Chapter 31 - And Nanowrimo draws to a close

I’m still a couple of thousand words shy of the finish line, but I’ll knock them out this afternoon. It feels good to be hearly finished but oddly unsettling that I’ll stop writing for now without finishing the story. As I said earlier, Junket is an 80,000 word novel, as most full-length novels are, so taking the foot off the gas at 50,000 is a fairly strange sensation. Maybe the Nanowrimo people need to get more ambitious on our behalf and up the wordcount. Still, I’m looking forward to finishing it over the summer and rewriting.

Here’s one that I wrote in the early hours during the week, when I was still stuck at the half-way mark (but sneakily telling people I was further along to keep up the morale!)

THIRTY-ONE

Rome, September 11

For a moment I didn’t know where I was. Everything was glowing green. I felt like I was on a cloud, a porcelain face floated above me. It appeared to be the goddess Venus. Her robe came into focus, the outline of a bare breast beneath it. She walked around me. I looked over to the left. Several people were sitting on white beds eating and drinking, talking and laughing, ignoring me.

There were lots of people like me, lying, watching the psychedelic images that were projected on the domed ceiling. Venus put down a carafe of wine. I followed her jewelled hand down, obsessed by it.

I was high on coke for the first time in over a year. I vaguely remembered standing in the glitzy toilets of the Supper Club, someone chopping out lines on the cistern, three of us squeezed in, taking turns to put our noses to the cool marble.

The images on the roof were of dolphins, darting through the water, appearing to swoop in from the roof, an aura of turquoise around them. I sensed I was on a raised podium. I rolled over and looked down. I was lying on a mezzanine of beds. Below, on the ground floor were more beds, people lying on them, drinking, talking, making out. The robed goddesses walked around topping up drinks. In the corner, a guy stooped over a laptop, controlling a trippy synth soundtrack.

I felt a buzzing in my pocket, not for the first time tonight. I fumbled at it and the cool mirrored phone slid onto my chest, still buzzing. I pressed the answer button.

“Hullo? Morgan is that you? I can’t hear you? Hang on.”

I sat up and shifted onto my hands and knees. I crawled among the couples, tangled limbs, hang bags and disgarded clothes and found the staircase down to the ground floor. I delicately descended the narrow steps, gripping the railing tightly.

Downstairs I headed into the lobby where the music wasn’t as loud.

“Morgan? Rome. What’s wrong? I know I said I was coming back after Germany, but-,”

Morgan sounded edgy, upset. Then he delivered the bad news.

“I lost the Mercedes gear.”

I took it in.

“What do you mean you lost it?” I said.

“I left it on the tube. I forgot it.”

“What the fuck, Morgan? Did you look for it?”

“Someone took it, they can’t find it.”

“They can’t -, How could you be so fucking stupid? Do you know how much that shit is worth?

He stuttered, tried to get his words out failed.

“It’s okay, I’ll get some- I’ll do something. I can get us money.”

“No Morgan, no more credit card scams, you’re finished with them, remember how close they came to finding you last time. None of that shit, they can find you through your computer.”

I looked across the lobby. A man was sitting on a couch with his back to me talking to a woman. I studied the back of his head, he turned slightly, side on. Pearse, or so I thought until he shifted further around. Someone else entirely. I wiped my soar eyes.

Morgan was babbling on over the phone, I was suddenly irritated with it all, these long distance phone calls with nothing but bad news from the slovenly 27 year old, wanting money or merchandise, then losing the merchandise. I flared up.

“That Merc stuff was supposed to keep us going for the next couple of months. What the hell is wrong with you?”

There was an uncharacteristic silence from London.

“Are you completely off your pills?” I asked, remembering the little brown bottle disappearing into the rubbish bin outside the Mater in Belfast.

“Yes,” he said.

“Do you think it’s a good idea, like to cut them out so quickly? You’ve been on them 10 years at least,” I said.

“I don’t need them,” he said defiantly. “And I don’t need you!” The phone line disconnected.

“Fuck you too.” I hung up and turned to head back upstairs. I needed another hit of something to get the night back on track. A man was blocking my way, leaning against the wall. I recognised him from the press trip earlier in the day. He wore an outdated brown suit, white hair to his shoulders. He looked like Einstein, minus the moustache. I nodded at him.

“Can you believe this place? Avante garde bullshit!” His voice was heavily accented from somewhere east.

“Why are we here?” He asked.

“I think it’s because it’s the best place in Rome and the people from the shipping company want to impress us.”

He rolled his eyes.

“All I want is some pasta. They say the kitchen is closed. You hungry?”

Now that I thought about it, I was. Ravenous. We’d skipped dinner, headed straight for the club after the cocktail party on the Costa Magica, the largest cruise liner of the Costa group, our sponsor on this particular excursion.

“Yeah,” I said.

“let’s see if the cook is in a good mood.”

We walked towards the kitchen.

“By the way, I’m Simeon Bratov, Kommersant Journal, Moscow.”

“Steven Man, EuroTimes.”

We shook.

“You know I once tried to subscribe to EuroTimes through the website -,” I cut him off.

“Give me your card, we had problems with the sign-up engine. I’ll get subs to look into it.”

At the entrance to the kitchen, a lone sous chef was cleaning up, washing down the benches.

“Can we get two bowls of pasta?” said Simeon.

“The kitchen is closed,” the chef responded. The Russian mumbled under his breath.

“Hang on.”

He disappeared into the lobby and returned trailing Antonio, the head of corporate affairs for the Costa Line.

“Tell this man I’ll cook the spaghetti myself and tip very generously,” he said, pushing Antonio towards the kitchen.

There was a rapid-fire conversation in Italian between the suited shipping executive and the crumpled chef, some money appeared from Antonio’s pocket and was pressed into the cook’s hands. There was more protesting but his will was slipping. Eventually he threw down his towel on the bench and walked out of the kitchen. Antonio gestured us in.

“Don’t take too long.” He said.

Simeon took off his jacket and rubbed his hands together looking around the expansive kitchen. He turned on the gas, a blue hissing flame came to life on one of the hobs. He clattered a pan onto it and reached for a jug of olive oil. Under a table he found a sack of onions and handed them to me.

“You chop them, I’ll make a nice sauce,” he said.

