thoughts of a longcat

round trip on foot

2012-01-21T17:06:00.002Z

Fulfilling day in amongst financial worries & emotional ups & downs...

Me & Emma are back together - after a break of a few months - a touch shaky as all such things are - less than a week in & it doesn't yet feel normal... i trust it will...

gigging tonight with the spanners in angel - the round midnight - 2 sets as ever - one 8:30ish - the other 10:30ish...

about to pack down my lovely red keyboard for the trip over to the soundcheck...

half of my brain is also on editing a video that is part of my application to Nordoff Robbins Master in Music Therapy that i'm getting ready... videos that i filmed earlier this afternoon before going out to do my dusk project...

i did it yesterday as planned but i was a few minutes late due to hungover slow walking - so now i have the choice of either today's footage or yesterdays when i get to the other end...

very old friend JF rang me to say he was going to an exhibition in Peckham - being what where i live these days...

i left here on foot (bicycle out of action for too long now - slaps own wrist) dropped a shirt off to be pressed @ the dry cleaners - went down bellenden road to see JF & his new flatmate - whose exhibition it was/is... hmmm - can i link it? Yes i can...

good stuff, documenting a housing estate in kidbrooke that's being demolished - photos of residents with a film & book...

then me & JF walked over to the NC for the dusk project - the 1st time i've had anyone with me - really nice to be with JF who's round the corner (ish) these days so will hopefully see more of him (he came to last week's gig in brixton that i didn't tell you about)...

and also really nice to be able to show him Nunhead Cemetery - it's right up his kettle of fish...

directed him roughly westward & he cycled off as i walked home - stopping by the dry cleaers to pick up the shirt...

one more tea & then i'm outward bound x

bone to the rescue

2011-12-29T17:15:00.002Z

he didn't turn up last week for the run through...

and i did give up on him...

i was thinking that i would have to show him where the tree is... off the beaten track as it is...

but it turns out he's still up for doing it... so i'm preparing a map/video to guide him to the right tree... part of me doesn't want to share the place with anyone - but that's foolishness and definitely in the way of anyone else helping me with the project...

so tonight i'm preparing my little video/map... packing up my keyboard for the spanner recording tomorrow... (this being the reason i can't do my dusk project myself tomorrow)... then eventually heading over to streatham for the 1st bang bang shot girl gig in an age... spski is meant to be there...

i'm mostly alone in the house - although someone's been in & out i think... haven't seen them...

audiovibe

2011-12-28T14:08:00.002Z

ok so i'm back from the seasonal blewbury thing...

ever so lovely as it always is... i love my family...

& whilst i'm currently struggling to find someone to do my dusk project for me on friday - (spanner recording on that day) - i am also enjoying one of the fruits of the season -

i'm listening to ornette coleman through one of my under the bed storage things - (currently on top of the bed) via the medium of audiovibe...

this particular storage thing is made of plastic and is a box - the audiovibe also works well on cardboard boxes - (which i still have thousands of - post moving) - the bin - the recycling thing - tables, chairs & the floor also work - although wood is quieter than plastic or cardboard - the piano works pretty well as well..

dirt tends to build up on the sticky thing that connects to (bin - floor etc.) and although the box claims to have come with 2 replacement sticky things i seem to have mislaid mine -

i can see a future in which i have several audiovibes - permanently attached to various objects -

aaah - jazz drum solo's through under the bed storage units -

this is the life...

the whole thing reminds me of the reverb journey i've been on recently - finding different impulse responses of various different reverb spaces - then plugging the IR into logic and it's like playing in that space -

the audiovibe is similar but from the other direction - can't explain this better right now but i know what i mean -

also - just tested it & the audiovibe is only playing the left half of the stereo signal - so that's something to look at - i wonder if i could get another one and rewire it to only deal with the right signal?

or somehow send it a different signal - with the left & right reversed - hmmm..?

6 am thoughts

2011-11-29T05:58:00.003Z

once upon a time, the fact that i'm awake right now only 2 & a half hours before my tuesday starts would have made me an anxious annie...

not that i'm entirely free of anxiety but mostly i'd say - which is a blessing... just how i'll be in 12 hours when my working day is coming to a close i can't say...

had another glorious day... met the world and their dog...

having seen someone close to me being manic all those years ago does cast my current behaviour in that kind of light - not that i'm manic exactly but i have ups & downs & these nutty meeting people days have much up in them...

took one of my keyboards back from the prog guy just as i agreed to lend another keyboard to YouMeBumBumTrain... & so far i've agreed to play next thursday for them... will almost certainly do more than just 1 night - although have yet to sort it out.

one of the men i met tonight (monday night) gave me an iced bun... he was scottish & ambidextrous...

one of the women let me have a little bit of her water x

Internet @ home yah yah yah

2011-11-15T22:02:00.001Z

i honestly thought that they wouldn't turn up... you know when you've been waiting for something for way too long & the moment is approaching when you'll have it and that moment is very important to you so therefore the law of randomness comes in and of course that moment gets delayed...

but they did indeed turn up when they said they would - not that i was here then - i was @ my tuesday work... and i'm now typing this on my little laptop... wirelessly connected to the world...

now most of you haven't lived without the broadband @ home since june... so most of this post is going to sound all very yes well la la la... but honestly... i don't care about that... i'm just very pleased to be able to do this now...

it's been ages since i regularly posted on this blog & if i ever had any regular readers they've probably upped & moved (their reading) out to the sticks...

(is it sticks?)

anyway - laters y'all x ha ha ha ha ha ha... x

clothesline in summer

2011-07-04T19:18:00.000+01:00

i love living where i live...

my cat digs it*... my piano is happy*... and indeed is played by more people than me... which is perhaps a little odd for me on occasion but is a beautiful thing none the less...

(* - yes - i know... how do i know that the cat digs it or that my piano is happy? you just have to accept that i do know these things)

i like & indeed will come to love my housemates... all 3 of them... communal living was not something i was looking forward to after living on my own for awhile but ... certainly in this honeymoon period that we're living through... i'm digging it...

and in fact you can come see one of my housemates performing live tonight in the newcross... something... for free... 10ish... send me an email if you fancy it... the band is called United Vibrations... i'm going...

i also like that it took me 20 minutes to cycle to brixton tonight - (i'm once again waiting for refugee students to arrive at the evening class that i'm doing for 3 weeks - one more next week)

i love that i live close to peckham rye park & nunhead cemetary... i haven't yet done so but i will surely be cycling to crystal palace some day soon....

and when i do - a certain thing i gave up in north london will be returned to me... alexandra palace park & it's neighbour - highgate woods - were giving me an awful lot of pleasure in the closing months of my north london living...

when i found peckham rye park, something about it gave me the feeling that highgate woods gave me (not exactly, but something like it)...

i'm hoping that crystal park will somehow represent alexandra palace park for me and that being inspired by my surroundings will continue...

not that i'm not already inspired by peckham... the surrey canal path is lovely... burgess park is beginning to offer up it's interesting places to me...

peckham library... the bussey building... all sorts of places inspire me...

but today... what is inspiring me the most... is having a washing machine & a garden & a clothesline...

the hot summer sun drying my clothes in super quick time... what's not to love...?

ok refugees here x laters x

absent

2011-06-21T18:51:00.000+01:00

but did your heart get any fonder?

no real internet @ home still, peckham life proving pleasant, & a dribble of internet through my phone is useful...

tethering for free won't give me https places, so no gmail, or blogging, the phone itself gets me my emails and i've been occasionally popping into peckham library or the kentish drover next door for wifi...

i'm auditioning on thursday for some nutty prog rock guy, slightly nervous about it, but it'll go as it will go...

recorded the piano in the kitchen last night... foolish business that might have cost me a good night's sleep but good to do it, my moog is sounding amazing in that house and has woken a part of itself... the rhodes is very happy, balthazara is also very much at home there...

for some reason after recording the piano part quite late @ night my mind wouldn't keep quiet enough to sleep... the kind of thing that happens after a jazz cigarette, but i didn't do any of that last night...

so today's long day of working is all the longer... but i'm almost there... ten minutes more & i'll be out the door, cycling down the road to dalston junction, the train to new cross gate, cycling from there to peckham...

and the sun appears to be shining... summer solstice today...

x

Charlotte

2011-05-09T16:11:00.000+01:00

Charlotte by longcat

Keyboards, Vocals: Robbie Knight

Guitar, Mixing: Chris Greene

Drums, Backing Vocals: Ben Haley

Bass, Recording: Pawel Kucharski

Tenor Sax: Pete Godin

Alto Sax: Dan Spanner

Trombone: George Simmonds

the 4-piece (bass, drums, keys, guitar) was the monday club & we recorded on the 18th of april @ core arts, with the vocals recorded by me & the drummer on that day,

the horns recorded last week:

pete on tenor sax @ mine on wednesday (4th may)

george's trombone recorded @ his on thursday morning (5th may)

& dan's alto sax recorded outside the jamboree club, limehouse, between the soundcheck & the spanner jazz punks gig on friday night (6th may),

i'd been without my lovely SV-1 keyboard all last week & i got it back @ that gig in limehouse, so i rerecorded my keyboard part also between the soundcheck & the gig, on stage, friday night...

me & chris mixed it on thursday night & saturday afternoon, it was played to the 2 year old it was written for on sunday (the 8th) which was her birthday...

i'm very pleased with it... it's possible i may put another vocal on it at some point but other than that it's pretty finished, certainly more finished than i've got anything to for a little while...

it was pretty nutty by the end, the process of chasing up all the recording & mixing. today i'm floating downwards from it all...

CM doco

2011-04-05T21:52:00.001+01:00

Almost no chance you'll see me, but CM, my sometimes employer & remaining fundee of the arts council has a glitzy doco on the community channel...

online here

the tireless bobby friction who hosted this nuttily glitzy night @ the brady centre, right where i teach, all done up with sofas & a makeshift bar... back in december - it seems it was filmed - the doco is on the community channel:

Weds 6th April: 09.00, 15.00, 18.30, 00.30, 04.00
Sat 9th April: 09.00, 15.00, 18.30, 00.30, 04.00
Mon 11th April: 15.00, 18.30
Thurs 14th April: 15.00, 18.30
Sun 17th April: 09.30
Weds 27th April: 09.00, 15.00, 18.30, 00.30, 04.00
Sat 30th April: 09.00, 15.00, 18.30, 00.30, 04.00
Weds 11th May: 09.00, 15.00, 18.30, 00.30, 04.00
Sat 14th May: 09.00, 15.00, 18.30, 00.30, 04.00
Mon 16th May: 15.00, 18.30
Thurs 19th May: 15.00, 18.30
Sun 22nd May: 09.30

The Community Channel can be found on Sky channel 539, Virgin Media 233, Freeview 87 and BT Vision.

i saw a documentary on billy childish in the ritzy possibly - or perhaps the ICA, and the man himself (who me & spski have seen in the boston arms, times gone by) told this story:

there was a documentary about him shown on the BBC & the following day he was walking in the town he lives in... (chatham)... & someone shouted at him from across the street:

OI!.... DOCUMENTARY TWAT!

x

night falls over north london

2011-04-04T00:52:00.000+01:00

emailed in a request to jarvis but he didn't play it... it was Bee Gees – Love You Inside Out for siggi on mothers day x

left mine around 7:15pm, knowing the sunset was due @ 7:40...

wanted to get out there at least once...

cycled out northish... i love the way my mind gradually finds out where i'm going...

crossed over the railway at alexandra palace station, into ally pally park... joining the route me & dad walked on wednesday (and indeed, me & emma walked last sunday)...

could see the sunset was the other side of the hill so i tried to move up to it... joining another path traversing the hillside...

i could hear music from the palace, a random guy working the barriers told me it was indian music..

one of those lovely experiences where you can hear the sound sometimes, when the wind is in the right direction...

passed on towards the edge of the park, other side from the station, the light fading as i reached the passage under muswell hill road, then the disused to highgate...

by now i'd started singing, an imaginary gig where i'm singing with the audience at the top of the gig...

"you know you are you know you are you know" - quick, in 3's...

triggering a slower part "you know the way you are"

went past that fantastic view over london... (the journey back's dark view of it at the top, the journey there's evening view, wednesday's view with dad here , last sunday's with emma below, and old friend J's drawing from 2008 at the bottom)

cycled on the highgate, out of the parkland and then along to the entrance to highgate woods... almost cycled in but i could see they would be closing the gates @ 8 & i guess it was 7:55 or so...

so i locked up my little bike on the road and went into the woods... singing as i went, the song growing all the time...

sat on a log and smoked half of the little fella i'd brought with me...

walking on i was videoing my face, while walking - singing the song wherever it was then and i came accross two park ranger types, R & D, who told me they were locking up... i told them i'd be ok and that if i needed to i could jump over the fence... R told me to be careful...

i walked on, now in a part of the woods i hadn't been in before... with the light failing more and more... a fence, across my path, a sign announcing a conservation area... finding a way around...

now off all paths... starting to slightly worry about the darkness and tripping over... i found my way back to a path and stuck to it...

getting to a gate just as R was locking it... i asked to be let out and it was onto an odd path that goes by the side of the woods, i walked along singing my song and just as i reached the corner of the woods and walked around to where my bicycle was locked up i could see R, or her shadow between the wooden bars of the fence...

she was locking the gate just as i was unlocking my bike...

back along the disused, stopping at the amazing view to take the night time panorama that is at the top of this post...

met one more random person @ ally pally - where i took loads more potential panoramas, chatted about games, both of us keen to see portal 2 when it arrives... i smoked the other half as we talked...

then back onto the path and out of the park, over the railway @ alexandra palace station and home through woodgreen...

the song now much more complete - a chorus that i'm pleased with x

march improv walking

2011-03-19T18:30:00.000Z

this from thursday morning...

today though was a killer day, the day that the moon is closest to us... i took a walk... once this video was rendering... did the 2 part... got told i looked like a movie star in jai... then up to the big green... standard circuit...

found myself saying to an almost complete stranger: "look after that leg" as she left the shop...

lovely S in there asked me about my living stuff - landlord - and of course it brought it all to mind, put the afternoon in perspective, this area that i love, coming home to this flat that i love, that balthazara loves...

and it does make me sad... seeking advice on monday...

x

fugees

2011-03-10T22:04:00.000Z

just a brief one... i was working with refugees today, and i recorded a sudanese man, we made a very bare bones track called supermarket... bare bones on my end at least... how nice it is to record original music that sounds so wonderful from such an original source...

that's all... listening to last sunday's jarvis which is characteristically marvellous x

slightly further afield

2011-03-09T19:30:00.000Z

funny old thing, living... i get that big shock last week and it rules my life for a week... then this week, even though the news is still the same, i'm much more relaxed and i'm back to thinking about the novel again, (not that that stopped last week),

as E tells me, i do need to to give my housing situation a lot of thought, but i will think about it in my own time... & today has been lovely...

oh & thanks felinity, it has been grim and will be grim again... but for now i'm ok...

i got up slowly, in the way that i do only on day offs in the week...

gradually working out to how to do what E wants me to do with her computer... then around 1:30 i look @ the time and i'm out of the house, doing the 2 part... just making it into jai before 2 for part 2 - the dall... then up to the big green bookshop and i order this years proust (novel writing cannot interrupt the slow moving proust)... and all three of them are in... even lovely S whose day off it is... and who has moved out of london... shockingly...

i agree to lend them my amp for their comedy night on friday, and then me & S walk up the road to alexandra palace station where he embarks further north, and i decide to cross the railway tracks and cycle through ally pally's park on the way home... not a journey i've ever really done, not like this anyway...

i met a man, watching the birds on the reservoir there - much interesting talk which may effect the novel (doesn't everything) about the ring main and the gulls... then cycling down on the edge of the park back to turnpike lane (the road) and home...

the sun shining underneath some forbidding clouds...

lovely...

x

peace

2011-03-07T12:14:00.000Z

well... a kind of peace... at least peace as compared to last week...

last week was a bit mad, and it was all because my landlord is putting the rent up by 30% - £350/month more...

mixed me right up it did...

anyway - i'm staying here at least until may, one month into the new rent - assuming that happens and is legal... (i'm seeking citizen's advise)...

the novel is still going, part of it may have to be told in the form of a childrens television program that the kids in the novel are watching... i've been writing the theme tune all weekend...

and i've been reading old blog posts from years back - 2004... found a lovely one from just after me & P began (P who is reading the 1st few bits of the novel now) partly about having a smooth ride on my shopping trolly in waitrose...

and the sun is shining x

E's been here & she's coming back later... x

rising sketch - Dsi Tetra tune

2011-02-07T20:03:00.000Z

Rising Sketch Tetr4 by longcat

being a tune i threw together today... pleasant enough... i was listening to david arnold last night on jarvis cocker's show, talking about john barry... not that this thing is anywhere near that kind of stuff but it has a rousing element to it that i like x

marking jarvis

2011-01-31T18:16:00.000Z

listening to yesterday's sunday service... with a very intelligent piece about the monkees...

foolish - as i'm also marking...

which of course means i'm also playing minesweeper...

