comes in 3's

woke up today and i was slowly making my tea in my immediate just got out of bed way and i read a note from my housemate....

hard to describe it but behind the note i know what kind of headspace she was in when she wrote it... a fairly petty, irritating headspace... and i read it just as my day was coming into focus.. i tried not to let it get to me but as i took my morning shower i could feel it buzzing around, as i became more conscious i could feel this point, a little like an insect sting/bite rising within me...

turned on my computer because i needed to check some information before i set off for work and someone had left a comment on my blog (this very blog) which might well have been left with some nice intention but was not percieved like that by me this morning, friend to the friendless... singling me out as being the friendless...

tempting to simply reply with a f**k off but i didn't, just let this new irritating thing join with the note...

then i was just leaving the house and i found that my back bicycle tire was completely flat...

and i comforted myself with the thought that they come in 3's, these irritating things, and that was my 3...

and lo & behold i managed to shake off the cloud and go about my day... taught a good keyboard lesson with the other keyboard teacher taking half the group, experimental time for us as we check out how best to combine our talents, promising beginning,

and then i was in town, bicycleless (i had no time to deal with the flat tire this morning, took the train in), in this grey day, with my camera... so i stooged about abit...

i was videoing the water of the thames and i fell into a conversation about the tide with a passing banker type, quite a banking hour or so it was in fact because i decided to go and seek out something M had told me about last night, right in the heart of the banking part of the city (bank - funnily enough)...

i almost couldn't get to it because it's part of a posh bar/restaurant with a dress code - (me in standard issue longcat scruffiness) but i managed it... and it was pretty great, very odd...

it's called 1 poultry and it's an ugly looking building right by bank tube, the entire top floor is the posh bar/restaurant but you can just get the lift up & go straight to this odd garden..

through the garden you get to a viewing platform which suspends you over the bank crossroads... i didn't hang out too much up there but i'll be returning again many times... high rooftops in london so do it for me...

after this little adventure i got a bus up to angel to check out which films i could see with the last of the free cinema tickets, that expired today, i had two tickets but couldn't raise another film lover (friendless you see) so i settled on watching wolf creek on my own, with the option of another film later in the day if i wanted it...

wolf creek was an hour or so off yet and i decided to hang out in angel instead of popping home, had i had my bicycle i'm sure i would have just come home and i like the fact that i didn't, that a different routine brought something different from me...

i found my way down to the canal and took a fair bit of video of the water, climbing over the lock to get some good views of the weir and the big old lagoon type thing they have there...

quite content by the time i got to the cinema, the canal perfect for me...

and then wolf creek absolutely ripped that contentment to pieces... horrible film... good, but horrible, felt cheated by it somehow in a way that i can't describe without giving away the film - which i'm not going to do - even though i would strongly recommend that you not watch it... horrible thing...

walked back through highbury and holloway listening to gil scott heron, that cloud from my morning solidly back around my shoulders... the sky above actually clearing just a little, patches of blue sky through the grey...

typical of autumn really for me this day, bits of moodyness, bits of good free inspiration and hope... the last day of september...

x

music making

M came round, a little later than planned, played me his track with a lovely vocal on it, recorded back in 2000 with a singer who i've heard on some great music...

i gradually got my head around the changes, the arrangement, it included a section where i could do what i liked, expand on the harmonic framework of the rest of the piece... fantastic opportunity, just the environment which nourishes me and which brings good playing from me... also good musical thoughts....

he bought a bottle of wine, plugged the same little 70's mic's that G had used to record connie - into his laptop, the fender rhodes swathed in it's own lovely vibrato, balthazara came in midway through the second take and sat on my bed, contentedly part of the recording session...

a very satisfying session, lovely tune, brought some good playing out from me, great also to revel in the glorious sound of the rhodes - which M himself had fixed only a week ago,

some good conversation after before he disappeared into the night, i have to teach tomorrow morning and i'll be a little fuzzy what with the red wine...

x

new jouneys

thursdays look like becoming quite a large day for me...

a three hour workshop in the morning, followed by an hour's journey (probably get it much quicker though) then a two hour workshop over here in hammersmith, then a... well i don't know how long it'll take me to get home, i'm just about to open up my bicycle map and see how far away the canal is from here...

not huge like mondays are - nor indeed by a normal working persons standards, but pretty big for me, and the classes so different... the morning with the production students, learning about harmony, organised adults... the afternoon with a BTEC class doing keyboards, mad chaos...

so i cycled along the river as far as i could to get from london bridge to here... i know there's a quicker way without really following the river at all but my quality of life is important to me... i like the challenge of this new arrangement, over the next few thursdays becoming better at the journey, both the one i've already made and the one i'm about to make (home again)...