I stood in front of the chopping board and selected a long knife from a rack in front of me. I realised I was slightly drunk. This would take some concentration. I started slicing onions and soon my eyes were stinging.

“What’s your story then Steven?”Asked Simeon bringing a pot of water to the boil, unwrapping some fresh pasta he’d taken from the giant steel fridge.

“You do a lot of these trips?”

“Yeah, it’s the business beat, you know, lots of conferences, press conferences, the beast to be fed and all that.”

“But you didn’t take a note all day,” he said, looking at me sideways.

“Shipping doesn’t interest you?” he enquired. I was sprung and drunk and unable to figure out how to get out of this one. Anyway I felt comfortable with the old guy, a bit like how it used to be with John.

“You know what?” I said. “I don’t know the first thing about shipping. I got an email on my phone, I was about to head back to London, I came here because I didn’t want to go home, simple as that.”

He lowered the pasta into the water.

“I used to do these trips because it was the only way out of the country. I was free, even just for one night, being in a nice hotel in the west, Paris or Vienna or somewhere.”

He shook the pan.

“Where’s the garlic?” He scraped the garlic I’d chopped up into his hand and threw it on the pan. It started to fry with s sizzle, the smell made me all the more hungry.

“I was a scientist, in the Urals, until an experiment went wrong,” said Simeon.

He shook his head.

“I wasn’t allowed in the lab any more so I worked for the science journals, if I couldn’t do it, I’d write about it. By the time it all fell apart, I didn’t know how to do anything else. In Russia, it is one job for life. The Soviet way. Only in the new Russia there’s no room for the journals. So now I write about anything.”

“A flea rancher, just like me.”

“Pardon?” He said, confused.

“On nothing,” I said, backing away from the onions to wipe the tears from my stinging eyes.

“Fuck me.”

“And you,” he continued, probing “what’s your story?”

All the usual scenarios I’d spun before were on the tip of my tongue, I could have rolled any one of them out. But I sensed I wouldn’t be able to get any of them past Simeon. I’d only just met the guy, but he’d already seen through me. Lying was pointless.

“I’m a complete fake. And I don’t know what I’m doing any more.”

He didn’t respond immediately, the sound of sizzling garlic and bubbling water filled the void.

“You think you have gone off the path?” He enquired finally.

“I hardly know what I am. Maybe, maybe I’m a bad person. The worst even. I really don’t know what I am capable of.”

I looked at the dull blade, my blurred reflection in it.

“Good and bad? We all have both in us. All cats are grey at night.” Said Simeon.

“And all those who carry long knives are not cooks,” he said watching me staring at the knife.

“Hurry up with my onions.”

I handed him the chopping board and he scraped them into the pan. The oil welcomed them with a sharp hiss.

I was standing beside him in front of the cooking food. He reached over and put his hand on my chest, directly over my heart.

“Everyone knows here what they are capable of. Don’t try and deceive yourself or let yourself be deceived.”

He took his fist away, held it up in front of my face.

“Otherwise, this is all you have.”

He opened his fist and blew theatrically as though blowing dust from his upturned hand. Dust or ashes.

A few hours later I found myself once again in an airport in that darkest of times before the sun begins to rise. The Alitalia desk was already open and had moved my flight forward. I stood in the departure lounge looking out across the tarmac as a golden glow began to light the eastern sky.

Morgan’s phone went once again to voicemail.

“Morgan I’m coming home. I’m sorry. Sorry for everything. I shouldn’t have gone to Germany, I shouldn’t be here. I’ll set it right. See you soon.”

Day 25 - Chapter 22 An end in sight

Last week was one of the busiest I’d had since starting my new job so the Nanowrimo pace slipped somewhat. Still, 36,000 odd words down, I’m confident of hitting the 50,000 word target by November 30, even if my writing buddies have pulled well ahead of me and will likely finish will well in excess of the 50,000 words expected of us. What I’m discovering is that 50,000 words will be a little less than two-thirds of Junket. It sure would be nice to be finishing the entire 1st draft come Sunday.

Anyway, here’s chapter 22 for you - it’s getting harder to post chapters without giving away important plot spoilers. This one doesn’t give away too much - the next one, chapter 23, is pivotal to the plot explaining what has made Steven the way he is and illuminating Pearse for what he is…

TWENTY-TWO

Budapest, August 5

After that text I’d received from Pearse in Chicago I’d waited for him to get back in touch. A day went past, me sitting on the bed in that dump of a motel room expecting the phone to go, or even a knock on the door.

There had been nothing. I’d texted him again with no response and his phone, predictably, went to voicemail. It seemed to be the fashionable thing to do these days – not answer your phone.

I was at an internet cafe near O’Hare, about to book a flight back to London when the invite to Hungary had come through from the Hungarian Development Agency, an organisation whose press list I’d been on for a couple of years but had so far yielded nothing. With Morgan presumably at Uncle Paul’s, I didn’t fancy heading back to the loft and I still didn’t know how safe it was anyway.

So I took the offer of a business class flight to Budapest and accommodation during the press tour which would focus on Hungary’s economic transformation five years after the country joined Europe’s increasingly less exclusive economic and political club - the European Union.

I paced up and down on the steps outside the convention centre, waiting for Pearse to show. He walked across the concourse slowly, looking around him, taking in the passing convention goers. Finally he was standing in front of me, a step higher.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

Pearse shrugged. “Fifth anniversary of Hungary getting EU status, it’s big news!”

He gestured with his hands, exaggerating.

“Bullshit,” I said sternly. “What happened in Shanghai?”

“Didn’t you get the videos?” he shot back.

He stepped down, level with me now.

“You were impressive in Shanghai. Handling those two beauties. How things turned that night…”

He started walking down the steps, I followed him.

“Look, the videos,” I said. “I don’t remember anything, I can’t even –“

“You’re saying that’s not you on the bed those two gook chicks riding you at the same time? That’s not you in the cellar, with her lying there on those sacks of rice like a -”

“Enough,” I said.

He shrugged. We reached the sidewalk, the entrance to the convention centre was choked with Skodas, taxi drivers waving at us, trying to win our business. Pearse walked through them and out onto the street. I followed.

“What the hell happened that night?” I said.

Pearse stopped abruptly and turned around.

