numbers

it's already 2006 in new zealand... probably many countries by now... in fact, somewhere they'll be counting the minutes right now to the moment...

as manolis says we're brainwashed into thinking it's a special night... something i both agree and disagree with, it's partly just our numbering system, an accident of when they started it running, but this time of year has something to it, i guess i like the winter solstice a little more but i'm deeply in this knowing what year it is right now thing...

2006 will feel qualitively different for a little while...

anyway, just pausing while i doll myself up, been into town and got a liberty shirt, the suit coming out...

the party won't be huge but it'll be warm...

and one more number thing... will my visitor counter reach 1666 before the year is out...

(currently 1665)

like anyone cares but me...

but i do care...

happy new year

x

back home in the smoke

met up with my girl on route to her work... i've really missed her kisses and i'm still missing them now, she'll be home in an hour or so...

really lovely to share a tube journey with her, she'd been with floopy & spski doing watt things this afternoon, bringing a brave new watts into focus...

played cards with felinity on the train from didcot, so, so pleasant hanging out with her for this week, mum & dad too... D & M all too brief arriving yesterday and here we all are back at our respective homes now... although my timing not so good, last night being the only time i could see old-friend M, lovely as ever, making tentative plans to go stay at his place in norway at some point next summer... the fjords...

got drunk, then stayed up later watching the feature length end of series of ghost squad which was characteristicly great...

my fixing of the puncture had not held and i gave in today and took it in to halfords in didcot, a new inner tube, good as new, locked it up at the train station ready for our departure later on and came back to blewbury for the last meal with all of us... great food all christmas... my mum...

also D had brought home the golf game that he'd worked on for the PS2, using a gametrak, actually swinging a pretend golf club, the PS2 tracking the movement of your hands/wrists... much more enjoyable than i'd thought it would be...

then we piled into the car and drove back to the station, D & M heading north to leamington spa, me & felinity london bound... cards, as i said,

cycled along the canal to get back here, mad rain made me very wet indeed... then rang her up and met up with G for the brief journey...

my own bed tonight...

glad of it

x

stranded on the ickneild way

brother D & M here and we're about to eat dinner so briefly...

went out on the bike up the icknield way today, part of it that the sustrans network has made into a cycle path, the icknield way itself is apparently 104 miles long and claims to be the oldest road on britain, pretty close to the ridgeway, which i've pictured having a WWF style wrestling match with the icknield way, leaping from the ropes and proclaiming itself oldest road in britain don't you dare challenge me...

anyway, very cold it was today, got to where i wanted to get to, lovely to be out & cycling,

got a puncture at the furthest point out, just as i was turning home, spent way too long by the side of the track struggling with cold fingers to fix it...

assisted by a passing cyclist (on foot) who helped me get the outer tire off, assisted also by abdullah ibrahim & ian nagoski on my ipod shuffle... just couldn't find the puncture... no water near to find the bubbles and i couldn't hear it the way i've heard them in the past...

spirits dropping by the shivering minute i gave in & phoned my dad, he was heading to oxford to pick up D & M so i walked back along the icknield way, coming to a largish road close to the A34 for them to find me on their way back from oxford...

passed another cyclist fixing a puncture who claimed it was so cold the glue wouldn't dry...?

the car was so beautiful and warm when they arrived, my little bike fitting into the boot...

all fixed now since i've been home,

going out to see M tonight, old friend...

x

signed music videos

i've always found it hard to turn off the tv...

in this, the house of my mum & dad especially so, sky tv and therefore many, many more channels than in my own home...

in particular the music video channels, of which there seem to be at least 10, i sit and gaze at music video's for songs that i often won't hear for a few months, the videos seem to be on these channels long before they filter down to my listening habits...

anyway tonight i noticed that some of the music channels have signing... little men or women in the corner of the screen signing for deaf people...

years ago i would sometimes watch the soprano's with signing and i loved it, the signing guy had something of tony soprano about him... very fitting...

these signers are all grooving away to whichever song the're signing, mouthing the words like the're in a gay disco and signing at quite a rate...

i guess the deaf people have the volume up really loud and maybe a speaker attached to the floorboards... reminds me of a guy i met on a train once who made alot of money putting on deaf raves, the carriage was really quiet but really animated at the same time, a whole crowd of partially hearing/ profounding deaf people... eerie...

anyway i've escaped from the tv, turned it off, come in here to get lost on the internet i hope not... want to shift my sleep patterns forward gradually so i can get a daylight cycle trip in at some point this christmas...

x

hustler tv

christmas day 2005, much eating, didn't leave the house once... lots of tv...

just watched the hustler which was long but great...

shrek, the importance of being ernest, toy story 2, the dr who christmas special....

a whole lot of telly...

also played a little piano, and me, dad & felinity have been puzzling away at the blewbury bulletin's christmas puzzle... fiendish...

brother D & M actually arriving on thursday as planned now, maybe will get to meet with G, josiah, grace, felinity @ the snow slide on friday like i want to...

hope to get out on my bike at some point this week... but christmas day was never going to be the day for that...

x

darkness mass

just missed a slow train to didcot so i got the next fast train to reading and caught up with the slow train... i think...

cycling from didcot to blewbury i was struck with how dark it is at night in the countryside, living in london i just don't get this, except cycling along the canal sometimes but even then... out of the town i was craning my neck to see the stars, i had streetlights on one side of the road... passed east hagbourne there were no streetlights at all and let me tell you ladies and gentlemen it was dark...

orion close to the horizon, i think i saw the M shape of that other constellation i know... can't remember the name right now... but so many more that i don't know, one in particular SE of orion (if orion's head points north, which i'm sure it doesn't, but i hope you get my meaning) a cluster of stars some strong some faint, kind of in a V shape... of course i was cycling along the road so i didn't look too closely at it, just got glimpses from time to time...

being blinded every time a car came towards me going the other way, that split second once they're passed when you can't see anything... and then when a car overtakes, the strange shape of the world that is illuminated by their headlamps... the changing shape depending on what is caught in the glow for that moment...

mum & dad & felinity here, brother D (& M) not here until friday now, the day me & felinity go back to the smoke... uncle C not feeling too good and staying at home so christmas is small this year...

my oldest friend M who i always see without fail on christmas eve wasn't up for it tonight, his cat got killed on the road earlier today... very sad... (these cats in this house are beautiful), tragic to lose a friend... hope to see him later on in the week...

so instead of drinking this christmas eve i went to midnight mass with felinity & mum & dad... walking to the church in the darkness with felinity she said oh... blewbury in exactly the way a character in monsieur said oh... (some place name i can't remember) in the passage i read on the train down here, which the narrator of the book said was just like saying oh... childhood

the midnight mass was maybe the first church service i've been to since i crept into that ruined but functioning church in herne hill that sleepless morning after an all night party @ my house (when i lived down there)... sat through a service finding great comfort in the words that i'd said in church as a child...

funnily enough tonight the words had changed a little, the lord's prayer with you instead of thy... but still a resonance with growing up, the excitement of communion, taking of the bread and wine... strange how visible it felt tonight walking up the centre of the church, a few familiar faces around but almost noone who recognised me (that i could see)... communion still very strong... rooting the service in that visceral experience of eating and drinking...

clever christians...

an eerie mist had lights casting strong shadows as we left the church and walked home, in particular the first sight i saw as i was walking out of the big wooden door, a grave stone in the shape of a cross caught in an over head light than shone from outside of the graveyard... moving...

must get to bed, christmas day itself later on this morning and i can't stay in bed as long as i do @ home...

x

blewbury bound

ok, the last light draining from the sky and i'm about to jump on my bike, cycle up the canal to paddington and get a train to didcot... then onto blewbury, place of my growing up, (although not where i was born)...

usual have i got everything i need?... a week in the countryside... with the piano i grew up with...

a mound of essays to mark, a girlfriend to miss,

i'll be posting from down there so i'm not saying goodbye to you lot for this week... happy christmas eve if you celebrate it..

oh, and if you haven't already seen it, this video of two young chinese men miming to the backstreet boys is pure laughing heaven... i've watched it about 8 times already this week... very talented...

x

grace G snowslide selfridges

went down to brighton yesterday to see josiah & grace... both on good form, we went round the shops in brighton largely for my christmas shopping then went back to their's for a meal... me & grace going out to the off license for some wine at one point and on the way back she sat at the busstop and announced that we were going to take a bus...
but your flat is right there grace...