M coming round tonight for me to put some rhodes on his tune, M who fixed my rhodes last week... glad to repay him with what i do well...

ok, not much else to say, just wanted to mark this time and place, first lesson of the new term @ hammersmith done... my working week fairly certain now, tomorrow mornings keyboard class over in southwark will be the last new thing of the term, then it's all in place and rolling along... must ring that other keyboard tutor...

x

sevens

7 Things I Want To Do Before I Die

1. write a book
2. start a family
3. make at least one really good album
4. become a music therapist
5. be able to make music all the time (i.e. – to not work)
6. be a member of a library in every borough of london
7. live in another country

7 Things That I Cannot Do

1. cook (in more than a basic way)
2. dress stylishly without the help of others
3. stop reading a book without finishing it
4. produce my own music to an industry standard (i.e. – i want other people to produce my music)
5. capoeira
6. speak any language other than english
7. drive a car (legally)

7 Things That Attract Me To The Opposite Sex

1. intelligence
2. sense of humour
3. beauty (inner as well as outer)
4. the right smell
5. bookishness
6. originality
7. strength

7 Things That I Say Most Often

1. ok people,
2. i don’t believe i’m being overly ambitious…
3. on your feet
4. yes please
5. bollocks
6. hey beautiful (to my cat)
7. x

7 Celebrity Crushes

1. anne-marie duff
2. lauren laverne
3. jill scott
4. nicole kidman
5. julianne moore
6. catherine zeta-jones
7. angelina jolie

7 People I'm Tagging To Do This

uncle filmo (but he’ll have to get hisself a blog to do it)
felinity
stringbeanjean
balthazara (my cat)
miles davis (from beyond the grave)
fernando pessoa
paulette

x

underground effra

pumped up my tires, oiled my chain and went into work for 30 minutes of paid work... insulting and at the same time not insulting... nice that they value my opinion, a lot of travelling for so little work,

saw nippy there and she told me how she'd dreamt of me last night, we had a lovely chat over my tea and banana cake, sat outside the island cafe, right in front of la palma where i normally eat, bizaare to betray them in such a blatant way but their cake - and come to think of it their tea... are just not as good, i wouldn't eat a whole meal in the island but their banana cake is really nice...

i cycled to the river then put on my headphones and listened to the house track that me & lovely M wrote that night after mobile clubbing...

ended up heading west then south, following the river passed westminster bridge, onto bits of the thames path i hadn't before cycled on,
it was low tide and getting lower and i was really enjoying looking at the little lakes left by the departing tide, water loving birds hanging out in the shallows... took a long bit of video from the thames path of one such lake, using my new found technique of putting the camera onto a solid surface...

got almost all the way down to vauxhall bridge where there is a slope going down to the water's edge... left my bike against the embankment
wall and stooged around a fair bit, finding large stones to put the camera on and videoing the things that caught my eye, another tidal lake where a couple of mallard ducks tolerated my presence for awhile, it never ceases to amaze me how far below the thames path the actual mud of the river lies...

some odd looking mechanical stuff drew me to the river Effra's storm relief channel... i didn't go under the bridge but i suspect the main river Effra channel spits out just where that odd tower is in this picture... i used to gig at a pub in brixton called the effra, never knew it was a river, an underground river at that... all the london rivers i knew of before feed the thames from the north, my picture of south london is more complete now with this river running below brixton, making it's sorry way to the thames just here by vauxhall bridge...

the afternoon had been beautiful when i began my riverside cycle but it was getting grey and almost raining by now so i hauled the bike back up to the paved thames path and made it back to westminster bridge, thereafter following the same route i found last thursday, through st james's, green & hyde parks... a little street action by marylebone tube then the regents canal through to camdem...

my lovely £10 bike carrying me with it's own version of graceful...

x

transformation

a little annoyed that i forgot about the march today, would have liked to have been part of that protest against the war... i love that it was worldwide, 100,000 people in washington (and that's what they're telling us, so maybe 130,000?)...

another hurricane hit the american gulf today/yesterday, rita gave the authorities something to be organised about, they'll be hoping we forget the way they dealt with katrina no doubt...

and i didn't go to a party tonight, feel a little cocooned still, almost hibernating, or maybe woodshedding as the jazzers put it... would have been a good party as well, L (bassist)... his flatmate C, they have a recording studio project together, C's birthday tonight and he invited me to bring my sound module down and play, a keyboard there...