“You came alive Steven.”

“I felt sick.”

“The next day? That’s normal the first time.”

“The first time what?” I said angrily.

A tram rumbled past just them, the concrete vibrating beneath our feet, the screeching of metal on metal.

“In Shanghai you opened a vein, you couldn’t get enough. You’re horrified at what happened, but at the same time you want more.”

He had to shout over the noise of the tram. His words hit me like a brick. I had to stifle a shudder. I felt light-headed, a montage of images from the videos blurring together, running through my head, replaying at speed.

“I’m not like you,” I managed, finally, once the noise had receded.

“Maybe you’re right Steven,” said Pearse. “After all, I’m a journalist, you’re a fraud.”

“What?” I said half-heartedly, knowing what was coming.

“Fake company, fake subscriber base, fake credentials. You fooled that lot back there, but I figured it out,” he said. There was no malice in his voice, just a cool frankness. He was enjoying this, but restraining himself.

“Is that why you tried to break into my apartment? To spy on me?”

He was determined to keep the upper hand.

“Come on Steve, you look like the kid whose mom just found a pile of Playboys underneath his bed. You think I’m going to rat you out, after what we’ve been through together?”

“We haven’t been through anything together,” I hissed.

“Well, the video tape…,” said Pearse, trailing off.

Pearse walked on and I followed him, watching the back of his suit jacket flap in the breeze. We came to a busy intersection and he went to cross, no regard for the cars nosing through. Horns blared at him. I jogged to keep up, scooting around the side of a small but fast-moving Peugeot.

“Bastard!” Someone shouted at me.

We got to the other side of the road and again Pearse stopped. We were in front of a squat, pale blue building. It was freshly-painted and well-maintained by Hungarian standards.

“Sixty Andrassey Avenue,” said Pearse. “The Nazis used it, then the Arrow Cross Party which did Himmler’s dirty work purging the Jews. Then the communists inherited it. How many people went in there and were never seen again?”

He stood squinting up at the building, its tall dark windows revealing little of what was inside.

“People let it happen Steven, again and again. Community, government, liberty? You’re fucking me up the arse.” He touched the smooth stone of the building, the former headquarters of successive secret police regimes.

“See Steven, in a world of supposed order people went into that building believing there was truth, justice, safety, between those walls. What did they get? They got nothing, because deep down we don’t really care. Society? Gimme a break. That’s why men like us Steven are so fucking rare. We understand this, you and I. We go after what we want, we take what we desire because we know it’s all bullshit. We’re all one step away from walking into that building and disappearing forever.”

We stood on the footpath in the afternoon sun, people passing by oblivious, both of us watching the pedestrians march along on their determined paths.

“Say Steven, you like art?” Pearse patted me on the shoulder.

“Come on, I know a good place.” He began walking and once again I found myself following him.

Day 15 - halfway and feeling strangely fine

So I’m 24,000 words into Junket at the halfway point of Nanowrimo, a thousand words shy of the halfway mark in terms of wordcount. I’m pretty happy with this and estimate I’m just over a third of the way through the story.

I was really firing last night, fuelled by a bottle of Johnnie Walker which I took to bed along with my laptop. Before I knew it, it was 3am and I’d written 3000 words. Funny thing was I woke up at 9am feeling better than I have in months.

The story is pretty rough around the edges, but I’m reasonably happy with the 20 chapters I’ve got through so far, there’s definitely something decent to work with there in draft 2. Anyway, here’s chapter 13 of Junket.

THIRTEEN

London, July 22

The minicab braked with almost enough force to throw me off the seat. It certainly woke me up. We were at the entrance to Myers Lane which ran between the dilapidated warehouses on either side. The Iranian driver obviously didn’t want to go any further off the beaten track.

I handed him thirty pounds and climbed out of the cab, taking my bag from the boot. It was the beginning of a beautiful day in London. Overhead, the whine of jet engines signalled planes heading for Heathrow.

The warehouses were silent, locked up. An old Ford Escort sat on the side of the lane, its windows covered in condensation. I put down my roller bag and rattled up the cobbled lane to the flaking, graffiti-ed particle board door with the padlock on it. Next door a sign hung from rusty chains advertising a English language academy.

For years it had been a base for teaching illegals English until it had been raided and shut down. Morgan and I were happy for the peace – the students had smoked and played football in the lane below – but we’d also been tapping free internet access from the language school. That had dried up when the Pakistani owners had been turfed out.

I opened the door and hoisted the bag as I climbed the stairs. Even from here I could hear the chaos of a violent video game – Morgan was obviously still up. I swung the upstairs door open with my foot as a hail of machine gun fire blasted out from the home theatre system dominating one wall of the bare brick room.

Morgan was sitting in the middle of the leather couch, his back to me. He was wearing his holey Megadeth t-shirt – no doubt it hadn’t been washed since I’d been down the Laundromat before I left. On a big screen in front, a soldier was walking through a cathedral holding an oversized machine gun. Mutant creatures swung down at him from all angles, but he blasted them away, gory pulp splattering in every direction.

I gently put down my suitcase and tip-toed over to the table we’d rescued from the skip at the back of the engineering shop across the lane. It was littered with FedEx and UPS boxes, most of them opened and empty. There were electronic gadgets spread across the table, bubble wrap and polystyrene padding thrown to the side.

I walked up behind Morgan. He was seven years younger than me but already he had a bald patch developing. He was sitting there on the couch oblivious, his fingers expertly working the fat Xbox controller. The sound emanating from the borrowed Bose speakers was deafening. You could feel the wind kicking from the bass speaker lying on the dusty floorboards beneath the screen.

I slapped my hands down on Morgan’s shoulders.

“Jesus Christ!”

He leaped off the couch spinning 180 degrees to face me. He threw the controller at me. Luckily I caught it. I threw it on the couch grinning at him. He looked puffy, unshaven, dirty. His droopy right eyelid twitched as he struggled to get over the shock. He put his hands on his head, trying to calm himself.

“What’s that?” I asked, nodding at the flat screen TV.

“That’s your surprise dummy. LG sent it. I said we’d devote a page to it in the summer lifestyle supp, supp –“

“Supplement,” I finished impatiently. “What supplement?”