lovely to be able to sit & drink wine with josiah and chat, she cooked for us, something she used to do a lot when she lived round the corner... lovely...

and then me & G went into town today to have a go on the snowslide by the tate modern... great fun... we also hung out for awhile in the tate's bookshop, some great, great books in there, almost finished my christmas shopping by buying something in there but i actually completed the main part of the task once G had skipped off to work... a little detective work led me eventually to selfridges on oxford street, they indeed had what i was after and once i'd bought it i wondered around for a little while...

the main stairwell - escalatorwell i suppose - was being serenaded by the london comunity gospel choir, or at least a few of them, each time they finished a song i would clap and shout along with about one other person...

i was trying to get a good view of this amazing thing set into the ceiling, it meant going up and down the escalator's quite a few times, no bad thing in itself when you've got sweet gospel music in your ears...

i escaped from the madness that is oxford street on christmas eve eve and cycled home where i'm now typing this out, got presents to wrap and then i might see if uncle filmo's up for a pint...

x

longest night

listening to a track i did with G, he's emailed me a version of it... lovely melody in it (mine) grooving drums that he's put under it since i last heard it...

slept too late today, no surprises there, missed most of the shortest day therefore...

at the exact moment of the winter solstice (18.45 UT) i was buying tickets for me & felinity to see the chronicles of narnia... as the sun turned the corner of the year and daylight began it's gradual fight back over night we saw the forces of day & night, light & dark, fight it out on the big screen...

kind of wish i hadn't seen king kong before this one as it seemed a little less in comparison, but it was still good... felinity liked it a lot...

before the film we ate in the eat all you like place on st martins lane and then played on the big chair thing and the dodgems in leicester sqaure... she finished work this afternoon and was fully christmasy, we'd done the same chair ride two christmases ago when we saw elf...

my bike was locked up outside the price charles cinema right next to another bike of the same kind... a shopper, both of them sporting sturmey-archer gear shifters on the handle bars, the one on my bike being brand new... i cycled over to whitcomb's in deptford & picked up my little fella this afternoon, another shift, from the 18 gears of the bike i was borrowing to the 3 i now have... the pedals on mine also felt huge, i'd got used to the smallness of the kids bike...

before i went up to leicester square i'd been on the south bank, getting a present for grace who i'll be seeing tomorrow, my bike was locked up against the railing by the river, as i was getting ready to leave there i was feeling pretty slow and dopey... i unlocked the bike, put the lights on, was bending over to put my cycle clips on my legs when the blue tire levers that were in the top pocket of my coat slipped out and bounced off the concrete, through the railing, plopped into the river thames...

very graceful it was, made me laugh...

x

Royal Northern Gardens films

railings:



rock:



twigs:




railingtree:



all 4 combined RNG an experiment:




x

fast car

stooging around online i came across this, being a mad dash through paris in a car in 1978, i saw it on you tube, something i'm having a look at for hosting video's... one more website where i'm longcat...

might not need it though, i think i've managed to upload the combined big tree video onto my webspace... which is daft, they tell me i have 50Mb, i'm currently at about 300Mb...?

did very little today, first monday off in ages, depressurising i guess, took G to manolis's and he was charming as ever, he's such a smoothy when he wants to be...

x

king kong bicycle stupidity old friends

bicycle stupidity first, 3rd in the set which includes falling off my bike because i was reading the map while cycling & changing the inner tube but leaving the new one off and putting the old punctured one back on...

this time it was partly because EDF have been doing some roadworks & disrupting the cycle paths near the barbican for months now... once before i was cycling back through this part of town in the middle of the night and something similar happened but i averted it... not this time...

so firstly it's a handy little junction, one single lane for cars, two cycle paths either side, as i've said the cyclists have been forced into the motorists lane recently, there is a gate that comes down over the motorists lane, but other than that time in the middle of the night i have never seen it down... that gate has always been open...

but this was yesterday, a sunday, and i only ever use this route to get to work normally...

also worth noting is that i'm still without my bike, i've become accustomed to the girls/kids bike that i've been borrowing for the week and i can go really fast on it now, but the brakes aren't that good...

picture the scene, bombing it down this quiet road near the barbican, singing a caetano veloso song in my head, following a route i know really well...

thankfully the gate gave so i wasn't too injured, i like to think the gate suffered more than me...

my forearms still hurt a little, dumb place to be hurt being as i'm a pianist, no bruises though which kind of disapoints me...

i was just in a state of shock at first but after awhile i started to feel a bit like desperate dan, crashing into solid objects that bend under my momentum, by the end of the night i was imagining the collision as though i was king kong...

anyway i dusted myself off, bent the gate back into the shape it should have been and continued on my way to dulwich village to meet with bo, spanna, E & the like, a really nice place called the greyhound, (in fact i bumped into G & C, G who recorded connie with me)... lovely afternoon i had, old friends galore and all the better for it... hungarian T was there, spanna's ex, i hope to get him round for a game of chess before he goes back to budapest, he reminded that the last time we'd played was on the roof of the herne hill house i lived in briefly back then...

then once more onto the bike and i swept home, one of those long, slightly drunken, exhilarating cycle rides, no accidents this time, the gate noted...

picked up G who was dolling herself up and we got a bus up to the muswell hill odeon to see king kong which was triumphant... very satisfying, kong himself just fantastic, very moving, i've vidoe'd the 1933 original which was on BBC2 this afternoon, going to compare it once enough time has passed...

really nice to see it in that art deco cinema, carefully reproducing the 1933 style as peter jackson is doing in this remake...

also just delicious to go with G, peggy lee singing bye, bye blackbird in the film and i was very glad to be sat next to her...

where somebody waits for me
sugar's sweet, so is he
bye bye blackbird

x

thoughts

just sat down in the tv room with spski and watched demolition which irritated me beyond belief and then the 30 minute combined film of the cutup tree films...

demolition could have been so good, a good premise, get the public to vote for the buildings they most want to see torn down, create an x list, like the listed buildings scheme but in reverse...

but it was so patronising, each person in it was introduced fully each time they appeared, we've met this man already, you don't have to tell me everything about him... the notion of the x list was repeated at least five times, almost word for word... it treated the television audience as though we're stupid... it was a little like a party political broadcast... it was toss... shame...

and so onto the experience of watching the tree film with spski... thoughtful man as he is... he responded afterwards with a couple of interesting things which i'm briefly noting here so i remember them... he talked about a writer called james hamilton-peterson and his book playing with water... a certain vividness of experience that this writer described through diving, percieving the underwater world in brief moments and so more intensely...

spski also said it was a little like seeing the world from different people's perceptions, this from the different speed of the different cutup films...

he also said he preferred the individual films and i know what he means, the individual ones work (if they work) because they are long, meditative looks at one thing, the longer film, combining all the individual ones isn't right yet, and possibly won't achieve the same quality as the individual ones anyway... the sequence of the cutups in the longer film need a bit of work he reckoned... i think that's right...

but i apologise people, this will mean not that much to you, not having seen the bigger picture... thankyou to trave who has watched rock and responded... just what i'm after...

a few years ago i collected together much of the individual tracks i'd been working on and concieved them together as an album, i gave this prototype album to a few individuals whose taste i liked and asked them to respond...

funnily enough my album never got passed this stage, by the time the last comments were in i'd moved on from that way of working (producing the music entirely on my own, using music software) and was starting to write music more sat at a piano... concentrating on voice and piano rather than the whole sound...

i'd like to do something similar with these films... giving them to a few people and asking them what they think... tomorrow i'm seeing quite a few old friends and i'm going to give the DVD of all the tree films to at least two people, spanna and bo, and maybe another if i can think of who... as part of the same deal i would love it if more of you good people downloaded rock, being one 5th of the whole film project and let me know what you think...

thanks again trave... looking forward to seeing you at christmas

x

slight cold sleep deprived beautiful life

woke up today knowing that i hadn't had enough sleep... pretty stupid it made me... i'm no good without enough sleep...

