and as if by magic…

I’ve only had a couple hours of sleep. I’m tired. I smoked too much last night. I have mixed feelings about The Kaiser Mix last night.

I’ll write a full “report” over the weekend, I can’t do it now because I’m just way too tired but I’d just thought I’d make some notes on what last night was like for me.

• It was bloody hard work
• I nearly gave up
• Blip was being a pain – I was almost impossible to “load” a live blip so I had to work from my back up playlist - and the blips of people I follow/follow me
• Yahoo Live wouldn’t let me into my original “Camera 1” (so I had to set up another), and the stream was too dark (I was in a bar. At night)
• I didn’t get to take as many photos as I wanted. In fact I didn’t manage it at all.
• The sound on the stream wasn’t hot was bloody awful. The sound was great in the bar.
• Happy Birthday was sung. Twice. (In the bar)
• It was crazy trying to chat, blip, talk to a camera and keep a room full of punk-hungry drinkers happy.
• I nearly gave up
• It was bloody hard work

Yes, I have mixed feelings about the mix, something close to pride mixed with disappointment. But, as I said to Seb, who was in the live stream, The Kaiser Mix was the hardest, maddest and challenging thing that I have ever done online - five hours live and online. It all nearly went wrong.

But I did it.

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So the Kaiser Mix happens tonight, and as I mentioned on twitter this morning, I’m actually quite nervous. But in a good way. If you don’t know what all this Kaiser Mix stuff is (it’s a live event) maybe you should read these:

• The Kaiser Mix - Taking Part (because you can)
• The Kaiser Mix - Interaction
• The Kaiser Mix - Live blip in Munich

Some of you may have noticed that the Kaiser Mix website has changed (see above) - and that I will be running 2 cameras tonight.

I’d thought I’d also put a list of global start times together - and here they are:

• Munich: 21.00hrs
• London: 20.00hrs
• NYC: 15.00hrs
• San Fransisco: 12.00hrs
• Sydney: 06.00hrs
• Tokyo: 04.00hrs
• Singapore: 03.00hrs
• Moscow: 11.00hrs

I’m nervous and excited and can’t wait to get cracking. Where ever you are - I hope you can come.

Jesus, I hope this works.

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Well, it’s four days until “The Kaiser Mix” on the 9th of October and I’d thought I’d give you a little update on some of the things that are going and how you can take part, even if you can’t get to Munich.

Twitter:
I’ve set up a twitter account (robbed myself of a former Character’s Twitter account) called TheKaiserMix which you can of course follow. I’ll only be using this twitter account on the evening and it’ll be tweeting my blips - and through that odd @ functionality the blips of everyone following me. If you’re on the road and want a song played just send an @TheKaiserMix to me on twitter - and I’ll play it.

Flickr:

I’ll be taking lots of photos during the evening which will be appearing in the slide show widget you can see above over on The Kaiser Mix blog (the charming Gentleman in the slide show above is Snoop - and along with Joseph runs The Schwarzer Hahn). If you’re there, like in “The Hahn” on the night and you have a flickr account you can upload photos and if you tag them thekaisermix (just that tag) they automatically appear in the slide show. Likewise if you’re not going to be in Munich but you’re listening or watching (see below) you can upload your version/experience of The Kaiser Mix.

Blip:

For those of you who are not going to make it to Munich, there is of course blip itself. If you follow me and use the @thekaiser function you can send me songs you want played. If I play your blip it’s goes into the kaiser’s playlist.

Yahoo Live:

OK, as some of you know I’ve been playing around with the video streaming stuff - and think I’ve got it nailed. You can either watch the event, live (starts around 21:00hrs C.E.T) on The Kaiser Mix channel (where you can chat with me during the evening - and if you’ve got a video camera stream on the channel as well) or on the The Kaiser Mix. If you’re especially excited by all of this you can actually embed the yahoo live widget on your blog (that’s the thing at the bottom of this blog).

So that’s pretty much it. I’m getting quite excited about all of this.

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I tried to interview Faris ages ago. Correction. I interviewed Faris ages ago but was too daft to record it properly. This time, however it worked so if you want to hear Faris chatting about

• big hair
• the current financial crisis and what that means for advertising, business
• trust and value systems
• brands as potential banks
• Kaiser Nuts

then get yourselves over to Werbeblogger sharpish, because that’s where you can hear it.

