I picked up the guitar again mid-2007 and immediately started picking. I'd been a total plectrum kid, but for some reason, after 14 years with barely a guitar in my hands, I not only wanted to play a real instrument again, I wanted to feel as much of it as I possibly could.

...with Benguela, Cape Town, July 2009. Photo: Niklas Zimmer

Over the years my approach has been influenced by guitarists from the Congo, Northern Zambia and South Africa. I've been inspired and encouraged by luminaries such as Ry Cooder, Jeff Beck and Australia's Geoff Achison, also a Beck aficionado. I've listened and watched guitarists from Brazil and string players on the streets of Istanbul.

I'm still crap at playing, but the joy of having both an instrument in my hands and the quest for expression through all manner of experiences again is more than I could have imagined three-quarters through my life!

On writing about guitar

I've been wanting to write about my return to the guitar as instrument of choice for some time now. I've kept a kind of guitar journal where I pen my successes, failures and track a kind of practice routine, but honestly, I didn't think public commentary would be interesting for anyone other than guitar nerds... and may be not even the nerds!

In all honesty, I'm writing this mostly for my own record and for anyone who may be interested. So I thought I'd begin by jotting down a few thoughts about picking. That's finger picking, and a summery of the choices one has to make with a few samples from the work of guitarists I admire and some I even learn from.

Thank goodness for broadband. Years ago some of us were trying all manner of means to shove audio across a telephone line, from one computer to the next, between buildings, cities and countries. To think we have such amazing advances in compression technologies that online video has become so ubiquitous YouTube logos appear on Indonesian mobile phone adds right next to Facebook and Yahoo.

So, there you go... I'd not have made any where near the kind of progress I sought for, nor been exposed to so many more guitarists willing to share their techniques and had so many of my awkward questions answered.

Nails or flesh?

I love my guitars. I love playing with my fingers. I love plucking, pinching and digging into strings, both nylon and steel, with a mix of delicacy and ferocity. But no matter which way I approach picking I'm left with cracked, split and worn out nails. Am I going about this the right way?

Let's begin with a lesson from Stefan Grossman. He picks with bare fingers. Bare finger picking hurts. At least until the skin hardens, but at the outset, with a steel string, it feels kind of crazy to be punishing one so much... that said, the sound is rounder and you're actually getting as close as one possibly can to the flesh of the instrument itself.

As such, I'm gradually moving from nails to flesh... largely due to the fact that my nails, if not worn down by my playing, break! Each time they do my playing feels hampered and any progress I'd made bails.

Recently the nail on my ring finger broke. Until then I'd not realised how much I relied on what would normally be a floating digit. Getting used to playing without the nail has not only been painful,  I'm having to relearn all my pieces. I've already leaned on the fleshy side of my thumb, barely using the nail at all. Just love the thumpy, slappy bass sound I get... and it's easier to whack the face of the guitar for extra percussive effect with the thumb, the hand leaning into the strings rather than suspended above them.

Here's Stefan teaching us mortals how to play the blues standard, " Corina, Corina". Note the position of his wrist and his sound. Where the wrist sits is important as it can either give one, or hinder flexibility of the thumb in particular.

If I wasn't happy with bare flesh, I could turn to picks. I've tried them, but they might put my playing back a few years. Tasmanian guitarist, Piz, told me the first time he used picks his fingers felt six feet long! But he persevered and like the next guitarist, has developed a strong, strident style, particularly on banjo.

Here's the beguiling technique of Bjørn Berge's mix of plastic and metal finger picks and slide. I ain't ever heard a 12 string sound so vast and generous... harmonics ablaze!

Finally, we're at the nails. I love playing with my nails, but I'm resting my rest more on the bridge than picking directly above the strings. This results in more access to the flesh of the fingers and greater wear and tear on the nails. The proverbial jury's still out.

Okay, let's see how John Butler hangs with nails and steel string. How he manages to play this piece without breaking a single nails amazes me. I'm wondering whether the nails are real or plastic...

Ultimately, it's what ever feels right... problem with me is what ever feels right changes from piece to piece, from day to day. I reckon if my nails never broke I'd keep going in that direction... but for now, it's a bit of mix, from nails to the flesh of it.

Whether it's the lack of blue sky by day or skies bereft of stars by night, I've taken to bleaching all colour and tonality out of my recent photos of Jakarta.

