water & improvisation uploaded

well as you can see, that improvisation finally came out... it actually took 12 hours and 14 minutes to render, but with the time cubase took to do it's rendering, converting to divx... i guess it's more like 13 & a half hours...

anyway, that is not why i'm here...

tonight is the night i unleash water & improvisation on the world, gordy has his film party tomorrow night so i've whipped it into a shape i'm happy with and i've uploaded it to both googlevideo and youtube...

it is the film i've been referring to as the thames path film that i did a version of for my december gig, it's been a long, long time getting here and it could still develope further but i'm signing off on it and letting the world see it...

both video hosting sites because i want to see how they compare and also to get the widest audience for it...

i'm not embedding either one here just yet because i only delivered this week's improvisation earlier today (yesterday) so i'll let that one sit there for the moment before showing this one...

but it's here or here if you want to go see it...

x

a fan

ok, so firstly, i've found a fan...

he put one of my weekly improvisations on his blog saying isn't he good?...

isn't that nice? (you know i just had a look at that improvisation - one of the few hosted on youtube - and it's been viewed 3306 times.......?)

and secondly i've been tinkering with the thames path film, the one i showed at my december gig... this week has seen me find a new way of doing something i've been wanting to do for ages and i've implemented an idea of spski's in relation to colour...

it's rendering now in it's most recent version and i can't wait to see it... gordy has a party on saturday night where we're showing films and it's a good kick up the arse to get this moved on...

i went over to felinity's new house last night where she's now living with her G, we ate fantastic vegi indian food and cooked, flipped & ate pancakes... lovely to see them both, strange to go visit her and for G to be there, not that it's strange seeing him, just that i'm so used to solo visits with felinity, this is it though, a new chapter in their life...

living together in a lovely, cute house..

makes me a little jealous...

it took me 2 hours to cycle home from there... although this was not a direct cycling experience... it was raining just slightly and i was a little camera mad... kept pulling it out of my pocket and snapping away...

well i had taken off my gloves by this point as it was not too cold and one time pulling out the camera i must have pulled out a glove at the same time...

i realised this on that road separating kensington gardens from hyde park and i spent a good twenty minutes looking for it, retracing my journey back to the royal albert hall but to no avail... i am now without my right glove which is a pain...

i cheered myself up with the thought of the miniroll that was waiting for me at home and i continued on, getting ever more into filming, until i was on the canal, the rain still there but only light... under a railway bridge, lights shining in wierd ways...

i don't know how long i spent videoing down there, and i haven't checked the footage yet, could well be all useless, too dark... but it was a lovely time spent all alone with the night and the water...

foolish again

Wshaman(floopy) came round tonight with his new for christmas chess set...

we didn't get it out in the end because we were working on my film, water & improvisation - also a little bit of thought on the new film as well..

i'm deeply in debt to him for tonight... several hours of work and it's almost finished now... just a decision about the colours... and maybe a second opinion from spanna if i can pin her down to a day...

dinah had been out at the theatre and when she came home we were wrapping up the work and we fell to chatting and playing cards...

a very pleasant evening indeed, and once the evening drew to a close around 1 am i set about preparing the film for rendering, intending to set it going and then go to bed, checking it in the morning...

but it seemed to be going so quickly... it's estimate of how long it would be was only around 30 minutes...

shame to leave the computer on all night for only 30 minutes of rendering i thought to myself, i'll stay up until it's done...

and of course it took a lot longer than it thought it might... and i'm still awake @ 4 in the morning even though my baby went to bed around 3 hours ago...

so i'm taking my foolish self to bed right now...

x

finished?

i'm about to start the film rendering, i've finished it but it may need a tweak or two before i show it on sunday, should be meeting up with E to pick up the projector (and the space echo) fairly soon so my plan is to set it rendering, go out, meet him, maybe eat something, then by the time i get back it will have either finished or not finished and i can try it out on the projector...

scary, but hopeful x

rendering

did something stupid, in fact it was a pretty stupid night for me...

the improvisation section proved to be harder than i thought it would be, mostly because i was in a not very clever headspace...

a daft wrong move late on meant i had to back track a little but my main stupidity was setting the whole thing rendering at 1 in the morning... being as i have to work in the morning...