@ which i have been going through a period of not being that good... my average of 24% which i sometimes get up to 25% had slipped down to 23% this morning... something i have now rectified...

i think i have been genuinely less clever over the last few weeks... an unfortunate mixture of causes... combining the end of my winter cold (or - just a continuation of my winter cold), the marking itself, which doesn't always make me more stupid, but mixed in with my peculiar behaviour with my heart these last 2 weeks (me & E broke up - floating about each other since then & could easily get back together... but haven't yet)...

however today i not only completed my tax return in record time...

i do feel a return to an older longcat - slightly more able... not that me & E are there yet - in either direction... not that i have so far managed to complete my marking - & lord knows that's something i'm looking forward to...

possibly me & E are wrapped up with the marking... once i've got through that i can really think straight about her... maybe...

this morning she went to work & i felt like the tax return would be easy - the momentum would carry me through the marking - i'd have it done by the time episodes comes on BBC2 tonight... not the likeliest outcome right now - but not absolutely out of the question...

around 1pm i was reading the new scientist whilst walking back from the cafe... i got in, sat on the sofa still in my coat... found reading a little difficult and realised i needed to sleep... so i got into bed... slept until about 3pm... woke with the sunlight and the blue sky in the thin gap of the curtains... balthazara there -

& it felt almost like i was owed this lovely waking moment from yesterday... when i was really hung over & sleep was sought after... E rang me about midday & it was still too early - it woke me up but i wanted more sleep - wanted to wake up more normally -

so - very nice to have that today - might mess with my sleep tonight, & i've got earlyless & lateness tomorrow...

anyway - more marking - less rambling x

stanfield

2011-01-26T20:05:00.000Z

3rd season of fringe... and i'm enjoying it so far (just seen the 1st 3)...

of course i'm only watching it because i'm marking at the moment... procrastination is the thief of time to quote spski... he whose tax return i'm helping him with on friday... josiah's tax return is also on my list although she's yet to get back to me... so maybe she'll be dealing with it without me...

... maybe not...

then there's my tax return...

but that is not what i am posting about this evening...

nor am i posting about the slightly difficult time i'm having with my heart...

no... i am posting about the wire - and fringe...

in fact i 1st came to fringe because lance reddick - the hard police boss in the wire (his title changes throughout the seasons, but he's always hard) is playing the hard fringe division boss in fringe... and the one in the wire who let his gun go off accidentally and became a teacher... he showed up as a one off character in fringe, maybe i read about it in the guardian?

so we already know about the link... but now bubbles (junky/police informer in the wire) is a taxi driver in the alternative universe of fringe... who is bound to come back because he's bubbles... & olivia has lost her mind, thinking she's the alternate olivia in the alternate universe... & bubbles is almost guaranteed to turn up helping her remember her real life...

but also... in episode 3 there is a great character (alternate universe) who is on super mind expanding drugs & he is able to kill people by carefully putting ball point pens places, causing a sequence of events that lead to someone dying...

anyway - his name is milo stanfield...

which is almost the same name as the name marlo stanfield, the name of the mob boss in the 2nd season of the wire...

now - the wire is so much better than fringe... & fringe is helped by it's links to the wire, for me... it's still good, fringe, mostly, it does make me miss the wire all over again though...

which reminds me... did i ever get to the end of the sopranos... this time around...? yes - i think i did... also very good... in fact i was i was trying to find a link from fringe to the sopranos, the lead woman - olivia - in fringe - i was thinking that she was meadows insane college roommate in the sopranos - although that memory is getting weaker - and is it really true that that character killed herself? am i thinking of a different program? like heroes perhaps? maybe it's the cheerleaders insane college roommate...

oh - but marking - yes... marking... x

started writing a novel

2011-01-12T17:02:00.000Z

if i know you, (if you're in my life), and you're interested in hearing the story, please let me know and i'll tell it to you,

i'm not yet up for emailing it to anyone, it's just being told verbally right now...

probably over a tea,

x

PS - i've started another blog, keeping track of who i've told, changes and stuff...

x

3 tweets

2010-12-09T11:44:00.001Z

all on november 25th... 2 of mine...

you see i have just noticed that i was mentioned by polly cupcake on this day & she said:

"i couldn't agree more" (tweet)

but was she agreeing with my tweet about gorecki - or my tweet about misfits?

how can i know?

x

aaaah the times of the tweets gave it away, she was talking about gorecki x

february 2011 in phones

2010-11-26T00:19:00.000Z

august 2009... + 18 months...

equals january/february 2011 does it not?

and if that is true then in february my 18 month contract with this phone will be over and i can get hold of something else...

my htc hero has been pissing my off of late - basically since the much talked about android 2.1 update, it's not been right... it's been good at all the other smartphone things it does but on occasion it becomes unable (and seemingly unwilling) to behave like a telephone... which is it's basic function afterall...

orange uk currently don't have a huge amount of choice in the android phone department, but these next few months will be interesting...

since i got my mac i have started to consider an iphone... although id prefer (at this point) to keep it in the android family if i can...

A desire HD would be nice... i wonder if orange will get hold of them and if i'd have to pay for it? hmmm

idly dreaming x

ode to portal... & the arguments for & against going backwards

2010-11-24T21:13:00.000Z

spent the day alternating between playing the piano & lusting after portal 2 in a few different ways....

for example... for the last few hours i've been completely caught in this flash version of portal... E got in a little while ago & i was desperately stuck @ level 37 (of 40)...

& then before that i was devouring all the youtube portal 2 stuff...

from this to this... to this... it just looks amazing...

but i will need a more powerful computer... it's possible it will run on steam for the mac... and therefore on my lovely G5... which would be odd because i originally wanted to keep that computer just for the music... something i'm failing to do already...

& the G5... hmmmmmmm...

which is now running OS 10.5 so well... i'm considering going back to 10.4...

you see i got hold of something back then, something i wanted, and on trying to install it my mac told me i needed 10.5...

so i managed eventually to go up to 10.5... by which time i'd deleted (by accident) the desirable thing... a few weeks later and lovely D gave the desirable thing to me again (i'd given it to him on 1st getting hold of it) and i duly sat down and installed it... but after everything... it just refused to work... and a little bit of research (which i wish i'd done back then) told me that it wasn't only that i need 10.5... it was that i needed an intel mac... which i don't have...

so i looked at another - older version of the desirable thing... & it turns out that version will only run on 10.4...

also today i tried to do something which it seemed to me the only way i could actually do it would be to reinstall 10.5 - and therefore i may as well go back to 10.4...

and the piano playing?

alternating between a new composition & "we've only just begun" which i learnt for a student on monday and which i'm really enjoying singing...

x

improvisations

2010-11-22T18:49:00.000Z

this one i did yesterday... mixing a drone i made in the TX modular synth with my rhodes...

last week it was the frohmage plugin from ohmforce that pleased me so much... with the rhodes...

and then a month ago, a week after the 1st i did (this time around)... rhodes & voice...

and while i'm in a youtube place... this rhythm tree i made as a reference for my students:

x

girlfriend

2010-10-28T15:34:00.000+01:00

i have met and am now going out with a young lady whose name bares a striking resemblance to certain other young women in my romantic past...

i am also struggling with tryin to put mac OS 10.5 on my new mac PPC... something i've been struggling with for what seems like eternity but is probably more like a week...

me & her have been together for just under 3 weeks now... i have met her mother...

she is beautiful, with long dark hair,

she came round to buy my trombone, and didn't leave for about 5 days...

october improvisation

2010-10-11T20:07:00.000+01:00

so today... after a weekend of setting up my new G5 computer (a mac)...

& indeed spending time with someone new... who shall remain nameless for now... but who is playing her trombone right now (used to be mine - then it was monty's - now it's hers)...

i got the m-audio sound card thing talking to logic in the G5... put the karma mics up under the knight piano...

and hey presto - a 9 minute improvisation -

enjoy x

booker business

2010-10-04T15:23:00.001+01:00

so i woke up today & lazily reached over to find the book...

& read the last 20 or so pages of "In a strange room" by Damon Galgut...

being the 6th of the 6 shortlisted books for the booker prize...

and the decision isn't being made on it until a week tomorrow - so how ahead of the game am i ladies & gentlemen?

slightly lost though now... without the need to go to the big green bookshop and swap over this book for the next one...

although i do need to pick which one i want to keep (not counting C by TomMcCarthy which i bought already)... at the moment i think it's going to be this book i finished today - more thought is required though...

and who should win?

well 1st let me give you my 6 twitter reviews:

In a strange room - Damon Galgut: Hugely powerful, sparely written at 1st but gathering like a storm, maybe a little unbalanced, beautful x (today 4th october)

The Long Song - Andrea Levy: took me awhile to get into the style but it embedded itself in my mind, great characters... evocative writing x (thursday 30th september)

Room - by Emma Donoghue... kept me close to tears most of the way through... well told, thoughtful, lovely, will stay in my head... x (saturday 25th september)

The Finkler Question - Howard Jacobson. Very funny, a little bit painful, slightly flaccid in the middle, has an ending i'm not sure about x (wednesday 22nd september)

Parrot and Olivier in America - by Peter Carey... too long, olivier's character irritating, but ended well & had good history.. too clever x (friday 17th september)

finished C by Tom McCarthy... i was left wanting more... longlisted for the booker... great writer... lovely progressions of images... x (sunday 29th august)

and the 3 that are vying for 1st place in my mind are C (Tom McCarthy), In a strange room (Damon Galgut) & Room (Emma Donoghue)...

hmmmm - i'll wait a little for the dust to settle over my reading of this last one then i'll let you know...

all before the judges make their decision (i'm aware that they all read this blog and they will find it hard to make a decision without my decision)

x

pulsate

2010-09-20T23:04:00.001+01:00

being what i found today... idly thinking about that lovely tonematrix... and stumbling from that onto a newer thing that he made... (andre michelle)...

this is the pattern i'm listening to right now... and i'm really enjoying it...

each circle expands until it hits another circle (also expanding) - they ring out a sound then both start shrinking until they're nothing then they expand again...

the bottom 2 circles... and the top 2 circles would be doing things independently if the middle circle wasn't there... they'd be locked into two different tones... with different cycles...

but the middle circle messes with them...

and it's all so non-linear dynamics... and a little bit solar systemeee as well...

there will be long periods where a small number of different tones are produced, with subtly shifting timings... like the top 2 will be just locked together making the same tone... the bottom 3 will be locked into a pattern of there own... until something shifts just far enough and everything changes again...

and this is just this pattern that i've got here...

sadly you can't save anything... or remove individual circles... you can just put in circles one by one or remove them all... but it's still a lovely, lovely thing... and it brings about a lovely calm in me...

x

Deflea again

2010-09-12T13:37:00.000+01:00

actually this was yesterday... the little blighters are still around so i thought maybe i did the last deflea wrong?

anyway... she forgave me almost immediately... i think because although i did lock the cat flap she didn't try and go through it... which is a pretty traumatic thing... racing away from the abusive human only to bang your head against the cat flap...

saw gong last night along with space ritual @ the forum... a friend of A's had a free ticket... steve hillage was in the band and that was nice to see... some of those gong tunes are fantastic and i'm about to fire up spotify and see if they're on there...

indeed they are... angels egg - (radio gnome invisible part 2) the 1st album i ever heard... courtesy of my brother... lovely...

the booker has begun...

i'm 160 odd pages into parrot and olivier in america by peter carey... which is good but a bit hammy so far... it turns out C by tom mccarthy did make the short list so i'm one book ahead of the game already...

this music does make me want to smoke... and smoking does not particularly agree with reading all the booker price shortlisted books before october 12th...

so there's a conflict...

anyway - happy sunday x

deflea dr john chico buarque

2010-08-26T19:13:00.000+01:00

she's sulking somewhere... but it's done...

dr john has come back into my life, much more than before... i'd seen him on jules holland and i think we supported him once at a student ball @ warwick university... not that i saw him then or him us - (i imagine)

anyway, i was @ core on monday for a meeting and a few of us musicians killed some time jamming, a straightforward tune led by me and then a much less straightforward melange which somebody said sounded like gris-gris... dr john's 1st album...

since then i've immersed myself in 3 different albums by dr john: gris-gris, dr john's gumbo & in the right place...