At first I took to softening Jakarta's CBD skylines, casual derives via taxies, as I can't go any where with out them. The end result is reminiscent of the stills I'd taken with a 125mm camera in the 1970s.

Jakarta CBD derive. Distortion by car window. HTC Desire and Vignette.

Perhaps it's the malls, the vast street advertisements that turn major thoroughfares into a kind of drive-through catalogue, that I've taken to bleaching Jakarta. That I can't do the same to the music leads me to a kind of sonic paralysis that over time blurs, but never quite enough to save one from jelly bean pop and every other inescapable cacophonous space.

Interior, the cafe Bakoel Kopi, Jl Cikini Raya, HTC Desire and Camera 360, bleached.

I'm experimenting with a combination of photo applications for Android phones. I have a HTC Desire, which, as of March 2010, was considered the most powerful Android yet. It comes with a 5 mega-pixel camera. The standard issue photo application requires strong light sources before a crisp image can be assured, but even then colours are too pale. I was initially very disappointed.

If I'd not read Techradar.com's review, I'd have given up on the camera as I wasn't sure whether I was dealing with badly designed hardware or piss poor software. In fact, neither.

Both are considered exemplary. I'd just not given myself time to learn about its features and how well one can shoot both stills and video. In the meantime, the few applications I've found on Android Market assured me the hardware is just fine and that a few people have devoted a lot of time to being very clever with the notion of “in camera processing” except this ain't no camera, it's a phone... or is it?

My present suite of camera apps include Camera 360, Retro Camera and Vignette. I don't want to turn this into a review, there's plenty out there already, but what I do want to write about is the increasing interest in vintage photography. Each of these apps support a variety of options that mimic everything from pin-hole cameras to Polaroids. And if that isn't enough, Retro Camera adds borders and textures that replicate the paper one would have originally printed on to. Why anyone would want a digital camera to replicate paper is beyond me, but the actual filters that have been designed to do this work is what interests my curious eye.

Jakarta CBD derive, HTC Desire and Vignette, border cropped.

This afternoon I trimmed borders off a number of stills. Not only were they twee and some what ironic, they made no sense to the kind of composition and tonality of image I was looking for. I prefer to sit on a rug and rifle through my mothers vast collection of family photographs as they were, packed neatly into envelopes, some bound with ribbon and the oldest kept within a leather wallet with passports that spoke of troubled times in languages barely remembered in my family, and secured in an antiquated suitcase that would be slid under her bed. Lovely stuff.

Anne-Marie Garton, Villawood Detention Centre, 1950/51. Photo by Alex Garton, Agfa 35mm camera, digitally scanned by Shane Garton from the original negative.

We grew up with a darkroom that was un-packed once ever few months to process and print the few rolls of 35mm film our father had taken... and gradually, the 125mm rolls we as children would take with our Japanese made cameras.

I'm a friend of noise. Some of my best friends make an insatiable racket! I've been known to create vast swathes of over-driven voices (listen to Kelly Churko and I hammer it out in Tokyo's bastion of noise, Soup) accelerated with ever widening square wave filters!

But put me in a Jakarta hyper-mall or sit me in the back of an antiquated baja surrounded by scooters, buses, SUVs and taxies I'll gradually lose my tolerance for these dense, complex and, I have to say, abusive sound scapes.

This morning, for instance, I had looked forward to a decent sleep having not done so well in the rest department for some days. Getting to bed at 3:30 ought to have set me up for a long, languid morning on my last day in Jakarta. Not so.

At precisely 8am the Situ Lembang Park, across the street, turned into a day-long fishing festival. The PA was cranked to max belching three Jakarta personalities yelling over each other, singing and still yelling, laughing and yelling, replicating the awful, noxious TV adds and game shows that seem to undermine every living cell, and the cacophony of every sound known to modernity screaming in every mall and shopping centre I had been in.

The screaming stopped at 11 by which time I was sat at the furthest end of the house practising harmonic minor scales, as one does, with eyes desperate for rest and silence.

By 1pm I was walking round the lake, every edge of it a fishing pole and folks earnest in their task. Before your imagination starts drifting to idyllic ponds and water ways, this lake is man made, is ringed by a reasonably pretty park, but sincerely folks, there ain't no fish. So it was with some surprise when everyone began to howl in awe and delight at the site of a large fish being wound out, not without a struggle, to shore.