Many thanks to the genius that is commonly known as Mr. Faris Yakob.

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I’m a sucker for this kind of silliness, because I believe it’s what the internet was made for. Having created “Super Robert” I felt the need to create “Super Martin” (go on, go and have a look at Super Martin - partly as a gift to my favourite WPP shareholder and partly for one of my more loyal readers, Sir Martin Sorrell himself.

Many thanks to Roland for pointing us in the right direction.

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This is Part 1 of a series called “Age, Money, Performance, Speed, Reform“. As I mentioned in the prologue, these posts form a a build on the “get fat quick chicken” post and are part of my central argument for something very exciting that will be hopefully happening soon.

Part 1, is about Age, and as the original post was very, very long, I have decided to split it up into a series of posts that will appear throughout this week.

So this is Age II (Age I can be found here).

A while back I was reading this article in the Süddeutsche about the youth of today. It’s an interesting article about how, in the past, “the youth” were easily definable (mod, rocker-metal, hippies etc.) and organised themselves into groups of opposition. This, it would seem, has changed and “the youth of today” is considerable more pragmatic than any other generation before.

What I found particularly interesting is that children/young-adults have very little to rebel against. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything to get angry at. It means, and it would seem that the Shell Study supports this theory, that as a whole our children find it hard to rebel against us, their parents.

It would seem that adults around my age are clearly reluctant to grow up. They not only listen to the music they listened too when they were younger (blip.fm anybody) but they continue to follow “what’s hip” instead of doing the sensible thing and tune into Terry Wogan. If I look at pictures of myself as a student and compare them to what I look like today then I look they same. I just have less hair.

As most of you know, I have three daughters. The eldest is 13 years old. I fully approve of what she wears, her personal politics, the music she listens too and what she plans to do with her life. If it wasn’t for the fact that she was 13 years old and well into puberty we would get on like a house on fire. If she wanted to rebel against me she would have to join the conservative party, the army and start going to church.

I’m 37 years old now - the same age as my dad when I was 13 years old, which also means when my eldest daughter is my age now, I’ll be the same age as my dad today (does that make sense?). If she has a child when she’s 24 then I’ll have a 13 year old grandchild. So I have a question for you : if

• my daughter’s generation can’t rebel against me because my generation doesn’t seem to want to let go
• then it’s likely that her generation will do the same
• and her kids won’t have anything to rebel against either

will we have three identical generations in twenty years time?

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Some of you may have noticed that I occasionally appear at the bottom of this page. Sometimes I’m singing, sometimes I’m dancing and sometimes I’m to be found wearing Lederhosen. I’m testing stuff, you see, for The Kaiser Mix on the 9th of October.

Yesterday evening I was testing the sound over the live stream and thanks to Patrick discovered that the sound is horrible, which is a bit disappointing because, well, that’s the point of the live stream – I want you to be able to see and hear what’s going on.

So I need some help from technically clever people. How do I improve the sound? I’m assuming that I need a special microphone or something but which one? It’s going to be very loud on the night, and hopefully chocker full of people.

So if you have any ideas on how to improve the live stream, (sound and image) or if your based in Munich and have a technical swat-team that have done this kind of thing before, could you please give me a hand? Please. My contact details are here or just pop ideas etc in the comments section.

Many thanks.

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This is Part 1 of a series called “Age, Money, Performance, Speed, Reform“. As I mentioned in the prologue, these posts form a a build on the “get fat quick chicken” post and are part of my central argument for something very exciting that will be hopefully happening soon.

Part 1, is about Age, and as the original post was very, very long, I have decided to split it up into a series of posts that will appear throughout this week.

So this is Age I.

One of the worst jobs that I have ever had was back in the summer of 1989. I was a young art student in my summer holidays and in desperate need of some cash and Jason, a fellow Student from my days at Portsmouth college of arts, had given me a tip off that one of the best paying summer jobs going was mopping floors at our local general hospital. He’d done it the summer before and assured me that apart from the ridiculously early start (which doesn’t seem so early now) the job was an absolute doddle. So I went along and got the job (I was qualified because I was halfway sober and could hold a mop). The job was potentially simple; mop the floors, clean the toilets, make cups of tea for the patients and supply biscuits as and when needed. An edge of difficulty was only added depending on the ward that you were given to work on. I can’t remember what ward Jason worked on but I sure as hell know what ward I got given.

I got the geriatric ward.

