ComEnts

As some of you might have read on Berkshire Live the Reading Fringe Festival has been hijacked. We had hoped to resolve the situation behind the scenes without anyone finding out because it is a bit embarassing and reflects badly on the organisation.

Anyway, the situation at the moment is that one member of the organising group has gone solo, changed all the passwords to the e-mail addresses and myspace site, moved the website to his own new site. We knew about all that and were discussing what to do about the situation when out of nowhere he held a Fringe Festival Launch party yesterday. Myself and the rest of last years organisers weren't invited but reports from one of the performers suggest it went pretty badly.

We've worked really hard over the last couple of years to try and build up the Fringe's reputation. It's been difficult, we've made quite a lot of mistakes along the way and hopefully we've learnt from them. My main worry is that reputation is pretty fragile and it's much, much easier to destroy it than it is to regain it. The rest of the organisers are going to carry on having our planning meetings, the next one is tonight, and work out what we are going to do. The Fringe Festival concept is about much more than a name, website, MySpace and e-mail address. Possibly there could be an opportunity to reorganise and rebrand. We could then put some measures in place at the start that would stop this kind of thing happening in the future. That way it wouldn't be possible for one person to have a hissy fit and wreck the whole thing.

I got myself a new phone at the weekend. Sony Ericcson K800i (which seems to be the one just about everyone has these days) and it got me thinking.

The modern mobile phone is a pretty amazing bit of technology. It's a still and video camera, music player, telephone, video phone, games machine, web browser, personal organiser, address book and alarm clock all rolled into one. We tend to take them a bit for granted these days but mobile phones have only been really common for less than 10 years. I got my first phone about 8 years ago I guess. It was pretty simple, you could store phone numbers, make phone calls and send text messages.

I remember reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy (-NERD!) around that time and one of the futuristic gadgets the Mars colonists had access too were hand held communications and information devices. They could make video calls on them, access the main information networks and various other things, but they still didn't have the depth of features that modern phones have. The line between modern phones, PDAs and even PCs is becoming more blurred. The worlds biggest technology fair, Cebit in Hanover, is going to really focus strongly on mini handheld PCs. With Wi-Fi becoming more and more widespread and VOIP (basically using the internet to make phone calls) now in the mainstream it could be that our mobile phones of the future are basically internet enabled mini-PCs. I've got no idea really. I never would have predicted we'd get to where we are today this fast so who knows what we'll manage to do in the next 10 years.

No blog for a week, sorry. And load's been going on too! Last time I posted I was just about to go to the Josaka 8th Birthday party. That was a week ago on Friday. It was a really good night in the end. First band on where What Is: Protocol. I was hoping for good things from them. I thought their MySpace stuff was promising, it was a bit disappointing in the end. They could obviously all play but their music was a bit uninspiring and not very original. One of the guitarists also had an extremely expensive looking rack mounted guitar rig that he used to get the blandest most overcompressed fizzy 80s rock sound out of. That annoyed me quite a lot.



For once Jim Bowes passed the compere duties over to someone else! Damien A. Passmore was the very able compere on the night (when Jim didn't take over for him...) as a little bonus he also played us a couple of his songs!



I'd been hearing a lot of great things about Audio Runway in recent weeks and they exceeded my expectations! Half the band has changed since I last saw them play. Lead singer Liam is now backed by a team of 3 brothers. That's one more than any other local bands I know of. Although My Luminaries have identical twins and there was some speculation that might count extra points. Anyway, the band were really great. Despite Liam breaking approximately a string per song. He's a very charismatic front man and their Indy Football Chav anthems are really catchy. I'm looking forward to seeing more of them soon.



Third on were Rebus. I've written a lot about Rebus a lot in the past. They did have a particularly good night at South Street though I thought. Just one of those gigs where it all clicked for them.



Last up were The Race, a band I haven't seen for a very long time indeed. They've been off touring, making videos and selling records and I've not been able to make their infrequent returns to Reading. I have to say though, they were absolutely spectacular. They really showed their pedigree even playing at the end of a very talented line-up of bands. And success is obviously not going to their heads too much, Jess even baked a birthday cake for Josaka! All in all a brilliant night.

Much more to talk about but I'll save it for future posts.