which is of course not strictly true... i went to work and did my last hour and a half's teaching of 2005, i was a tiny bit crabby before the lesson started but i was still a good teacher... lovely lesson teaching my two (meant to be eight, shame at their behaviour at the christmas party may have been one of several reasons not to show today), teaching about 7th chords (including 6th's and major 7ths's) with the aid of my funny valentine...

then after work i ate with nippy and M, nippy who i love dearly more than ever right now... got on the kids bike that the bike shop have leant me and cycled to the river... someone has put up a big snow slide outside the tate modern, £3 for two go's... i'm so taking G there real soon, and grace if i can... in fact any and everyone i can think of... of course it might not be as much fun as it looks... but i bet it is...

filmed a little from my spot on the jetty by gabriel's wharf - footage for the new set of films that i began once i'd started editing these tree ones - once i could see how i could put things together...

then i drifted into town as i so often do.. really wanted to see king kong that came out today but reluctant to pay the £11 that leicester square wanted for the pleasure... chose instead to see bombon (el perro) for £1 at the prince charles cinema...

beautiful film, very funny... that dog is a comic genius... short on sleep as i was i put up no resistance to the tears that inevitably came, twice... i like being short on sleep for that, i love crying in cinema's, well...

i love crying in cinema's when i don't feel manipulated by the film, which generally means i love crying at non-hollywood films... (let's be clear after all)

then i cycled home in the darkening late afternoon...

i've just got back from jai krishna's south indian vegetarian restaurant which was fantastic... i have a slight cold and their food is so what i want to get over it... i started digging my teeth into monsieur which i started yesterday (or the day before) but hadn't got into the swing of before jai's, more characters to live in my head along with the cast of lost... this avignon quartet is five novels long... i still feel a little daunted by it... but i'm in it now...

and me & irish G watched magnificent 7 which she video'd the other day, helena bonham carter as the mother of four boys all at different points on the autism spectrum and three girls, very good, made me cry again, a little chessy and simplistic in places but good telly...

not as good as ghost squad though... have i mentioned how great that is? anyway i'm going on with myself and i can hear G getting in...

laters

x

the trees

ok so in theory i only have 50 Mb of webspace and one of these tree films comes to 60Mb, so i've no idea how i've managed to put it up there... maybe i can put them all up there? unlikely though... i think i may have a cutup tree film a week... starting with this one which i've shown you already... it's over there under the video links under the name cutup trees (rock)... being as the camera was placed on a rock for this film...

as opposed to twigs where the camera was on the grass and i'd set up a rectangle of twigs to tell me where in the grass it was day to day... or railings where the camera was pointing upwards through railings to a tree or railingtree where the camera was on top of the railings just pointing at the tree...

my computer is feverishly converting the other three to divx and i'll post them each, one by one, each week (probably)... i'm investigating how to deal with the larger one...

if you do actually download one i would appreciate a comment telling me you have... even if you hate it...

these are the trees that rock (and twigs) are both of, only from directly underneath them, i find it odd looking at this picture after editing the films, the perspective is so different... they are so damn tall, when you're looking directly upwards at them you get no sense of this, i mean you know they're tall but this tall?

if i'd had thought a bit more carefully before i set this thing converting (the films to divx) i would have realised it would take this long and i wouldn't have set it going this close to desired bed time... yawn...

x

it is done beard rethink

me & my squeeze just sat down and watched the 30 minute long film i made out of the four 7.30 minute long cutup tree films, which are all now completed...

looking back at it the first one could be better aligned, in fact they all could be a little better aligned but definitely that first one, and i may experiment with getting rid of the black edges in them by zooming into them abit... but aside from how i could/will improve them it is damn nice having finished it... the whole project...

i've put them onto a DVD with each of the 4 and the 30 minute combined one... must go out on saturday and get some better looking blank DVD's so i can give it to a couple of people...

the 30 minute film is pretty intense, G said she liked it, reminded her of a text she'd read today about the sabbath... time moving on, but taking one day to step back, the trees staying there while all kinds of madness go on around them...

if i can i'll post the smaller individual ones up somewhere and link to them, the longer one as well but it's less likely i can find a space big enough to host it...

so now my life can go back to whatever i was doing before... so all consuming this film project has been...

my beard has grown really long, it's quite definitely passed some kind of perceptual point because noone i know has resisted the urge to comment on it in the last week...

i'm getting really bored of the comments... well-meaning though they (generally) are...

so tonight after the film i took it down a notch... i'd intended to video my face reading a set line before i did this but having finished the film i've entered a new energy and i had to change... the videoing of my face may happen though, intended as a record of change over a year or so...

my last thursday teaching before christmas tomorrow (later today), followed by my last teaching friday... hmmm, bring on the holiday,

x

slight cloud alphabetic order books

i turn my camera on
i used to love him
i want to sing that rock'n'roll
i was born to love magic
i wish i knew

the randomness of alphabetic order...

clicking on an mp3 on the web, itunes springing up and playing that mp3 (the first one on the list), then carrying on playing everything else it knows about... in alphabetical order... (alphabetic or alphabetical?)...

spoon
lauryn hill
gillian welch
nick drake
chet baker

(what else am i listening to?)

i finished the collected works of billy the kid by michael ondaatje last night... very good, very small... now i'm gradually turning my attention to the next book... what will it be?

i've been meaning to borrow a book from spanish M but she's just gone to italy for the weekend (yes, i know it's wednesday), and now a peculiar thing has happened... got a comment from patroclus because she saw the shortwave set the other day (as i did) and she read the alexandria quartet earlier this year (as i did)... so i go along to her blog, read a little, am amused, click on that mp3 mentioned above... i see that as well as the alexandria quartet she has also read the avignon quartet by the same guy (lawrence durrell), which i have the first book of - monsieur - it's in my pile of books i've bought at one time or another and haven't yet read...

hmmmm?

and then the slight cloud, found myself not going out to my work christmas do last night, partly because of the cold but mainly because of this cloud that had come down over me...

don't know where it came from, it disapeared when G got back from work, but it resurfaced in the middle of the night, so i sat at my fender rhodes piano and i wrote a tiny piece of sad music... i played it when i got up today and i'm digging it..

x

bike with barry fourth film in process

went down to deptford yesterday to drop of my bike at whitcombs cycle shop, B is going to strip my sturmey-archer gear hub and fix it, giving me access to the other two gears...

a week or so...

in the mean time i was lent another bike by S who kind of works there, it belonged to his daughter lulu before she grew out of it and it tires me out because the pedals are closer in than the ones on my beautiful bike... also because it has gears... many, many gears...

it's really odd, having only had one, hard gear, to go to having many gears... i'm not at all used to it... but i'm glad of the bike... a week without cycling would mess with my head...

i also saw D yesterday afternoon, had a lovely hour or so with him, sipping tea, discussing the world...

and i've begun the fourth and final film of this original batch of films... currently doing the middle rendering bit... another day off tomorrow and it should be done by the time i go out with felinity in the evening... narnia awaits...

x

to be not working

in a week i'll have finished teaching for 2005...

not the case yet though and i have to be at work in 7 hours...

i'm just rendering (finishing) the third tree film... my divx converter ran out of it's free period and i haven't yet bought it (but i will) so i can't make divx versions of the most recent two films, but i'll post them when i've done that, assuming my webspace holds out... which is a big assumption now that i think about it...

just posted the first one up on deoxy... wonder what they'll make of it... can't wait to see this third one... 86% done... during the footage for this one that guy came up to me and started talking about the local area... a part of our conversation is embedded in the film... but cut into third of a second bits...

