wordcloud

looking through old posts and i remembered these people, i mis-spelt my blog name but i don't really mind x

where i've lived

a couple of hours ago or so i saw that the woodsman was about to start on channel 4 + 1... a film about a man struggling to come to terms with normal life after being released, a sex offender...

dinah was going to bed and i was toying with the idea of watching it, it's a great subject and one that's close to my heart... not that i'm a sex offender,

just that paedophiles get a horrible press in this country, in such a stupid, rabble rousing, hang them all way that even though the act itself is so hugely wrong, because of the stupidity of the press i end up wanting to show paedophiles more understanding...

like with many aspects of life there are those who want to show understanding and there are those who want to show hatred... so anyway i found myself online and lo & behold the films almost finished now and i'm still awake anyway, not having watched it...

a few years ago a popular, national, tabloid newspaper published the names and addresses of paedophiles all across country... a clear sign of hatred and possibly the beginning of my changing attitude and need for more understanding...

anyway, i find myself wanting to write a little description of where i live now and where i've lived, through the medium of google maps satellite view which is the same i think as google earth...


View Larger Map

i had a look back at blewbury and the definition is much better than it used to be... blewbury being ever so small and un-important... so indulge me, if you will... click on "view larger map", get rid of that daft balloon and check back here for directions...

you're looking at blewbury & you can see blewburton hill just to the east (the right).. you scroll out just until the picture gets worse... that more primary colours, grainier version that's been there for ages...

on the right of the map you'll see a river going north-south... centre on it and scroll inwards just one notch to get that better picture...

now follow the river south (down)... through a number of larger towns.. south-east, sometimes north, sometimes south, but always east...

follow it as it gets smaller in places and larger in places, until it gets really large and you can see many bridges going over it and it is in the shape of a capital M... in a city... it makes a capital M once before actually but this M has absolutely loads of bridges in it's top left hand corner...

(if you reach the millennium dome and the eastenders dip in the river you've gone just too far)

so with the M in the whole of the frame go directly north until you can see the new arsenal stadium... in the left of the frame, keep going north until you have the stadium bottom left of the frame, a pair of reservoirs directly to the north-east of the stadium, and a collection of 10 or so reservoirs roughly north-east of the pair...

zoom 2 notches in and centre on the pair of reservoirs, moving to the west a bit so that the pair of reservoirs is in the right of the frame and a park is in the left of the frame, the park has a train line running north-south immediately to it's west (left)... and on it's north-east edge it has a road, (running almost north-south at this point)... follow the road north...

after the park this road just meets other roads, until a bit of green on it's left, stop going north when that bit of green is at the bottom of the frame...

if that bit of green is at the bottom & in the centre of the frame then there is a line running almost diagonally across the frame, top left to bottom right, (the road we were following is itself heading a bit west as it goes north now)

that line you can see running diagonally was once a railway and it's now abandoned and indeed developed to the extent that it's hard to follow it on the ground, only visible from the air...

i currently live somewhere in the current frame, not far from that abandoned railway...

i have no idea whether or not this is easy to follow or indeed if anyone will follow it, so if you have a go please leave a comment as to whether it worked for you or not...

cue massive, rolling, tumble weed style silence...

now to bed x meeting dad tomorrow for a walking tour of london x

yr2wk45 piano & cavafy

yesterday's late afternoon improvisation x

pollen cavafy piano

yesterday and today i've been scratching at my eyes like a bastard...

hay fever rears it's ugly head once more...

and lo & behold it's the burch pollen that's doing it, great pollen index website from the ever helpful BBC told me that...

went over to O's today, reversal of the last few fridays... wrote another killer tune with him & M, then drank to his birthday in the same pub that we drank to felinity's birthday in last year, which is fast approaching again now...

last night i played a piano gig in mamilanji... nice people, nice place... white piano... not the best grand piano i've ever played but pretty good, and hard work to push down those keys...

anyway i've lost the proust book somewhere and so i had cavafy with me and in between sets i found a couple of poems that i really like in that "open the pages at random" way... this book so full of tiny poems i love, finding a couple i hadn't read already was lovely:

SINCE NINE O'CLOCK

Half past twelve. Time's gone by quickly
since nine o'clock when I lit the lamp
and sat down here. I've been sitting without reading,
without speaking. Completely alone in the house,
who could I talk to?

Since nine o'clock when I lit the lamp
the shade of my young body
has been haunting me, reminding me
of shut scented rooms,
of past passion - what daring passion.
And it's also brought back to me
streets now unrecognisable,
bustling night clubs now closed,
theatres and cafés no longer there.