Morgan grinned at me. He may have been dropped at birth and numerous times afterwards, but he wasn’t stupid.

“They want it back,” I enquired?

“Did I sign anything saying I’d give it back?” He shrugged.

“Got anything for me,” he said looking down at my suitcase expectantly.

I lifted my well-worn suitcase onto the couch and unzipped it. Nestled among the stale shirts was a black box. The case was roomier on the return flight given that I’d ditched the blood-stained tuxedo.

I’d stuffed it into a bin in the service alley behind the Grand Hyatt. I’d waited half an hour until the area had been free of people before ditching the clothes. On the way back I’d noticed the red glow giving away a CCTV camera. That was fine. Someone had to be watching to have spotted me. The chances of that were slim.

I handed the box to Morgan. His eyes lit up.

“So what’s been going on?” I asked examining the discarded takeaway wrappers and pizza boxes stacked on the chipped formica bench that represented our kitchen.

“We lost internet access for a while. I hacked into the wi-fi from the antique car place. They were using WEP, was easy to crack. Astin01 is the access point, oily321 is the access code.”

I nodded. Internet access was our lifeblood. Without it we had to trek down to the internet cafe to update the website. No updates, no snippets on Google News and that meant the people who assembled the lists weren’t being bombarded with tempting headlines from EuroTimes offering exclusive coverage behind the pay wall for a 12 month subscription of only 799 pounds. No place on the list meant no more junkets.

Morgan opened the box and delicately lifted out a big ball of glass engraved with Chinese characters. He frowned, disappointed.

“What do we have on eBay?” I asked.

“Rats and Mice,” he said, mimicking one of my favourite sayings and annoying me in the process.

“I need more stuff to flog.”

He flopped back down on the couch, the soldier frozen on the screen in front in the process of throwing a grenade. I went to the grimy window and looked down. Old Fowler was hauling back the door to his panel shop opposite. Fowler was the one guy in the area who knew of our existence up here but he was a good sort, kept to himself, didn’t ask questions.

I’d been worried when Morgan and I had emerged from the warehouse one night, coming face to face with him. But he’d engaged us as though we were neighbours.

“Alright son?” he’d said to Morgan sensing from the start there wasn’t something right about him.

“Anything you need fellas, let me know. And keep an eye on my place, eh? Had too much stuff ripped off over the years.”

“So all the China stuff went up?” I asked Morgan approaching the iMac sitting hibernating on the bench.

“A bit of it,” he mumbled studying the crystal ball.

“I’ve been busy surviving on nothing,” he said accusingly.

“No kit to flog!”

The empty parcels on the table suggested otherwise. Morgan got off the couch and approached the swivel chair in front of the Mac. He tapped the keyboard and the screen came to life.

“What’s the source?” He asked.

“Search for AP and Jeffrey Ratz, R-A-T-Z. Reuters and Stephen Wang, p-h, not v.

“Not like you Stevie.” He said.

He typed rapidly, his fingers moving quickly on the keyboard, once white, now a grubby cream. He squinted at the screen reading from Google News.

“China’s new power struggle by Jeffrey Ratz of Associated Press,” he announced deliberately.

He clicked on the link and opened the story.

“I’ve got some nice graphics from that free Brookings Institute website,” he added.

“I’ll Google for some generic Shanghai photos.”

I sat down on the couch and took my shoes off, letting the business class socks breathe.

“Cut and paste, but change every second word,” I reminded Morgan.

He had a habit of stealing large slabs of text from other stories. Plagiarism was too easy a way for EuroTimes to get busted. You could change every second word and disguise your tracks in cyberspace.

Sure a story may read pretty much the same as any other one coming across the wires, but in the age of instant dissemination of news and the reliance of reporters on packaged content and press releases, that was pretty much the norm. As long as the language was different, the headlines were uniquely composed, you might be saying the same thing but no one could pin you down as a rip-off merchant.

“Three pars on the front page, the rest behind the firewall,” I said.

“The Great Chinese firewall,” Morgan came back.

I ignored him.

“Gi-, Gimme a new intro,” he said.

I closed my eyes and tried to pull together the random strands I’d picked up from that dinner the first night in Shanghai.

“Okay, try this one, bro. As a modern wave of nationalism sweeps China, driven by the newly assertive middle class –“

“hang on!” Morgan shouted.

I carried on regardless, I knew his touch-typing was 120 words a minute at least.

“- and the politicians pandering to them, Asia’s giant is being pushed into a conflict over geopolitical clout as well as its political history. Steven Man reports from Shanghai.”

He rattled away on the keyboard, then silence.

“You know Stevie, you could just about do this for real.”

I closed my eyes. I was thinking of that hard basketball beneath Michiko’s aqua blue dress in Tokyo and the eight minute video sitting on the fancy phone in my pocket. They were both most definitely for real.

Novel writing month - day 1 and Chapter 1 of Junket

Boy, well we’ve begun and it wasn’t quite as difficult as I expected it to be. Many times I’ve sat down at my computer over the last ten years to start writing a novel and never got further than a page in before giving in, deleting what I’d written and moving on to something else.

But when you’ve a deadline of November 30 to write 50,000 words of a novel, you tend to get over the agonising quickly and start banging out words. I just finished chapter 1 of my globe-trotting hi-tech thriller Junket, which is in the vein of Joseph Finder’s Paranoia. That’s what National Novel Writing Month is all about and I’ll be grinding out words the rest of the month along with tens of thousands of people around the world who just want to write (and finish) a novel.

I’m also going to be publishing the occasional chapter here on Griffin’s Gadgets as I go. Excuse them being a little rough around the edges - this is a first draft and they’re written at breakneck speed. Nevertheless, here’s chapter one of Junket…

ONE

______________________________________________________________________________________

Shanghai, July 7

For the first time in months, I wasn’t jet lagged. In the back of the black limo, cool air blew out of vents in the roof. Through the tinted window a lumbering Emirates jet descended on its way into Pudong, an oily haze of avgas in its wake.

For the first time in months everything was okay. Morgan was well fed and happy, taking his medication, putting his computer programming skills to good use. We had a regular supply of packages turning up to the Pimlico drop box, so the eBay listings were mounting up, a few big ticket items too, so they’d be some serious Sterling sitting in the PayPal account for Morgan to draw on as he needed.