but if you don't feel it you don't feel it...

and what did i do i hear you ask yourselves?

well i stayed in and got my video footage together, sat through 20 minutes of my ceiling, mapping out how it changed over that time... video'd at some point before spski went away, i woke up and gazed at it,
the pattern that the light reflecting off the cars outside made on it, i turned on my camera and lay it on my bed when i went downstairs for my cup of tea, got chatting to spski... came back up 20 minutes later... only now looking at it properly, although it was still on my camera when me & P went down to brighton last weekend and we stared at the first 5 - 10 minutes before our train arrived in preston park... it stays still for minutes at a time but when it changes it transforms in a great way... my film is about the transformation between summer and autumn, well, it's now & we're almost all the way into autumn now, but transformation still... and i'd love to use one of all of these ceiling transformations, as itself and also representing the shift from light to dark... summer to autumn...

such an odd activity, staring at a largely motionless thing, waiting for it to change, reminded me of a night years ago when i was lying on the sofa in my parttime lover's flat, waiting for her to come in to her living room, listening for sounds of her, i guess we'd slept separately that night but i was hoping she'd sneak in to join me... and as i was lying there waiting and listening this in turn reminded me of a couple of other things, a piece of music that is great, that is grooving away but which really rises at one point, which i listen to, trying to divine the moment when it builds, getting it wrong... (something off miles's porgy & bess which i must impotr into my PC, i lust after it's sound these days)... and then one other thing? i wander what it was...? i wander if i made a note of it...

also i've been thinking about the i-ching again recently, particularly now, looking at the changes in the world around me, the i-ching being the book of changes... something i read or talked with SJ about - to do with really looking at the changes around you and seeing the seeds of future events in the changes you see now...

maybe i'll ask it something again...

x

tennis...

my arse...

went to the loo, made a tea, all in a blur of activity so that i could catch the beginning of the life and death of colonel blimp on BBC2 this afternoon, but the m*th**f**king tennis is delaying it... found myself watching a pokemon film on channel 5 while i waited until i realised what i was doing...

i know other people find tennis interesting, and i can see that if the match is exciting it's good to be able to stay with it...

but...

quote from a commentator:

they've started a mexican wave down there to celebrate... more like a swiss roll...

help me

late sunlight

blessed day without work, fridays will be a working morning, but not until next week, then my irritatingly short lessons start... going all the way into work for only one & a half hours...

but then it'll be midday and i'll be near the river...

hammersmith still want me even though i took so long letting them know i couldn't do thursdays like they'd booked for me, the manager there is famously useless but he's also a supportive and nice guy when the mood takes him... so my timetable hasn't quite settled down yet, but for now it looks blissfully light, tuesdays and wednesdays off, i can't quite work out if i can afford to live on it (or indeed pay off my summer debts with it) but i'm liking the look of it...

at some point earlier today i was really digging the idea of making a short film to put music too, as i've intimated here before, a rainy afternoon it was, but clearing up a bit so i put on my big coat and scarf and wandered around out there with my camera and my shuffle,
M.I.A got me (on foot) to the holloway road where i chilled out a little @ the amazon, S & S their usual delightful selves... then miles's E.S.P album took me up the road, off to the west through a little park i keep forgetting about, played a little on the roundabouts and carried on following a route i'd walked once before,
passed this great lantern made from nescafe tins, ending up at tufnel park...

then looped back round, miles playing along with herbie hancock on piano, one of those quintet albums from the 60's, wayne shorter, tony williams... back on this side of the holloway road i took some video from that odd circular stone in the park by the beaux arts building, resting the camera on the stone and getting views like the library both directly and reflected in the water that gathered from the rain earlier...

met a 2 & a half year old with his mum (P & T), perfectly nice... then once home and transfering all the images and video's onto my computer balthazara came in and we loved each other for awhile, her watching the computer screen while i tried to get rid of something from her fir... she gets love in different ways from each member of this household and now they're almost all away she misses them...

not quite

ok i got it a bit wrong, the equinox is 18:23 at some american time... 22.23 for us brits... gives me a few more hours to work up something, only really getting why the equinox is at a precise time rather than just a day... as i said on that last post the sun crosses the equator at this time... i love reading about celestial events, trying to get my head around them,

must get a tiny tripod for my camera, the video is so much clearer when i'm not holding it...
just got a little hypnotised by a video i took earlier of the canadian war memorial: maybe my equinox creativity will be putting together some of these hypnotic videos and recording a rhodes accompaniment to them?

