hitchhikers nambuka euston braking

on my way home i video'd the sight from the train braking as it pulled into the platform @ euston (northern line - city branch), which pleases me, as the tunnel leading off to the victoria line is right there in front of you when the train has finally stopped...

then when i got home me & spski went out fairly soon to see sox from college playing with his improvised band, interesting and arresting stuff, although not all to my tastes, interesting violinist, fantastic bassplayer... funnily enough i saw FP there, she doing a gig in the same venue later, but we had already planned to go to the pictures to see hitchhikers guide to the galaxy so we didn't stay, also saw C & E, students...

hitchhikers proved to be immensely satisfying... much of the dialogue exactly as the original... when mos def as ford prefect said time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so i was right at home... heartwarming stuff, probably also great if you're not already a hitchhikers fan, but really great for those of us who are... (except for those who will no doubt pick it to pieces in their purist way)...

once home i got the video out of my camera and i've posted it up there beside grace, squeezing as much out of my 30Mb webspace...

meeting josiah & grace tomorrow morning so i must sleep now...

x

midnight

naked in rainwater...

a song i wrote right after the summer solstice 2, maybe 3 years ago... i want to sing it at this party we're having here on sunday, but it doesn't fit my voice and in fact it never has... one line in the chorus is never heard because it goes too low, so i'm changing it, but it is so hard changing a song i wrote back then, the original way is so strong in my mind (& as a melody it works - just not for my voice)...

so that's an odd deal...

beautiful sunshine right now, straight after a big shower... april living up to it's nickname... change happening before your eyes...

& i'm watching series 3 of 24, i began it back in november but then me & P got together and suddenly i had no need of 24... but these days... i reluctantly picked it up again last week and now i'm about 6 episodes away from the end... it has got really good again... D (bro) tells me he's watching series 4 now... it'll be awhile 'til that happens to me but i'm enjoying this one...

x

Grace on film

probably won't be up there for long but here she is:

grace

enjoy, it's much smaller than it should be so it looks a little rough around the edges...

daktari grace too big

in my struggle to get 15Gb down to as little as possible i revisited quite alot of music that i'd forgotten about making... one gem that turned up was the music i recorded for josiah when she was pregnant, to be played to her bump... of unspecified gender back then so we were using the ungender specific Dr a fair bit... which translated into the name of this tune, daktari (being swahili for doctor)..

i've used it as the music to a short film starring grace that i've made, my first venture into film-making using windows movie maker, sadly too big to put up on my webspace @ 60Mb, maybe i'll find a better compression for it, or maybe i'll find some bigger webspace... it needs refining anyway so it's probably best it's not viewable yet by all and sundry, but it is sooooo cute... all stuff i filmed when they were last here, just before her 19th birthmonthday...

i could gaze at her image all day so i'm not a very good judge of what works or not, there are long shots of her talking to strangers on the tube which i find fascinating... but then she is my goddaughter...

x

compression boring tech post

compressing 15Gb of audio files so that i can completely clear my C drive, so that i can format it and start filling it up again is taking 4 hours... winrar politely putting it all into 700Mb bits so that i can burn them to CD's...

so i went to the rarely used TV room and caught a great program about making birchbark canoes... really nice to see ray mears building it with some old canadian guy, native canadians?... i phoned spski who was in the basement and he came and joined me for this televisual spectacle...

spski has recently obtained two barstools for this basement, for the bar in particular, he got them from someone who needs them every april (early april, 12 months now), on the condition that we provide the owner with a picture of spski riding them home on his bike... which we duly took this early evening... maybe post one of the blurrier ones here...

and now i'm munching toast and wandering what to do... an insane business because there is probably just enough things i want & need to do to occupy me until a sensible bedtime... but i spend so much time in front of my computer that it seems wierd spending time not at my computer...

also odd to have that timeframe... 4 hours... to know that i can't use my computer for 4 hours... time normally passes in it's own uneven way, i love my life most when i'm not thinking of how much time i have left...

anyway, compression continues, my beard really needs trimming, my cat loves me... i love her... life is pretty good..

x

back in cannibalistic thoughts

phew....

so i'm back into my pc... from midnight monday through to now that's a frenetic oh lordy how can i fix this? 60 hours or so...

also odd to have missed more than one episode of both megatokyo & questionable content... nice to have a few back to back...

i'm checking out my RAM situation and before i make the leap from my 256Mb up to 1Gb which is the plan i've cannibalised my old PC, not much to speak of but another 128Mb is not to be sniffed at in these tight times...