The London joint was secure again now that the language school below had been vacated, leaving the Isle of Dogs hideaway isolated and forgotten once again. I had enough airpoints to circle the world a half dozen times and as far as the myriad collection of PR flacks, marketing jocks, spin merchants and conference organisers keeping me afloat knew, EuroTimes Business was still among the most respected, subscription-based online news magazines covering European business affairs.

Most importantly, I was still on the list, still on the junket trail, still riding the gravy train and no one was any the wiser. Yes, for the first time in months, there wasn’t anything to worry about.

The Chinese chauffeur looked at me in the rear view mirror, a wireless mobile headset pulsing blue in his ear. He murmured to himself, humming along to the wispy Chinese folk music playing low on the stereo. Out on the six lane highway, a fleet of Volkswagen taxis, all the same boxy model in dark navy, glided along, past slower trucks and vans – Toyotas and Nissans, Japanese hand-me-downs.

I finally opened the press pack I’d carried from London – a thin dossier of paper embossed with the logo for Shanghai Bell Telecom. It was another itinerary prepared especially for Steven Man, managing editor of the EuroTimes business journal, written in that stilted PR speak layered with English as a second language awkwardness.

The pages were loaded with formal meetings, factory visits and tourism excursions. I scanned them looking for something that might bear fruit. In Asia, there was usually a decent present, the thinly-veiled bribe. In Shenzhen a couple of years back, it had come in the form of two hookers a couple of low-level, local Government officials lined up. It would have been insulting to turn them down.

A journalist’s code of ethics dictates that freebies are out, but I’d seen the most experienced reporters, big names working for Reuters, Bloomberg, the WSJ, discretely take their goodie bag back to their hotel room. Some things are just too good to pass up.

This gig was being hosted by a telephone company, so surely there’d be some nice expensive gadget or other on offer. When would the little felt, gift-wrapped boxes appear? On the first night after the welcome banquet, or later in the piece, once the Chinese executives had extracted some value from the western guests?

The restaurants listed for the formal dinner sounded expensive. I’d never had a taste for real Chinese food – too bland, insipid.. Give me a plate of crisp wontons and some fried rice over a hundred dollar bowl of shark fin soup any day.

Then there was the accommodation – the Grand Hyatt, one of the finest hotels in the sprawling city. I’d had lunch there once before and had always been determined to come back and check in. The lodgings were what had hooked me on this trip. I just needed a day or two in luxury, between thick sheets, a mini bar at my disposal, a high room overlooking the city. It was time for some much needed R&R after months of hard graft, Morgan’s meltdown and a couple of disasters that had nearly blown the lid off the EuroTimes scam.

I opened the zip bag containing my collection of press credentials, all professionally put together by Morgan in Photoshop and printed to plastic using a fancy printer Kodak had “lent” us for a product review to go in the Boys Toys section of the website. We should have held onto it, but the money had dried up, so we flicked it on Trader Bin for 400 pounds.

Ironically, the National Union of Journals press card was still paper and a passport photo covered in adhesive plastic, a dawdle to forge. Morgan had lasered off the paperwork before I left the warehouse for Heathrow - in a manic rush as usual. I shuffled a set of four passport photos out of the bag and onto my lap and tore one off. I positioned it carefully on the green press pass and pealed off the adhesive backing. I coated the whole think in plastic thumbing over the picture I’d had taken at the end of a drunken week spent in Bangkok which resulted in my passport being stolen.

I looked slightly frazzled in that photo, which betrayed the fact I’d been up for 36 hours straight before it was taken. But it would do fine. I slipped the press pass into my suit pocket and put the paperwork back in its folder. Through the window loomed the city, dominated by a hulking tower – the Grand Hyatt herself. I pressed a button on the arm rest and the tinted window rolled down. The sound of car horns, truck engines, the blast of clammy air, a mumble of disapproval from the driver. I did a quick survey of the towering glass structure I was bound for and put the window up.

The Blackberry in my breast pocket buzzed, delivering some message from a different timezone, a different continent. I ignored it, lying back against the cool leather, breathing slow and deep, dozing off, thinking of the friendly brunette in the jacuzi in Houston last month. She was an analyst for Conaco Philips. A crazy night at the Swan, the gaudy centrepiece of Disney World’s hotel complex. I’d definitely be taking a side trip through Texas on the next US excursion for some more analysis.

The car slowed as we left the highway and entered a tunnel. We emerged into a grey haze of inner-city smog, towering office blocks, building sites covering in bamboo scaffolding, mid afternoon traffic choking every piece of tarmac in sight. Finally we rolled up into the sweeping entrance to the Grand Hyatt. The driver was out quickly, opening the door for me, shattering the cocoon of silence.

I stood gazing up at the 150 floors above me as the driver took my bags into the lobby, which featured a massive mosaic of a dragon on its curved roof. I smiled at the receptionist as I approached the counter.

“Checking in, Steven man, guest of Shanghai Bell.” I kept it businesslike, clipped, just short of impatience.

She tapped away on her computer silently, scrolling through screens, taking longer than these things should. I looked around the lobby, Asian business men with comb-overs and grey suits, bell boys in crisp black waist coats, a woman playing a soft jazz number on a grand piano on a raised platform. She had a split in her dress that went all the way to her waist, exposing her slender thigh.

“There’s no record of…”

I frowned, leant over the desk, irritation stirring. Booking mistakes went with the junket territory – there are a lot of vacuous people in PR and booking a hotel room, rental car, airplane ticket often proves too much for some of them. It was usually sorted out quickly, but a messed-up booking had on occasion meant me covering the bill on my own credit card until I could be reimbursed. That wasn’t an option since the Amex limit had been knocked back to 1000 pounds.

Äh, here it is. Mr Man.”

I exhaled slowly, showing nothing. She slid a card key and letter across the counter. I banged the counter lightly, pleased.

“Incidentals?” I asked.

“They are all on the Shanghai Bell account.”

“You’ve just made my day, luv.”

In search of a happy ending

I caught up with Luke Buda of the Phoenix Foundation as the band was putting the finishing touches on Happy Ending, its latest album and what’s widely considered its best yet. The Herald voted it album of the year. I’d met Luke a few times when he used to call into Wellington’s fringe installation art gallery Show, where I used to live.