The six weeks mopping floors on the geriatric ward of Southampton General hospital changed me completely and it is the only job I have ever had that I have properly despised. Not because of what it was menial labour - my mother was a cleaner right up until her retirement and what was good enough for mum was good enough for me and it was openly discussed amongst the full time cleaning staff of the hospital that the job of cleaning on the geriatric ward was particularly “challenging”, no, I despised the job because I had never and have never since been in such a place of complete and utter despair. It was the parking lot of death. Worse still, it was a place completely void of all respect.

Everyday I would quietly clean the floors, supply cups of tea and give an extra biscuit here and there to adults who had stepped over the threshold of being grown up and old into the twilight zone of old and a burden only to be shooed away to clean the toilets by the over zealous senior staff nurse when visiting time came.

I wasn’t supposed to be seen by “the relatives” and I wasn’t supposed to see them, and the way they treated there former parent like a child. It seemed to me that, without exception, the children of our patients were punishing there parent for all the sweets that they never got, for all the evenings they had to be in before ten o’clock at night and for the fact that they were still alive. Yes, they were pretty angry that dad hadn’t just pissed off out of it - like Mr. Jones had the day before (I’d found Mr. Jones the day before. Dead, in the toilet.)

When the relatives had gone the nurses swarmed out into the ward and placed those high back chairs that you can only find in hospitals at the foot of each of the patients bed facing the window. One by one the patients where plucked skillfully from there beds and placed into “the sunny seats” where they were to spend the rest of the day staring out of the window. Day in, day out; tea and biscuits from the spotty art student, a visit from the psychopathic offspring and an afternoon in the sunny seat.

It was heartbreaking. It is still heart breaking.

Now, as we all know, the world is getting older and we’re not having enough kids. This is what the United Nations “World Population Ageing 2007” report has to say:

Population ageing is unprecedented, a process without parallel in the history of humanity. A population ages when increases in the proportion of older persons (that is, those aged 60 years or over) are accompanied by reductions in the proportion of children (persons under age 15) and then by declines in the proportions of persons in the working ages (15 to 59). This leads to the big reduction in the support ratio.

In 2000, the population aged 60 years or over numbered 600 million, triple the number present in 1950. In 2006, the number of older persons had surpassed 700 million. By 2050, 2 billion older persons are projected to be alive, implying that their number will once again triple over a span of 50 years.

Globally the population of older persons is growing at a rate of 2.6 per cent per year, considerably faster than the population as a whole which is increasing at 1.1 per cent annually.

Today the median age for the world is 28 years, that is, half the world’s population is below that age and the other half is above it. The country with the youngest population is Uganda, with a median age of 15 years, and the oldest is Japan, with a median age of 43 years. Over the next four decades, the world’s median age will likely increase by ten years, to reach 38 years in 2050.

So what does my little story have to do with the UN report, fast strategies, marketing, advertising and business?

• Respect
• Culture (young vs. old - west vs. east)
• Shortsightedness

Tomorrow, I’ll try and explain why.

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I’ve been quietly working on a series of posts which you will be able to read here as of Monday next week around performance, speed, age, money and reform. These posts are a build on the “get fat quick chicken post” and form part of the central argument for something that is currently being organised. It’s a very special something – a something that I’m secretly very excited about and if you live in London will hopefully excite you too.

If you haven’t read “get fat quick chicken yet” please do.

The series starts on Monday and looks at age, which, for me, is one of the most important issues of our time.

Before we get going I’d like to ask you to do something. Look around the place where you work, look at the people you work with, and how old they are – and how old you are.

What do you see?

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The news of Rick Wright’s passing away has deeply upset me. That may sound odd, but it has. Rick Wright was part of something, a band, that was for a certain period of my life extremely important to me and if I brutally honest with myself, pretty much formed the way I see the world. Anyone who has met me, and those of you who have been following what I have been writing over the last couple of years, will know that I tend to be melancholic and where everyone else sees light I am often to be found in shadow. It’s a place I feel comfortable and the words and music of Pink Floyd helped me along my career path as a chronic misery.

The thing that upsets me most is the reminder that I am now of an age where by people and things that are important to me (whether it be people I know or otherwise - musicians, actors, playwrights, artists) pass away, that I am of age where I start to loose people.

I lost something today that was, in an abstract way, incredibly important to me and that makes me very sad. But it is also a reminder that the worst, far worse, is yet to come.

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