hmmm

x

teaching and cycling equinox coming

in bed last night i had trouble sleeping at first, thinking about how i would teach today, it payed off, good lesson, although i learnt a little about my students and i went a bit too fast for a few, plenty of time for them to catch up though, now i'm aware of it...

after work i ate in stinky - the cafe near there, then got on my bike and cycled up to the tate modern, lay outside there on the grass reading from the jose saramago book, eventually getting up and putting my shuffle into my ears, first a few lauryn hill tunes then lakshmi shankar made me want to not cycle on any roads, just drift along listening to tunes... so i followed the thames west this time, all the way round to westminster bridge, rather than forsake the music i walked my bike over the bridge and passed parliament, getting back on again at st james park,

hung about by the canadian memorial for awhile, lovely thing, gentle water cascading down, lots of maple leaves etched into the stone... tasteful, unlike most memorials...

then through to hyde park, a little rest from the music while i navigated actual streets from hyde park to the regents canal, this time i got it at very nearly the other end from tuesdays journey, that time i met it at the thames, this time just along from little venice, where it turns into the grand union canal...

lakshmi shankar still serenading me as i took the canal passed regents park, then camden, by the huge gas cylinders at kingscross, eventually to the other end of that tunnel that i stopped at coming from the other direction on tuesday...

today's route as compared to tuesday's route, only 11 miles or so today...

right, only half an hour or so until the sun passes over the equator, i want to be playing the fender rhodes and i want a cup of tea first...

x

poetry autumnal equinox

saw felinity tonight (wednesday) and we saw crash, a very long, hard, train wreck of a film... actually good but not easy, and with one or two glaring faults...

a film that tries to look racial identity and prejudice in the eye and succeeds partly but is also caricatured and stereotyped... two words which maybe shouldn't be used in the past tense like that now i'm looking at them...

anyway we had a nice time, she treated me to a dinner and we got in to the film with almost the last of those free tickets...

she told me that yesterday, when i posted that pablo neruda poem for stringbeanjean she'd assumed it was part of this poetry meme that LJ people were doing, all kinds of people posting poetry, but it wasn't, and i find it pleasing, the coincidence...

came home just in time for lost which was alright, i just cannot wait for six feet under to get to terrestrial tv... lost is ok... but give me the undertakers any day of the week,

almost got sucked into a film that i missed the beginning of, had james spader and was set in mexico... it looks good so i'll watch it in it's completeness one day (assuming i find out what it is)...

and then i realised that the autumnal equinox is almost upon us, so wrapped up in the actual changing season that i'd forgotten this celestial event was coming, i often get good creativity around the equinox's and solstices and here i am with it about to happen with a fully functioning fender rhodes piano just sat here...

pleasing...

ok, planning my teaching tomorrow, later kids

x

fender rhodes

mad day, taking roughly a fivers worth of copper coins to the sainsburies in angel to pour them into that machine which gives you money for the money (minus their cut)... going into two useless lloyds banks before the one in angel with a very helpful manager... gradually sorting out my finances in this temporary way...

then on to a meeting at work, apprentice issues... lost one a couple of weeks back, now i'm gaining several...

and tonight M came round, M who teaches with G who records me, he had a look at my fender rhodes (beautiful, old, analogue, electric piano... heaven when it's working) he found a problem or two, did a bit of soldering, tweaked a few places, showed the old beast some love and it responded by being restored to it's natural volume - which is massively loud...

it's amazing how playing it at it's tiny volume just misses out on the truly great sound it has... such a difference emotionally to play it and hear it's fullness, not that i'm playing on ten, four is a little too loud...

played cards with G just now, carried on drinking after sharing a glass or two with M (basking in the glory of the restored fender rhodes), spanish M & edge off to barcelona tomorrow, the house will be so quiet with just me, T & G... although Gr is coming to stay in edges room... that man can can make a noise... and then irish G is back on friday...

so now to bed, no work tomorrow so i'll be playing this beautiful rhodes all day, meeting felinity in the evening...

x

happy day

x

leaning into the afternoon (for stringbeanjean)

leaning into the afternoon i cast my sad nets
towards your oceanic eyes.

there in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames,
its arms turning like a drowning man's.

i send out red signals across your absent eyes
that wave like the sea or the beach by a lighthouse.

you keep only darkness, my distant female,
from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges.