The feature’s not on the Idealog website, so here it is in its entirety…

While Flight of the Conchords and Eagle vs Shark play on American screens, the final member of the Wellington creative triumvirate currently chipping away at the US market is aware of the mighty task it faces.

“It’s a huge fucker of a country and there is much, much, much to see,” says Luke Buda, a founding member of six-piece The Phoenix Foundation, which has won critical acclaim and modest sales success with its Eno-ish soundscapes and infectious pop/rock tunes.

With two successful equine-themed albums under its belt, Horsepower and Pegasus, the band is now trying to make its mark in America with the help of New York-based indie label Young American Recordings. That has meant revisiting Horsepower, which was released here in 2004 but debuted in the US just this March.

The Americans, unable to resist a patronising jibe or two, nevertheless seem to like what they hear.

“There aren’t many success stories from New Zealand, so when a band from the land of more-sheep-than-people gains a cult following in the States based on some old-fashioned pavement pounding, it’s a notable event,” wrote a reviewer for Big Shot magazine.

VMan proclaimed Horsepower “one of the most gorgeously unexpected surprises of the year … proving once and for all that movies about hobbits aren’t the only good thing happening in New Zealand”.

There have been numerous gigs in support of Horsepower at festivals and in sweaty underground clubs across America, most recently on a self-funded tour in June. Did the band make its money back?

“No way,” says Buda. “Six in the band, manager, sound engineer. No, no—no way.”

But there’s also the soundtrack to Eagle vs Shark, which the band was primarily responsible for, contributing some original compositions and previously released songs such as the sublime instrumental Hitchcock. More than just providing a soundtrack, the Phoenix Foundation played a part in the film’s creation.

“In a way they deserve some credit for the screenplay,” says director Taika Waititi. “Some of the tracks I was inspired by when I was writing Eagle vs Shark are used in the same places in the movie.”

Buda, who counts famed Greek soundtrack composer Vangelis among his biggest influences, said the band took a completely different approach with the music it composed for Eagle vs Shark. “With an album, you want the music to be totally engaging and you don’t hold back,” he says. “With the music for a film you really are just trying to add to, or help the movement, action, emotion on the screen. So there is a lot of space you can leave that you might not when making music for its own sake.”

The band came on board reasonably late in the piece, but enjoyed a good working relationship with Waititi.

“Taika did a rough cut with temporary score, and we got all the scenes we did music to with that temporary score there as a sort of guide,” says Buda, who also has a cameo in the film. “He was very specific and full of input. I guess in the future I would probably want to be involved earlier, or to try and do some demos for the temporary score.”

Many of the reviews accompanying the June release of Eagle vs Shark in the US made mention of the great soundtrack, which also features Buda’s solo work and the music of other local artists such as Age Pryor and The Reduction Agents.

“We receive album royalties for our own albums whereas the soundtrack is not all our music so we won’t be getting as much for that side of things,” says Buda. But there will be royalties from the theatrical release of the film and should the soundtrack sell well, it will ultimately help Young American shift more copies of Horsepower, which was repackaged with bonus tracks for the US market.

The soundtrack is released through Hollywood Records which, like Miramax, is a Disney subsidiary, but Buda says the band’s dealings with the studio, by choice, were minimal. “A couple of us went and had a meeting with someone in Los Angeles at the Disney studios. Ha! She was very nice.”

Idealog caught up with Buda as the band neared the end of its recording sessions on new album Happy Ending at Wellington’s The Surgery studio. The band line-up is the same as for Pegasus: Buda on guitars, keyboards and vocals, Samuel Flynn Scott on guitars and vocals, Conrad Wedde handling guitars and keyboards, Warner Emery on bass, Richie Singleton on drums and Will Ricketts providing percussion. Lee Prebble again assumed producing duties.

“We came in with the idea of recording great band takes and then just touching them up a wee bit,” says Buda. “But with the last two we weren’t quite good enough to pull it off so we had to deconstruct everything and rebuild it. It was quite an angsty process!”

The band, he believes, is now sounding better than ever in the studio, something he puts down to the extensive touring they’ve done in the last year. “We could just concentrate on making what we already had, sound better, rather than destroying it to make it work at all.”

The results will get a public airing with the album’s release here scheduled for September. Meanwhile, the Americans will get their introduction to the Phoenix Foundation album that went gold on its local release.

“After we release Pegasus over there we will shop around our new improved album to some bigger labels that hopefully may have actually heard of us.”

For the rest of the year, says Buda, the grand plan for The Phoenix Foundation has three equal parts.

“Tour the album. Chill out. Look after children.”

Idealog: the Taika Waititi interview

One of my most pleasant interviews of 2007 was with Oscar nominated Wellington director Taika Waititi who did the media rounds as his feature debut Eagle vs. Shark was released. We spent a couple of hours talking at Wellington’s Deluxe cafe. His movie was opening at the Embassy Theatre next door that afternoon. Here’s a link to the complete interview on the Idealog website, which is formatted in much nicer way.

The Webstock special

I didn’t get a chance to post these last week as I was tied up posting on another blog. Webstock Mini was a great event and credit to Natasha Hall and the others on the team who continue to put on some worthwhile internet events in Wellington.

The new Internet: All fizz and no substance?

by Peter Griffin | from New Zealand Herald

It was with great anticipation that I settled into a seat at the Paramount Theatre in Wellington this week to listen to a bunch of internet experts debate a very live topic - whether the new wave of websites gathered under the Web 2.0 banner is “all fizz and no substance”.

The debate could have gone anywhere and indeed it ranged widely.

“People just aren’t that technology savvy,” argued Radio New Zealand producer and head of the “fizz” team, Mark Cubey.

“Second Life? It’s that versus House on a Tuesday night. Yeah, Second Life just doesn’t have the dialogue. We’re talking about stuff that is real and you can’t tell me Web 2.0 is real,” he concluded.

Cubey’s opponent, Philip Fierlinger, a former dotcom entrepreneur and now developer at accounting software maker Xero, said the money paid for Web 2.0 ventures such as MySpace and YouTube, spoke for itself - essentially, there was substance where there was money.

“Is US$500 million [$658 million] substantial? Is US$1.5 billion substantial?” he asked.