'68, '72, '73,

and then chico buarque's construcao came to mind today after listening to some of the crazy arrangements on gris-gris...

i'm also continuing to write the tune i started last week on the rhodes... some lyrics are floating in...

and the sopranos is getting dark... ralphy in season 3...

oh and i've started my booker book club reading, although C by Tom McCarthy is only on the longlist, the shortlist hasn't been announced... i read an excerpt from C in the "sex" granta... what i read was great and i'm very pleased to have found another writer i like, and for this book to be at least in the longlist for the booker...

if it makes it onto the shortlist i will have begun early for the booker book club challenge of reading all 6 booker shortlisted novels in the 5 weeks between shortlist announcement & winner announcement... (i did it last year)

x

rhodes muse new tune

2010-08-20T00:14:00.000+01:00

that beautiful electro acoustic instrument feeds me... i didn't know i was looking for love until i found it... i had forgotten how much it gives me & i am oh so glad to have it back in my life...

yes it would profit from the preamp being looked @ by the nice milton keynes man...

yes... that's true... but in the state it's in right now, which is pretty much the way it's been when it's been working for me in the past...

it is both muse and instrument... it calls forth music from me...

and since it's been working again - roughly the last 24 hours... i've written a new tune... well... i've got 2 sections chordwise and i've written a provisional melody for the chorus which is really nuts chordwise...

it may suit the voice of someone i met last week... it may suit my own voice... lyricly it may well talk about my feelings in relation to oncewassqueeze... it could turn into a spanner tune... it could be a longcat tune... it could be a tune from this identity i'm thinking about which uses my real name...

from me... if you will...

x

rhodes stuff

2010-08-18T23:53:00.000+01:00

so i got the amp bit home... asked around and got hold of a soldering iron... soldered in the speaker lead that had gone astray... put the amp bit back in... proceeded to screw back in the 10 huge screws that i remember it taking me an age to unscrew the 1st time i ever did it...

didn't quite finish before the job finished off the screwdriver i was using...

excitedly moved the keyboard part near the amp/speaker part... plugged it all in...

and it didn't sound right... still doesn't... although it did for one moment...

disappointing yes... but i remember it being very reticent when i 1st got it and it finding it's proper voice after 6 months or so... i came to believe that it was being left turned off for long periods of time that it didn't like...

anyway translate that to today and it's clear to me the preamp (on the keyboard part of the suitcase) is having trouble... (the lights aren't coming on properly... so maybe it's not getting it's power quite right...or it's not happy in some way inside...

it's a job for daylight... and a possible phonecall to the nice man i saw today... although a thought has just entered my mind that maybe i didn't push the bits in correctly before screwing it all together again... and my heart breaks at the thought of undoing all those screws again...

so... that's where i'm at x

but just before i close... i'm just had another look at it and pushed the sustain pedal a few times, turning the tremolo on and off...

and it has started behaving like it's old self again...

tomorrow now before i give myself a proper rhodes experience... one can't play one's rhodes at the volume one deserves in the middle of the night... not in this flat anyway...

must also get hold of a new screwdriver and finish screwing down those pesky screws... exaclt half of them are as far down as i intend to get them, the other half and a cm or so off...

tomorrow x

tethered

2010-08-18T15:29:00.001+01:00

my 3rd trip to milton keynes of 3... picking up the bit of my rhodes... then home... then some work putting it back together again... then possibly a smoke... then rhodes bliss once more...

blogging from my PC.... tethered to the internet through my phone... something i was looking forward to being able to do with android 2.1 - although it turns out i could have done it anyway...

around about the middle of the 2nd series of the sopranos... it makes me happy... a smile coming to my lips fairly often... such well written and beautifully crafted TV...

ok, that's all i have to say... i'm really just showing off because i can use the internet on this train...

and then i can't... mobile phone networks being oh so fragile while on trains...

x

today... the day before my brothers birthday

2010-08-17T11:55:00.000+01:00

worked...

the 1st full day of the new term... although not such a full tuesday as i used to have... the spanners not rehearsing this time, and in the future they won't be rehearsing on a tuesday any more which, no matter which day it eventually falls upon, will make my life easier...

after work i walked over to see C (homerton to broadway market) - guitarist and recording engineer... as well as being many other things... we recorded over @ his place a few weeks ago, in the week where i had no work at all - (except a meeting... nothing's prefect)...

then after leaving his i got onto the canal and walked to angel... even trying to go beyond the bit that's closed off... i got through several fence type obstructions before a security guard stopped me, very reasonably from going the final 20 meters... the concrete had just gone down today apparently and even if he hadn't been there i probably would have turned back anyway...

then into the vue cinema for the loo, finally finding my way into wagamama's for a small meal...

i wrote this down while i was in there:

quite richard fordesque acceptance falling over me

although of course it's also eminently longcatesque & it's one of the things i like about richard ford - & about frank bascombe - that in some ways they are like me -

the rhodes situation casting a lovely bubbling presence behind my mind all day,

slightly timeless quality now - in that i don' know what time it is - only that it was 9 when i got on the canal -

walking also a welcome influence on my mind - the hint of autumn that the low sun coming through the trees @ london fields... not quite - it's more that lovely late summer magic that blesses us a few more times...

trave 39 tomorrow-

frank bascombe being richard ford's main character in the sportswriter, independence day & the lay of the land... the 3rd of which i finished reading today while waiting for students to show for my keyboard class - a risky strategy because it could have been cut off at any time... but it wasn't...

the rhodes situation being that part of my lovely suitcase rhodes piano is currently in milton keynes, under the watchful eye of a very nice silver haired old git who is mending it for me...

i don't know... you wait for a reason to go to milton keynes for decades... and then 3 turn up all at once...

x

magical menagerie & the sopranos

2010-08-12T00:28:00.001+01:00

these days i watch way too much average TV... average to below average...

true blood is still good... and probably will remain so... i'm watching the 3rd season gradually as it is on in america... as i am watching warehouse 13's 2nd season... warehouse 13 being not as good but still mostly good... with the odd duff episode thrown in sadly...

also warehouse 13 got me into eureka... which i wish hadn't happened... a character from eureka turned up in warehouse 13 so i got hold of the 1st season of eureka and it's terrible... well... it's mostly half good... with the odd really terrible episode and once in a while there is a good episode... i'm about 3 episodes from the end of this season and... i know... why am i watching it?

some completeness thing i have i think...

anyway, i've decided to go back to the source and i'm currently getting hold of the entire 6 seasons of the sopranos... all of which (except for the last 9 episodes) i watched back when it was on british TV... somehow i missed the last 9 and i was thinking of getting hold of just them but it's been so long that i think i'm ready for the whole thing again...

it'll take awhile to get here... it's on it's way...

and then, just a few pictures of what me & grace got up to on sunday... except that blogger is odd these days with me & pictures... and i don't have the brain right now to go the long way around... so this is the only picture you have... suitably mysterious... the fantastic up down lever on one of the fish... so much fun...

more information another day x

michael franks half of life

2010-08-10T23:38:00.001+01:00

a circuitous route brought me to this singer this morning...

i got a phone call confirming that i wouldn't be seeing the person i was hoping i could see this week... and indeed i haven't seen her for a couple of weeks... and i won't see her now for another 2 weeks after this week..

a fact that i was told back when she found me on facebook... (do you want to meet? yes, but it's either this weekend or not for 5 - 6 weeks)... but which i didn't really take in back then...

so i said to myself... as i got out of bed (the phone call had woken me up),,, it's better to know than to not know... which brought the song positive into my mind... the michael franti tune that i had loved all those years ago (around the time she was in my life last time)...

so i fired up spotify and i tried to find the song... and spotify asked me if i meant michael franks... which pleased me immensely... part of the album "the art of tea" was on a cassette tape that my friend luke hedge made for me when were in the sixth form together... half my life ago...

naturally i wanted to hear that album now as well as the michael franti tune...

not that spotify could satisfy me on either score... spotify with it;s random holes...

however i used my other means and i got to hear everything i wanted in the end... except that the 1st time i downloaded the album, whoever i got it from had the wrong version of st elmo's fire... very odd, listening to the 1975 album of lovely wistful jazz (featuring the great joe sample on keys) and then being thrown into the 80's sound of john parr... most distressing... even though that tune was something i was fond of even further back than my liking for michael franks...

oh and... talking about half my life ago... on monday i passed through being exactly half as old as my dad... without realising it...

something i'd been thinking about for ages and which had sometimes been casting a dark shape over my emotions (uneasy comparisons between him then, me now, me being born, his 2nd son, me having no kids and no prospects right now)... and while it was going on i was saying goodbye to grace after 24 hours of her... having my ear syringed & thus ending the ear saga... generally feeling as though i was crossing a line in a few ways, but forgetful of the actual line i was crossing... only tonight, reading richard ford on the tube did i remember...

must ring dad tomorrow...

x

longcat in mono

2010-07-26T16:05:00.002+01:00

about to go out and start the doctors process... register at the doctors on the corner, make an appointment for as soon as possible...

it's been a week and it hasn't cleared up so doctor bound am i... just as most of the women in my life are telling me to go there (sister, ex-girlfriend, long-lost-once-was-squeeze)...

so hopefully this will mean an end to this situation in the nearish future... but while it's here i want to mention a few facets of it...

1stly it's odd that i listen to most of my music these days through a mono speaker anyway... the TV is stereo and headphones (when i listen to music from my phone) are too but mostly i listen to music from my computer through spotify... (like i'm doing now, with the mono speaker on my left hand side, with the ear that works... lovely album by Bill Frisell, Paul Motion & Ron Carter)...

2ndly - it may be an illusion but i can hear my singing voice clearer now, so singing in tune is easier...

this is something to do with the background noise being more foreground i think... although i can't tell you why right now...

3rdly it has been very odd and a little like taking hallucinogenic drugs... in that i feel somewhat at odds with the world... at some distance from it... like the world is behind a sheet of glass...

and then there's the pain, when i yawn, swallow, that kind of thing, not all the time when i do these things but quite a lot of the time, and i've been taking pain killers but i don't know if they've been working...

and when i'm in pain, i become a much simpler human being... i can't deal with as much as i normally can and my world shrinks down to the space in my head...

ok 4thly... the space in my head... i have this odd movement of my jaw which i've been conscious of for a year or so now, i tend to do it when i'm lying down ready to sleep... i move my jaw so that i get a sensation of pushing against something... although i don't know what it is i'm pushing against...

only now, with this ear thing, i do the pushing thing and somehow one of my teeth - (whose filling fell out ages ago and i haven't been to the dentist about) connects with the pushy jaw thing which in turn connects with the ear pain, and it all hurts...

it's amazing... and irritating... i wish i could stop doing it... when both pains are there sometimes my brain interprets them both as a major third (2 musical pitches).. high up (because the pain is in my head)... i blogged about this sort of thing once before... hmmm... no, can't find it... anyway... must go to the doctors x

portishead

2010-06-19T15:07:00.000+01:00

listening to the complete works of portishead, as presented by spotify... not quite the complete works of course... but what's easily to hand...

i love this band... haven't paid much attention to them for some time, and it's nice to re-associate with them in my mind...

i'm also taking the initial questionnaire for the UK COSMOS study - the mobile phone usage and it's effect on health study that i'm signing up for for the next 40 years or so...

i'm taking a break, because i don't know how tall i am, nor how much i weigh... i've just put a pencil on my head and drawn a line onto the wall... like mum & dad used to do when we were growing up... at some point i'll find a tape measure... as to my weight i've have to find some scales... not in this flat...

i'm also heating up some daal in the oven, it's from sainsburies, 1st go at it, i stopped in to the sainsburies in camdem on thursday after a walk along the canal from paddington (as is my want) - hoping to find an indian meal for one, which my local sainsburies has stopped doing... (they have the meal for two) but sadly even the camdem one doesn't do it, maybe sainsburies as a whole have given up on me and my single liking for indian food...

i did get a few other indian ready meals which i duly ate on thursday night, except for the daal... which is in there now...

the walk was lovely, and i'm very glad that i'm getting used to putting it into my weekly routine - such as it is... quality of life is important to me... x

oh well

2010-06-17T23:12:00.001+01:00

peter green... popped back into my life again yesterday as i was showing him playing in the 60's to a student...

via the medium of youtube...

oh well... being a killer, killer riff based tune that peter green's fleetwood mac used to play...

and the words "oh well" describe something in my head this evening... not a great deal, but something...

that's all...

x

canals

2010-06-05T20:48:00.000+01:00

so this is for 3 different occasions recently...

the 1st a couple of mondays ago, then the wednesday after that, then this thursday just gone...

1st & 3rd on foot, 2nd on the bike...

it started that monday, regretting not cycling in to KCC (by trellick tower), i got onto the grand union canal right there and wondered along it, at a very different pace to the cycling i generally do on it - although having said that, my quite impressive walking pace cycling technique does get employed with pockets of pedestrians on that canal from time to time -

little venice came along & i transferred onto the regents canal with a certain amount of street necessary... although less street than when i'm on my bike as feet can go back down to the canal earlier than wheels it turns out...

it was around 2 in the afternoon and on the two mondays previous to this i'd been to see the finches, 1stly with felinity on her birthday, then on my own (but seeing felinity's friend & goddaughter there)...

back to this monday i'm talking about i found my stone grand piano, under those rail bridges... place of homage for me...

i met a lovely young woman reading a huge textbook where the canal goes around the top of regents park... then floated off the canal and lay down in the park for a little while... reading proust...

i wanted to take the canal all the way to kings cross tube but i was kicked off it by some work happening (not happening in my sight but cutting off my progress),,, so i reluctantly made it back to street level and found the 29 bus home...

the following wednesday i had a meeting @ cm for an hour in the middle of the day, and afterwards i rolled a little jazz cigarette & stowed it away in my bag - i went in search of dilmah tea in the huge sainsburies in stepney... successful in my task i then headed north and when i hit the regents canal i got down onto it & headed west...

finding my progress cut short by another bit of work i stopped and smoked my JC... watching a man deal with his barge on his own...

when he started trying go through the lock that was just on the other side of the barrier blocking me & my bike i lent him a hand, squeezing through the barrier and assisting him with shutting the lock doors...

it turns out he possesses a sound system so we traded numbers, the idea that one day i might need a huge soundsystem seemed possible just then...

then finally this last thursday... again i hadn't cycled in to work over there (this time HWLC) and again after work i rolled myself a couple of JC's & i was drawn to the canals again... i got the train over to paddington and came out round the back by the canal... walked through the throngs of commuters up to little venice and onto the regents...

did that little bit of street, coming down just east of the maida vale tunnel... stepped off the path to right by the tunnel mouth and smoked the 1st of my two JC's...

saw a boat enter the tunnel and headed east... meeting a family of ducks, a couple of beautiful women & a travel writer on my way around regents park, through camdem and then eventually off the canal at the same point i'd been kicked off a couple of mondays earlier...

this time i tried to walk from there to where i could rejoin the canal but i got distracted on the way by st pancras graveyard... by st pancras old church (where R used to do those gigs, maybe still does)...

the graveyard suited me fine and i smoked the 2nd JC while looking @ hardy's tree... really enjoying the low angle that the sunlight was coming in @...

also really enjoyed soanes tomb for his wife (and eventually himself) which seemed to me to be like a really old rolls royce car...

eventually leaving there & walking down to st pancras station, through the eurostar bit (under that fantastic roof) and down finally to the tube @ kingscross and home...

many more canal days ahead i hope...

x

YMCK & Blewbury

2010-05-30T12:52:00.000+01:00

1st blewbury, the whole of our immediate knight clan met up over there yesterday, because felinity & her G were planning to go down & pick up some plants...

i met felinity & G down @ the BFI IMAX @ some ungodly hour of the morning for Avatar... the 2nd time i'd seen it there and with slightly better seats, although still not perfect...