89%

x

fendering felinity party with squeeze

me & G (squeeze) stepped out together last night to felinity's party, very rare that we make it out into the public, nice that she met felinity & her flatmates, E as always very funny, made a spectacular cake with a hawthorn tree on it... very nice...

the gathering was really nice, a little on the quiet side perhaps but perfectly formed none-the-less, discovered that it's really hard to rotate your right foot clockwise in the air whilst at the same time drawing the number six (in the air) with your right hand... (unless like E you draw your six from the inside out)... and that your height is (pretty much) the same as three times the circumference of your head...

the party started pretty early and me & G were hungry, so afterwards we went into town and ate @ mildred's on lexington street, good vegetarion food... again, nice to be out with G on something a little like a date...

i've been working on the third of the four tree films... i'm now in cutting mode, slicing the video into third of a second bits, refining the process with every film i do... this one is the most work as it swaps between images every third of a second instead of half seconds or two-thirds seconds like the other two... finding ways to get through it better though... every now and then i think of the woman william burroughs and anthony balch employed to cut up and paste together their footage for them back in the late 60's... i am my own woman...

the stage before this one, which i was doing friday, is of tilting all the images so that they are aligned with each other and then rendering them tilted... i've found that the time it takes to render a 30 second piece of video on my computer is not really enough time to do anything else except sit at my fender rhodes piano and play... (spski told me that therefore i'm actually fendering the video)

so far in the process of making these films i've written two chord sequences, one of which came to me on friday night... i love the focussed time it gives me to just play... it also makes me realise how little of that i do at the minute and how necessary it is...

also on friday night i watched the thin red line which was really good, very beautiful, very moving, spski told me he hated it... i loved it...

x

not enough sleep lowtide reality

went and saw the shortwave set last night in kilburn, good band, kind of irritating and beautiful at the same time, very pop and a little experimental, went with A, he of rediffusion who is leaving these shores for india within the week...

missed the last overground so had to cycle all the way, not far as it turns out, unintended night out so i hadn't planned my route... borrowed an A-to-Z from A's friend S, have to meet them tonight to give it back... very tired so i'm wondering if i'll make it... they're drinking in stoke newington...

glorious afternoon again today, just like yesterday, lowtide at just the right point in the afternoon as i by the thames so i cycled over to the northbank, locked up my litte bike and clambered down to the beach... walking along to that lowtide underworld that i've been to once before...

strange and eerie again, but this time i was not alone down there, i met a photographer who has been working on a project about this and many other undercrofts as he called them, his exhibition is on next year at the docklands museum of london, must try and get along to it... name of C... unquiet thames is the exhibition i think...

strange place to find someone else...

x

assessment regular videoing

just discovered that i can access my register in the lesson... instead of going back to the office after the lesson and doing it...

sorry, i'm @ my hammersmith work, very few students for some reason and those i have preparing for the assessment i'm giving them next week... a couple have done it already, assessments are great....

a real kick up the arse for students... right, show me that you've got what i've been talking about...

this morning i had a minute to spare on my inward journey to catch the canal for the first of the 5 pre-christmas canal videoings that may continue into the new year...

then after my london bridge work the greyness had cleared up and the day was glorious, i kept stopping and filming things... the river, the water in green park...

is it green park, where the palace is..?

then the canada memorial which i've been filming each week for a little while now... i love how the water ripples down it...

i assembled my royal northern gardens films into a whole last night, 2 out of the 4... it kind of worked although i've got ideas about how to improve it...

facillating between feeling it's a successful experiment and feeling it doesn't work...

x

royal northern wind-up bird riff

finished the second of the tree films on tuesday... had a few faults which i fixed today, then turned my thoughts towards putting them together, found out that i've lost something quite crucial... but have just found a way around it...

thinking of them all together now as a 30 minute film... swapping between each of the four every 2 minutes at first, then getting quicker and quicker until it's swapping every 2 seconds...

so now i'm getting the first two into a form i can use when i've made the other two... memory is an issue... someday soon i may well get rid of a whole lot of mp3's that i've been carrying around for donkey's years, ever since J and me started using napster around 5-6 years ago... several computers since then as well...

when you burn onto a DVD the video compresses down to MPEG-2 format, so i've decided to keep everything at that level of compression which will allow me to have 30 minutes of footage to play with as well as having room for the 30 minutes finished video...

complicated business... i just hope it works as a video in the end...

last night i finished the wind-up bird chronicle by haruki murakami, simply fantastic, what a great writer that man is... sad to finish it, reading through the gardian weekly until i can read another book... maybe a little time in between...

and i found a riff, playing on my fender rhodes piano while my computer rendered some video yesterday, i'm pleased with the sound of it... it moves in semitones or tones and it's sexy... i need to record it onto something so i can think about what can live with it...

x

rendering beginning another mobile clubbing

about a third of the way through the rendering for the second of the tree cutup films... this one swapping between clips every 2/3rds of a second so slightly less ordering to do than the last one... spent more time lining up the images so it should work a little better, still got the black edges though... did anyone watch my first long version i wonder? anyone outside of this house i mean... i'd love to be able to track who downloads the media from this blog...

also began another film series... this one on it's own from the bridge over the canal that i cross over on my way to work... i captured the first bit today on my return home in the afternoon... my poor book, the windup bird chronicle that has suffered through my bike, frayed edges with the last carrier bag i was carrying it in, today it was in one of those thin bags you get fruit in in the supermarket... racing back after work, really loving the new front tire...

bump...

the bag ripped open and the book fell under my tires... still here, just a little ripped on a page i've already read... no other book has been this mistreated by me... somehow this one is bearing all the suffering...

so i stopped, picked the book up and went and stayed motionless on the canal bridge to think about it... that's when i realised what a prime spot for filming it is...

this first piece of footage might not be useful in the end because if i film on the way to work, the three days that i work down there, it will always be the same time of day that i do it... this appeals to me...

i was a little sad tonight because i had to work and thought i would miss the mobile clubbing event going on on villiers street... after work i cycled along the river listening to my shuffle (which i haven't listened to in an age) in a utopian haze... lovely thing to do... i arrived at villers street and immediately saw spanish M who raised her arms and yelled in that clubbing way...

a few stragglers still keeping the flame alight and i joined them for a little while, the music was stuff i'd downloaded from joolsMF mashup mp3 stuff... i only had about 20 minutes of dancing in me after today and in fact my shuffle ran out of juice just as i did, nice to be part of that scene just for a moment though...

x

tati night bus kismet

she calls me boobelah in her text messages...

i now know what it means, it's yiddish, she is studying judaism with a view to converting so what happened last night i shall call kismet...

yesterday afternoon i pressed record on the video for sherlock holmes and the scarlet claw and went out to manolis's cafe, then onto the train station to catch a train to acton central where i chilled out a bit with nippy before she drove us (& her son R) to brighton to see josiah's gospel gig...

grace came with dad T, josiah was this time in the performance choir, she sang an improvised solo, the choir sounded amazing, the work of K who used to teach with me, josiah & nippy several years ago now...

in particular i'm a believer, marvellous & amen were just stunning, a great singer called wayne ellington sang this last one, a lovely melody to the word amen that he sang over three octaves... hair-raising stuff...

on the way back i phoned TfL and verified that i would miss the last tube back from nippy's... so i decided to nightbus it, not something i've done that much of in the last few years, not yet that flush to take a taxi in that setting...

anyway i spoke to my squeeze and it turned out she was drinking in town with some friends, nippy dropped me off at a busstop in acton and i immediately caught an N7 bus heading to russell square, opened my book and started wending my way through it's pages while the bus wended it's way through west london,

before too long though the nightbus was becoming populated with noisy drunken folk, making reading hard, then impossible...

so i phoned my squeeze again who was by this time waiting for the N91, which passes russell square, so i suggested that i catch that same N91 once my bus had made it's way to it's destination... just so long as my bus got there first...

now willing the bus to be quicker as it finally left west london and slowly trundled along oxford street... my squeeze now on her bus...

my N7 reaching russell square and then a quick dash to find the right busstop, seeing her N91 pull up and running over to it, you know that run into the road so that the busdriver knows you're there? (and has the option of running you over)...

a perfectly timed set of bus journeys bringing me into the arms of my squeeze...

woke up today and watched the sherlock holmes film with spski who then insisted on putting on a jacques tati short film concerning bicycles... very funny...

x

hypnotic tree video

many hours later...

making video sure does take time... this version of the cutup tree thing is 7 and a half minutes long and has taken me a long, long time...

i haven't got the angle exactly right on all of the clips i've used but even the one that is most out gives this version a certain lopsided rhythm...

i finished putting all the half a second clips into the correct order about an hour ago and i got my squeeze to come check it out... we stood in front of this screen swaying slightly, holding each other, letting it wash over us... i'm really pleased with it, especially as it's the prototype, may try to burn it onto a DVD and see it on the telly later on in the weekend... i'm currently trying to upload it as a DIVX file to my webspace but it may be too big...

i'm heading down to brighton tomorrow to see josiah sing gospel... really looking forward to it, nippy and R coming too... josiah rocks when she does gospel...