Fishing in Menteng, Jakarta

I'm sure live fish had been placed in the lake the previous day in preparation for today's festivities. Not so says the Mayor of West Jakarta, who claims the water is so clean gold-fish can be found there. That may be so, but something as large as a carp? I think not. Besides the water is far from clean. I've lived opposite it for a month.

But what the heck!  I preferred the murmur of Sunday folks with their fishing rods to the days harrowing start.

Slice of JK skyline.

Jakarta is getting richer and the divide between the rich and poor is said to be decreasing, but ever so slowly. There's so much money and and plastic here. Cleaning products are stacked in supermarkets from floor to ceiling and all of it terribly toxic and no doubt ending up in rivers and oceans!

I'm fortunate to be living for the moment in a kind of roomy, urban villa, which gives one the impression of being far from the sprawling, congested malaise that is Jakarta.

I spend most days working from a pristine courtyard that bridges the house to the kitchen at the rear of the property. Lush gardens on either side of me and a pool next to the kitchen make for a pleasantly cool setting from which to forage my working day though. Yet one is never too far from the scavengers, the poorest people in Jakarta, who make what could hardly be called a living from everyone else's waste. Hauling large carts they appear late afternoons at the front of the house, ensuring nothing of value is left to idle in our rubbish, which is accessible to them by means of a hatch fashioned into the sturdy fence.

Of the 140 cities on planet Earth, Jakarta is rated the 123rd most liveable, or 54th in Asia. The top five Asian cities are Osaka, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore. I'd go do Tokyo at a drop... Japan... Osaka... languid evenings on push-bikes along delicately lit river-banks flanked by bars and restaurants, the rare squadron of firefly's, escapees from the farm they are bred in near Takadanobaba where I lived a few weeks... Let me digress a moment and reflect on a most magnificent month I'd spent in Japan, pretty much two years ago to the month.

A thought on Tokyo

Despite what many say, I found Tokyo affordable. If you sub-let via craigslist, ride a bicycle, shop and eat with the locals in the back-streets and outer suburbs Tokyo life can be cosy, healthy and entertaining.

Clothes are cheap too. Unlike Jakarta, one can find men's sizes to suit slightly wider and taller blokes like me. Shopping for men's clothes in Jakarta is like shopping for children. Shorts and shirts are cut tight and tiny! In almost all stores I've poked around in, an XL sized shirt in Indonesia is no larger than an M.

2nd last weekend in Jakarta

It's 27 degrees and thunderstorms are expected. Yesterday an earthquake monitoring organisation released data recommending the kind of weights required to be engineered into new buildings throughout the archipelago given the sharp increase in tremors and quakes. Jakarta is sinking at a centimetre a year and still the skies are cluttered with cranes, new office blocks and malls. They may sink, but they may not fall should the perilous "ring of fire" burp.

It's humid and as much as I tend to work well in such environments, for some reason the atmospheric mix has stimulated a fungus that continues to eat at my feet and hands... is if it were dining on me alive! A lizard creature just ran down the wall from behind a large painting hung above my desk, startling me for a moment. As much as I'm gradually warming to Indonesia, in spite of the lack of summer clothes and the state of my skin in parts, I look forward to the winter, rain water showers and clear skies.

Did I say how fortunate I am to be staying in Menteng? This house was built by the Dutch in a rather unassuming palatial style with art deco resonances that, in 2010, one could describe as bohemian earthiness at it's nooks and far reaching crannies. This is further amplified by Heidi's substantial art collection, some of which we hung throughout the house just as I returned from Bali.

Detail - floor tiles, Menteng villa.

The tiles on the floor of my room, for instance, could have been lifted from any Turkish bathhouse, or perhaps inspired by traditional Javanese batik. Kind of crazy to look at, but strangely appealing!

The gardens are lush and ample, a veritable jungle for the two cats that have kept me company on my late evening writing sessions and the few occasions I've had the entire premises to my self. The house is so comforting and cheerful, with its courtyards and open lounge and dining areas that I find it entirely unnecessary to step out. I can sit at the rear of the premises by the side of the pool, as I am now, and practise my guitar, read or write... or head back to my room if I need a does of air-con, which is rare given the cool calm and serenity of this tiny slice of Menteng.