3D cinema really does require some extra brain work, small parts of my mind constructing the 3D world from the 2 visual sources, and we all found this a bit hard after 3 hours, but it's a great film, i loved it until the last hour and felinity could have lost the middle hour or so... if only G had really disliked the 1st hour we could have all had separate hour breaks...

then off we drove across to blewbury, where D&M&C had also landed, i got to sing a little bit of charlotte's song to charlotte just before they left, got an appropriate leaning in my direction from her as a response...

mum & dad both well, D&M on good form & felinity & G their lovely selves... charlotte the star...

got home last night and i've woken today with nothing to do...

not the worst sensation in the world... i might ring up le fam pevo & see what they're up to, i have been invited to a barbecue by someone i met last weekend, but i'm not sure i'm ready for so many strangers @ once today...

G came round on wednesday night to finish watching the leopard (visconti) & whilst he was here he showed me a few ableton tips, so i'm curious about that little world, music making in a different way... also i've got charlotte's song to finish writing & begin recording, a tune of HK's that i said i'd find a bassline for which i've had the idea for, but not followed through with the recording...

so there's a few things i might do... or again i might do nothing at all, smoke a little & play the rhodes all day x

listening to YMCK - family genesis, it's beautiful... i find their songs pop into my head at odd times... lovely music...

finches portal dance

2010-05-17T15:23:00.000+01:00

currently queuing for the finches... the 2nd monday in a row... after me & felinity came here for her 30th x

these days i'm playing portal... a game that's become free on steam (i heard about it on charlie brookers twitter)... it's great, it stretches my little computer...

i took a really slow train back from brighton last night, after a truly lovely weekend with grace & josiah, also catching a bit of mr dance, and a great actual dance/movement piece called expresso that josiah's downstairs neighbour was in... fantastic...

so i was on the train that took 2 & a half hours to make the hour or so long trip... i was a bit spangled (mark turned up just before i left & we piped a little before getting into a large one about israel/palestine) and i spent some of the time gazing at the fieldlines thing, some time reading, although i only had the new scientist with me & i was having trouble taking it in...

so i spent quite a bit of time in portal... it works better when @ home with my larger monitor, but it works ok with this little screen just so long as the character doesn't go into any really large rooms... i'm not sure if she can go into large rooms alright @ home, but for sure my little computer starts slowing right down when the distances get bigger with the little screen...

so for example i would be puzzling over this massive room right now but i know it would just frustrate me... hence blogging...

.............................................

ok, finches done, sat out in the dazzling sunshine after having eaten a pasta dish served up by the waterside cafe... thought i recognised a woman in with the funches as felinity's friend... with her daughter, who would be felinity's goddaughter if it was them... but i didn't make contact...

also a few finches landed on me a few times... put me in mind of the rilke poem about the birdfeeder...

very pleasing all round... and now i think about it.. i got a text yesterday from felinity showing me something she made from a book i made her get last monday while out for her birthday and she might be offering it to me...?

or she might be making another one for me... pictures when it arrives...

happy day x

Richard Ford & me

2010-05-02T14:01:00.000+01:00

@ 8 last night i was getting changed in A's car... (A is the bass player in the Spanner Ja zz Punks), listening to Richard Ford on the World Book Club...

i got the suit on by around 10 minutes in & then A came back down & we went up to the stage... got caught in the speech being made by Ab who was having her birthday party & had drunk a little bit...

then A was moving bales of straw for me to sit on & i was setting up my keyboard, whilst a salsa thing was going on...

the band who had played before us were leaving so 1stly i had to take the drummers place in the salsa line (men remain stationary while women move along the line, very odd), and then just before playing our set the same drummer found me & i had to tell both A & P (tenor sax) to move their cars so the other band could leave...

then we played our set to a small but perfectly formed audience... (aliens)... lovely time had i think...

we got out of there quite swiftly... P driving me & M (bari) back to london... i got in to mine around 2:05am...

i very quickly transferred myself into bed and was drifting ever closer to sleep when P rang me & told me i was on Radio 4... he'd just heard me ask my question to Richard Ford...

the world service popping over to Radio 4 in the night...

i did indeed make it onto the show, i can be found asking my question @ around 14:53 - 17:12... but you can also hear my chuckles, laughs, a "yeah" @ all kinds of moments in the whole show...

it was a lovely afternoon spent listening to him talk, and aside from my relentless need to self publicise i think it's a great show, he gives good radio...

x

deflea... jethro tull... mad men

2010-04-29T00:08:00.000+01:00

ok, so 1stly i found a flea earlier today... so i've just (5 minutes ago) deflea'd her ladyship...

she took it... she didn't like it... but she took it...

she'll be back in a bit and i'll be forgiven... i hope

i'm currently listening to jethro tull... (lastfm me if you don't believe me)... to do with the shadow of the moon & to do with L @ core arts...

the film had michael collins talking about (amongst other things) how it felt to be left out of the walking on the moon thing in 1969... and there's a tune on benefit called "for michael collins, jeffrey and me"... so i had to listen to that tune in the brief break i took in the middle of the film...

then L @ core arts and me have been talking about jethro tull and it's really nice to talk with him about it... he's a wonderful musician himself...

so today i listened to the whole of benefit, while cycling about town... including the song "cry you a song" which i want to do an arrangement of for the SJP's... i'm now listening to the album before it (stand up)...

and earlier i watched the last episode of this season of madmen... which came to me in a very nice serendipitous way...

on saturday me & E popped over to meet spski in spitalfields market... we were watching the lodger the 1927 hitchcock film... with live soundtrack from minima... it was heavenly... and something in the film brought madmen to mind...

which was odd because i hadn't thought of madmen for several weeks... it's been a bit nutty you see...

about 3 or 4 weeks ago josiah was here... we watched the 2nd to last episode of the season together on BBC4...

then on either the following wednesday or the one after that i was @ the sun ra gig with N & R... didn't even think about madmen...

last wednesday was E's birthday & i was showing her a good time... no thought of madmen...

so by saturday it had been a few weeks since i'd even thought about the program & it seemed likely the season had ended...

but what worked well for me, was that BBC2 was at least a week behind BBC4 and that episode me & josiah watched together was only on BBC2 last week (i guess there must have been something to interrupt it, you know how BBC2 is)

so the last episode was on last night and i-playable tonight... and it was perfect... deeply satisfying... didn't quite make me cry but it was close...

oh good telly... thankyou x

richard ford

2010-04-19T22:58:00.000+01:00

it turns out he was just like old friend DR... (PD to some)...

i woke early, went over to beneath the trelick tower...checked out the lesson i'll be teaching in a few weeks, the man who's currently teaching it is off touring by then...

perfectly nice...

then home, found the sports writer which had been missing for a little while... got on my bike, went down to aldwych... bvsh house...

had a fine old time... asked my question.. which i think has a better chance of being aired on the show than last time's question... because it drew an interesting bit of conversation...

he signed my copy of the book, i had a glass of wine, played the thing i often end tunes with on the steinway grand in the room...

then once outside i bumped into him again, he was waiting for his car to take him to the hotel, i offered him a backy, but he said his prostate might give him trouble, he said my prostrate might start giving me trouble too...

i asked him how old he was, hoping he'd say he was 72... because i met the 18 year old me on the train down to brighton on friday night & it made me realise i was surely going to meet the 72 year old me as well fairly soon...

(18 years old (ish), half my age, doing mechanical engineering (mathy) @ university, plays piano, has a stud cat... (we had a female stud cat)... so the 72 year old i'm going to meet will have been doing roughly what i'm doing now... 36 years ago...)

he said no he was 66... oh well, nobody's perfect...

it also turns out that there's a 3rd book to the frank bascombe books (the sportswriter, independence day...) called the lay of the land, which he was writing just as i started reading him... back in 2002...

so that's very exciting... i've got independence day ahead of me, then the 3rd...

so i was totally high on life as i cycled away from bvsh house... went over to le fam pevo to deliver some books josiah wanted them to have (baby stuff)... had a gradually calming down evening with those lovely folks...

it turns out EQ is just about to pop... by friday apparently...

now i'm home & i've got my 1st huge tuesday since the holidays ahead of me...

oh & i met a nice woman on the tube... as you do... (in the 1st half of the day, the 2nd half all bikey)

x

Bean Juice? Human Bean Juice

2010-04-16T11:54:00.000+01:00

@ some point in the night i was looking at the book about Sun Ra that N gave me on wednesday...

it's a headpress book, i ended up with about 5 copies of it for some reason, which are going back, but i also have my own copy of it...

it's got a picture of sun ra on the cover - with a blob of perhaps sunlike stuff over him... maybe on his costume, although it's a black & white picture & the blob is in colour...

anyway, i'm asleep... and i'm looking at the cover, and i realise that the blob is my own blood, not much of it, just a little tiny sphere that been squashed between two surfaces...

so i'm about to give the book back, but something stops me... and i realise how i should hold onto that copy, because i've made it my own, it's got my blood on it...

and i feel special...

many hours later i wake up and look at the sun ra book & laugh...

.....................................................

i have all these copies of this book because on wednesday night, me, N & his R... (who he met in thsiland, lovely woman) went to cafe oto to see the sun ra arkestra, led by marshall allen...

it was one of the most inspirational gigs i've been to...

influences from throughout the history of jazz, from the 40s onwards...

able to go to some very scary 60's free jazz type places, which felt like an opening out of the heart... play a chopin piece which was the most beautiful thing i've ever heard... play some old jazz standards in a swinging fashion... (stars fell on alabama).... do lovely vocal melodies with lyrics to do with freedom & peace & love & losing your mind... they ended on a few outrageously cheerful tunes that might have been disney tunes... he did a few arrangements of them apparently...

in particular there's a kind of sun ra tune i've come to love, where parts of the band are doing complex, but rhythmicly working things... african type rhythms & cuban type rhythms... like the guitarist wil be gently plucking a rhythmic pattern... sometimes very quietly... and then gradually, some of the horn players will start playing a slow and aching melody over the top, more & more horn players join the melody... in sometimes strange & beautiful harmonies... the rhyhtm also grows...

just perfect x

also hafa was there - hafa who N has kept in touch with over the years, who i know/knew, back when i knew N the 1st time around... (hafa's blues was a tune we used to do in the cops, one of the few i produced... with hafa's voice...) - in fact, it was only on wednesday morning that i found the minidisk i'd recorded hafa's voice onto, which i'd sampled from...

hafa used to talk about sun ra back then... he knew him...

hafa (from wednesday): if you want to talk about music go & talk to marshall, i never talked about music to sonny, me & sonny used to talk about "the ascension of the name"

this was in the break between sets & me & R were talking to hafa who was a little irate to begin with...

i took me leave and crossed the room to use the toilet, and on my way i bumped into marshall allen and i shook his hand and told him how happy i was that he was there and that the spirit of sonny was alive in that room... he told me that it was what kept him going (he's 80 odd)...

then on my way back from the loo somebody yelled for me and i had a little chat with a guy i've met over in homerton, bass player (very sharply dressed that night)...

it was a truly lovely night... aided in part by a little tickle of something which might have a name but i don't know what the name is...

3 different T's combined.. very pleasant...

x

life worth living

2010-04-10T00:39:00.000+01:00

sometimes i am so glad that i live in this city...

met up with felinity to go check out possible venues for her 30th

it will be taking place 2 days before her birthday in a secret location...

there will probably be a facebook event relating to it for those of you interested in coming...

so anyway, we started in angel, got a bus down to holborn,

popped into conway hall where an old fashioned dance was taking place...

we crept into the balcony and looked down on the dancing partners...

stopped in on G, out drinking in the place where it will be taking place... as it happens...

then got another bus down to the southbank... sat in the royal festival hall for a couple of cups of tea... dropped her off @ waterloo,

lovely to spend time with her, nothing quite like being with someone you've known since you were 7...

she got on her train, i was about to go down to the tube...

but something in me wanted to walk for awhile...

so i popped on my comedy over sized headphones, listened to julian joseph's version of "the other side of the tracks" for the 7th, or 8th time today (loving that tune) in fact you can find out exactly how many times i've listened to that tune today over on my lastfm...

should you want to...

then just south of the river i started listening to my lovely herbie hancock playlist..

butterfly,
sun touched,
bubbles,
people music,
gentle thoughts,

it carried me over the north hungerford bridge, up passed charing cross, passed trafalgar square,

walking up charing cross road...

down onto the picadilly line @ leicester square...

& in fact it carried me all the way out to turnpike lane, starting to repeat the 1st tune again as i arrived at my door...

lovely to walk in london, over the river...

joss fucking stone

2010-04-04T18:42:00.000+01:00

me & dinah came back here last night after the gypsy hotel gig...

a way station on her way home... a smoke to take the edge off the adrenalin...

& we were listening to al green... when suddenly "how do you mend a broken heart" came on, but with joss stone singing over the top...

most unnecessary...

& now here i am, having recorded a couple of minutes of piano through the new mics, watching eragon, and who should turn up as a shabby looking fortune teller?

indeed yes, joss f*cking stone...

(because i can't spell that word in the content of this post, but strangely i allow myself to spell it properly in the title...?)

the gig was triumphant, a bit like that gig down in bristol... great crowd...

put me back into a good place... went to bed around dawn...

x

april fool

2010-04-02T00:07:00.000+01:00

so, the long weekend stretches out in front of me... it must have been a full moon recently (or perhaps in the next couple of days) because it's easter...

spski & the family are meeting me tomorrow @ the ICA... we're going to see the billy childish exhibition...

i drank last night without eating properly, and i woke quite hungover... got out of bed around 7:30 to wait for the new microphones to be delivered... i was lying on a blanket near the front door napping when they arrived @ around 9:45...

i left for work about an hour later...

so a bit short on sleep, and although i was intending to start testing the mics tonight i found myself watching "the dark is rising", here through love film, and i was dropping off near the end wondering if it really was as bad as it seemed of if it seemed that bad because i was so tired...

it's been a night in front of the TV, i woke up a bit and watched madmen from last night (very good as ever)... then i started watching "this is england" which was looking great, but i realised after awhile that i needed to eat and didn't have food in the flat so i gave up on the film (which will be on my lovefilm list any minute now) and went out to lava's for a takeout,,,

then came back and watched wallander (swedish one) which was also great...