anyway, not much to say, just happy to have done this thing... the first of many i don't doubt,

my bed calls to me x

rainbow glimpse roadside bike realisations weather shifting

my journey to work saw the weather go from coldish to outright wet raining... you know the difference between wet rain and not so wet rain?

cycling over southwark bridge the rain reaching a peak... only got really wet towards the end of the journey so not so bad... on the bridge i was aware of the rain but felt somehow insulated... didn't stop me being very damp for the first 10 minutes of teaching, but my gloves and hat very, very welcome...

then after work (eric satie drifting through the building from my keyboard students) i arranged to meet M in the amazon cafe, M from work, she had a meeting with the university that we have dealings with, she got on the tube, i got on my bike...

cycling over the millenium bridge i was loving the sunshine, got just past st pauls before i realised my front tire was punctured...

no chance of making it to meet M... a few frantic moments before it occured to me to fix the puncture myself, as i put the puncture repair kit in my pocket this morning i'd been thinking how i hadn't used it yet...

so i wheeled the bike over to a little parkish bit behind the cathedral and i turned her upsidedown, got out the bits and proceeded to fix my puncture... my first roadside puncture fixing and what might become a 5-minute job took me 30 minutes...

the front tire has the old fashioned kind of valve that doesn't really fit my pump so i suffered... cold hands not quite working properly, the wind biting despite the sunshine, rain almost beginning again and i felt slightly on the edge, but the rain amidst the sunlight promised a rainbow and i raised my head up and did indeed glimpse a rainbow between several tall buildings... momentary grace before finishing the job and getting back on my bike and my journey home...

met up with M as promised although later than planned, devoured a mountain of food, discovered the first of two great things about my bicycle pump whilst talking with M, looking at it and wondering about the strange shape of the handle, reasoning that it looked as though the handle would tilt... and lo and behold tilting did occur,so much easier to pump therefore...

then we walked down the holloway road, her to her meeting and me to the bike shop, even though i'd fixed the puncture i decided i wanted to get an inner tube with the same kind of valve as my back tire and indeed the valve that my pump could deal with, whilst in there i also chose to change the outer tube, poor thing was worn and cracked...

whereupon two more realisations, firstly that my bicycle pump could deal really well with both kind of valve, a fact that spski had posited but that i hadn't believed, foolish to go against spski's bicycle lore, the guy in the shop showed me how to swap it over... so no new inner tube thankyou very much, good job because they don't seem to do inner tubes with the other kind of valve for that small a wheel... my repaired inner tube survived the day out and got itself a lovely new outer tube as well, being the second realisation... when i came back to pick up the newly fitted bike with tire i found the make of tire was the make that Ch had recommended to me the other day, much faster with a swaby tire not that that's how it's spelt, we chose the tire without talking about names... funny to follow his advice without consciously doing so...

oh and one more bicycle fact... my front wheel is a metric wheel, my back wheel imperial...

jus how many kookie facts about my bike can i find?

by then the wind really cold as i cycled home on my new nippy tire...

now i'm deep in rendering/video stuff for the cutup tree film... many hours to go yet...

x

cut ups

there is a great website that i found earlier this year, you can download some great films from it of various counter culture icons like william burroughs, maya deren, jean genet... in the past i've downloaded genet's film un chant d'amour which he made in the 50's, also maya deren's meshes of the afternoon a surealist film from the 40's i think...

the grey lodge this week furnished me with a few different things, a film about shane ballard, an enormous 22 year old who stood for sheriff of some southern county on a pro-pornography platform, maya deren's living horsemen of haiti, some noam chomsky stuff and william burrough's the cut-up's that he made with brion gysin and anthony balch in the late 60's...

i've been interested in burroughs and his cutup technique of writing for many years now, (i taught it as an aspect of composition to a class earlier this year), he used it as part of his writing from the late 60's all the way until he died...

he got the idea from brion gysin, the painter, and the first thing they did with it was to make films... really nice therefore to have seen the later literature that came out of the cutup's and now get to experience the earlier, cinematic experiments...

this film the cut-up's is almost 20 minutes long and seems to be made up of four different films cut together at half second intervals to form the whole... i sat through it yesterday and it was pretty intense... in 1969 it ran for afew weeks in a regular cinema in london and people regularly walked out of it, often leaving their belongings in the cinema...

so it got me thinking about an approach to my videoing of the sky that i did october-november, so far i've taken one of the 4 locations from which i video'd and selected a minute from each day that i did it... 15 days in all...

as a preliminary test i took the first half second from each day and threw them together, being 7.5 seconds long... i really like it, particularly the sound, chopping between each clip...

i need to find a way of moving each clip a little so they line up nicely, easier said than done, i've spent the last hour & a half working it out, my brain is starting to melt, but once i've done it putting together the next, longer version should be fairly straight forward...

then whether to just leave the sound as it is or to compose a piece for it, maybe letting the sound that is there dicate the music that comes out...?

x

TfL possible number perfection performing dream

i'm not sure if it's accurate but every time i blog i see a counter saying how many posts i've posted... if it's true then this post is post number 444... just missed this coinciding with the palindromic visitor number 1331, they came here last night...

groovy huh?

anyway, back in the real world i got up late for the second day in a row... sleeping until 1 (yesterday) or 1.45 (today), then reading in bed... and in these short days too, pretty nocturnal creature i'm becoming...

my last dream before i woke up today was of a gig, i was playing, although maybe i was just walking through the stage during a piano solo by Y, the organiser of Raison D'Etre those live gigs we used to be apart of... he was playing this really nice jazz tune, as a solo - i got the impression he was playing over a record... he was also controlling things from offstage, (dream logic) and he told me he wanted me to have a solo next... Y stopped to great applause, i walked back over to the piano (my pink shirt open and flapping in the wind)... also to great applause, was struck by the silence, where was the backing record?

started out my solo with a few blues chords/riffs, out of these freefrom bits a rhythm emerged and i got onto a blues/boogie-woogie thing... started rocking away but there was one voice (female) i could hear amidst the yelling crowd that was shouting:

stop playing that f****** awful rock'n'roll

so i started singing lyrics, improvised, like i did a year or so back... i can't think of the rhythm now but effectively:

stop shouting abuse at me, it won't get you anywhere...

i stopped playing shortly after this and ran out of there, ran really fast away from the gig, then realised where i wanted to get to but didn't want to go the direct way as this would take me near the gig, instead started running the round-about way...

then i woke up...

talking of direct ways and round-about ways i saw a link on a website today to the Transport for London's cycle route planner and i may not have complained about them enough... so here it is...

twice in the past month or so i have had occassion to look to the TfL's cycle route planner and both times i have been led a merry dance (as it were)...

the first time was coming from my london bridge work to the eastend and it led me the wrong way down two one-way streets and directly down the middle of a busy market...

the second time (and why oh why did i use it a second time if it had messed me up so much before? good question, i'm slightly at a loss for an answer) i asked it how to get to herne hill from my hammersmith work (last thursday, day of much cycling) and it made me turn right at a junction where there is no turning right allowed...

both times it also took me along some big, big roads before settling into a quite good back street route...

so frankly i'm pretty unimpressed by it... but aside from it's bad points the route to herne hill it gave me turned out to be a good one... i think i'm going to have to email them, see if i can effect some positive change in it, because it does fill a hole, it is needed, although what would fill that hole better would be digital versions of the excellent london cycle maps that you can get sent to you for free... if i could just download the relevant one(s) of them for my journey i wouldn't need a journey planner... for some reason they are only published in hardcopy...?

x

headache squeeze random cyclist

the headache is today,

the squeeze is spread over a couple of months now,

the random cyclist yesterday...

not too much to say about the headache, just that it's there, coupled with an aching back that could be a result of the marathon lord of the rings fest we did on sunday (oh... haven't blogged that... hmmm), or could be related to the headache, also felt a little sick earlier...

so i hope i'm not coming down with anything big and nasty... i'll let you know...

then the random cyclist... i met him as i was cycling down on the river, decided to cross by the hungerford bridge, the south facing one... i could see that someone had called the lift already, could see it descending from the other side of it, i cycled around to the front and it was Ch... random cyclist who i'd met on the way to a restaurant very close to there actually where i was meeting felinity & dad a couple of weeks ago...