leaning into the afternoons i fling my sad nets
to that sea that is thrashed by your oceanic eyes.

the birds of night peck at the first stars
that flash like my soul when i love you.

the night gallops on its shadow mare
shedding blue tassels over the land.

pablo neruda

the void

my trip down to brighton yesterday was entirely due to P lending me the train fare (and looking after me all day)... close to the edge as i was... and today i'm over that edge...

lent my last note for a few hours to someone only to find they didn't have the means to give it back, which happens, and with this person i don't mind normally, i've got it, she hasn't, but when i don't have it either it puts a slightly different spin on it... so it hastened the approach of the void...

spent my last coins this morning on a croissant & a smoothie (bizaarely extravagant) and then went off to work, teaching the teaching group, nice to meet them and to check out how what they've got, P sang the song she wrote for D, we had a bit of a sharing of people's tunes to get a flavour of each other...

M bought me lunch, i finished up there and set off in the mid afternoon sunlight, pushed play on my shuffle and p j harvey's album came on, i decided to float along the river a bit, listening...

that first tune, the void, the sunlight, all quite intoxicating, cycling along the thames path passed the tate modern... stopped after the second tune and phoned my bank, the void though exciting is not a place i can stay in... since then i've found a way out but back then i was skint with no plan as to being not skint and there's something i like about that...

i decided to give the whole album a spin so i turned around and started heading towards the sea, crossed over by the tate modern and wended my way along the north bank of the river, as much as possible cycling by the water but it's a bit patchy the thames path once you get passed the tower of london,

got as far as the isle of dogs and realised i'd gone too far, missed the limehouse cut where the regents canal spits out... retraced my wheels a little, found the cut, by now the album was finished, not ready to comment on it beyond a yes, yes, but i'll let you know my thoughts later...

so i followed the regent all the way from the thames to angel, got home 2 & a half hours after i left work, body tired, 13 miles of cycling... ran my bath straight away... p j harvey & the void mapped onto my physical exhausted self...

x

exhausted

about to hit they hay after a long weekend...

spent today in brighton for grace's birthday party... went down with P and it was nice hanging out with her... grace on top form surrounded by her adoring boyfriends, three of the five (or is it six?) godparents in attendance, a fourth one doing her monthly internet radio show tomorrow night (monday) at 6:00pm (london time) over on stads fm, well worth checking her out if you can hook your computer up to some speakers...

bo was down there too, she'd made a fantastic apple & cinnamon cake, enjoyed by all us adults, just before the kids dug into the very yellow birthday cake,

dr K on good form, her, me & witchy making up the three godparents, witchy's kids being the boyfriends... P fell in love with 10 year old H... Y & M turned up as well, marriage in the air... with their M... funny to be there with P, when we were together we'd gone down to brighton to see grace & josiah who were staying in Y & M's flat, we slept on their sofa...

all this after r9's party last night at which nippy's band played, M the drummer got stuck in traffic and was 4 hours late for the gig but strangely the crowd (small as it was) hung around waiting for us to play... we got on stage around 3am, i got into bed last night @ 6:30, running on empty a fair bit today therefore...

took a fair bit of video of my fantastic goddaughter, maybe enough now to put together another little film, very tempted to use that old jungle tune original nutter because that's what she is...

teaching P tomorrow morning with the rest of the new teaching course group, interesting year ahead, i'm looking forward to meeting them again as a group, must to bed now...

x

world wide web

having a run of good chess wins over on gameknot... peppered here and there with some losses, of course now that i've said that i'm doomed...

no work today (friday) after more work in two days than i'd done in a month, stayed in bed a fair bit...

i also spent way too long on the internet, i discovered a few kookie things here and there, for example, what so should be a tribute to me but isn't (click on zoom in, but beware of pumping techno) - repent ur sins to longcat, (their spelling)...

being just one expression of the LongCat meme:

A picture of a white cat being held up so as to stand on its back feet, showing off its unusually long body. LongCat became a fairly popular meme on /b/, and predictably has been Photoshopped to hell and back by /b/tards.

just what /b/ is i don't know and may never know, thankyou to these kindly people for the explanation... 4chan...?

and then i saw this which i'd completely forgotten about, in fact never knew about, they've changed their name, used to be audioscrobbler, (which in fairness is a rubbish name)... a community i joined back in march that logs what music i listen to, or at least the music that itunes on this PC plays, not the whole of my listening, cd's, my shuffle, even the occasional vinyl record make up more of the picture, not to mention live music, and accidental overheard music...

so if someone were to be looking at that last link right now they'd see that i'm listening to chet baker, a lovely album called grey december which starts with a few sung numbers then the bulk of it is made up of trumpet tunes... which are growing on me, i used to only be interested in his voice, vulnerable like my own voice, the instrumental tunes on this album remind me of miles's birth of the cool which makes sense of course because in the 50's he was in the cool school, some nice pictures of him over on that link under his name, from 50's poster boy to 80's ragged junkie...

and lastly i recieved an email around midnight saying:

Dear tibbsy,

As of this morning your website is 100% full. You are using all of your site quota of 30720 KBytes.