(incisive reviewing you get here - such great descriptive words as - great... and... bad... oh, hang on, maybe it's bad reviewing... oh...)

so anyway, slightly reluctant to be going out tomorrow, as i really do want to start recording that piano with those mics, but k-wo, baby bird & spski are some of the best people in the world so once i'm there i'll be perfectly content...

gigging on saturday night with the SJP's, seems a long way off but it's not too far...

oh dear, largely pointless post... just wanting to mark how foolish i feel on april fool's day x

large emotional gradient important me is interviewed

2010-03-31T00:29:00.000+01:00

the 1st of several mental days today...

and i didn't know it was going to be this mental when i woke up,

in fact, when i woke up, i felt quite desperate, not sure why exactly, but then about 12 hours later, cycling up kingsway, i felt like i was floating on a cloud...

because, whilst i was @ work, i got an email from someone @ the BBC, asking if i could be part of a trailer for the world book club event coming up in about 3 weeks... the one where richard ford is coming to talk about the sportswriter...

the one that i'll be attending,

the email i sent to ask whether i could come was very enthusiastic...

that's why they asked me to be part of the trailer, because i was so enthusiastic...

and i was so enthusiastic, not just because richard ford is such a fantastic writer, but because i'd started rereading richard ford a few months back, well, further back really, 6 - 8 months... in an effort to connect with the version of myself who existed before i was with dinah... a getting over dinah kind of thing...

that book that i'd left down in brighton in the house of a man i barely knew, and got back a month or so later...

that was "just a little piece of my heart", it was great, and it was very good timing for the world book club to decide to bring him over...

anyway, la la la...

i finished the sportswriter over the weekend and again, very good timing to be asked today to do the trailer thing...

it turned out that the best time to do it was this evening after work, (because the next few days are going to be mental) and i cycled over to bvsh house in the rain around 7ish, floating through the barbican highwalks along the way which i love...

met with a lovely guy called B who led me through the plush old parts and into the not so nice newer parts, sat me down beside a neumann mic and asked me questions about the book, the writer, myself, my thoughts...

it was lovely... just to have a chance to talk about something i care about, and be listened to...

i left there just after he turned up the microphone on big ben for the 3 chimes of 8:15.. (so cool to have that mic on big ben all the time, live, so when you hear the bongs for the news it is actually big ben bonging...)...

and i cycled home high on life... stopping off in muratori's cafe, full of cabbies, for a largish roast meal... while mum & dad were probably eating down in earlsfield with kat & her G, celebrating the new flat, which is on my itinerary for tomorrow...

the trailer will be made by next tuesday and there'll be an extended web version around too, B's going to send me a link when it's around and it will make me very happy to hear myself on the BBC, or at least on the BBC website...

ok, bed, big day of travel tomorrow, biking it down to whitechapel for a meeting and to drop the bike off for a service in the one bike shop i trust in london (bicycle magic, greatorex street)...

then public transport down to earlsfield to see kat & the new flat...

then up to ladbroke grove for another meeting,

then the science museum for their science museum lates night, a core arts staff do type affair...

covering all 4 corners of this great city i'll be...

x

garden mixer

2010-03-29T01:17:00.000+01:00

last week, one of the items i've recently bought arrived, it's an active monitor, (speaker) and it's lovely...

one more thing to carry to gigs and i probably won't always, but it's good to know i will be able to hear myself if i do take it...

this afternoon i decided to clean up my mixing desk, it's been in a bad state for a little while, gathering dust even when i was using it every day...

so i got my can of servisol 10 & i set about squirting it into various bits of the mixer, (a mackie, same brand as the new speaker)... after having done 4 channels (of 16) with a lovely advancing cleanness visible... i decided to heed the advice on the can and not do all this in an enclosed space...

i took the new speaker, plugged my phone into it and put it on my window sill...

a de la soul album pumping out which i've been enjoying very much for the last couple of weeks,

i took the mixer and the can outside into the garden and i had an enjoyable 45 minutes, cleaning up the rest of the mixer... in the best way i could think of, which hopefully is the proper way...

the album lasted exactly the right amount of time, i was a little aware that i might have been being antisocial with my loud music, but it was only an album, in the middle of the afternoon, and had anyone raised their head over the fence i would have turned it down...

anyway, it's such beautiful music, i'm sure all my neighbours appreciated it anyway...

i haven't yet tested the mixer, that's a task for tomorrow, but i'm glad to have done it...

x

highs & lows

2010-03-15T21:53:00.004Z

proust's on hold, because richard ford is going to be on the world service's world book club and i'm going to be there to ask him a question...

so i'm rereading the sportswriter, the book of his that's going to be discussed...

judging from the cinema ticket stub that is the bookmark, i last read this book in 2002, the film (from the ticket stub) was Ivans XTC, which i might put on my lovefilm list to see again...

the sportswriter is wonderful and it has made me laugh out loud (not lol) several times already, made me smile many times and brought me quite close to tears...

richard ford isn't wholly responsible for the almost tears, i've been quite low recently... lonely...

bubbles, the downstairs cat, meows mournfully all day when they're not in down there, i feel for her, and try and show her a little attention whilst at the same time assuring balthazara that i'm not cheating on her... i'm a one cat man... even if that one cat wakes me up in the morning by touching my face with her paw...

i'm very glad to have her, i think it's true to say she's very glad to have me...

other highs have been:

true blood season 2, which i've had for a little while, but was holding off because it's on the telly (FX), but since last friday's episode i've been hungrily devouring the whole season, and it is better without adverts, the only thing is sometimes my copy of the episode doesn't have the closing tune, which changes each episode and is generally both fantastic in and of itself, and funny, in relation to the story just told...

one episode left and i'm trying to hold it off, but i won't be able to hold off for much longer...

my piano, tuned a week or so ago and in a wonderful place, no downstairs neighbour conflict, possibly side to side neighbour issues to come but i'm not being rude about it, if someone can hear me that way...

i'm writing a synth thing that currently has piano playing on it, i've ordered a couple of niceish mic's that i intend to have setup on the piano fairly constantly, my nice condenser mic would have been recording that piano by now, but it's still in the hands of T who i used to make music with... he's dragging his heals to an extent... glad to have ordered the other ones, they'll be here in a couple of weeks or so, coming from america, i wonder if i'll have my stuff back off T by then?

all this piano playing has given me a renewed interest in my GEM piano module, that may surface at a gig some time soon...

my tetra, my space echo, both of which met my gigging keyboard last night at the spanner jazz punks rehearsal in the venue for next saturday's gig... my keyboard which is so slim the mopho fell off it many times, and last night the bari player knocked the tetra to the ground and i lost the plot a tiny bit, it's partly my fault, i haven't yet invested in the bluetack necessary for the purpose...

on the way back from the rehearsal, keyboard on my back, a drunk polish man (i think he was polish, and he was definitely drunk) told me he needed someone to make music for him, him being a rapper, he wrote his number on the brickwork by where we were standing with a bit of chalk from the ground and proceeded to sing a really long and loud tone into the wall to prove to me that he could sing... i left him there...

x

retrograde

2010-03-10T23:22:00.005Z

just watched dogma, which i've been meaning to do for ages...

it was great, bless kevin smith...

alanis morrisette is a weird looking lady, she looks like she belongs in a circus... and she's god...

anyway, i just turned on voyager, the star, sky software thing that i like, that i've got set up like a astrologer would have it, the planets and the sun (but no moon for me, she moves too quick) arranged around the ecliptic...

and i see that mars is right on the border between cancer & leo, my sign and my brother's sign...

i'm curious which direction it's moving in so i press forward in time, and it drifts into leo proper, i press backwards in time and it drifts into leo proper...

which means it's balancing, right now, between moving backwards and forwards.

it turns out that it's been moving backwards (retrograde) for almost 3 months, and in almost 2 hours it's going to stop moving backwards and start moving forwards again...

it didn't quite make it back into cancer, it's teetering right on the edge...

dinah & her mum & dad are astrology people and all i know about astrology comes from living with dinah, she used to speak of mars being in retrograde as being a difficult thing... so i'm all for an end to a difficult thing...

ok, the talented mr ripley... which now i remember is based on the same book that plein soleil is based on, and i think i didn't which this one when it came out because i felt i should watch the older, french one 1st, alain delon...

which i never did, and now here i am watching the talented mr ripley... and i might have read that book...? and mars will reverse it's direction (relative to the earth) in less than 90 minutes... and i've got to be up for work in the morning... i'm a fool x

before time 1980 techyness dream eating

2010-03-07T10:50:00.006Z

on friday morning i just missed a call from a student... i knew roughly what he was going to say...

sorry i'm late, or, sorry i'm not coming...

anyway, the answerphone message he left remained unlistened to until this morning...

also on friday i finally got my windows 7 computer to sync up to my HTC Hero phone...

which means that:

a - i could install the new ROM that came out for the hero (on orange) a few weeks back

& b - i could back up all my text messages that would have been deleted by this process..

they all got backed up onto my gmail... which is really odd, seeing text messages in gmail...

so anyway, it all happened, it all works, which is pleasing...

i woke up this morning and looked at my phone, and it told me i had an answerphone message from june 22nd 1980, this being the answerphone message from friday morning,

from before my phone got it's ROM changed and therefore before my phone's current conciousness came into being,

like imagining events from before i was born...

anyway, i like the fact that it chose june 22nd 1980... pleasing x

but while i'm talking about things working, i have a few positive and one negative "things working" stories to tell,

1stly the negative, the mopho is not responding to treatment, or at least, not the last bout of trying to fix it that i gave it, with the arrival of the soundcard with it's MIDI in&out i can now talk to the mopho, and i've tried a few different ways of getting it back on it's feet but it's resisting...

but in a positive way, i was able to take the sound i use in an SJP song, put it into the computer, then load up the Tetra sound editor and manually program that in so i have the exact sound now... and all the original mopho sounds i programmed are all similarly in my computer now, in code, so i can get them into the tetra slowly... and maybe someone @ DSI will tell me how to load them onto the tetra in a much easier way...

but sad for the mopho, i can't help be struck by the fact that it broke (or i found out that it was broke) on the day i ordered the tetra... to anthropomorphise my mopho a little, either it knew it's old age was coming and it just managed to hold on until i had a replacement, or it saw that i was getting the tetra and it broke itself in a fit of anger..

so, fantastic that i have the tera now, but what would i have done if i hadn't been buying the tetra when it happened?

my other (partial) success concerns the tetra and the spin doctor... the spin doctor being a purple object with 16 knobs on it that you can plug into any MIDI device and set those knobs to controlling the device, i got it from D (moog drummer D) on thursday...

i'm currently plugging it into the tetra, which is a beautiful synth, but it doesn't have that many knobs on it, you can assign 4 of the knobs to whatever you want, which is great, but i want to be able to control more than just those...

so far i've been able to set up 11 knobs on the spin doctor to control the tetra and it's lovely...

there are many, many more settings i might want to change yet, and also i need to do a bit of learning as to how to speak in NRPN MIDI messages, but it's a really nice and intuitive way of interacting with a synth and i'm really digging it...

ok one more thing, i dreamt of bass player A last night - well - this morning, and it was the end of a long day, moving things, and suddenly he came out with this amazing veggie indian food... and offered half to me - by saying "well, you're not going to get a quote on it", which seemed to me to be inviting me to eat...

and i ate, in my dream...

x

jazzers meeting by chance

2010-03-06T16:24:00.003Z

a week ago i went to see my friend J (JtJP) play a gig over in ravenscourt park,

playing with J that night were - R, student of mine, lovely singer, F a wonderful drummer who i've played with once, when i played one of those sunday jazz gigs in camden... and the guitarist who i've met but can't remember his name, lovely player, and a bass player...

on my way out there, i got off the tube and was walking up the road when a man asked me if i knew where the polish centre was...

i told him i didn't but that i had googlemaps on my phone and that i might be able to help...

a short while later i had directed him back down the road he had been walking along, and i made my way up that road towards the gig, where i met lovely D, (who sold me the moog all that time ago and who drums in many of the improvisations)... the gig was wonderful... all of them were marvellous, i had a rocking time watching them play...

also the pub saw fit to show Top Gun projected massively behind the band from film4... it started pretty much as they started and it finished almost exactly when they finished...

me & D drunkenly shambled back down that road to the tube and were waiting for a train when the man who i'd directed to the polish centre earlier came onto the platform...

it turns out he's a sax player, he was going to see a bigband, run by a man who fixes and sells saxophones, in fact at least one of the SJP's have got a sax from that man...

so we chatted awhile, talked about the musicians life... sax players... music...

got on the train when it came and before we knew it me & D were getting off and he was staying on...

so that was that... he goes by the name of BP... and it was nice bumping into him x

under the sea

2010-03-03T15:25:00.003Z

in a couple of hours i'm going out to meet with felinity, we're seeing micmacs....

i'm feeling a bit under things today, a sore throat and a cough/sneeze thing...

i'm about to smoke a tiny bit, which won't be very pleasant but it will produce quite a nice feeling, upon which i'll sit down at my rhodes, with the MIDI keyboard on top, the rhodes going through the BlackStar valve thing, the MIDI keyboard controlling the hammond and the tetra, and everything going into the space echo...

and i'll play for an hour or so...

still not recording because i'm still waiting for delivery of a USB sound thing, it turns out the Edirol one i ordered (and paid for) was in between names, being rebranded, and i wasn't going to get it until the end of next week...

so i cancelled it and tried to get it from someone else, phoned a few people, one man told me he wouldn't be able to get an edirol for a little while and anyway, the last one he'd sold (a year ago) had blown up...

so he persuaded me that in fact i wanted an M-audio thing, newer, for £100 less...

i was persuaded, and tomorrow morning, possibly before i leave for work, i shall receive it in the post and then it will all start to slip into place...

i will also be able to start mending the mopho, or at the very least recreating the mopho sound i was using in the SJP's in the Tetra...

x

2010-03-01T20:45:00.004Z

just listening to this, being another time i was playing my rhodes through a space echo, but that time, my rhodes was in full working order and it was a real 70's space echo...

this time, my rhodes is still broke, the amp part is in need of some specific love, but the upper, harp part is currently wired into my Blackstar valve overdrive pedal, which is wired into the brand new (to me) Boss Space Echo, a seemingly faithful digital reproduction of the original...

similar therefore to my hammond organ module - the Creamware B4000, a lovingly researched and recreated digital version of an analogue classic...

week 24 of the weekly improvisation (because that's what it is i'm listening to) was recorded on the 5th of December 2006,

ok, it's just finished, and now i'm listening to week 34, from the 10th of february 2007, the day that landlord E popped over to pick up his space echo after a few months of it living with me...

i'm sharing these links with you because my old computer is dead and until my brand new Edirol USP sound thing arrives i can not record anything just yet... but when i can ladies & gentlemen you will be drowning in the deluge of music i'll be making...

earlier on i felt so completely at home playing the rhodes through the space echo (with that lovely bit of valve overdrive), i tweeted with joy, and tomorrow i'll be taking both the space echo and the brand new tetra to the SJP rehearsal, we'll see what the hammond sounds like through it...

we're practising up for a big showcase type thing that will feature dancers (including dinah):

be there or be square folks x

space echo

2010-03-01T13:24:00.003Z

my heart is full of music making love...

i currently have AT tuning my piano, and i also have, by my side, the Boss RE-20 Space Echo pedal which i picked up from the post office this morning...

so i've got my lovely DSI Tetra, going into the Space Echo, and it's just heaven on a stick...

my cup runneth over...

i am, if you haven't guessed already, going through an acquisitive month or two, what with the laptop, DSI Tetra, Space Echo... and indeed an Edirol USP Sound unit currently waiting to be sent off from liverpool...

it's all come from the marking that kept me underground for ages recently and also the fact that the very reputable company that i bought the tetra from mistakenly charged me too little for the beast...

so for once i find i have money, but of course it won't last long...