10 minutes at the most i thought...

it still has 6 minutes left on it and it's been going for over an hour...

and it's not even finished, but i'm getting close...

i was playing around with the image of my piano playing when i realised i needed a firm idea about it, not just messing about... so i thought, render it as it is, watch it, go to bed...

foolish of me...

and the classic playing the piano and using the rendering time to write music is not on because it's the middle of the night...

oh well...

laters x

editing well

so today was all about the editing of the film and now, at the point where i'm about to go to bed...

i've got the thames footage to about 2/3rds of the length of the film... just at the brink of the improvisation section...

so today i completed the intro, the 1st 2 sections & the middle breathing section...

i need to work out how to achieve the last improvisation section but the way i now have of working will stand me in good stead tomorrow night when i come back to this...

in other news i went down to producerG's music forum where we performed 3 of the tunes from the electric set, interesting comments from listeners (including mars),

i also spoke to E from hammersmith (who i'll be seeing tomorrow) and he told me he has a projector that i can borrow, which is a huge weight off my mind...

and finally i've made a little progress in both of the songs i'm writing this week...

so it's going well, deadline central...

x

words done

just a quick one to say i'm on schedule, the words are written and recorded just in time for me to get going to the rehearsal...

x

schedule

so i've got this gig on sunday @ which i'm doing 2 sets and showing my film...

one of those sets is ready..

for the other i'm writing a couple of songs this week...

and the film is far from finished...

which means i've got quite a tight schedule to get everything done... the 1st item on the schedule is getting the voice for the film recorded today... so i've recorded the sung part, i'm now getting together the script for the whole thing...

ready to record in about an hour, maybe sooner...

then @ 6 i'm strapping my keyboard onto my already not right back and heading down to a rehearsal with T's band, tomorrow i'm working all day, followed by a rehearsal for the electric set @ producerG's,

wednesday i'm back on the film treadmill, editing together the video from the shape of the voice (that i'm recording shortly)... then off out wednesday night to play @ producerG's music forum @ londonbridgework, a chance to run through one or two tunes from the electric set...

working on thursday and friday morning, back to the film on friday afternoon, by which time i should have got hold of the projector for the film...

at some point within all this i'm writing the songs i need to write...

hectic but good...

do come to the gig if you can,

x

another stab at the words

(for the film)

you can't see me...

you can't see me because i'm not there...

you can't see me because the angle is too narrow...

you can't see me because it's the wrong time of day...

walking, stumbling, carrying my bicycle over the rockier bits,

immensely impractical as it is, having a bicycle down there...

all about poetry, and nothing to do with practicality,

except that it was practical tonight, having cycled north from G's place in gypsy hill, wanting the darkness and the desolate nature of the beach, wanting to listen to a few john martyn songs while i rested from cycling at that midpoint on my journey home, walking from the tate modern to waterloo bridge where i got back on my bike and cycled home to finsbury park...

my own G in bed,

walking, stumbling, as you do on the rocks and the shifting sand,

you can't see me because my phone was dead and i didn't have my camera with me...

no visual record of that walk, only the mud & the sand on my bicycle tires and on my shoes when i got home...

my bicycle, which in a way, this film is all about, i started filming from this place because i passed it each week, cycling accross town between two different teaching jobs, it was one of two places where i put down my camera to film the same scene on different days,

this walkway covered in trees that you see before you, my main experience of this is cycling along it,

sometimes also playing chess with one of the booksellers underneath waterloo bridge,

the national film theatre on the left a useful toilet, and wrapped up for me in london, just before i moved to this city that late august day ten years ago when me & luke hedge caught the train in for the nottinghill carnival, my 1st carnival, wide eyed and foolish, luke leading us up to the national film theatre that night where by chance nick cave was providing the live soundtrack to a french surrealist film of joan of arc..

a few months later having moved here, finding myself by the river one night, sad & alone but revelling in the romance of this river, these skies, a romance that hasn't left me these ten years...

the poetry of this place... step by step, bridge by bridge...

something about improvisation, about that stumbling walk along the beach, carrying my bike at times, step by step, bridge by bridge...