(tibbsy being another name for balthazara)

an email i've had every night since i filled up my webspace with whatever nonsense i've filled it with, (my mp3's or my videos as linked to from the side there) on the 9th of may, (just before felinity's 25th birthday)

there is something comforting about this nightly email... i've since found other webspace which i'm in the process of filling and i could remove a kilobyte or two from this one but i like recieving my gentle reminder, also i like that i filled it up so exactly, to the kilobyte...

ok, a bath... then my bed, too much world wide web for now (or maybe just enough)

x

dancing

full on day, first full day of work as promised and not enough sleep which was no surprise, began the day without tea very shakily, but i'm a good teacher and it didn't take long to get back on track, great morning session with new students, promising bunch...

during the day i found out that my ipod shuffle is not broken afterall, G (recording/producer G) with the knowledge, and M right there with knowledge too, teaching pair @ mywork,

directly after work i cycled over to london bridge for mobile-clubbing, my now functioning shuffle put to good effect, although the selection of tunes was not the most dance happy set i'd ever made... i ended up grooving to the headhunters album, herbie hancock's electric jazz-funk, found dr K, spanish M, G (watts daughter), spski & edge and we rocked it right there on the bridge, amid commuters, pretty arsy commuters at that, a middle aged woman approached me at one point and said what are you f**kers doing here?... mobile-clubbing i replied...

it normally takes me ages to get dancing, the layers of self-consciousness falling away only slowly, but with your own music, amongst a small crowd of ravers, all @ different tempos, somehow it got groovy for me pretty quickly, good company of course does wonders...

i stayed for the 1st two tracks on headhunters, chameleon & water melon man, then the rest of that album saw me drifting down the thames & just over tower bridge, before plunging into the ditch and finding my way though to mare street, the home of lovely M... even got to cycle by the canal for a brief stretch...

M who was present @ one of producer G's early summer jams, beautiful man and a maker of beautiful tunes, and we made the sexiest tune tonight... long planned for and not a moment too soon... many beautiful tunes coming from that relationship i hope...

x

transition

from summer to autumn, and from rest to work...

my happy, lazy lifestyle, creative and bookful, is coming to an end, work calls, tomorrow (later today), my first full day of work, actual teaching for once... tight belts for a few more weeks until i get paid... always the poorest part of the year for me...

today, after lunching @ the amazon i walked up the disused railway with spski, we popped into prospero's books but the fernando pessoa book of poetry i've had my eye on was too slim for too much, i'll get the one in foyles next time i'm down there... he went back down to jai's and i carried on up the parkland until the highgate tunnels... taking all kinds of pictures, maybe a few will come out... then i walked back down, passed a man singing to himself which pleased me, and in fact drew some song from my voice too, but he sounded better than me...

passing close to where he lives i phoned floopy... G's dad, (they form the father & daughter punk band the watts) and i popped round for some conversation, i'll be returning there next week for another chess duel... i beat him back then but i bet he's been practising...

and now i'm getting afew things together for my teaching tomorrow...

a certain energy or mood out there today, really nice, sunny, summery moments and blowy, autumny moments too...

you know those days when you get lot's of eye contact from strangers...?

that was today for me,

x

doors that open beaux arts building goodge street tube

this is all about thursday, two days later, first the lovely afternoon, then the night...

i went over to manolis's to break my fast, early afternoon, took the guardian weekly with me and devoured it gradually, manolis had loufkia for once and as ever that lovely dish sorted me right out...

i left there and wandered up the holloway road, turning into manor gardens and on a whim into the public library there - with the amazing old school neon sign (i'm guessing neon - you know those 50's tubes that light up)... i didn't stay too long but i stumbled out into the garden which i didn't know existed, looking back at the building i'd just left i could see it's beautiful semicircular shape, invisible from the road... i came back out through the library and there's a sign at the front, not just a sign in fact it's the real thing... this first stone was laid by... la la la... in 1905 (i paraphrase), placing the library about 12 years after this street that i live on, and hence this house i live in...