anyway... the space echo, i hit the Push It button on the tetra and turn the Cutoff control, giving a short burst of synthy loveliness... it goes into the space echo and repeats, i turn all sorts of dials on the space echo and the synthy loveliness turns mad and nutty and even more lovely to my electro loving ears...

all to the background sound of my KNIGHT upright piano being tuned by that lovely man...

x

Tetra

2010-02-27T17:37:00.005Z

it arrived on wednesday, while A was here trying to fix my rhodes (to no avail, although he brought us closer to knowing what is wrong)...

i took it into work on thursday and played with it after teaching, with old friend D on the drums... lovely to play with him again, and lovely, if new & a bit odd to be playing with the Tetra...

it's basically 4 mopho's in 1, and in protest at being outmoded my mopho has been behaving strangely ever since i ordered the new beast...

i booted up the old computer, to speak to the mopho, and i think i can fix it... but it will take a bit of time, and of course my old computer died the very next day so i have to wait until i get some MIDI going in & out of my laptop before i can do the fix on the mopho...

once upon a time i would write bits of tunes or sounds on the mopho and dream of having just a little more control and sound possibilities and using the mopho live to give me a rhythmic pattern to play over... in particular i was frustrate by the notion of being able to set up a lovely groove on the mopho, but being unable to change to the next groove (verse => chorus) during the song...

the tetra is currently balancing in my mind between being clearly much more able to deal with that dream of performing with it, but perhaps not solving that specific problem... not that i know this, and i'm going to try and get it to work how i want it, i just have to think quite a lot about the situation and what i now have at my disposal...

loving the possibilities x

early morning

2010-02-21T21:42:00.003Z

late notice cover asked of me today, for tomorrow, so i'll be rising @ 6, leaving the house around 6:45...

nuts... for me of all people...

but at least it means i won't sleep in on tuesday, something i was a little concerned about,

it's for M, M who i mentioned a post or 2 ago, who's been round to look at my rhodes & my moog...

it'll all be over by 2.00, and although that would be stretching it a little, on a normal monday i could sleep until 2... alhtough generally i'm up by 1...

i committed the error of supermarket shopping while really hungry earlier today, and now i have loads of food... i'm sandwiching tomorrow, and probably tuesday as well... i packed tomorrow's lunch & it's 2 chicken sandwich's, a cox's apple and a cookie...

in theory, in order to get 8 hours sleep, i should go to bed in 10 minutes... but i can still feel the food in my stomach and even if i went to bed, i don't think i could go to sleep very easily, however i will be in bed by 11... and hopefully i won't spend hours tossing and turning...

oh and i started writing another tune today, based on 2 notes from my moog that have been playing since thursday, quite possibly it's for baby bird, who officially has a name now, courtesy of a text from Kwo earlier (they told me and josiah on friday, and once josiah knows, it's safe to assume it's not long before everyone knows)...

Robin...

hence baby bird...

x

baby bird

2010-02-20T16:09:00.003Z

7 days have passed since it ended with me & emivore and i'm trying to slightly ritualise this moment, kiss the memories as they pass so as not to be haunted by them...

i saw baby bird yesterday, i didn't have to work over in homerton so after CM in the morning i went over to SP of stepney and Kwo's to meet with the 2-week old...

grace, josiah & M came up as well so it was quite a big visit, grace was irrepressible and i found myself bearing the brunt of her while the grown up's talked...

the baby is wonderful and sp told me a story that i love - that perhaps one day i'll retell here, but not yet...

me & dinah are in communication again, i don't have a huge amount of space for her in my head just now but at least we're talking...

and the sons of anarchy are in my life... i got hold of the 1st season, thinking that the series currently on 5 USA was the 2nd... i was going to catch up with them and then watch them weekly...

they arrived on thursday and i've watched everything but the last episode now,

just checked though, and 1stly the 5 USA thing is this 1st series, so i've already over taken them, and it's shown on wednesday's @ 10, which is when madmen is shown over on BBC4, so that's not going to happen, it looks like i'm going to get hold of as much SOA as i can and consume it madly...

it has helped me this week, what with my small but definite heart break...

also i'm buying the thing i wanted... retail therapy which for once i can afford... but won't be able to afford anything else for a little while...

x

the fog

2010-02-17T23:56:00.002Z

& lo & behold,

TV let me down, then the BBC came to the rescue...

i watched the fog on the iplayer just now and it almost made me cry...

it really is very good TV...

& i am sad, as my screensaver tells me...

last week it said "i am in love"...

the day before valentine's day it said "i have my eyes open"

and today it says "i am sad"

and although i am a bit sensitive to the thought of a certain ex-girlfriend of mine reading this and being pleased by it... i hereby announce, once more, that me & emivore are no more...

it happened on saturday, the day before valentine's day...

one of the 2 reasons i had for not going to work yesterday was in order not to see her... and as it's halfterm and weirdly, that place respects half of halfterm, (i should have worked yesterday, i'm not expected to work on friday), i don't now have to see her until next tuesday...

i began this current period of singleness quite relaxed and remarkably calm, but, unsurprisingly i am actually quite angry and sad...

at the rehearsal last night there was drum stool right next to me, covered in dust (the drummers studio where we rehearse is constantly shedding dust, it is below a railway track and stuff is shaken from the ceiling all the time...)

anyway, at a certain point i drew my initials into the dust on the drum stool and then i wrote "is sad"...

a bit weird because the youngest SJP (G - trombonist) was walking up to me just as i was doing this, in order to look at the lyrics i had on my music stand, and he might have seen it, i considered rubbing it out straight away but i realised that i wanted it to be said so i left it there...

later on M (baritone) sat on it, rubbing my sadness out with his arse...

at one point in this episode of madmen a character says to another character:

"you're a house cat, you're very important and you have little to do"

x

things

2010-02-17T22:13:00.007Z

things are bad...

mad men is right now on bbc4, but in the 1st 11 minutes it froze up about 5 times, each time lasting a couple or perhaps 3 seconds... tiny bits of dialogue lost that in a lesser program i might not mind, but in mad men?

i had to turn it off...

also my internet has been a bit odd recently, i put it down to the cheap wireless router i bought, and it still could be that, but it's still a bit rubbish even when i plug in directly, still plugged to the router, so it could just be that...

(still using that still word)

but if my TV is being weird too then maybe it's virgin?

anyway, i'll catch mad men tomorrow on catchup whilst i'm not working over @ hammersmith - it being halfterm...

and in other news, the mobile phone money came through, and the RAM has been bought and installed and i can see no clear evidence that anything's improved...

it's always the way, when i installed the new ROM in my phone i wanted to see an immediate improvement but it just seemed the same...

i trust in both cases that it is better...

my studio is coming on... slowly but surely... A from the SJP's (bass player) is coming round next week to have a look at my rhodes... possibly fix it... another lovely man in the tradition of MM who's been round several times to look at the rhodes... the moog.. etc.

and i'm developing a longing for a Tetra, a small box of heaven... like my mopho but 4 notes at once... chords possible...

& i love my cat

rescued by the 1930's and 2009

2010-02-16T16:41:00.002Z

missed work today, for a couple of reasons, and i was feeling low...

and i was listening to the album nuclear war by sunra on spotify...

and the song "smile" came on, written as an instrumental for the 1936 charlie chaplin film, modern times, words written for nat king cole's version in the 50's,

it very much helped me, i've learned to play it on the piano and i may well do a version of it, in the same kind of way as stardust effected me back then and the plan i had for that tune, i don't know if i'll ever get to where i wanted to get to with that tune (it only got some of the way...) but this one would belong with it...

and then i watched moon, the 2009 film, which was really good... made me feel good...

so, thankyou, 1stly the 1930's, 2ndly the year 2009, and 3rdly, my day off, which is costing me money, but which i clearly needed...

spanner jazz punks rehearsal later...

x

no tits please

2010-02-15T15:27:00.003Z

evony...

it advertises on chess.com so i've seen many of their adverts, and i've always thought they're a bit breasty for a gaming website...

but yesterday i was on chess.com and an evony ad came on which was a picture of a woman with large breasts wearing a tight white shirt, that scrolled down so that only her breasts filled the frame, then back up to her face, then down to her breasts...

to be honest, i could do without breasts being pushed into my face... i am a man and as it turns out i don't mind looking at breasts if i've chosen to do so, but whilst playing chess?

it's a bit page 3 and i'm not after it x

old phones for sale

2010-02-10T20:57:00.003Z

one of the things this current cleanout is doing, is bringing old things into the light of now...

so here are my 3 last phones, the most recent, the motorola v8, on the left, (£22)
the one before that, in the middle, the motorola v3i, (£7)
& the one before that, the motoralo v500, (£1)

along with their SIM cards and the memory card from the v3i, which i have taken out because the people i'm selling them to don't want these things...

the picture was taken with my new phone - the htc hero, and the old phones are resting on my lovely new laptop - the asus eeePC 1005H...

assuming that it all goes through, i'm going to use the £30 selling these phones will get me, to buy most of the new RAM i want for my laptop... (£35ish)

ok, techy, named things post over... x

frank sinatra

2010-02-10T17:56:00.002Z

young at heart is on film four, i'm eager to play my piano, i would really like to know when frank sinatra is going to sing a song...

he just sang someone to watch over me...

i've heard of websites which tell you at which moment in which films you can see some flash of female flesh...

what about a website which tells you at which moment in which films you can see & hear frank sinatra sing a song...?

this film was made in 1954, at the height of frank's capital recording period... doris day is in the film too...

i've got an observation tomorrow (someone observing my teaching) and i have a little paperwork to do also today...

the tune i'm writing got a possible tap in a different direction yesterday when C (silver fox to some) was playing the chords with me, but said it sounded to him that it started on a different chord than i had it starting... it made me think of it as a 4 chord thing in a 6 chord pattern... the 4 chords repeat 3 times, and 2 different 6 chord phrases go over it...

as chance would have it the melody i wrote the other day breathes in naturally after 6 bars, the remaining 2 bars are lovely and i wouldn't want to lose them, they'd probably come sometimes later...

anyway, a cup of tea and some piano playing...

x

a tune

2010-02-08T14:43:00.002Z

i suppose it could be a baby tune, either for spski & Kwo's little one or for charlotte... but it's got a sadness to it, so it might not suit the baby project...

i started writing it in the runup to B's gig @ core arts on friday night, B being the artist who was having his opening view thing, and the singer who was fronting the band made up of mostly staff & volunteers...

i was on stage playing around with some chords, i'd taught the devils interval that morning over @ CM and i was checking out beginning the tune with a chord jump with that interval...

B came over and starting singing a gentle jazz thing over it... it was lovely...

so i've been playing those chords on my piano today and they're starting to work in my brain, a melody has come which works over 2 times round the chords...

it could be a spanner jazz punks tune... it could be a me tune...

loving the piano where it is x

piano moved

2010-02-07T23:13:00.004Z

emivore & me, over the last two days, began work turning this flat into something lovely again...

when me & dinah moved in we (well, i say we, it was largely her) made it lovely... then after me & dinah broke up and she moved out a little later, it drifted back down into something i loved, but let's be honest, it was not lovely for anyone else...

i had been letting it drift down, partly to do with getting over dinah in my own way...

anyway, the move to get it lovely again, (partly to do with me wanting to have grace here, and making it nice for her, partly for emivore), began this weekend...

and part of it for myself was getting my beautiful piano out of the room where it's been since it moved in (that day a couple of years back, when landlordE, spski (now dad), floopy, dinah, me... movingM & his sidekick... struggled for many hours getting it up the stairs and round that corner)...

getting it from that room, which is above my downstairs neighbours living room and therefore not a very friendly place to play my loud piano, through the seemingly very thin floor boards and straight into their TV watching room...

into this pink room which dinah used to use for her uni work... which is above my stairs and their front hall...

emivore left a few hours ago, after much work clearing, sorting, cleaning... we ate @ lava's and i took her to the tube,

i phoned spski (now dad) on the way back to the house and i had a lovely chat with him, he's in great place, sad not to be with KWo & the little one, (she's in the hospital still, nothing dangerous, just resting after the birth), but drifting in the clouds in a hallucinogenic, childish way as he described it to me...

30 minutes on the phone with him, then i put on Aja, the Steely Dan album,

there was a little preparatory work to do still, and i set to it, moving lesser things, dinah's (now my) wardrobe, with all kinds of floopyness on top, clearing a path...

then i started moving the piano from there to here, shedding clothes as i did it... a mad energy within me as i pushed it, pulled it, shoved it, lifted it, many trips from one end to the other, midway through doors so the only way was over the top of the piano...

balthazara watching in cat bemusement...

after the album finished the spanner jazz punks demo came on, (i'd forgotten that i'd accidentally put it in the same playlist in itunes, before noticing and putting it in the right playlist but obviously leaving it there also)...

at this point the piano was half in the hall, half in the living room, having turned about 10 degrees and was about to change direction, heading into dinah's (now my) room...

so the last part of the move came with the 1st 2 tunes on that demo (which may or may not have made it's way onto the SJP's myspace by now...?), and as the last 2 tunes played i smoked some and sat at my freshly moved piano, not playing it, just sitting @ it, smoking...

when Punk Jazz Spanner came to it's nutty "band going mental but being slowly driven away" ending and gradually faded to nothing i was left with a lovely silence, as i contemplated the piano in it's new place...

still no playing of it, it is the middle of the night and i don't yet know for sure it's not going to bother somebody...

naturally, midway through the move i thought i should have set up a camera, filming the whole thing, speeding it up afterwards... but it was too late then, so no visual record remains of that mad dash...

strange, i just got a skype phone call from someone in russia, strange but kind of nice... not someone i know (i don't think) perhaps he found me because maybe he calls himself longcat as well...? not sure but... anyway...

my piano moving story is told, i still have the post moving settling back from the chaos to deal with, but maybe that's tomorrow now...

ok, laters x

imbolc

2010-02-06T12:17:00.002Z

being a pagan festival to mark the 1st signs of spring...

and although people generally place it on the 1st or 2nd, i have seen the odd thing putting on the 4th...

yesterday, being the day she was born, was a lovely spring day, unlike the day before or indeed the day after, a rare glimpse of spring...

the festival is a fire festival, out with the old and in with the new, and what is newer than a baby's birth..?

the name is as yet undecided and i'm going to try and find a fire related name for her imbolc nature...

grace says she should be called violet or indigo, (although she also says that if she's called violtet she might turn into a blueberry)...

barbara or bridget maybe...?

x

baby girl

2010-02-05T21:01:00.002Z

spski & kwo became, this morning, the proud parents of a new baby girl...

in fact, just as i started blogging, he phoned me, he's talking to me right now...

