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