so with this vague map of times and places i walked up the street, hoping to find out when the beaux arts building was built... now when i'd first moved to this area, 4 years ago, i'd walk up eburne road (which comes off seven sisters road perpendicularly) and see this building a few streets across with what looked like palm trees on top of it... this turned out to be the beaux arts building which i now walked up to and tried the expensive looking glass door...

and to my surprise it opened... so i walked in, and had a look around, who wouldn't?

i found my way up who knows how many floors and out onto the roof, saw the palm trees (not palm trees actually but some similar potted variety), the huge chimneys, some covered with ivy in the afternoon sunlight, looked out over london, great to see this area where i live and wander from this height...

such a beautiful day, such a lovely chance to explore, as i was leaving i passed a very pleasingly symmetrical ornamental garden... then just before i walked out into the world once more i asked a security guard when it was built and he told me 1909... i pushed the door to leave but it was now locked, had to push a button to get out, who knows when i'll go in there again..

that night i went out with my work because A is leaving, has left i suppose by now...

last year whilst observing the teaching of one of my students, this student told me he was glad it was me that was observing him because when he first started at my work i had interviewed him and i'd done the first workshop with the prospective students that day... somehow i was the face of my work for him... of course this pleased me... (flattering your assessing tutor during assessment)

now when i started @ my work - 8 years or so ago (when i was first a student there), A was the face of (her) work for me, she was the person who i met when i first walked into the door, i signed onto a series of workshops that she was running, that turned out to be search & reflect, which i now teach...

so it was quite an emotional night... we got drunk, i had asked my friend M to look after my keys (and my bicycle light, bicycle clips, plastic wallet travelcard thing)... and then completely forgotten about it... many people there to talk to, myworks past and present, spannaman may do a little saxing for me, me & P (mywork from years back) might get together to work on some gospel voicing (on the piano)... all kinds of good talk and plans, i got pretty drunk...

at a certain point M left, later still i remembered about my belongings in her bag... nothing i could do by then, she'd gone home, deep south, my bike would have to remain there and i'd have to get home by public transport, get into my house somehow, not enough to spoil the evening so i carried on...

got into a good conversation with D my boss, me & D haven't always been on the best of terms and it was good to have a drunken conversation with him for once... absurdity and humility, he had some great stories about random art events in london, a group called the welfare state who built a 60 foot model of the houses of parliament in front of the houses of parliament and then burnt it down... then lost their arts council funding... (he said you could see the flames from lewisham)...

we left there, the four old timers of mywork, one of whom was leaving, (B was the other, canadian, drumming, biking B) and staggered off into the night, i wandered for awhile thinking of how to get home, so unused to public transport these days, my bike locked up right there but no key... walked passed goodge street tube and on an offchance decided to try the gate, finsbury park has no barriers so if you can get onto the tube without paying then you can get off there easily...

and just like the door to the beaux arts building many hours before the gate swung noiselessly open, come aboard mr longcat, and i traveled home on our dirty, much maligned tube...

x

music

H came round today to play cello with me, fantastic, it's going to be really good i think, we got into a long conversation about personalities over lunch (in the amazon), the dynamics of playing with different people...

it made me think about last year's music making, with K, L, H & me, when harbour walls was coming into focus... i really liked that the band was becoming a thing as the tune became a thing...

this year it is Catalan E's tune which is gradually becoming itself as me & H crystalise our thing,

that space where a tune is becoming itself, from fluid to concrete, (reclaiming land) which i live in, how i want to expand that space to include others... while still retaining control/ownership of the thing...

(how many times can i use the word thing in one post?)

we also looked at harbour walls, checking the rhythm of certain bits, i really want a drummer on that one...

and i hooked my mixing desk into my fender rhodes to get the volume that it doesn't always give me on it's own, made me think of getting my sm58 microphone into the setup, practising the amplified voice thing...

the deviousness of the nearly 2

me: can i have one of your crisps please grace?

grace: no.

me: please grace, can i have a crisp?

grace: NO.