9:31 am this morning x

mixing & one more reason to avoid facebook

2010-02-03T11:45:00.003Z

jai bound any minute now...

me & DSpanner found ourselves locked in to OTR studios last night with M, the guy mixing us, who had recorded the band on sunday...

some muppet had padlocked the door on leaving, without checking to see whether anyone was still in the building...

this was discovered around 12:30 am with 3 out of the 4 tracks mixed...

anyway, aside from a few mad moments - M considering climbing over a razor wire fence - M considering hot-wiring the goods lift - we got all our mixing done and the muppet returned to let us out...

interesting experience working with a hard disk recorder, no computer screens to interact with, the whole thing taking a touch longer in certain situations, but an experience all about the ears and not the eyes which is refreshing...

so DSpanner drove me home, he had to get up for school in the morning, glad i didn't...

at a certain point i realised that it was a bit like the day before, walking around kew gardens with emivore, really not wanting to look at the time because time had expanded and i didn't want to return to normal time yet...

yesterday i'd been working, 11 through to 7, then a stroll over to the studio, then mixing from 7:30 to 2:15...

we looked at the time when the drama happened, (12:30 ish), but even this i resisted...

i was sat there pushing through, not knowing what the time was, not wanting to know, just knowing that we had to get the mixing done...

everything always takes longer than you think it will in the studio...

ok, and then facebook... i'm a fan of the SJP's on facebook, so i wrote on our wall just now, reporting on the mixing... and it disappeared into the "just fans" tab... so it's not on the wall, unless you click on that tab...

i'm not just a fan...!

just one more reason why i personally should not try and interact with facebook, it is set up to upset me... i see that now... i don't know how they did it... but they definitely had me in mind when they set that thing up... "no wait, hang on... if we do it like this it'll really twist his mind up"...

i wouldn't be surprised if they've got access to the little camera in my laptop, everytime i log on to facebook it logs the video taken from that camera, so they can see the irritated looks on my face... and laugh...

x

kew

2010-02-01T18:33:00.004Z

she woke in a blue mood, i peeked behind the blind and it was a beautiful morning...

so i suggested she not go to work and instead we go to kew gardens...

which she agreed to,

so we got the bus here to feed the shmoosh... i shaved, finishing the job i'd started yesterday before the recording session... i picked up my camera which has been laying dormant for too long... we ate in the cafe by turnpike lane station then travelled to kew on that little train from highbury...
a train journey i love, passing by all sorts of memories... kensal rise where i lived for years, the view from willesden junction, on the train not quite as nice as from the platform but still lovely (a very different kind of lovely to the lovely of kew a little later)...

got to kew @ 2.30, with just less than 2 hours before it shut, and only 75 minutes before the glass houses were shutting, luckily emivore's science museum volunteers card got her in free... we raced over to the palm house...
basked in that amazing place...

wondered over to the treetop walk...
strolled over to the temperate house...
the sun, having gone behind clouds for much of the afternoon, came out again just as we were walking in the park, down vista's, the sunlight coming in low, lighting up the trunks of the trees... we saw a few green parrots...

it was heaven...

we ate in a much more expensive cafe by kew garden station, then got back on that little train, now full of commuters... i got off @ highbury and braved the rush hour tube north, she stayed on until homerton, where she went to work for a few hours (she's there now)...

loveliness x

tax return done

2010-01-30T17:43:00.002Z

all done...

met emivore in jai & she came back here... she had a nap and i lay with my back to her, filing my tax return online on this here laptop...

so it's all over...

x

tax return woe

2010-01-30T13:11:00.002Z

so i just did josiah's tax return, took me half an hour...

then i tried to log in to my tax return, not that i was ready to do my own one yet, just wanted to check it out...

and i found my user id in my old computer, typed it into my new computer and tried a couple of passwords... to no avail...

i must have tried wrong passwords 3 times, because when i got firefox running on my old computer, firefox who knows my password from last year, it still wouldn't let me in...

it turns out i've locked myself out for 2 hours...

fantastic...

so i've got 2 hours to find all the stuff i need to find... i did get scared, but i phoned up the tax office and very quickly got through to a nice man who explained what was going on...

i finished a whole heap of marking on thursday and i'm recording all day tomorrow with the SJP's... it doesn't stop people, it just doesn't stop...

once i've done this tax return it will be a weight off my mind...

ok... laters x

cookies google chess tax return cubase

2010-01-25T12:04:00.002Z

so that was weird, google wouldn't accept my password all morning...

i was having odd thoughts about someone hacking in and changing my password...

anyway it's working now... maybe it's time i changed that password anyway...?

i gigged with the SJP's on saturday night to a lovely big crowd (including dinah, floopy, Nslider & emivore), the venue was right by a sainsburies so i popped in after the soundcheck and got some of those cookies that i love... i had them tucked behind my stool on stage while we were playing...

i ate one between sainsburies & the venue, me & emivore had one each between the two sets... so that means there are two left... and it's just possible that they are still tucked behind something on the stage @ the round midnight jazz & blues bar...

i won't lie, it is odd having both one's ex-girlfriend and one's girlfriend at the the same gig, odd for me, odd for dinah, odd for emivore...

the gig was triumphant though... a big crowd really pulls something out of us i find...

i'm currently down in brighton to help josiah with her tax return, it turns out she didn't request an activation code before this morning, something i was worried might happen and i thought she'd already done it, so they're sending it out by post and it may or may not arrive before the deadline... anyway, i'm adding up her numbers for her so she can put it in when the time comes...

i've got my own tax return looming, and that'll probably be done on saturday now, what with the moving but ever so slowly moving marking mountain that i'm still under...

and i'm a bit stuck in a game of chess i'm playing with felinity, one of those knight situations where all sorts of forks are available to her, and what do i want to safegaurd...?

oh & i'm in denial about this little computer being just a netbook... it's only a couple of decimal points below my recording computers processing speed (this is 1.6G, that one's 1.8...) and i used to run cubase on older computers...

so i've downloaded a free bit of music software called Kristal... it seems to do what it needs to, although i'm sad that i can't get my old favourite the arcdev dubb bbox working with it...

it made me decide to get hold of cubase... which i duly did last night... and it turns out this copy of the arcdev dubb box doesn't work with that either...?

cubase certainly takes up more of my computers thinking than kristal, but i know cubase (although this is cubase 5, i've been using sx3 for years) so i'm hoping i can use that... i loaded a demo song into cubase, with all the bells and whistles galore and tried to play it and my computer just laughed at me... in a very unpleasant digital distortion kind of laughing way...

ok, later x

brain working

2010-01-20T16:54:00.002Z

sometimes you only have to write a problem down to solve it...

and in this case, that's what happened...

i put the DVD into my... what do i call that one now?

my music recording computer... the one i used to call my new computer...

the asus DVD has 4 & a bit Gb's on it, so i clear off the appropriate amount of room on my longboat... it's currently taking an age to copy all of those files from the DVD onto my longboat... must take the DVD drive from the older currently not working PC & put it in this one... this DVD drive is a bit rubbish...

(exactly as i wrote that, the humming sound of the rotating DVD stopped, as if to say... insult me will you? well let's see how you like not working at all eh?!!!... thankfully it was only a pause in it's business)

i'm off to the post office with the clock... when i come back it may have finished doing it's thing, it may not, but once it's all on there i'll connect the longboat to the Eee & then begin the next stage...

unless of course i decide to concentrate on the marking for a brief few hours... just to ease my worried mind...

sample tracing new laptop adventures...

2010-01-20T16:10:00.003Z

here i sit, blogging when i should be taking my poor clock to the post office to send back to the science museum, but i wanted to record this moment...

last week a member @ core arts was talking to me about steely dan, 3 albums in particular... so i got hold of two of these albums - the royal scam & aja...

and today i'm listening to them both... and on aja, there's a track called peg...

so i'm listening to peg & i hear something familiar... it takes me a little while to find what it is in my mind... but then it becomes clear, there's a track on 3 feet high & rising (de la soul's 1st album) that samples the track peg...

hugely pleasing to trace that...,

ok, laptop adventures... i'm blogging on it right now... there's a wireless router waiting for me in a different post office which i'm picking up in the morning... (i think)...

it came with windows 7 starter... and several cool asus things attached to it... the way the touchpad works & an over/under clocking thing...

but windows 7 starter frustrated me, so i got hold of windows 7 home premium, and put that on this machine, all well & good...

but i didn't do it how they expected me to do it, so the groovy asus things have gone...

how do i get them back?

this machine (an asus EeePC 1005A) came with a DVD... (although not a DVD drive)... so maybe those things are on there...

also, since putting W7HP on here i think it's got a bit more glitchy... (i could be wrong), so maybe W7 starter is in fact the right thing for this machine...?

so can i go back to how it was? do i want to?

all this in amongst the marking mountain i'm still climbing...

i'll keep you posted x

more clock doom improv listening rennaisance

2010-01-16T15:47:00.003Z

slept @ hers last night, came home and the clock was stuck @ 11:45 (am or pm - unclear)

so i plugged in the mains supply and it started working again, i manually put in all the balls needed to push through to 1st 12 O'clock, then the big 1 O'clock tumble,

then set the time right (1:45) then spent a few hours faffing... then i looked at the clock and only ten minutes had passed...

even with the mains supply...

so sadly, that little puppy has to packed up and returned to the science museum...

...............

in other news, i've decided to watch/listen to all the improvisations...

i just saw a couple of odd ones from the middle, i'm right now listening to the very 1st one...

it'll take awhile yes... but that's what i'm gonna do...

oh - and i bought a laptop... quite cheap, more news when it gets here...

x

clock tale hour

2010-01-15T18:11:00.002Z

so, briefly...

i got home yesterday to find my beloved clock had stopped @ 11:52 am...

this threw me...

i took it apart, i gazed at it, i took out the batteries, put them back in...?

then in the night i got a head ache and it woke me up... the same kind of head ache i'd had yesterday morning on waking...

anyway, i took some ibuprofen and tried to get back to sleep, but to no avail, only when it was getting light, around 7:45 am did i slip back into sleep...

waking @ 10:30, the time i should have been starting teaching...

so i phoned in sick...

i decided to eat @ jai's and see if it made me feel any better, so i was waiting around for 12 O'clock to come and i paid some attention to the clock, in bits...

i plugged in a mains adapter and it started working... strange... the batteries surely wouldn't have run out in a week?

i set the time and left for jai's...

when i came back i decided to try the batteries and it worked also... strange..

then i realised that i'd got it working exactly 24 hours after it had stopped working... 11:52 am...

so now i'm assuming it took a day off sick, like me...

x

clock again

2010-01-06T22:20:00.002Z

ok, so it's a little noisy...

i'm not sure i'll be able to sleep with it in here, (being the living room) being as the doors have to be open for balthazara to move freely between the outside world... her food... & my bed...

not that she has to have access to my bed, but i do find it comforting, if sometimes a pain... a warm, cat shaped presence curled against me on the other side of the duvet, an excited cat waking me up when she comes in from the outside...

hmm...?

of course emivore is allergic to her, so nights when she's here balthazara is kept out of the bedroom anyway...

but that's not the issue right now...

anyway, tonight i'm going to try it out, leave it on all night... we'll see how it goes... or we'll hear how...

i do love the thing... it has a certain grace, when, every minute, it's arm does one rotation, picking up a ball at the bottom and putting it at the top, also opening a gate to let some balls go through to the bottom, regulating the balls for a reason i don't yet know...

i currently love looking at it, and i love the different way it presents the time to me...

it's possible the novelty will wear off, it's possible i'll get into the habit of taking out the batteries @ night and forgetting to put them back in in the morning...

anything's possible... but i love it right now...

finsihed BSG season 3 tonight, an orgy of viewing which was partly inspired by the marking i need to get on with... a perverse nod towards getting those episodes out of my way, so i can concentrate on the marking...

i think the novel i'm thinking of is also partly to do with not marking...

anyway, BSG season 3 was great, although it ended with a dodgy version of all along the watch tower, but nobody's perfect...

ok bed x

my clock

2010-01-06T17:51:00.006Z

yesterday, in the basic music skills class i teach @ core arts, my 1st teaching session of the new year, one of the members was singing, and we were all singing what he sang back to him, it's something i do there every week, everyone has a go @ leading (and being copied)...

anyway, this particular member has a habit of doing this a bit longer than the others (and indeed myself) and the style of the vocals (which i'd started) was a sort of singing what was happening in reality...

and he sang that tomorrow (today) the clock he'd ordered would arrive...

and i told him afterwards that i was expecting a clock to be delivered also tomorrow (today)...

anyway, i'd given up hope of it being delivered today, i'd been out doing a few chores (like picking up this years volume of proust, eating in jai shri krishna where the proprietor told me my hair was like Mr T's hair (?), foolishly cycling but not falling off in the snow)

and i was back home, in slippers & dressing gown, watching BattleStarGalactica when there was a knock on the door and it was delivered... & it's doing it's little clocky thing right now...

i love it...

i've wanted this clock for about 20 years... since it used to appear in the innovations catalogue... and then, when i was in the science museum christmas shopping i saw one... and i had to immediately stop myself from getting it for myself - reminding myself that i was shopping for other people that day...

anyway i ordered it from their website between christmas & new year (it was almost immediately on getting back to london from visiting blewbury for christmas) and it's here now...

but i've said that,

oh & look, it's about to turn 6 O'Clock...

i so love this thing...

ha ha ha... i just had to set it to 12.59 and watch it all tumble back to 1:00...

anyway here it is just turning 6:23:

x

scifi

2010-01-04T18:24:00.003Z

so, ages ago i had an idea for a story, based upon my experience in the shower...

it used to make dinah laugh...

anyway, i've started working it into a novel, just working out a rough outline of the plot, more specific at the beginning and a rough direction with a couple of ending ideas, or rather at least 2 things that i know have to happen...

i've been partly inspired by bad television, such as flash forward, i really like that part of my brain that appreciates a good story and notices when bad TV separates from good story telling, and i was thinking, if i have this finely tuned storytelling nerve, can i therefore write a good story...?

and this is kind of the crux of it... i have a few ideas about the basic story, i have notions about why the characters do or have done things... but can i actually write it?

x

2010 new tune BSG good again

2010-01-01T23:45:00.001Z

ok,

so i spent last night and most of today with Emivore... we walked on the heath this afternoon, cycled there from hers, lovely to know that's easy...