i'd reached the euston road on my way to the south bank and i was waiting at the traffic lights, wandering how i was going to get there, only a rough idea of the route.. he cycled up beside me and started looking closely at my bike, the wheels, the lights... asked me how much my front light cost me and how big my wheels were... the lights changed and i said goodbye and cycled off, i looked back a minute or two later and he was there, keeping up with me...

so i asked him where he was going and he said chinatown, not too far from my destination i thought, so i asked him to lead the way... which i love, following someone else's route... took me almost to waterloo bridge... i thanked him and we parted...

yesterday i asked him his name to verify that it was the same man... as we got into the lift with our bicycles he didn't remember me but after awhile, crossing over the bridge he did remember me, we spoke about all kinds of crazy things...

condoms, sex, lesbians, chinese philosophy, lao-tze, blood groups, bicycle tires, hands...

i hope to see him again, two random meetings in a town this big, in just under two weeks... odd cycling companion...

and then my squeeze... not to say much about it, just that it's going on and it's been going on, sometimes more off than on, for a little while now...

she's really nice...

x

connie & alfie

made my way over to putney to see connie today, felinity & me have been planning it for awhile with J & A, J being our cousin, dad of connie...

so hang on... am i calling her by her real name? i appear to be, oh well, no harm, she's only 4 months old... odd though, to have a rule and not observe it in one situation...?

anyway, on the way there i was thinking about her, her birthday, which was the day after my 32nd birthday, and of alfie, G's son, who was born on my 25th birthday...

when i arrived in putney felinity was already there sipping tea... she gave A her present which was a perfect little hat that she'd knitted, fitted very well on connie's head, i gave them the CD of the track and we listened to it... i think over the course of the visit we heard it maybe three times... neither J nor A actually said whether they liked it or not, they both said how much they appreciated it, the fact that i'd done it and how only i could have given a present like this, but neither one said what they thought of it... not that i mind, it's for connie not them... odd though...

near the end of our visit, which involved much tea and some cake, connie was layed down on a mat, she'd started rolling over this week, although J hadn't yet seen it in the flesh... so we all watched as she wobbled around on the mat and raised her little legs in the air, toppling over onto her side then rolling back again... very exciting actually, would she do it? i video'd her exertions, possibly to be used on my video of the piece... she did in fact do two complete back to front rolls (as in, lying on her back and then rolling onto her front) while we were there, something special about the fact the J was seeing it for the first time too... J and A were both lovely, he's become a really nice dad, this was the first time i'd met A except for their wedding (for which i bought the suit), nice to talk to her - passed on the knowledge of chamomilla for teething troubles, just as josiah passed it on to a new mum at her house on wednesday night...

very glad to have felinity there, strangely her voice got quieter and quieter as the visit went on, although she was back up to normal volume as we walked to the train... i forgot to mention it to her...

nice also to have long train/tube journeys in which to read, the wind-up bird chronicles being great, for some reason i didn't know that felinity had read it, and i was slightly put out that i hadn't lent it to her... i'm fairly possessive about haruki murakami in an odd way...

so anyway once back in north london i was out and about doing some shopping and i got a phonecall from G, dad of alfie, who i'd been thinking about earlier, he's in town for the night and was inviting me out to the party he's going to, which i now know i'm not going to, just going to read and chill out at home...

another saturday night not partying, boring old man i'm becoming...

x

huge cold cycling

yesterday that was... cycled to work in london bridge then over to hammersmith, then over to herne hill to see bo then back to mine (finsbury park)...

phew... the last leg, back from bo's to here, took me 55 minutes and was hard work, drunk as i was at the start of it... the entire day's journey looks like this... and was 29.78 miles long...

really cold feet by the time i got here around 12.20am, not something i felt today as i had even thicker socks on (yesterday i'd taken the precaution of wearing thicker than usual socks and they didn't quite cut it)... sadly these are the only really thick socks i have with no holes... methinks sock shopping is a priority, also cycling glasses, i've been finding it really tricky cycling south in the mornings on clear days... the sun low in the sky and really glaring me, particularly where the new arsenal stadium is being built the road is often wet and the combined sun & reflected sunlight is blinding... but also my eyes have been suffering with this cold, spski says it's the eyes drying out... so cycling glasses are another key item...

around lunchtime yesterday as i was beginning my journey west it was really grey still, but there was a line of blue sky on the horizon, framing st paul's and the barbican towers really nicely from the millenium bridge... by the time i got over to hyde park the sky had mostly cleared...

but back to the millenium bridge, it was lowtide and i had a bit of time free so i decided to go check out that wierd underworld right by southwark bridge on the north bank of the thames... but the wooden steps that i'd found a bit unsafe on my first visit there had completely come away from the stone... no way down... so i abandoned the lowtide concrete world for the day...
instead i found myself getting off the bike in st james park and chilling out with the canadian memorial again, my thursday route takes me past it each week but i'm always in a hurry, i love it... the maple leaves, the running water... the geometric shape of it...

one moment of bratness

josiah has told me that she wants someone else to witness what a brat her daughter is... being told that grace is a lovely, beautiful, well behaved child is a little jarring with her because grace is a terrible two year old and she can be a real brat to her mum...

so today, in amongst a lovely day of piano playing, reading books, eating, playing... after i took her to the park to play on the swings... all just beautiful...

getting her off the swings proved a nightmare... to be fair to her she was tired... and she fell asleep as soon as it was over... but i witnessed the brat...

so once again she's asleep in my bed, i'm about to pick up the wind-up bird chronicle... T, the dad, is coming here at some point in the next hour or two and we're taking grace down to brighton together...

amazing how i was congratulating myself on a stress free visit only 30 minutes before the fight... that girl can wail...

x

the wind-up lullaby chords

grace here & asleep in my bed... i'm doing myself some food and i'm going to watch ghost squad in about 45 minutes...

there was a torturous separation from josiah who brought her up here, we'd eaten in the amazon, got back here and me & grace were playing just prior to josiah leaving when she shifted into i want to go with my mummy i don't want to stay in this COLD house...

once josiah could be persuaded to leave i rocked the wailing child to sleep while playing two chords on the piano... later on, once i'd woken her up to get her changed and she had her doll near her she asked me play the chords again... lullaby business, her name sung as well... i love being a godfather...

so i turned the lights down low and i started the wind-up bird chronicle for the second time, it was the first murakami book i read back when i was running that blues workshop & one of my students lent it to me... i'd read everything there was in english a few years before kafka on the shore came out earlier this year, i remember the thrill of that one... now i'm going back to the source again, while grace sleeps in my bed...

x

days off about to disappear

in less than 2 hours my life will be given over to a 2 year old...

josiah's bringing her up now, i'll have her until tomorrow night when i'll be taking her down to brighton then hanging out a bit for a little social...

so my tuesday & wednesday space in the week is now completely full... and even though i wanted this, asked for it, just this element of it is slightly unsettling to me, i love having days off, of not knowing what i'm doing...

not that i know what i'm going to do with grace all the time she's here...

anyway, just a thought, i've been thinking about joseph schillinger and about how he was an inspirational teacher but after he died his techniques died too after a decade or so... these days there are a few people interested in him but it's recognised that the books he left behind aren't as good as they could be, not as good as having him there to answer your questions...

the w h matthieau book on music theory that i bought almost 12 months ago now and still haven't really got my teeth into addresses the question of having a real teacher against learning from their books... but just the fact that matthieau is addressing this bodes well for the quality of the book...

the long & the short of all this is that i can see myself writing a book in a decade or two... a distillation of the ways i have found to teach music... and i want it to be a good book.

i finished what i loved the other day, still haven't started another yet... toing with the idea of rereading the wind-up bird chronicles but haven't made up my mind yet, yesterday i enjoyed being bookless for once, i had several hours off in the middle of my day, just as the sun was nearing the horizon, drifted around by the thames and took pictures, video's, there was a lovely almost mist around things that turned into a real cold mist by the time i was cycling home in the dark...

wintery feeling to that journey,

when G got home last night we watched the first of the downloaded lost episodes, i've lost patience with the TV, going to download until the end of the series and then maybe on into series 2, it was great, so much better without adverts, longer somehow, (i dreamt that we discovered that the uncut episodes were an hour and twenty minutes, i was outraged)...