Austrian database architect Sandy Mamoli cleverly worked away at Web 2.0’s biggest weakness - its ability to create online worlds for its users that are detached from reality.

“We don’t share our tacky tastes or our boring personalities,” she said.

“Web 2.0 creates a huge gap between the online persona and who we really are. Web 2.0 makes it much easier to be fake.”

Brenda Leeuwenberg, online producer at NZ On Air, saw it differently.

“Sometimes there are moments of pure joy in what people put out there on the web,” she said. They are both, of course, quite right.

Web developer Mike Brown sees the rise of Web 2.0 as a giant conspiracy to advance the cause of the letter “R”, which indeed defines a fair number of Web 2.0 website names - Twitter and Flickr being just two on Brown’s list. “You might think it’s just a case of letter jealousy, but R wants to be an A-lister,” said Brown.

And so the arguments bounced backwards and forwards for an hour or so mirroring the global debate about the value of Web 2.0 services and intensifying as web sceptics hone their argument.

The anti-Web 2.0 arguments have perhaps been best articulated by the British web entrepreneur and author Andrew Keen who in his new book The Cult of the Amateur suggests that the proliferation of user-generated content that’s central to the Web 2.0 way of doing things is killing culture.

Others are saying similar things. Take US technology commentator John C. Dvorak’s dismissive take on the newest of the Web 2.0 players Twitter, a “micro-blogging” service that allows you to post short updates during a day to keep everyone abreast of your activities - no matter how mundane. Dvorak sees no substance in that, other than to provide a record for the sociologists of the future.

“All of these sorts of networks should provide a trove of insights into society - if the entire system is archived and turned over to the sociology departments of some major universities,” he wrote recently in a PC Magazine column about Twitter.

“I’m afraid that the people who implement stuff like this never think in these terms.”

Dvorak admits he was also dismissive of podcasting and blogging when they were introduced yet he himself has since become a podcaster and a blogger.

Which just goes to show how hard it is to pick where the Web 2.0 movement will lead us.

For the record, the team pushing the argument that there really is substance in Web 2.0 won the Webstock debate by a slim majority. That wasn’t surprising given Webstock’s audience, which text messaged in votes for the teams and was filled with web developers.

There are 140 web development companies in Wellington alone. The industry has rapidly geared up for the local impact of this new phase of internet development. There’s plenty of fizz on the local scene in everything from online retailing to insurance, but there’s also a fair bit of money floating around.

I think the debate came out how it should have, despite the “fizzers” presenting a more compelling and humorous argument than those with substance.

Above all the inane chatter on Twitter, the annoying music blaring at you from MySpace pages and the flying penises in Second Life, there’s something powerful going on in these new web communities.

Whether they will all live on remains a moot point, but one thing is for sure, the new makeup of the internet is seriously changing our approach to information use and social interaction. Whatever price you put on that, such transformation in a few short years has been nothing but substantial.

On The Web
www.myspace.com
www.secondlife.com
www.twitter.com
www.webstock.org.nz

Virtual beers with Darth Vader

by Peter Griffin | from New Zealand Herald

It’s the place where virtual friendships are made and digital real estate is bought and sold, but educators say the fast-growing Second Life community is also a powerful tool for collaborative learning.

On first appearances it doesn’t seem very productive: a group of digital avatars - the online creations of real people - sit around a campfire in a pleasant park, chatting away.

“This experience can be a lot of fun,” says Leigh Blackall, an education development manager for Otago Polytechnic.

“We drink around the campfire and the beers are programmed to make us tipsy.”

Blackall conducted a Second Life meeting of education professionals from around the world during his speech to the Webstock internet conference in Wellington on Tuesday, and
says that such virtual meetings could be the future of long-distance learning.

“It wasn’t until I had my first encounter with a purpose in Second Life, like a meeting, that I realised what it’s all about. There are a lot of people in education trying to get into this.”

build their own world is seen by networked learning experts like Blackall as an ideal forum for students to collaborate and share ideas.

Its potential has already been recognised by Second Life’s creators, Linden Lab, who have set up Campus: Second Life, which allows a free grant of land in the virtual Second Life world to an educational organisation for the duration of a semester.

Discounted land plots are also on offer for schools and universities - something of tangible value in a world where an island will set you back US$1600 and US$100 a month in upkeep.

Whole islands can be bought by educational institutions where entry is restricted to their real-life students.

Educational professionals collaborate on a Second Life wiki - a type of online database - to standardise virtual education tools.

Blackall says the potential for development of educational resources in Second Life is huge, but that the tightly funded education sector is hesitant to invest in the online community, which has 7.2 million members and can turn over the equivalent of US$1 million a day in virtual currency.

“So far, no takers,” he says ofprojects he has suggested. “It’s quite difficult to get things going in education.”

Blackall says the real-time aspect of Second Life makes it “bandwidth hungry” and suitable only for high-speed internet connections. But Second Life is becoming increasingly sophisticated - he is particularly looking forward to Second Life users being able to display websites within the online environment.

Students could, for example, sit in a virtual meeting collectively editing a wiki document.

COMMENTS:

Hi Peter,
Wanted to thank you for your article on Leigh Blackall’s Second Life presentation and also to let you know that there is already a small but thriving NZ education community in Second Life.
Here at Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology (NMIT) in Nelson, we are investing in an island in Second Life to explore its potential for enhancing our students learning.
In fact NMIT already has a presence in Second Life - we have been renting space on EduIsland alongside places such as the University of Cincinatti and Universtiy of Hawaii! Our space is called the NMIT Garden of Learning, and apart from being a space for some of my students to explore Second Life, it is also the venue for the informal meeting of the Kiwi Educators group at 2pm (NZ time) every Sunday afternoon.
If you are interested there is more information on our Second Life Interest Group website (www.nmit.ac.nz/research/2ndlife) and also at https://eduforge.org/blog/blog.php?/categories/140-NZ-Education-in-a-Virtual-World which is run by Aaron Griffiths.
We are now planning several projects which will be undertaken once the island is operational and have received some funding from the government’s e-Capability Fund to help us get going! The exploration of NZ education in a virtual world is very definitely underway.
Many thanks

Dr Clare Atkins
School of Business and Computer Technology
NMIT

The Kiwi Firefox connection

by Peter Griffin | from Griffin’s Tech Blog Herald Online

Aucklander Robert O’Callahan, who as a contractor to the Mozilla Corporation has been working on some of the new features that will be built into the upcoming Firefox 3.0 web browser, gave an interesting Webstock presentation on where browser development is going.