2 years ago today i improvised a short piece of music, 1st on the piano, then on the rhodes...

the rhodes part i repeated twice, with the original piano part coming in on the repeat...

this tune - 1st january 2008 - is one of the tunes on my myspace...

since i woke today i've been itching to get back here to do a similar thing... but my music making equipment is in disarray and i currently have 15 minutes left of this 1st of january 2010...

one of the differences between me now & me 2 years ago is that it's easier these days when things don't work out how i want them to... at least in this setting... today i don't mind letting it go, the kind of mania that used to fuel the weekly improvisations is a little eased... so there won't be a "1st january 2010"...

having said that i did just set up the juno 6 and got it going into the computer...

over the holidays (both down in seaford with emivore & in blewbury for christmas) i had my DSI mopho with me... without any kind of keyboard around me i was glad to have it... the opportunity to make music... so i made a few nutty loops & i got into the habit of it...

so the other night, (30th/31st december) i couldn't sleep, i got up and started writing down ideas about my scifi novel (more on that later) - i also got out the mopho and programmed a simple thing to keep me company while i wrote... well... simple thing has been floating around for the past couple of days and i really like it... so i'm excited about putting it down into the computer and building something out of it...

in general this is pleasing because i have about 10 different ideas in the mopho, from this last holiday season and from trips i've made before, and it'll be nice to get them all recorded into the computer and work on them (if they deserve working on)...

ok - and lastly, i'm in the middle of BattleStarGalactica season 3 and it's good again... the 1st season was great, the 2nd season lost it, this 3rd season is back on track and it makes me happy... i guess the writers strike in america was to blame for the faulty 2nd season, or am i just making that up? the timings don't necessarily match up.. anyway...

balthazara here x happy new year x

new years eve

2009-12-31T18:34:00.002Z

ok so its new years eve... i'm going to spend it with my girlfriend shortly...

i do hope those of you who read this (if there are any of you left, i know i haven't been a very good blogger recently) have a lovely new year and can be proud of what you did in 2009 and look forward to the good you are going to do in 2010...

x

Burning Sand 2

2009-12-17T20:55:00.001Z

well, well, well...

i downloaded a falling sand game from the internet...

it's called Burning Sand 2...

and i'm loving it...

x

all the fleas are dead

2009-12-03T01:48:00.001Z

(all the fleas are dead)

and the sky is grey (and the sky is grey)

at least I hope they are... it's been very cold, & they can't be living on balthazara..

both my computers continue to be dead & I managed to upgrade the firmware in this here phone the other day, so I'm going through a hero renaissance...

it's my email, my internet... my phonecalls... my texts...

it's everything right now...

I'm blogging on it from bed in a slightly insomniac way...

loving certain apps... (full list to follow)...

loving the whole HTC hero experience...

ok, sleep... x

deflea

2009-11-30T19:43:00.002Z

I de-flea'd balthazara this afternoon...

about half an hour later she'd forgiven me & came to see me where I was fiddling around with both my computers, both dead as you like...

tomorrow morning I may forgo cycling, there's a risk of ice...

I just finished Palestine by Joe Sacco, a non-fiction comicbook about the writer's time in Palestine at the time of the 1st intifada... very good, moving account... I wonder how things have changed for the Palestinians in the book in the 17 years since that visit...

quite possibly things have got worse for them...

emivore leant me the book... that being the longcat blog name of the woman I'm sharing my nights with...

my girlfriend... E as was...

ok, not much more in me... I hope I have the strength not to watch flashforward later...

in fact the best thing to do would be to go out to the spanner bigband gig @ the cross kings... but I don't know of I have the energy...

x

last spanner gig of the year

2009-11-29T13:04:00.003Z

floopy was there, resplendent in purple top hat & coat, videoing the whole thing,

dinah of course, lovely,

it was a private party, we were great, i think,

afterwards i got the bus up to east finchley where i am now, blogging from E's bed while she meditates, just listened to boychild by scott walker...

the spanners are concentrating on recording in the near future...

ok, that's all i've got x

back, but sick - a chapter ends

2009-11-23T19:54:00.002Z

ok...

so it's been awhile since i last posted...

i'm currently coasting over the top of an illness, E had it, i now have it...

did i tell you about E?

well, she's mine, we're together these days...

i know that we're gonna be together you & me,
for more than a rhyme or two you're time belongs to me...

as john martyn says it...

my more recent computer has died, it's the on switch, it's gone, i'm going to have to open her up and look inside and trigger the on in a different way i suppose...

so i'm back to this computer, which has spent a month of so under my dining table...

it was busy downloading something and must have been writing to the disk at the moment when there was a power cut...

so that drive is dead, i'm running this from my dual-boot ubuntu...

the 1st time i've tried it since that day (at least a month, maybe 2... 3?)

i twitter these days, i can be found here: http://twitter.com/robbielongcat

i can tweet from my phone, for that matter i can blog from my phone also.. my phone which only came with one lead, USB to it... that one lead which you need to connect the charger to the phone and which you need to connect the phone to a computer...

great, only one crucial lead, and i've lost that lead... so my phone gradually dying until i can get another lead (or find that one - i was connecting the phone to E's computer on sunday and when i got home i didn't have the lead...)

sunday, yes sunday,

so if you look at my twitter page you'll see the 2nd last, (at the moment of writing) tweet being about eating lamb... in fact - i'm going to copy the whole tweet - hang on:

"Finally had the roast lamb i've wanted... the holy grail... almost as though it's the end of one chapter & the start of another x with her x"

it was several months ago (august 15th), i was in brighton, on DMT & meow, and i saw some lamb being prepared, or maybe just waiting to be prepared...

i think that that was the event that triggered this current trip down carnivorous lane, and it was specifically lamb that i wanted...

i passed through salmon, (with pregnant K-wo, spski, and EQ wierdly enough)
chicken (with felinity, her G & dad)
pork with ham over it, (with felinity & dad)
chicken (with E)
chicken (with E)

before having roast lamb with E in a pub in east finchley on sunday...

so in a way i'm choosing to see this eating of lamb as closing the period that began with the brighton DMT/meow time, just over 3 months...

also - i just heard through felinities twitter that honey is not long from this world, dad rang her, she may not make it to christmas, i don't know the full story...

very sad, & it makes me all the more glad to have balthazara...

anyway, there you go, long splooge of a post...

booker done tv heaven

2009-10-15T01:18:00.002+01:00

read the last booker book this morning in bed...

j m cootzee, summertime, badly named, badly written, occasional bits of good writing but all kinds of unsatisfactory writing...

when he's writing as women I find him pretty rubbish...

so, definitely ended on a low, those 6 books I read...

also I watched monday's flashforward which was distinctly average... just like lost, take the smallest amount of storytelling you can, wrap it in the thinnest drama you can find, pretend it's fantastic...

but the day was rescued by channel 4's HBOfest from 10... trueblood & generationkill...

just wonderful...

and then there's hung.. josiah mentioned it over the weekend... any good?

my cup runneth over...

x

review of FlashForward, True Blood & Generation Kill

2009-10-10T17:23:00.006+01:00

in the last week, i've seen the opening episode (or 2) of 3... just 3?... yes, 3 i think...

3 new tv things, all american, 2 on channel 4, one on 5...

Flashforward
True Blood
Generation Kill

flash forward first:

it's the only one of the 3 programs that hasn't already been shown in america...

this is nice...

i watched it on the internet, because demand5 is not yet on virgin V, unlike all the other terrestrials, (4 on demand, BBC i-player, ITV...thing)...

demand5 delivers adverts, at a few points in the show, which you can see as dots in the line at the bottom, also they have adverts before the show starts...

the 2 adverts at the beginning are repeated at least once in the show...

this is shit...

and to think i could be downloading this nonsense and not watching any adverts...

so to the show itself... it's made by the makers of lost... and i remembered this midway through the 2nd episode and i laughed at myself for watching it...

it has a good premise, and the story looks promising, and it good in it's way,

but there were a few too many moments where the cheese got grated a little too much... the main male character, whose wife saw a future in which she was loving another man... keeps giving her a hard time about this... he's dumb therefore... his side-kick / another important male character, spends ages being down on our main characters theories because he didn't see anything in his future and therefore might well be dead...

so already, within the 1st 2 episodes, drama is being inserted with no good reason to insert drama...

in this current world we live in, too often we are expected to sift through flaws in TV shows to find the good that is in them... i don't know if i have the patience for flashforward...

ok True Blood:

which i watched on the TV as it was broadcast, with dinah, after our turkish resaurant/police with large guns event earlier...

HBO made which counts for alot...

great so far, but a little too much "local colour" here and there, something heroes did with it's new orleans characters...

not only from black characters, but mostly from them, larger than life, sassy, performances which distracted a little from the story i found... not that i'm faulting the acting, it's the writing i'm unhappy with,

but not too unhappy, this is a smaller complaint than i had with flashforward and i think it'll be worth sticking with true blood... the magic, the sense of real connection the main woman feels for the vampire... and already a good story...

i loved buffy the vampire slayer and so i was always going to like true blood anyway,

it's quite explicitly rude for TV which is nice... the characters are coming along nicely, no 1 dimensional people as far as i can see, although there's time...

so to Generation Kill...

watched last night on catch-up, on the TV, after a mental few days of not enough sleep, a few pints and some smoking (which is exactly the right idea after a mental fews days on not enough sleep)...

then watched again this afternoon, again on catchup, after a lovely night's rest..

made by the team that made the wire... and just fantastic, no flaws to speak of... (as indeed the wire was flawless)... a huge cast of characters that it's quite hard to follow, and no easy explanatory TV, which is a strength in my world...

i'm curious who wrote it, as in, which character is the writer, it's from a book and it seems likely that the reporter in the story wrote the book... but not for sure...

it shows a side to the tank loving boy audience, lots of hummvees... in formation rolling through the desert... a nod towards the glory of the mechanisms of war... while showing the stupid choices of the military...

just as in the wire there are people in the military world of this show who are willing to do a good job, and there a people who are motivated by other things, greed, power, and for many different reasons do not do a good job...

a great character who wistfully pisses on the desert while talking about the destiny of the white man... a curious mix of racism in a seeming lovable character...

a seemingly true account of what it was like in that unit... with porn magazines, chewing tobacco of some kind, drugs, well almost drugs... homophobia, racism, comradery, stupidity..

hasn't put a foot wrong yet...

so that's what i think x

from bed

2009-10-07T01:56:00.002+01:00

hmmm... a sedintary life for me, the booker prize all done... the last one I read won it, the great wolf hall... I got through 5/6 with the 6th now in my possession, I don't know if i'll read it... we'll see...

blogging from my phone, in bed, just to check it out really...

not working Wednesday but if I can i'll pick up my fender rhodes x

yr4wk11

2009-09-12T01:13:00.000+01:00

my friend (with yr4wk10)

2009-09-04T00:17:00.003+01:00

the weather today was very appropriate for my emotions...

these days i can go from feeling really low to feeling great and back again in such a short space of time...

and today's weather was doing exactly that... i left the house to go & do some errands and it started raining, so i put on my waterproof trousers, but took them off again by holloway road because the sun was out again...

my friend GM, the guitarist came round in the evening, he's just left, we had a lovely time, playing music, eating @ lavas, (turkish place near me), playing music, talking...

we're performing together at the core arts gig tomorrow night, just a couple of tunes, walk on by, and one or 2 of mine... one of which is so new it's as yet unwritten...

the main line is written, and i'm fairly sure of where the chords are going, but there's a whole load of lyrics that need writing before tomorrow night, and i'm working all day...

in fact, tomorrow is the beginning of my mental weekend, i'm covering for GM in the morning, running my regular jam in the afternoon (which will be largely taken over by the needs of the evening gig) then gigging in the evening...

tomorrow i'm being picked up around midday, we're driving down to bristol, we're gigging as the spanner jazz punks, stripped down... then i'm being dropped (i hope) in bath where my mum & dad are celebrating their ruby wedding anniversary with all us kids and partners and grandchild...

makes me a little sad, not being with dinah no more, but then dinah would have tried to get out of going anyway, not a huge socialite when it came to my family that woman...

so i'm basking in the family celebration until monday, then limping back to london...

and i haven't done my improvisation this week...

oh - that reminds me, last week's improvisation is here:

yr4wk10, voice & hammond improvisation from longcat on Vimeo.

yr4wk9 piano

2009-08-27T14:45:00.000+01:00

yr4wk9 piano from longcat on Vimeo.

yr4wk8

2009-08-20T12:56:00.000+01:00

yr4wk8 moog & overdrive from longcat on Vimeo.

5 year return

2009-08-18T23:46:00.002+01:00

i'd been talking to someone about the 27 year saturn return, when it became clear that i had a kind of 5 year return going on...

a week ago - on the wednesday - i get a text message from josiah marking the 5 year anniversary of grace's naming ceremony...

@ which i played the piano & sang...

a week ago i was on my way to a small gig in brick lane, promotional thing for CM, lovely H was there DJ'ing and he dropped a few choice textures behind my playing...

i was videoing it with the idea of using some of it as my improvisation...

so, two piano playing events in the open air, exactly 5 years apart...

back in 2004, midway through my version of the song for grace (wild is the wind i think...?) some of witchy godmother's kids came and started messing about on the keyboard as i was still playing...

2009 - i had, 1stly a small group of asian kids, playing the odd note on the keyboard, then a small child, playing notes on the keyboard, but this time i'd invited them to play and i was happy with the situation...

in 2004 i was a bit flustered by it...

now please bear in mind that i had no conscious thought of this link while i was doing the gig, although my subconscious could see what was going on i'm fairly sure...

anyway, it was on friday/saturday when it became apparent, i like it, i don't know what it means beyond me moving more towards acceptance, but i like it...

just to say, friday/saturday/sunday i was in brighton and i had an old fashioned weekend, with more than a little bit of indulgence... which i'm still paying for a bit...

x

yr4wk7 overdrive heaven

2009-08-13T11:02:00.003+01:00

yr3wk7 mopho, hammond & blackstar overdrive from longcat on Vimeo.

thursday... very late, no good... but don't you just love this overdrive?

fixed my puncture yesterday, had a fine day of cycling as a result...

went down to an odd fete in a park in poplar for work, met a few nice kids...

then back to whitechapel (although to be fair this was all taxis' from whitechapel to poplar and back)... a lovely chat with G & H @ CM's office...

then into town to see felinity, no cinema but some food & a few gin & tonics, a lovely night, much laughing... walked her to waterloo, then sat in the royal festival hall for awhile using their wifi for my phone... then a cycle home with herbie hancock in my ears, magnificent, foolish yes, but beautiful... i love that bike..

x

sometimes a hero comes along

2009-08-08T13:48:00.003+01:00

what is that song?

no, not that song, this song... "i'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me"

anyway...

(unrequited's for losers...)

now, many years ago, i did my 1st ever tax retun, and it scared me, and i rang up a helpline...

a very nice man, very calmly told me what i had to do, what numbers to put in which boxes...

all very easy...

i love that man...

on thursday i was in brighton with grace & her mum & her 2 cousins...

my phone had stepped up it's irritating behaviour and i'd been threatening it for awhile (you're days are numbered, i'm getting a smartphone)...

so on thursday, this entire troop of people, large & small, went into the orange shop in brighton, and a very nice man gave me a new smart phone...

all very straight forward... i love a good bit of customer service...

these people are heroes...

but not only that...

my new smart phone is a hero...

i'm teetering on the brink of the smartphone way of life, just as soon as orange text me that they've enabled my internet...

x

nothing for nobody

2009-08-02T21:06:00.003+01:00

i'm taking some time off...

i've got 2 weeks off from my work, and i'm also taking a break from all the rehearsing, recording, mixing i'm doing for other people...

off down to brighton on tuesday to see my glorious god daughter & her lovely mum...

dinah's in poland,

my time is my own...

got hold of a BlackStar HT-Drive overdrive pedal this week... i'm just listening to the improvisation i recorded tonight with the hammond & the mopho going through it...

valve distortion... it's a beautiful thing... of course whether anyone else other than me will like it is another matter, but right now i'm in a pretty much - it's all about me - zone anyway...

x

yr4wk6 moog & voice

2009-08-02T20:12:00.001+01:00

yr4wk6 moog & voice from longcat on Vimeo.