had my first sessions @ hammersmith college yesterday, pretty cool... i sang harbour walls to one of my classes on the spur of the moment - i was about to listen to each of their compositions - at first there were sniggers, but i made it clear how out of order that was, incorporating how annoyed it made me into the lyrics... always surprising (to me as well) when real present life turns up in a song... that was the tune i used to improvise some of the lyrics to anyway so it was an easy leap... but it left me a little shaky, vulnerable stuff singing to a group of young people, some of whom snigger...

i also took advantage of their computers to make a bootable CD, to fix my troubles over here... it was a bit experimental but it might have worked... after that i went straight to nippy's then onto our rehearsal, by the time i got home i was sooooo tired... i got straight into bed, savouring the expectation that when i woke up i could try the cd, my troubles over maybe...

then when i woke up this morning i went straight to my keyboard bag to get the cd and discovered i'd left it @ the rehearsal - on the other side of london -

so i was just thinking of who there might be locally who had an xp machine with a cd-writer... weighing up the options of going to get the cd, going to either of my workplaces to burn another (better) one... when P turned up to work on our windows, he lives with my landlord and he has a pc...

NT 2000 as it happens but everything else i needed... so i gathered some things onto a few floppies, trundled over to their's, played a little on the fantastic piano that lives there and gradually made myself a bootable cd with which i have now made my way back into this lovely computer of mine...

x

low tide reality locked out fool future awaits

taught approaches to composition to my class today, basically improvisation... & how it relates to composition...

i included william burroughs, got my students cutting up newspapers... also tossing coins to determine the steps of a scale... a strange afternoon it was... such an unverifiable learning process, seeking to inspire my students but i really don't if i succeeded, and the uninspired ones are the most vocal ones...

anyway, it was one of those rainy/sunny days... a walk @ break did me alot of good, then after the session i went walking down by the thames, low tide, down on the beach i walked to bits i'd never walked before, all the way from the tate modern to the london eye (almost), coming up to a very thin strip of land between the river and the... not sure of the word... the wall...?

lovely sunlight...

then home and this thorny problem i've created for myself, i've been dualbooting between windows98 & xp for a few months & i've finally sorted xp so that i don't have to return to windows98, so i gleefully removed almost everything from my windows98 hard drive, just got 10Gb or so of old audio files to find a home for before i format the whole drive... i was up last night doing all this... called it a night... woke up this morning turning my computer on to aid my lesson planning and it shook it's little head at me... no i'm afraid not sir, you can't have xp... but i only removed windows98 files...? actually sir you removed a crucial xp file and i'm not going to turn on for you, you fool... but i..? talk to the hand...

so tonight i'm blogging from the communal computer downstairs... i'll work out how to get back into my one in good time... also checking out new RAM for mine, want to be really rocking now i've got video going in... this is the downtime before the future me strolls out onto the scene... i can wait... the future is going to be marvellous... x

house full of spaniards camera'd up groaning under the weight

unexpected late one last night, up 'til 4 drinking with M & her spanish horde she has staying here... we polished off the tallinn, then the baileys.. made a dent in the limoncello... guitars were brought out, K sang some of the songs that i love him singing...

then today my new memory cards arrived, my lopsided entry into this new camera world, of course i should have ordered everything at once, but i didn't know, so 1st the camera comes... on wednesday, (along with a stack of london review of books & my tax return), and only then did i think about expanding the memory beyond it's tiny capacity... so i order the memory cards, which come today, and only then do i think about rechargeable batteries... which i set out scouring the streets for this afternoon, getting some & coming home to plug them in (they came empty) then out again to get some ready right now batteries, finally set up i went straight from the carboot sale (batteries) ona longish circular route that eventually came back round to my house...

listening to the shuffle as ever, but also videoing portions of the walk... new camera joy.... solitary walking is so a part of my life, to be able to make records of walks... odd i know, but i'm very drawn to it...

i got home and tried to watch the videos, but they were huge and my PC really struggled with them, it refused to even look at the really huge one (15 minutes of video), and played the smaller one really jerkily.... i'm going to have to get my head around this asf format that it ends up in, some version of the mpeg4 format but one not recommended by the sites i've looked at... microsoft's proprietory format... so i'll be looking for ways to convert to other formats, also to mess with the audio... but this all not your concern, just my brain trying to adjust to this new world...

and my poor PC groaning under the weight of it all, this and the huge swathes of mp3's that are coming my way.... x

tense confusion despatched full of grace chinese girl

so i just got an email from the company i'm buying the camera from, the camera i ordered over a week ago, and it says:

We are pleased to inform you that the following item was despatched on
13/04/2005.

which is tomorrow, so surely it should say:

We are pleased to inform you that the following item will be despatched on
13/04/2005.

however, tenses be damned the thing is finally coming...

my sister K would appreciate the wrongness of their sentence, and it was she who came with me tonight to see maria full of grace which was marvellous, moved me to tears, although not as much as it would have done had the film not stopped... TWICE... BOTH times at CRUCIAL moments in the film, they gave us a free film each at some point in the future (well, before september) which was nice of them, although entirely our due, it was a little like when trains stop in tunnels and you start talking to the people around you... the unexpected community of accidents...

i loved the film, K slightly less so i think... we wagamama'd afterwards after finding our way half by instinct and half by luck through the twisting streets of covent garden...

on the way to the cinema, i was reading the ambidextrous universe on the tube when i happened to notice the box that was in my fellow travellers bag, which was on the seat next to me (she was two seats away)...

CHINESE GIRL caught my attention and i started reading this box... full lips, strong breasts, inviting... HANG ON A MINUTE

this is a family show ladies and gentlemen but i doubt you'll be surprised when i tell you that the name of the product had been slightly hidden, it actually said

CHINESE SEX GIRL

!

so i spoke to the woman, this is really rude of me but i can't help but ask... and she told me she'd found the box... empty, on the train one day and had been keeping it at college, she was taking it home today...? i ended up trying to recount the closing moments of bogeyman that i saw a few weeks ago and she'd fallen asleep in the other night... almsot got to the crucial bit when she had to get off the train... always the way with random train conversations, they are going to a different stop to you...

and finally, i'm expanding my work horizons tomorrow by going to see another college about a few hours work a week... only a step but a significant one for me... that's all...

x

old and new cameras

just uploaded lots of the pictures i took this early evening by the river to my flickr... a whole load of photos of the sky reflected in the surface of the water collecting on a long step, the tide was going out, so water was being left places as the waves receded... i find those photos hypnotic but it's quite possible they're also... boring... but not to me (not yet anyway)...

i finally found out what's happening with my new camera, for some reason i hadn't checked my gmail account for awhile and that was where the email from them was, with an easy link to where is my camera that i ordered and paid for OVER A WEEK AGO?... they didn't have it in stock, despite clearly saying that they did have it in stock when i ordered it... so it's coming... should be here within the next few days...

and it kind of makes me feel nostalgic for my camera phone... nostalgic clearly the wrong word as i'm still using it now, but... a little like when i move house, which i used to do roughly once a year in my early london days... each trip to the shops, or just up the street, an awareness that you won't be doing that much longer...

except that i will still use my camera phone - i won't always have my NEW camera with me i guess...

just looking at my photos on flickr, then looking at other people's photos with more pixels... that'll be me...

any day now x

solitary walking

so as i left the house today i listened to a couple of mark murphy tracks which i was checking out, but the main thing was to make sure i got on a bus by 1.00 listening to eternal rhythm by don cherry, a bus journey being the only way today (i thought) i could listen to my shuffle for the whole length of that album uninterupted...

it turned out to be a largely freely improvised album... not quite what i was expecting... but glad to have the experience as the number 17 bus took me from holloway road to st pauls cathedral, on this beautiful sunny day, as i crossed over the river on the millenium bridge dark side of the moon kicked in, the first few tracks got me from there to work, a couple of workshops and a telephone marking meeting the rest of the album got me back to the river, with lakshmi shankars wonderful voice accompanying me as i stooged about, taking pictures of more steps going into the thames... the tide was going out as i moved west along the thames going down to the (dropping) waters edge whenever i could...

i loved the look on one man's face as i came up from the water, undid the gate and crossed over into where everyone else was walking... like i'd walked out of the river...

lakshmi turned to L. as i wended my way ever west, stopping in the NFT for a cup of tea and some cake, finishing the book i was reading, the very interesting the mandate of heaven by s j marshall, pseudonym of my friednly neighbourhood yijing authority... i eventually crossed over to the north side of the river on the west hungerford bridge (or maybe it's south, the thames having turned a corner by then) - opened as the hungerford bridges and then reopened a few months later (i think) in 2003 as the golden jubilee bridges...

always the hungerford bridges to me...

i walked into town, eventually finding my way into foyles bookshop where i bought on the natural history of destruction by w g sebald, the last one i haven't read by him, well, the last full book, dribs and drabs come out now he's dead...

then, still listening, L. shankar turning into the band he used to be in, shakti, took me home... and i'm just stopping by before i go out to jai's to eat some great, great food... i had a look on itunes and i worked out that i'd listened to 3.9 hours of music today on my shuffle... that's alot of solitary walking, reminds me of a pablo neruda poem... can't remember which one, i will curl myself up like a cat, having spoken to noone...