x

joseph schillinger

i was wondering about palindromic scales again, since i checked them out last week and i typed that phrase into google and i found a few interesting things...

firstly someone called Benjamin Tubb, he made a list of all the palindromic scales in the same number format i use to teach with... it's dated 1981... he's also got a list of international scales which i'm going to be perusing...

on my musicianship module, which i teach to two of the courses at my london bridge work, i try and present students with a range of different scales for them to check out and potentially use... he's got way more scales than i've seen...

my little investigation the other day about palindromic scales was just a teasing look, he has it all laid out... of course you've got to hear them as well as just see them written down, i'm glad of what i've got both in my teaching and my own journey... glad also of this resource he offers...

then he mentions joseph schillinger, a russian born composer/teacher who came to new york in the 30's and taught loads of groovy students including gershwin, he had some kind of mathematical approach to teaching music, which is my bag too... i'm just finding out about him, and he reminds me of count alfred korzibski who taught his general semantics to william burroughs amongst others in the 40's... also of willhelm reich, european ideas fleeing to america... a rich time...

just as i write this my eyes fall on the edward said DVD i borrowed from D (not the writer of book about fiat cars)... another great teacher and ideas man... must watch that again some day soon.. i saw it at the cinema back in early summer i think it was...

x

palindromic number

i'd like to welcome visitor 1221 especially because it is a palindromic number (looks the same forwards as it looks backwards), like the dorian mode as i was talking about the other day... although that visitor has gone now and may or may not return again, they came twice in the last two hours trying to find out something about the beaux arts building that i so love...

and then just a few words about sony vegas which i've started using today to put some music to the video i took of la pro that day when he fell off spski's bike and i put him on a train to gatwick trussed up in inexpertly applied bandages...

i'm enjoying it and i'm somewhat intrigued by the fact that i can output video of proper quality using it... albeit video that has come originally from my little camera and it's compression... so i've had to get another piece of software to compress the result back down again in order to make it a suitable size for the internet... funny business...

at the minute that piece of video is in DIVX format, i hope those of you who wish to check out my video's can see DIVX, it does seem to be the most popular of the mpeg-4 codecs so i will probably stick to it... may even pay them the £20 they want for the converter...

the music i used is one of the piano tunes from love & understanding that i listening the last time i went up the beaux arts building, odd circular route back to my 1221st visitor...

oh and i've managed to lose all my cards (travel, cash & credit) in the back of nippy's car... last night i was feeling so cold and hungry... couldn't bare the thought of leaving the house but had no food in... nippy came round to pick up the money for her PA which we borrowed for the party i didn't go to and she gave me a lift to crystal kebabs on holloway road, what i loved by siri hustvedt was in my pocket and it must have pushed out my blue plastic wallet... so no money until monday beyond what G lent me this morning...

and i just got paid as well.. typically awkward...

i've been reading the siri hustvedt book avidly today, really enjoying it... very moving, certain passages in it that really strike home, in a passing offhand way...

x

sturmey-archer short light

i've been talking with spski about my bike, the strange noise eminating from it (i'm fed up with not using a word just because i can't spell it - and i'm too tired to find out how this word is truly spelt)... he thinks a ballbearing might have come out... it turns out that my gear system (which doesn't get used) is a sturmey-archer hub...

after checking a website he told me about i've found that my sturmey-archer hub is a little younger than me, made in october of 1976, just a little older than my fender rhodes piano which was made in 79, can't remember the month now but it's stamped on the main inside bit in exactly the same way the stamp is on my hub... pleasing piece of knowledge...

spski also tells me there is a bike shop that specialises in hub gear systems, somewhere around notting hill, it would be good to lavish some care and attention on the gears... particularly as it's started complaining to me every now and again...

i went out today without my bicycle lights, only working for an hour or so as i was today, finishing @ midday... after work i did some extra stuff, tutorials with my students, then made my way over to the river to pootle along for awhile,

i stopped in @ the NFT to use their loo and as i was coming out i noticed that double indemnity had just started, 5 minutes in and i didn't even have a ticket yet, so i left it, thinking idly that i might catch a film in town...

cycled into leicester square and the constant gardener had also just started, i missed three minutes or so i think... really enjoyed it, found it curiously moving and also vibrant, city of god director did it...

anyway midway through the film i realised it would be dark when i got out of the cinema, no lights with me, foolish, perilous journey home therefore...

not that anything happened to me, just got caught by the shortness of the light,

x

dance police

A's last night, a work night, i only have to work for 1 and a half hours tomorrow but it is going to hurt...

i started getting ready for my bed about 15 minutes ago but i was simply not allowed to get to my bed...

the other 4 dancers steadfastly refused to let me off the dance floor and i am truley knackered now...

on a school night..

oh dear..

x

strange noises

left my london bridge work to come over to my hammersmith work, a cycle journey by the thames and through several parks... very beautiful today it was too, but i'm getting ahead of myself... just as i came up behind the tate modern i heard and felt this very strange noise coming from my bike...

i stopped (as you do) and the noise stopped...

after a little experimentation i found out that it happened sometimes when i freewheeled... somewhere inside the gear hub of my back wheel... the mysterious holder of the key to more gears, or less gears if i'm unlucky...

after awhile of cycling it stopped doing it, my last thought was that it had something to do with the cold, and when my journey had warmed up...?

but a scary sound, like metal chewing into metal, can't be a good thing...

i'm about to cycle back now from hammersmith to finsbury park, tired... it will be properly dark as well now by the time i get to the canal... maybe find another route...

a little sad today because something beautiful came to an end last night... in my morning lesson part of the time was spent listening to the students music, many minutes listening and not talking... mind free to ponder...

x

piano symmetry grappa sleep

slept well and long last night and today is the first of 2 days off that i am so loving...

in a whole better place than i was in at the start of the weekend, worked yesterday and was still a little not there, worked out that i hadn't slept properly since thursday...

was just round at manolis's ate well, then he offered me some watermelon, which was lovely, then a friend of his offered me some cypriot grappa... i can't remember what they called it but it was just like the italian drink... clear, strong...

asking manolis if he'd had one:

i've had one glass and i'm smiling,

if i have another i'll be laughing,

if i have a third...

cypriot grappa alternating with bits of watermelon... hmmm

then in the warm glow that that gave me i went over to the clerks factory shop on seven sisters road and picked out the 2005/2006 longcat shoe... missed josiah just a bit as she was always the one who helped me decide in that shop... a nice lace-up blue suede affair, trainerish...

spoke with josiah after and have decided to go down there to see the pair of them tomorrow for the day... way too long since i've seen my goddaughter... and tonight i'm off to see felinity and dad, he's in town buying mum's birthday present... annual thing...

and then this piano symmetry... it came out of teaching about modes last thursday, always a tricky subject... the riskiest of those sessions i teach in that module, being the furthest out we go in terms of music theory, and the nature of the group i'm teaching to means it doesn't completely make sense to everyone...

anyway i was thinking about scales afterwards, about the structure of the major scale - tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone... (last year on the same course i had a tony... it made me laugh all year, he didn't find it quite so funny)... and what scale would have the same structure coming down...

so on sunday i sat at my fender rhodes piano and played through some scales to find out... it became clear to me that each scale would have another scale associated with it which was it's mirror image, i found that for all the major modes the mirror image was another major mode except for the dorian mode, which was it's own mirror image...!

one example of the dorian mode is played from D to D using only the white notes...

and i appreciate that this may be a little tricky to follow, i apologise,

following on from this i noticed that the note D on the piano (in between the two black notes), is a point of symmetry for the keyboard, if you put a mirror in the centre of the note D and looked along the keyboard at it, the keyboard would look right...

also the note Ab is a point of symmetry...

i love this... the piano keyboard is so a part of my life... finding a new way to look at it, to percieve it... hmmm

x

not partying with felinity

just got back to this house that has that stale beer smell to it... mayhem strewn about...

i was thinking that they'd have put the house back by now but clearly it went on until the early hours... (7am) and they're still sleeping...

i got my shirt pressed, did my bit setting up the house, recycled the tetrapacks... got in sack loads of loo roll...

then realised that i simply wasn't in the right space for a party... spoke with josiah who offered that i come to brighton for the night, then in the end decided to go down south where felinity was cooking her first ever dahl...