The shade of my young body
also brought back the things that make us sad:
family grief, separations,
the feelings of my own people,
of the dead so little recognised.

Half past twelve: how the time has gone by.
Half past twelve: how the years have gone by.

----(and on the facing page - both poems written in 1918)----

OUTSIDE THE HOUSE

Walking yesterday in an outlying neighbourhood,
I went by the house
I used to go to when I was very young.
There Eros with his wonderful power
laid hold of my body.

And yesterday
when I walked down the old road,
shops pavement, stones,
walls and balconies and windows-
all were suddenly made beautiful by the spell of love:
there was nothing ugly left there.

And as i stood staring at the door,
stood lingering outside the house,
my whole being radiated
the sensual passion stored up inside me.

(translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)

a new chapter

you know sometimes you feel like that, as if things are changing, and a new cycle is beginning...

of course the human brain is a slow old beast at recognising such things and it's probably been a new chapter for a month of so now i just haven't named it as such...

so i've been looking at the improvisations, partly for a work reason, and i saw that this week, which i thought of as being wk2yr44, (last week actually), is also week 96...

which means that week 100 is on it's way, and that's something...

if you've been a reader of this blog for more than a couple of minutes you'll know i like the numbers thing...

also a few old friends have popped out of the woodwork, J from way back who i used to drink alcohol on abandoned railways tracks with when we were teenagers, he now lives in muswell hill, only for a couple of months, and D & N, who i used to work with in a telephone fundraising job a decade ago, N also being a veteran of Hotel Full of Cops (must fix that link over in the side bar, sadly our website went down at long last)...

teaching sometimes looks like something i might be coming to the end of...

i suppose i'm also a little wistful because we may well have lost our drummer in M's band over the weekend and that's sad, while there is much to be hopeful about with that situation, M & O having been round here a few times now writing songs...

oh well, anyway,

sleep (i hope) x

yr2wk44 early morning rhodes improvisation

it has been a really mad day, i couldn't sleep last night (i may have had a couple of hours) so i got up & watched "i am legend" which was surprisingly good... then i did this improvisation, upped and went to a rehearsal with M's band, followed by all sorts of drama with a few members of the entourage...

added to which i've been the 999,999th visitor and won an audi a3... several times...

of course this all happens when i've had so little sleep,

i've completely passed through to the other side and after dinner i'm going to sleep like a lamb...

x

cycle maps predestination

ok, so it's been a nutty day of cycling long distances and i must sleep but i wanted to share this great place with you, i'm interested in the greater london journey planner and i haven't looked further than that but i suspect there is more to them than just this...

i was visiting felinity & G in there new pad tonight after college and i used this website which outputted a list of roads, how long to go down each one, what the next turning is... and it was surprisingly easy to cycle the 9.45 miles from shoreditch to earlsfield using it...

one needs a printer to use it really and it would have been nice to have a map bigger than the one given but i have to tell you i think it's really great,

oh and this video, which i took in july 2006 one hot and random sunny day cycling in south london, turns out to be right by where felinity and G have just moved into...



kookie huh?

x

e=mc squared

does mariah carey understand what this equation means?

in any way?

does she get asked about it in interviews..? is there a clause in her contract that she is not to be asked what it means?

or does she in fact have an interest in physics and is perfectly able to explain not only what the equation means but the ramifications of the special theory of relativity...

it's hard to hear it but here is einstein talking about e=mc squared,

we went to see the film with the music tonight... it's such a strange thing writing music and then seeing it in it's place, it always freaks me out a bit, added to which i have this flu/cold thing which means i'm a little out there, you know how slight feverishness can do...

ah, that's nice, i recently moved a whole bunch of mp3's from my old computer to my new seemingly bottomless hard drive and after einsteins voice my itunes decided to play me a skryabin study, (this is because i had ordered my itunes by song length)... this new phone of mine is ushering in an mp3 renaissance which is lovely,

there's music on this hard drive i had forgotten all about, but i miss my little ipod shuffle, the new pone wants to be as great as the little shuffle but the experience is just not as good yet as the shuffle with itunes used to be... if only the little fella would work again...

x

yr2wk43 rhodes & filter improvisation

@ 7:53 pm last night i emailed an mp3 of the film music over to the film-maker, it was my intention to then go over to floopy's to check out the track on his great speakers... then take the uncompressed file to M directly,

but i spoke to M the film-maker and he said he had no time and it sounded fine, and then this morning i slept right through 11 O'clock when i was due to be over @ floopy's whose sound card had broken anyway...

so it's done, the door is closed, it's being shown @ 6:00 this very evening...

