation people.
"No." say the remediation people. "This is an insult to us. He's ours. You stay away from him."
So I ignore them and go straight to his parents. "No." say his parents. "You're not practicing some weird Russian brain technique on our son!"
I tell Marilyn what's happening and she says "Look, I'm not going to do it if it's this much trouble. I don't really have time to do it anyway. It's better we just leave it."
And so the years pass and, no, regular remediation never sorted out his problem, and so this darling little boy just got fatter and fatter and constantly more angry and confused, until, today, he's a no-hoper dropout who smokes a lot of dope and hates everyone. And Marilyn is a professor at an important university and well out of our reach, and to this day, I'm still so angry about all those filthy egos and abject stupidity, I too hate everyone on his behalf.
* There are so many different levels of illegal in this next story, I'll change all the names etc so you can't identify anyone.
Old friend, Penny, had a husband - let's call him Tom - who went barking mad and was dangerously violent too, so she divorced him. Then, right in the middle of the custody battle, he kidnapped their son Mac and vanished into thin air.
Then, about eight months later, Keith and I are traveling somewhere at the farthest ends of the earth when who should we see but ... Tom and Mac.
Hand of God?
Immediately, we're on the phone to Penny telling her and she's immediately on her way with the plan to kidnap him back again.
Keith-the-Straitlaced wants nothing to do with any of this, so I'm on my own, killing time while waiting for Penny to arrive by doing a bit of undercover work; information gathering etc.
With very little effort, I find out where Tom and Mac are living and am doing a lot of sinister lurking in a shop across the road, spying out through the window, trying to see what I can find out that will be useful for Penny when she arrives.
Then, as I'm lurking, I see a young woman come out of the flat below Tom and Mac's place and she heads straight for the shop; straight towards me. OK, she's not the most salubrious-looking soul since she's all butch, tattoos, piercings, shaved head, but when she gets close I notice that, as well as being tall, large and overweight, beneath the fat are great big muscles and, most importantly, she's got very kindly and intelligent eyes ... and so, when she's at the counter buying her cigarettes, I take a big chance and start casually chatting with her.
It's unbelievably wonderful. We have an instant rapport and she's all open and honest with me and starts telling me, with very little prompting, how she hates the guy upstairs because she thinks he's dangerously insane - see, I said she was clever! - and that she's very worried about the young boy he has with him and has tried to talk to him many times to find out his story, but he's forbidden to talk to anyone and too frightened of his father to disobey.
And because we have this trust between us, I tell her about Penny being on her way and the proposed kidnapping attempt ... and this lovely lady says "Count me in! I'm in the perfect place to be your inside man! Whatever you need! Whatever way, shape or form you think I can be useful, I'm in with you 100%."
Penny eventually arrives and I arrange for our new friend - who I actually explained to Penny as "our very own heaven-sent inside man" - to drop by to meet her. "I'd like to introduce you to our new best friend." I say to Penny ...
... Penny takes one look and her face fills with contempt and disgust, rakes her gaze up and down the length of the lovely lady's body and she says "Yuck! Why would we want to be friends with THAT!"
No, I'm not kidding. That's exactly what Penny said. Accompanied it with a lot of shuddering too.
And that's when our inside man, with great dignity, gets up and says "It was nice meeting you, Denise. But please never call me again!" and she stalks out!
Fury! Never have I ever felt such abject fury! In white hot rage, I tell Penny in no uncertain terms what she's done - the real heaven-sent gift she's so callously stomped on ... "But you didn't explain! I had no idea. This is all your fault." she whines at me.
I won't tell you any more about this proposed kidnapping attempt mainly since I don't know a lot since I too walked out, too incandescent with rage to want any part of it, but I do know it went horribly awry and it was Penny who ended up in a foreign mental institution!
Yup, again I'm The Bad Guy!
There are more stories, a great many more stories, along these lines. So many, many stories about the times in my richly blessed life, when I've tried to spread around the largess, everything goes horribly askew and always it's due to the achingly abstruse obtuse stupidity of other people.
Stomping on the hand of god!
Yup, I really have to stop doing this!
Monday, November 1, 2010
Jay Lim, Folk Legend!
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!
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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