Aaaahhh, Cape Town! Beautiful city by the sea, complete with humongous ornamental rock, otherwise know as Table Mountain.
Cape Town, located very near the southern-most tip of Africa, and the birthplace of the enigmatic Tom Kidding, is a beautiful and scenic tourist attraction which brings holidaymakers from around the globe to its sunny, sandy shores. Shown above is a picture of Table Mountain taken from the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront development, a popular tourist hangout complete with gigantic aquarium, theatre, movie houses, yacht basin, gift and novelty stores aplenty, five star hotels, and fine restaurants.
Cape Town is located on a peninsula, much like San Francisco where Tom Kidding currently resides. Learn more about Cape Town and find out more about South Africa in general.
At the early age of two, I both startled and delighted adults by picking my nose in public. From this moment on, it was predicted that I would become a veritable child prodigy, astounding adults with my surprizing level of prowess. Unfortunately, this prediction fell hopelessly short of reality, and it was not until the ripe age of 12 (over the hill, in child prodigy terms) that I started to display any real inkling of talent in matters creative. It was at this time that I began to draw and paint.
Strangely enough, I have very little in the way of fond recollections of my early childhood (ages 0 to 12). Looking back, I have this sense that I was only half conscious most of the time. I was going with the flow to such an extent that I wasn't even aware that I was alive - a walking blob of flesh, you could say. My parents' divorce was to change all of that, but you'll hear about that later.
Anyway, so as a walking blob of flesh being processed through the metabolism of junior school, I played sports such as soccer and proved hopelessly poor at it. I don't think I ever fully understood what my function as a full-back was. I would sometimes fulfill my duties as defense by intercepting a ball that was making its way danbgerously close to our goals, and then proceed to dribble with it all the way past the half way line towards the enemy's goals, all the time ignoring pleas of "Pass! Pass! Pass the ball!" that came from the forwards who were actually now behind. The end result was always an off-side penalty. I never understood this and thought it was quite unjust and discriminatory. After all, why shouldn't I have just as much right to scoring a goal as any of the other players. My team didn't much care for me and my career in unprofessional soccer was very short-lived.
At around the age of 17, towards the end of Standard 9 (equivalent to 11th Grade in the American schooling system), I started becoming a very questioning and cynical individual, with a growing aversion to accepting the rule of authority, especially the authority of psycho school masters that I had no respect for whatsoever.
I wonder to this day whether Pink Floyd's "The Wall" played any part in opening my eyes to the nauseatingly twisted nature of the British single-sex schooling system, complete with Nazi-like school uniforms, military cadet practices, and boarding schools with paedophiles as boarding school masters who probably cum in their pants every time they get to spank a boy for not polishing his shoes correctly.
From early 1996 to mid 2001, I worked at Headspace/Beatnik (Beatnik, Inc.), an Internet technology company based in San Mateo, California and headed by none other than Thomas Dolby, the eighties hit pop musician and ongoing pioneer in the field of multimedia and interactive music. At Beatnik, I acted as Director of Web Authoring Technologies.
It's a long story, but here goes.
The reason I came to the States originally was because I had been developing a software sound synthesiser back in South Africa. I realized after much frustration that SA was just not the place to be if you were involved in the fields of multi-media and music technology. California (Silicon Valley, to be more precise) was THE place where I would have to relocate to. It was a big step, but one that I realised was inevitable. So, in March of 1994 I left friends and family behind and embarked upon my journey into the great unknown, complete with backpack and traveller's checks.
Well, after having stayed in the States for about a year, and having found noone interested in investing in my sound synthesis software, I started giving up on the idea and focused instead on music - arranging, producing, engineering, composing and singing. While being involved in a project called SIGMA (Songwriters' International Guild and Musicians' Association), located in San Francisco at the corner of Haight and Ashbury streets (near the original Ben And Jerry's Icecream), I picked up an outdated Recording Industry Source Book from a garage sale on Ashbury Street one day. It sat around on a bookshelf for several months, proving to be a total waste of one dollar. To think, I could have satisfied myself with a 99c Whopper from Burger King instead.
Anyway, in the meantime I had seen an interview with Thomas Dolby on VH1 one evening. I think it was one of those "your-favorite-old-stars-and-where-they-are-now" type of shows, the type of show that Thomas has since confessed he loaths. In the interview, Thomas was going on about his involvement in multi-media and cutting-edge technology, the kind of juicy stuff that fascinates me.
Now, I was well aware of who Thomas Dolby was but I must confess, I hadn't exactly followed his music during my high shool years in the 80's. At that time in my life I was an introverted nut absorbed in the music of Vangelis, Jean-Michelle Jarre, Kitaro, Gary Numan, Ultravox, Pink Floyd and Mike Oldfield. I remember friends insistently telling me: 'Van [my nick name at that stage], you've got to get into Thomas Dolby if you like weird electronic music.' I think at that stage I considered Thomas Dolby to be too "poppy".
Well, whatever. I digress. Back to the recent past.
So, I decided that I should perhaps contact him some time to see if he'd be interested in my software synthesizer. Thing is, I just didn't know how. A few months later, while going through that old Recording Industry Source Book in search of artist management agencies (for myself), I came across an agency called Left Bank Management. And in the list of artists they managed was none other than - you guessed it - Thomas Dolby. So I called them up only to find that they no longer managed Thomas. The guy I was speaking to told me to stay on the line for a moment while he flipped through his Rolodex to see if he had the number for Thomas' new manager. I waited nervously, quite expecting that he wouldn't come up with anything and I'd be right back where I started, but, miracle of miracles, he stumbled onto the number of Mary Coller, Thomas' manager at that time. After contacting her, and convincing her that I had some great new technology that Thomas just had to know about (which I, myself, truly believed at the time), she graciously relinquished his e-mail address so I could contact him.
If I remember correctly, I sent him a really strange e-mail and we hit it off in a certain kind of a way. We corresponded for a while and threw a few e-mails at each other. Then, in about May of 1995, I finally met the man in the flesh. I was pleasantly surprised to find Thomas to be a completely unpretentious, unimposing, humble, and just all round cool kinda guy, quite incapable of controlling his outpourings of technobabble and infusing me with the same sense of enthusiasm for the great new technologies becoming available to the creative society that he, himself, was victim to. He talked my ears off for several hours and I politely reciprocated by talking his ears off for an hour or two as well.
I proved succesful in convincing him that I was an insane mad-hatter type of creative person and that, therefore, I should be working for Headspace. Unfortunately, Headspace could not immediately justify taking on any new people and it was another several months until there was space for my head at Headspace."
And that's the story of how I met Thomas Dolby.
(So, I guess that old Recording Industry Source Book turned out to be more valuable than the one dollar I had paid for it.)