millenium, blackfriar's rail, blackfriar's road, that strange bridge that doesn't exist, just pillars,

walking passed the jetty from which this is filmed, passed the side of this walkway... lowtide... the whole area only temporary,

something about walking there, in between the land and the water,

step by step,

about this being the improvisation...

improvisation not just the water... as i'd seen it before, but the graceful or clumsy steps between land and river, some solid sand some mud...

but my bed now, maybe more of this tomorrow, very glad to have found a way in to the words

x

princess mononoke

i'm not sure when but about a month ago i started watching princess mononoke on filmfour, but had to stop for some reason... i started watching it knowing that i could'nt watch the whole thing...

i remember being really struck by it... by how a complex story is built up slowly and meticulously... it's animated...

so it was on again tonight and i managed to get the remote to work for once and watched it...

less satisfying than the 1st hour had been - partly because it was broken up over about a month, but still very good... visually pleasing...

..

i'm in a strange place with the words... i've done a couple of experiments with how i wanted the words to fit with the film and it's proving harder than i thought... i'm almost at the point where i'm going to have much fewer words...

x

full moon

dinah got accepted onto her course this morning... she's handing in her notice this evening @ the job she hates & in a couple of weeks she'll be resting briefly between leaving that job and beginning student life...

my oh my...

the moon is full and last night as i cycled back from the riverside cinema i was videoing bits of it for my film... although with my phone camera, not as good as my other one but probably good enough for what i want...

i'm really getting into this phone, you know that initial time of excitement with a new thing?

similarly new is beta.blogger which i've switched over to, blogging is changing a little and i was keen to be at the cutting edge... what with my 4000 visitors and all that (oh get off your horse about the visitors already)... but i'm almost regretting it now...

i went to comment on patroclus's blog yesterday (franticly looking for someone to share my 2for1 deal with - to no avail) and i couldn't... i can't comment on non-beta.blogs, which i have to tell you is a huge no-no...

there's no going back either, once you're in you're in... as that guy found out last week in the soprano's and ended up topping himself... oh... roll on 10 o'clock and give me that old time mafia feeling...

the film @ the riverside was renaissance - an animated french thing... very good in how it looked and actually pretty good all round... noirish...

the words are coming on for the film... getting close... which is just as well beacuse i'll be back @ work before you can wack that stooly...

x

paying for a really funny night

Wfloopy(shaman) came round last night to play chess... bringing a number of marvellous longplaying records with him...

spski was around in the early part of the evening and he's always good fun... really lovely to spend time with him actually, don't seem to see him much these days even though we live together...

so me & W played chess... 3 games, 2-1 to me... dinah coming home midway through a particularly good abdullah ibrahim which she made very clear was not her thing...

anyway, the night ended with the 3 of us smoking & playing cards... our southern accents came out and we laughed & laughed...

W finally heading out to my record of peggy lee... clicking our fingers as we escorted him to the door... living out the ridiculous nonsense we'd brewed up by then...

by smoking in the evening always gets to my sleep... it's amazing... insomnia... guaranteed...

so today i've been a little shaky...

went to see the bill viola thing @ st olaves in london bridge... very good indeed... wonderful video artist...

just now i've been tinkering with my film... took a wrong turn and now i'm struggling to fix it... awkward space i've got myself into...

but i'm leaving that to go get my girl... have to find the energy somewhere... i'm sure once i'm on the bike it'll be fine...

laters

x

riches

The moon orbits the earth. As it passes it pulls at the earth's waters with it's weight, it's gravity, creating tides. The tides were on this planet long before we were, coming in and going out with noone to see it, like traffic lights at a deserted intersection, performing their slow dance divorced from the purpose we gave them, just patterns and movement, animating a lifeless world.

each sentence alternating with a cutup version of the spoken words... this is currently the opening passage for the film... it's been floating around on various bits of paper for ages and i wanted it to live in cyberspace...

a couple of nights ago i had a dream that included me blogging about it with the post title riches... it involved meeting god... or somesuch entity...

i remember floating around in a pre-god stage with many waves or ribbons of water arcing up in the shape of daffodil leaves with someone there concentrating on the water until one arc became solid and i was immediately holding it as it drew me upwards...