(to her mum) Uncle longcat doesn't like crisps...

brighton bound

just for the night...

josiah & grace, and then nippy & R9 coming down tomorrow so i should get a lift back...

and grace gets 2 godparents on the same weekend...

i just cycled over to sainsburies on greenlanes with a massive bag full of tetrapak's.. finally found the postcard that we were sent announcing the tetrapak recycling bin there, we got it about 6 weeks ago and i picked it up, half read it, put it down...

then feeding 6 months worth of tetrapak's from this 7 person house, one by one into the mouth of the bin... only the second time i've done it and it was much easier than sending them in the post to scotland which is what i had to do last time, roughly the same amount of tetrapak's, the looks you get holding one of these plastic bags - i-bags as me & josiah call them now, avoiding the name cedric nash gave them awhile ago - you know those bags that you see people holding when they cross a border point, fleeing their country, refugee bags then in fact rather than immigrant bags... anyway, i-bags... the looks people give you when you're holding one of these i-bags stuffed with.. well they don't know what it's stuffed with, they just stare at you...

right, brighton bound...

x

first day back @ work later today

only a training session, or a skills sharing as they call it....

i hope it's a paid session but maybe not you know, i'm down to lead one of these fairly soon, on active listening... putting that counselling skills course to some use...

not only is it my 1st day back @ work, it is also the very 1st day of september...

and what, you may ask, am i doing being awake right now? with only 3 or 4 hours left before i've got to get up for the afore mentioned work...

well sleep is not coming, partly down to the good time i had tonight celebrating witchy godmother's birthday (a surprise party at that... she didn't have a clue... great preparation on the part of her mum...),

and maybe partly down to the slight insomnia i often get the night before work begins, i think i've explicated on this before in this blog, the holiday is ending and perhaps in my mind i see going to sleep as giving in to work, staying awake prolonging the holiday a little further... lingering with this delicious freedom...

could be a little of that in there...

in order to get to the surprise party last night (tonight) i had a monumental journey from walthamstow to frien barnet, in fact after i left the revellers still going @ 2:35 am it took me an hour to get back home... cockfosters to finsbury park...

so being as i'm not sleeping let me just lay out the details for you, (those not interested in my cycling patterns yesterday can fast forward to the cello rehearsal i had with H... i'll try and make it easy to find)...

first i cycled from mine @ finsbury park to walthamstow... wood street, where H is currently staying, took me 45 minutes in the blazing sun, streets all the way to stamford hill and then simply gorgeous parkland riding over the marshes (hackney, walthamstow, tottenham - i saw them all today), in between the reservoirs...

waltham forest really good for cyclists as H has told me and it's true...

after we had our music making fun i set off from hers & crossed the marshes & reservoirs again a bit further north... tottenham marshes this time, at one point i saw a small group of cyclists puzzling over how to get past a forbidding looking fence, to where i was... nice to check in with them briefly and show them my map before plunging on...

then intense map reading and many streets, some hills, not too far from the north circular getting to frien barnet...

the whole journey took me 1 hour & 15 minutes...

then after the do we slung my bike in the back of R's car to get to their's and as i've said after a little more razzle dazzle i set off from cockfosters to finsbury park and it took me an hour, some huge hills, both ups and downs to deal with, and me in my depleted state...

ok bike stories over...

BIKE STORIES DONE YOU CAN COME BACK NOW...

because i want to close on H... music making with her,

she is the cellist that i worked with for a couple of those gigs @ my landlords place, we are so rubbish at getting together, it's been way too long, it was heaven...

we worked on the tune i wrote for catalan E, the one which i posted up here a little while back but didn't want to draw attention to until i knew she'd heard it, it's over there with the other mp3's, it will almost certainly form part of a larger piece that will include the ethereal chords i wrote @ christmas and the slightly old-fashioned but beautiful chords i came up with just before the jam @ work that i led, i only had two other musicians present and we went round this gorgeous change i'd come up with...

me & H worked on each of these three bits today and it was great to be involved in it again, with her, the sad piece for E sounding almost messianesque in places with the cello, her playing the tune an octave below my voice...

the ethereal chords still so openended as to where it's going, just nice to spend some time negotiating the space with her,

then that beautiful change i've worked into a cycle that could even break off and form a whole nother piece, by the end of the rehearsal we were experimenting with my voice moving a certain way over her cello moving slightly differently, maybe even stripping down to just this and bass notes...

hmmmmm

creation and arrangement, thinking musically,

now i'm thinking about music i may as well forget about sleep altogether, this headspace often just too busy, too excited, too full of notions to rest...

but then these crucial 4 hours now before i have to be at work, it always looks as though i could make it through without sleeping but then my body takes over and says enough is enough mr longcat, get in that bed... i don't care how much you feel inspired, you want me to get you to work on that bike in the morning so do what i say and fall asleep damn you...

ok

that's me

x