O’Callahan demoed some new Firefox features, such as the updated Gecko rendering engine and offline web browsing functionality that will be available in Firefox 3.0, but he used the bulk of his presentation to explain the philosophy around open source web development.

O’Callahan seems wary of the growing focus in web content development on Adobe’s Flash player. That’s because Flash and its new rival, Microsoft-developed Silverlight, operate on a different model to the web tools the open source community comes up with. They’re essentially privately owned and controlled.

“We want to avoid people getting a monopoly on web clients. If you can control who can render web content, you control the platform,” says O’Callahan, who has contributed to Mozilla since 1999.

He believes there’s plenty of life left in HTML, the standard language of the web and that focus should be put on fixing the bugs in existing web pages and doing smarter things with HTML than trying to “supercede the web with shiny new design”.

“You can add things to HTML that are harder to do if you don’t control the platform,” he added.

O’Callahan believes the dominant browser vendor, Microsoft “isn’t so interested in the web at the moment “.

“We have to unseat their dominance and gain market share with browsers interested in pursuing our mission,” says O’Callahan.

The mission of course is to keep development of the web open so that no one company or technology can control its evolution. O’Callahan seems pretty ambivalent about Apple’s move to release its Safari web browser for Windows computers.

“We’d like Safari to take all of Internet Explorer’s market share and none of ours,” he says.

“I wouldn’t trust Apple any more than Microsoft necessarily if they got the monopoly.”

O’Callahan said developing open source alternatives to more sophisticated web tools was essential to keep browsers like Firefox competitive. One set of functionality that’s viewed as being particularly important is offline browser capability.

The idea is that when you type a URL into the web address bar when you’re not connected to the internet, the browser will search local storage for a cached copy of the page and allow a certain amount of functionality and data back-up. When you go back online, the local version of the application syncs with the version stored on the web and updates it.

“It’s similar to cookies, but with more grunt and more storage,” says O’Callahan. Google has developed similar technology to allow its applications to be used offline with the open source development tools, Google Gears.

New Zealand’s association with the Firefox browser, which has rapidly gained market share at the expense of Microsoft’s dominant internet Explore browser, is very strong. Ben Goodger, a lead Firefox developer who also works for Google is a kiwi and O’Callahan said there are three paid Firefox developers based in Auckland, with scope for the team to be expanded if people with the right skills can be found.

O’Callahan’s blog can be found here.

COMMENTS

Barnacle
You might want to check out Robert’s presentation at the Auckland Web Meetup. He covers the offline stuff, new video formats and font rendering in FF 3. It can be found here - http://www.meetup.co.nz/2007/06/21/video-june-meetup-robert-ocallahan-

(Manned) mission to Mars

by Peter Griffin | from the Herald on Sunday

Photos courtesy of my friend Ellie who visited Nasa in 2003 and got up close and personal with the Mars Rover!

It has to be one of the more unusual job descriptions ever advertised: spend 18 months locked in a metal tank with five other people, eating vacuum-packed food, with only radio contact with the outside world.

But that’s exactly what the European Space Agency is looking for people to do, and it’s all in the name of space exploration.

The agency and the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems want to simulate a manned mission to Mars, including the 520-day trip to and from the Red Planet, the landing of a space craft and the scientific testing such a trip would involve.

Why undertake such a time-consuming experiment? Because space agencies have their hearts set on landing people on Mars. As the ESA explains: “To go to Mars is still a dream and one of the last gigantic challenges. But one day, some of us will be on precisely that journey to the Red Planet.”

To give any such mission a chance of succeeding, it needs to be simulated first, in part to determine whether astronauts would be able to psychologically cope with being cooped up together for such an extended time.

The agency admits the whole thing has the feel of a reality TV show. I could imagine it turning into one massive episode of Big Brother, with bed-hopping astronauts, territorial arguments and emotional meltdowns.

But the agency says the volunteers on the simulated mission will be kept busy carrying out the activities Mars-bound astronauts would be given. So it wants candidates with scientific, engineering and medical backgrounds.

The six participants will live in a series of metal compartments about 200sq m in size - roughly the space of four studio apartments stuck together. There will be living quarters, a kitchen, a research area and medical room. They’ll be able to talk to the equivalent of ground control and presumably their families, but once the hatch is closed and the astronauts start their journey, they will be on their own, having to fend for themselves if anything goes wrong.

The experiment could produce a treasure trove of information for psychologists and the agency is working out what scientific tests it will carry out on the participants.

Key will be exploring the group dynamic that develops, the effects of the confinement on things like sleep, mood and the ability to perform complicated tasks. The agency also plans to look at medical procedures that could be performed.

As the months pass, scientists will no doubt be peering into the tanks via closed-circuit TV cameras, to scrutinise everything that goes on.

Mars is about 1 1/2 times as far from the Sun as the Earth is, though the distance between the two planets fluctuates wildly from around 56 million kilometres in 2003, when they were at their closest in tens of thousands of years to 380 million kilometres at their farthest apart.

As epic as any manned trip to Mars will be, many countries - the US, China, and the members of the European Space Agency included - are investigating the potential.

There have been several unmanned trips and another will begin in early August when the US$414 million ($542 million) Phoenix Mars Lander will be launched. Phoenix will land on the northern Martian plains, on top of ancient fields of ice which lie below the planet’s surface. The plan is for Phoenix to scoop up some ice and analyse it, beaming the results back to Earth.

As much as the Mars Rover’s exploits on the Red Planet caught the world’s attention, that will be nothing compared with the buzz a manned mission would generate. So who wants to be the first Kiwi to pretend to go to Mars? The hyperactive and claustrophobic need not apply.

A few robotic Mars discovery vehicles from the Nasa colection. Remember when Rover’s wheel got stuck on a rock? Easy to dislodge on the floor at Nasa, not so easy when you’re using a joystick to control a robot that’s tens of millions of kilometres away…