the meeting with god was entirely unmemorable, or perhaps i just skipped it in my dream, suddenly i was in an after-meeting-god room with several people i knew, including one of my housemates who i don't get on with... the dream became about avoiding sharing a car with this man even though he was organising it so that we would share... luckily a man halfway between stumpy & brinded (brinded always reminded me of stumpy) came along and swapped seats so that this situation was avoided...

i shaved this afternoon - which i mention only because i bought that beard trimmer on the same day that i bought my ipod shuffle which today ran out of batteries... dying as i knew it would die...

sad

x

Behave!

i heard a rumour that the metropolitan police are cracking down in the next two weeks on bicyclists who run red lights... go the wrong way down one way streets... ride on the pavement...

as a proud london cyclists who does all of the above i'm keeping myself in check for the afore mentioned time period... an interesting yoga...

i popped into town to see fearless @ the prince charles cinema this afternoon, which was great, although chinese hollywood so a little black & white but very good none the less - that jet li huh?

then afterwards i cruised over to the location of my film and improvised a vocal part just to see how it felt... before heading up to holborn to meet my boobelah and hold hands a little before she went to work...


it proved to be one of those many, many photo days... the light around 7ish just being beautiful...

i found the grand lodge & have decided to go on a guided tour some day soon... i strolled in but it was only open because they were having a meeting...

a masonic meeting...

oooooh...

i was taking loads of pictures in this pedestrian alleyway thing near dinah's theatre and on leaving the alley i found one of the 1977 silver jubilee walkway things in the ground... that 1977 silver jubilee walkway sure gets around... it extends to where my film is by the thames...


cool... considering blending a few more found images into the film, according to the speech... which is the next thing to be done... all else waits for the words as we were once waiting for the music (notice how i referred to myself as we there - being as i am the entire production team on this film...)

oh and i woke up with a gammy eye... maybe a sty... eating well today as i think it's related to feeling rundown...

x

wandering camera improvisation

dinah has started cycling to work and i'm escorting her there and back to get her used to it.. and because i'm a little over-protective of my lovely girl...

i went into town earlier to see Dave Chappelle's Block Party @ the Prince Charles Cinema... great film, simple... just a load of good performers and some community from members of the audience... Jill Scott, Erykah Badu AND Lauryn Hill all in one night... the Roots providing most of the live band backing... wonderful as ever... Mos Def, Common, Kanye West, Dead Prez, Talib Kweli...

some of whom i knew, some i'd vaguely heard of, one or two i'd never heard of...

good performance is so inspirational...

dropped into the museum of london for some research on my film & although they didn't have what i was after i liked what was in there... checked out a few film snippets of the capitol from around 1900... always nice...

got a puncture on the way home which meant that we didn't cycle in to dinah's work tonight... took me awhile to get the energy to fix the puncture and while i was trying to find that energy i found a way to only use one microphone stand for both my microphones so i set them up to record T's piano...

not my favourite piano but a real piano so not to be sniffed at...

once set up i went and fixed the puncture... washing my hands carefully afterwards, not wishing to get bicycle dirt on T's piano...

i heard someone come in through the front door about 2/3rds of the way through my playing... and just as i finished G opened the door and came in, interrupting the very end... i looked over at my camera and it had strangely moved, the vibrations had made it swivel away from my hands which i find strangely compelling... G's laugh ends the video'd improvisation tonight..:



x

the ground beneath our feet

so i've been researching for my film, trying to find out when the walkway that is the subject of the film was built...

managed to go back to 1977 and the silver jubilee walkway but it seems to me that the actual walkway itself probably predates this, the jubilee commitee had no real money in '77 so they can't have built it themselves... i think...

waterloo bridge was rebuilt in 1942 - 1945, largely by women (the women's bridge)... the south bank was created in 1951 with the festival of britain, it was a bomb crater left over from the war... so maybe that walkway was built then?

research on the internet is not easy for the 50's... i think i need a real library...

in other news my bike was almost stolen on friday night... locked up and left overnight @ crouch hill station as it was, when i got to it on saturday it was twisted vertical, as though they'd been trying to twist off the lock... and they stole my back mudguard...

my new phone has arrived and it's a deep purple... very nice... it takes video, but worse quality than my camera so no real news there, but it doesn't (yet) go wrong like my old phone and it talks to my computer better so i'm pleased...

me & dinah went out to see cars last night, pleasing entertainment, we'd seen the break-up last week & i saw miami vice on friday, all free and actually all pretty good quality, wasn't expecting much from any of them and they were all good... the break-up surprisingly so...