the improvisation took place before i'd finished the composition and of course it took about 3 or 4 hours to deal with... i always think i can deal with it in an hour or so but it's never true these days x

starlight comes down

when my old friend J came round for dinner and a floor to sleep on last night i had written half of the music for the 2:36 film that's being shown tomorrow night...

i've now progressed by around 45 seconds and i'm at the crucial 10 or so seconds where it all goes on...

i'm surprisingly calm... this may change...

looking at a larger time scale i am waiting for musical instruments, as reported over there my GEM piano module is at least 2 weeks away, probably 3 weeks... i've tracked down a klangbox version of the B4000 hammond organ emulator in rotterdam and i'm buying that once i get paid on friday, very few of them in this continent is what i think...

and i didn't get an improvisation in last week, so i'll be doing that today, in amongst the composition and the recording...

tuesday afternoon cycle ramble

spur of the moment little cycle investigation of some green i could see to the north east of us here...
....................................................................................................................................

a sometimes grey, sometimes bright april afternoon...

4 mile kind of triangular journey

yr2wk42 rhodes, hammond, voice & face

cut with a few shots of the snow, the improvisation that i had to do twice for cubase crashing reasons...

dinah back now x

spring indeed!

adverts, indian food, horror, poo

i don't know, adverts, as if i get enough people looking at this blog to make any money out of it... i may well change my mind because it may just irritate me no end seeing the google ads at the top of these posts, this being my home page... but it's there for now, public service ads until they judge what kind of blog this is and assess what kind of ads to put there...

if it makes you sick please put a note in the comments before you leave me forever...

in other news i woke up today (saturday) with a hangover from the small amount of cheap white wine bought in a bar last night and i had no dinah to look after me and make me tea, she being away for the weekend, so i went back to bed, rising around 18:30, feeling more human...

went over to jai krishna around 10ish to eat of their delicious fair, dinah not a fan of indian food and it's not so close anymore so i hardly go at all these days, i was phoning them to make sure they were still open and i ordered my food over the phone to speed it up because they were close to closing...

"masala dosa with no peas" and once i said "no peas" she knew who i was and sounded pleased... always nice...

i just saw 30 days of night and it was pretty great, fantastic turn from danny huston as head vampire and josh hartnet wasn't half bad...

improvising tomorrow - untless i can't sleep in which case i'll do it tonight on headphones, yawning though now @ 1:30 am which is a good sign...

and i'm making a bid for balthazara shitting outside, the litter tray has been outside the backdoor since yesterday and although there were light showers today i changed the litter and hopefully it won't rain until tomorrow now, i don't really have a solution to the litter tray being outside in the rain, but i'm determined to leave it out there for a few days and certainly not to bring it back in...

we were trying this when she went missing a few weeks ago, and when she was back we relented and brought it in the flat again, but not this time, some kind of shelter out there, not that she's used it in the 36 hours or so it's been out there, she's probably already using the garden... either that or she's shitting in the corner of my room i can't get too because it's stuff mountain again, i'll probably find it all in a few days once the smell alerts me to it...

anyway, bed x

spring

what a lovely day...

got up hellishly early for my last schools visit of the season... on top of the summertime clock change last weekend which i still haven't got used to...

cycled back slowly and deliciously in this glorious spring day, said goodbye to my beautiful girl who has gone away for the weekend and chilled a little bit with B who was round papering the hall...

then M & O came round for a song writing session which proved to be very productive, we took a tune that was an idea and turned it into a tune... another meeting next week to get it down...

what a lovely way to spend one's time, allbeit pining for dinah all the while x

waiting for delivery

i've got a new phone arriving today... updated version of the phone i have now...

i've been complaining about this current phone for months now and i've finally got around to upgrading it... hopefully the new one won't be as ridden with faults as this one...

so it means i have to stay in until it comes,

2 weeks ago i ordered a new sound module, updated version of a sound module i have now...

it hasn't come because the italian company who make it are well known for their great products and their terrible distribution and service, the german company i ordered from aren't really to blame, they're waiting for a deliver from the italians... but today i discover that they have a date for the next delivery and it's the 1st of may!!!!

today is the 1st of april... i ordered the thing, and paid for it... on the 18th of march...!!!

i know...

can i wait that long? on ordering it i'd hoped it would have arrived before the recording we did last friday @ the townhouse, up until today i was hoping it would arrive before the session in a few weeks to record more keyboards onto those tracks...

is it worth getting my money back and spending more money from someone else to get the same thing?

i probably won't... i'll probably forget all about it until it arrives and it'll be a nice surprise...

oh how i love new things...

when they arrive

x