i found all the housemates i could and raised a beer with/to them to not be a damperner... and set off...

which was lovely, we watched some seinfeld, chatted, walked around wandsworth common today, lovely autumn sunlight, a chill in the air... a heron...

i just had a really nice chilled out time with felinity and her flatmate E...

i also really enjoyed the tube journey, both south last night and north today, never tubing it as i don't... a chance to read the book i'm currently reading, what i loved by siri... can't remember her second name, paul auster's wife... the last book i read was by him as well, i wonder if they have any children and if so whether any of them have written anything, it would be good to remain in the family a little while longer...

but also just to experience the strangeness, the unreal warmth against the cold on the surface, the extreme right angle at the top of the stairs at finsbury park when it is so easy to bump into someone walking across you... the palimpsest of posters that have been ripped off and replaced by others that you only see when the new poster has yet to arrive... always makes me think of william burroughs paintings...

so now i'm going to help some in the setting back to normal of the house... i'd like to eat well tonight, i might take G over to jai's...

x

abuse and friendship

i was sat in the amazon cafe today, and P walked in, actually i saw her when she was leaving with a sandwich in her hand... she being the mother of S who runs it now that P has given it over to her...

i just exchanged a few words with P and it pleased me... i felt so different than i'd felt so far today, in fact my whole experience of the amazon was one of friendship and love... so far removed from the one relationship that was bothering me today...

i've just finished teaching the search & reflect intensive week... another source of love it turns out, much appreciation from my students... great week, though hard...

i've not been able to sort out something in my house, actually to do with my cat, because i've been working, and there has been quite some level of agro building up this week because of this...

culminating in a text message from one particular house mate which was abusive... this morning before i went to work...

it hung over me like a cloud of rain through my teaching this morning... i was teaching keyboards first thing, i couldn't shake it...

i think the storm has broken and whilst we're not exactly speaking we'll probably be alright by tomorrow night's party, not something i would normally bother blogging, i don't like giving such things the energy that blogging gives them if that makes sense to you? anyway,

that darkness throwing quite normal exchanges with people into sharp relief, making them seem full of love... that's been my day...

x

arnica power cycling firefly party

mid search & reflect week... the sometimes strange and marvellous set of workshops that JS wrote, he who set up my college with the current boss 20 years ago...

JS died before i even came to london, i learnt the workshops from A, A who left my college recently, @ whose leaving do my current boss told me the story of the welfare state, the organisation who did the first burning down of a model of the houses of parliament that walk the plank did on saturday night to great effect...

anyway, it's always hard work the intensive search & reflect week... and at lunchtime today i realised that i wanted to have an arnica... the homeopathic remedy that i used to carry around with me all the time, but haven't felt the need for for some time now...

it was a conversation with a student that brought on this fragile moment for me... i didn't have the arnica, didn't have any on me... as a cream it's used for bruising, as a pill... (is it homeopathic..?) it's helpful for getting passed emotionally challenging moments, you know when you are a bit paralised by something, can't quite get passed it...

anyway, the afternoon session was even harder work but i was triumphant... somehow, got the students to where i needed to get them, and got myself very much back into a stronger state... cycling home after work was one of those powerful... fast... deeply satisfying journey's... crossing over the thames and then a little later crossing over the regents canal...

on another matter i was kind of hoping that my counter over there would show 1111 on friday, being the 11/11/05, just now when i looked it was up to 1121 already, so it must have passed through the date it represented at some point in the last couple of days, either 1107, 1108 or 1109... i could check actually... maybe i will, the kind of numbery thing i like... i was tempted the mark the moment when i passed the millenium but i forgot, or it didn't matter that day...

and i have been really enjoying firefly the joss whedon scifi series that fox tv axed three years ago that then got turned into the film serenity that i saw a week or two back... i bittorrented the series and i've been watching it on and off for a week now... good characters and pleasing situations... please, please, please make another series, not that i'd get to see it for years now but surely after the film...?

and we're having a party on saturday, i keep forgetting about it and have invited almost noone (actually i just invited a few of the old crowd but it's already wednesday... i am terrible at inviting people to parties) but it should be a swinger... spanish M has thousands of spaniards to call upon, the watts are playing... the cocktails will flow, it'll be a farewell to A also, he's shipping out of this birdbath republic sometime next week...

anyway, the bourne identity is on the box and i quite fancy it, after the day i've had...

x

guy fawkes

and a lovely party...

me & A (temporary resident of this house) made it over to victoria park for the fire works... including the burning of a massive model of the houses of parliament...

we got there about 15 minutes after it was supposed to start and we got there at exactly the right time... a big image of guy bursting into flames as we walked up...

the burning of the houses of parliament was just great... a remake of the 1981 welfare state version i believe... stange how watching the seat of our nations government burn to the ground answered a deep seated need in me...

fireworks hidden in the structure - for example in big ben - went off when the flames reached them, burning the wood around them really quickly...

guy himself appeared, a massive puppet, he walked passed the crowd and around the houses of parliament ending up on top, he was engulfed by flames and utterly destroyed in minutes...

i video'd quite a few bits, including guy's burning and also big ben catching alight and eventually toppling... but when the fireworks really got going, after big ben had come down, the rest of parliament burning away, i put aside the camera and just enjoyed the complete thrill of the fireworks, i so love being in a crowd and oohing and aahing at fireworks, near the end of it they let loose with so much all at once it was truly great...

i've enjoyed quite a few different november 5th nights but this one was the best, largely because of the burning of parliament... (to the talking heads tune - burning down the house)...

we couldn't find spski who'd come down separately, neither did we set eyes on W floopy who was there with Th, they being G's mum & dad, but i spoke with floopy, hope to catch him soon...

we did however see the lovely P whose house we went back to for a bit of a shindig, met her flatmate L which was cool, nice chats about meeting strangers... funnily enough didn't talk with P herself too long, hope to rectify that some day soon... and another friend of P's J, named by her mum after the lawrence durrell book that is the first of the alexandria quartet... she said that she would reread J, and go on to read the rest of the quartet for the first time, pleasing, i hope she does...

eventually me & A wended our way home, got tea and biscuits and watched the 9th gate which was good, but not that good, too slow to do justice to the great arturo perez- reverte book it's based on... but a good attempt...

and now i'm sleepy...

x

stupid

bicycle stupidity at that... on a par with when i fell off my bike because i was reading the map while cycling... but no injuries this time...

my front wheel got a puncture, which i've been waiting for, so i could get a new inner tube with the same kind of valve as the back tire...

so yesterday i walked down hornsey road to the bike shop and they said they didn't have time to fit it but i could buy one... (an inner tube), ok, so i got it, walked the bike home again and swiftly left the house heading down to the angel to meet felinity... we ate and watched wallace & grommit and it was lovely, (we also saw these blue symbols embedded in the pavement on chapel market... marking where the canal goes underground...)...

i got home and set up the video for lost, K was watching attack of the clones and i'm glad because no matter how stupid i might have been there's no way i could match the stupidity of these new starwars films...

anyway, once videoing i decided to replace the inner tube on my front wheel, discovered that in fact to replace the inner tube i had to take off the entire wheel... you live & learn... then i discovered that i'd bought an inner tube with the same mismatched valve on it as my last - now broken - inner tube, the guy in the shop obviously seeing which kind of valve i had already on there and giving me the same type... helpful...

i went round the inside of the outer tube and found the tiny shard of glass that had made the puncture, got it out... feeling pretty conscientious... put the new inner tube in, fought with my bike to get the wheel back on, pumped it up...

and heard the unmistakeable sound of air escaping... another puncture, there must have been two tiny shards of glass i thought to myself... the new inner tube pucturing even now as i put it... having fought for so long with the beast i gave up and went upstairs to watch the video of lost with G (pretty good this week, it's picking up lost is)...

just before i went to bed last night i went to pack up the bike fixing mess and discovered that the new inner tube that i'd bought was still lying over the back of the chair i'd been sat on...

i'd taken out the old inner tube and put it right back in again... the new puncture was the old puncture... stupid...

and today would have been so nice to cycle through - well, cold for sure but nice... the bright sunlight making buildings glow against the dark clouds... the patches of blue inamongst it all... leaving work tonight i had such fun kicking through the leaves underfoot... so anyway i have to do it all again now... that'll learn me...

x