x

gate i want to squeeze through x 

disused

the disused railway that runs from finsbury park to highgate is beginning to be a little like blewburton hill for me, when i was living with my mum & dad i would walk on that hill all the time, the past few weeks i've been up and down that disused numerous times...

it's really because i've got my shuffle, and i spend way too much time sat in front of this very computer downloading mp3's, a certain time of day will arrive and i'll look up, realise i've almost missed the light, cram all i can onto the shuffle and get walking, it's not always the disused but it generally is...

today it was the music of L. Shankar, he of shakti fame, an album from 2000 with Zakir Hussain and T.H Vinayakram, also from shakti... last week i downloaded a lakshmi shankar album thinking it was L. shankar, this week i downloaded an L. shankar album thinking it was a lakshmi shankar album... both wonderful accidents, lakshmi a female singer who is amazing, l. a male violinist (& singer it seems)...

also a little shakti, a little ali farke toure, then the entire return journey to herbie hancock's headhunters... music so nourishes me sometimes...

made it all the way to the highgate end this time, the tunnels... must squeeze through the gates one day and walk down one of them.. scare myself... i love that whole bit right at the end of the disused - or at least the partial end, if you can find your way through highgate you can pick it up again and walk all the way to alexandra palace, i tried to trace the way today but didn't get too far and it was getting a little dark and i wanted to get back...

new camera still not here, the company i bought it from also curiously silent on emails... scares me a little but i guess it'll come...

going a little deeper into the yijing (i-ching), i probably won't talk about it much here, just to let you know that's where i'm at, funny how asking questions of an oracle suddenly makes you a nutter in some people's eyes... x

music

once more up @ this hour and i'm finally uploading some mp3's somewhere on the web to sit beside ramjac's jam session over there under the links and above the books...

the first one is harbour walls as recorded recently, dedicated to K & P & myself, my voice and the fender rhodes that my dad found in the village hall...

this is followed by an improvisation from 2001 when my gran passed away, Sadie's Gone, piano (a keyboard i've had since i was 16) & SH1000 synthesiser which actually belongs to ramjac...

then the jam from march...

i've got a big day tomorrow and i really am a bit stupid being up at this hour...

x

brave new world of light jam fruits

strange and wondrous day...

meant to wake up @ 9 when the windowcleaner came... thus helping me shift me sleep cycle earlier and getting my windows cleaned... so keen am i for this...

but i was up 'til 3 faffing about on soulseek and i was in no mood to arise when dr K knocked on my door this morning, leaving said door wide open, i drift back into my dreams...

next thing i know my landlord and the handyman are in my room looking at my shelves.. surreal experience this is... i ask my landlord about the window cleaner, he's not coming, could you pull the door shut on your way out please?

arise a few hours later... excitedly check downstairs to see if my new camera has arrived... no luck...

then spend hours just waltzing through soulseek, listening to many, many gems... oh my shuffle i could fill you again and again and again...

finally get dressed, open my curtains and it's clearly been raining but the sun is shining...

HOW NICE IS THAT?

blue skies even now, a freshness from the rain with beautiful light... light like the camera in my phone can't deal with... but that my new camera....

but it's not here yet...

and i got an email from ramjac... with a link to the first recording i've heard from our jam sessions... it'll live over there in the links... enjoy, (that's me on the keys - except for some dicordant stabs from A)...

x

went over to P's to give her a copy of harbour walls, recorded just before i left for home and intended to be heard by her, K and myself, (my mum & dad also heard it while i was at home)...

cedric nash has given me his copy of gathering evidence by thomas bernhard, his memoir which i used to possess but haven't seen for a few years, i started rereading it today, although i still haven't got very far, his style is so dense, by which i'm only really talking about his absolute lack of paragraph breaks, very few chapter breaks either...

also watched the first episode of dr who with christopher eccleston on video, not sure what this weekend holds for me but i suspect i may be watching the second episode tomorrow early evening, just as i saw ring and then ring 2 on wednesday & thursday nights, ring i watched with my mum, surprised me that she watched it all, surprised her as welli think, japanese horror not normally her bag...

also surprised myself by now wanting to watch the american version of ring 2, as it's directed by the japanese director... although in two minds as to whether that means i should watch the american ring... almost certainly rubbish...

my second night back @ home in london, balthazara here with me, now i'm back here the weather has got nice again, nothing but grey down in the countryside, even so i had a lovely walk up the hill while i was down there, posted a picture up on my flickr which has earnt me my first comment... strange the communities that exist on the internet...