Getting to the weekend was a worthy pursuit as was the week prior to it. Friday polished off a week of preparation for a day with peers and partners of EngageMedia, leading community and activist media makers from mostly Jakarta based organisations. Much of the day focused on discussion around the future of video as a social justice tool here and Asia-Pacific, the results of which I'm writing up over the coming week.

Workspace, Menteng, JK, Jul 2010.

Weekend highlights include starting out on my first novel by South Africa's, J.M. Coetzee; hanging out with Sydney - Indonesian based sound artist and all round open source minded technology dude, Dan Mackinlay; and completing preliminary ideas for a track on South African producer, At Nel's next album.

AKA Somerfaan, At was co-founder of the infamous industrial outfit, Battery 9. I'd first heard of Battery 9 via Benguala's Alex Bozas who,  in his opinion, had produced "the best" remix on Benguela's, Chop Sui, also featuring a remix by Burnt Friedman. Looking over the album I'm not sure which artist can be attributed to Battery 9. Electronic musicians have a tendency to release an assortment of works under a variety of different names. In any case, Chop Sui is worth a listen, as would Bengeula's latest offering, Black Southeaster, was coincidently launched last night to be launched next weekend in Cape Town.

A weekend for music in the hemispheres... Some how, South Africa never quite leaves me.

Waiting to board a dhow, Inhaca Island

Who would have guessed that nearly two months since I'd left Inhaca Island, straddling a dhow to Maputo (capital of Mozambique), I'd be taking my morning coffee in the garden of a fine house around the corner from the home of the vice-President of Indonesia in Menteng, Jakarta?

In the past five or so weeks since I've been in Indonesia, the EngageMedia team here launched the Time for Reel Action DVD I'd produced. Soon after I was to slump to my bed with dengue fever that saw me spend two nights in hospital as my white blood count dropped to 10 platelets short of a transfusion. Two weeks ago I'd dropped into a hole on a warm night in Bali, mangling my left foot, my right dangling in sewage and all manner of ugliness below street level.

My daughter cared for me in her cool pad in Seminyak whilst I returned daily to a clinic to have my wounds cleaned and dressings changed. The day after I'd fallen, someone I'd been quite fond of wrote that she'd lost interest in me due to my alleged "self-obsession" with these "dramas". Oh well...

I reflected on her words that evening as I thrust the sash of my bag between my teeth, gripped the edge of the bed and called out, "Ok sister, go for it..." My wounds were found to have not been cleaned properly so I had to endure an hour of wiping and brushing without anaesthetics! It was perhaps the most gruelling experience I've had yet to face. I'd thought the crushing pain brought on by dengue was bad enough, but this was something else.

Dramatic? Well, it was... Self-obsessed? I do spend a lot of time thinking about my work and playing guitar, but I can well do with out the dramas.

Back in Jakarta and a guest of Heidi and Andrew's (both of whom nursed me through dengue), I'm finding both time to repair my feet and catch up with the work I'd not been able to muster during those odd periods of sorry health. I don't get sick that often and apart from the occasional whack to my shins and an over-sat, some what achy back, I'm not prone to many physical ailments. All this changed in November of 2009.

Late last year problems I'd had with my back finally caught up with me. I was only a day or so away from heading to Malaysia to run a workshop. A team of print journalists were eager to improve their video production skills. But it was not to happen. I'd not been able to get out of bed. What followed was months of exercise and careful planning around my work practises. Eventually I got careful, stronger and better.

Then, two weeks before I was to leave for South Africa in May, I'd some how managed to acquire a viral infection in my right lung that left me bed ridden at best, sleepless and gasping for breath at worst. Thankfully, with the help of two powerful antibiotics, I got to Johannesburg and Quiet Mountain where I'd spent a week at one of the rare face-to-face APC board meetings . It was to be a month before the next ailment, but those four weeks prior were nothing short of inspired.

What transpired is best encapsulated in an improvisation Roy MacGregor and I  cooked up one warm afternoon after a day of libations and casual chatter. We played a lot of guitar together spending ten days roaming Kruger National Park, Mozambique and Nelspruit. Although many more musical revelations were to follow, this was one of the few captured on video.

Take a moment to listen and reflect on Pecan, performed at the foot of Sudwala Caves. For me, it's a very special piece that some how captures the warmth and breadth of our friendship.

Roy taught me many things - 'how one lives well with little' is perhaps the most important lesson I'd left South Africa with.

Oh Lordy, I ain't done with living yet...