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

oh look, i didn't publish and now i've got a few more things to say... researching on the internet...

so it turns out the national film theatre was opened in 1957, the building had been the thameside restaurant before that... so presumably the walkway must have been open then...?

strange that you can generally find out about when a building was built... but as to when the ground underneath that building was put down...?

still stupid

the film is moving on...

i did something else stupid in the process but i've found a way around it without redoing what i was doing...

just too eager... should have had a little more sense as i was starting, but i wanted to do it right away... in the evenings when i've been working every day is not my most clever time and that's when this process has been taking place this week, and that's why i've been a little dumb, not that dumb, just dumb enough in a couple of crucial places...

don't know when i'll be able to do the weekly improvisation, saturday i guess, would have been today if i hadn't been working...

nippy & felinity have both helped me out this week which has saved me, particularly as lloydstsb have completely failed to even meet with me to discuss helping me... yesterday it made me really angry that i'd made a point to get my bike into work so i could cycle to a meeting with a bank manager style person, only to find that - even though i had an appointment - she refused to see me, she was in another meeting and tried to tell me over the phone why the answer would be no... all of which i already knew, the reason i was meeting her was to find another way...

anyway... suffice it to say that that woman was seriously lacking in humanity - not to say no to my request - but to not be able to say it to my face... but that was yesterday and a brief shower in an otherwise sunny day washed away my annoyance and i spent the next 15 minutes chasing the rainbow that i felt owed... (didn't find one)

last day of the weeks work tomorrow and i will miss those students, particularly 2 of them... one of whom (cabbage) is the owner of this bear (but they're my shades)

x

fools rush in dixie no more

my dad rang me this afternoon while i was just finishing up teaching, he told me that dixie, the oldest of the 2 cats that my mum & dad still had is no more, she's buried in their garden...

i think it may have actually happened yesterday,

my dad actually told me about a month ago that she was on her last legs...

i have a picture of her and her mum (silky) that my mum painted and i've been accustomed to looking at it knowing that silky's gone and now i'm looking at it knowing that they're both gone...

sad... obviously...

and quickly, before i collapse into bed, i started rendering the bits to cutup for my film and i got through all 24 7 second bits of rendering (about an hour & a half's work) before i realised i'd done it wrong and had to do them all again...

marvellous

x

report from out there

right now i'd like to be working on the film... so this is a kind of pointless post, just expressing that, i'm @ work in dagenham on my lunch break...

i've been inducted into the langdon corrupted ladies crew... even though i'm not a lady and i don't go to langdon school... but longcat is in amongst the tags on the board as part of that crew... only they don't spell either corrupted or ladies like that...

the different names they go under... teenagers... one of the levels of names my students go under is: cabbage, pants - the same 2 are also called younga kiddi & tubbzy... the 2nd of which is a name balthazara gets called when people think she's over weight...

i got so excited last night when i made the piano float in over the thames path images and then recede like a ghost... i so want to be making that film... although between here and the finished thing there is a lot of menial work..

also the text needs to be written... i bring my notebook into work these days but yesterday on the way in my head was full of the approaching day/week and on the way home i was really tired, sort of fell asleep on the train a couple of times...

this morning i was trying to dodge the train ticket collector amongst other things... strange to be doing these things when you're 33 but needs must...

anyway... rabbiting on as i do... i hope you're all well...

bless the ceasefire in lebanon & long may it last x

working and creating

helping young people to create during the day... my 1st day of the week's work and it went pretty well...

then coming home to create my own stuff by night... edited together the thames path piano piece, so now the time is set which means all the other things can begin to happen... also put the video of me playing the piano into vegas and i've found a way to float it in & out... just want to be able to see it at a few moments in the film...

i'm working with a couple of really nice people, had a great book conversation with M - cortazar - murakami - w g sebald - always nice...

anyway, my bed...

x