insomnia weekly improvisation

i bit my tongue last night munching on some pitta bread at manolis's meze... stuck my finger in my mouth and when it came out ther was real blood...

i got to bed around 1:30 but woke up with both kinds of hallucination just before dinah texted to tell me she was coming home @ 2:07... the 1st kind of hallucination is when i have my eyes open and i can see visions in the yellow LED from my monitor, the 2nd kind is where i "wake up" and see something in my bed which scares me, and which i gradually realise is not real as i really wake up...

anyway, once she was back and in bed we were dozing off, mumbling conversation and something she said pissed me off, it burrowed down into my almost asleep state and woke me right up... couldn't sleep until 6ish after that...

Hcello was came round this morning to play and i feel like the walking dead on this little sleep...

funnily enough though i was quite a productive insomniac... i oiled my door (long overdue) and set up my keyboard ready for Hcello's visit and the improvisation i knew i was going to do today...

and which i've done, currently awaiting verification over on googlevideo, it's the 2nd weekly piano improvisation and i think it's pretty cool, it was really hot earlier in the afternoon and i was stripped to the waist, the camera angle catching my stomach in a not very flattering way...

but the improvistion was good, amidst the haze of not sleeping...

i'll pop back and put it in this post when it's verified...

oh lordy, i want my bed, but i'm going to wait until at least 11... 5 hours times...

x

exiled

if i could have got hold of a video projector i would have hung a sheet across my room and projected my Royal Northern Gardens films onto the sheet, with the chaos hidden behind the sheet...

but i couldn't get hold of a video projector...

i could have still shown the films just on my monitor but instead i chose to dismantle my setup... move my table away from the longest wall in my room and let my landlord hang pictures on it, including 4 of my mum's (3 of which i'd carried back on my bicycle on saturday)...

so i'm blogging from the basement, listening to meshell who i'm delighted to have found on myspace, her bitter album has long been one of my favourites... me & spski are going over to manolis in a little while for his meze night, and by the time we come back the exhibition will be over and i can start to restructure my room again, from the ground up... a whole new plan, building towards a functioning music making place...

gigged last night as a duo with nippy, chaotic night @ the gate in nottinghill, the promoter has asked me to play as longcat on my birthday which i won't be doing but may well do it a week or so later... putting my head into the lions mouth because it will be hard work playing down there with my stuff... but i'm up for pushing that kind of thing, emerging stronger...

x

2 weeks today

oh blog readers, i hereby invite you to my birthday do, 2 weeks today:



Wfloopy (shaman) did the invite, bless him, sadly he won't be coming as he's away,

i don't really expect any of you ephemeral crowd to show up, but i'd like to see you in the flesh, so think on it, and let me know if decide you to come...

(gigging tonight over in nottinghill)

x

idle

yesterday (sunday) me & dinah missed out on our sunday lunch @ the amazon cafe, so we got it today, set us up very nicely it did too...

i started the blog bit of mypace also today, just about the improvisation i did last week, that i'll be doing again on thursday...

went to the pictures with a free ticket to see united93, the 11/9 film about the plane that crashed without hitting it's target, surprisingly good...

then just now i was waiting for my girl and i picked out my route from our house to paddington...

glad to be going to bed...

x

things are afoot

so yes... i did indeed cycle the 15.6 miles from blewbury to reading... i set off thinking it would take me 45 minutes, an hour at the most...

left mum & dads @ 9:40pm and arrived at reading station at 11:00pm...

so an hour and 20 minutes...

the big hill really hurt, but also the many, many smaller ups & downs, (that part of the countryside is known as the downs) weren't always what i wanted, particularly as i was carrying three of mums paintings, hung somewhat precariously from my handle bars, gyrating wildly every time i picked up speed, well, they found their niche after about 5 miles or so but it was pretty freaky the 1st biggish downhill i had...

but i'm sounding as if i didn't enjoy it, which isn't true, it did take longer than i thought it would and not all of it was that nice, but certain bits were just beautiful.. a road that gmaps seems to think is called tour of berkshire but presumably can't be was just heaven, i was over half way through the ride and the big hill was behind me by now, the sun was over the horizon which meant that when the road went through a wood it was very dark, but there was still some light in the sky, the road had evened out and the ups & downs were still there but much gentler...

also cycling through goring, over the thames which is really wide there, very posh looking with all kinds of boats.. very nice...

i'm glad i did it, it's good to know exactly what that cycle ride entails, but i was thinking it would be a 45 minute journey which would have made it a viable option in terms of travel... hmmm? not the last time i do it i hope,

and so to today, me & dinah are hatching a plot which is making us laugh alot, more details when it's completed, this is her with a piece of cake & a cosmopolitan last sunday when we were out celebrating Wfloopy (shaman)'s 50th... i love this girl x

hills

in blewbury, just for a few hours, me & D came down for the photo...

i'm pondering whether to cycle to reading instead of didcot... being as more trains go to reading than didcot these days (unlike in my youth, didcot seems to have fallen out of fashion in the last 5 years or so) and it would be easier in the future to just get the london to reading train... but there's a hill...

it's 15 and a half miles and it's probably beautiful... the sun would be setting over my journey...

i'll let you know when i reach the other end...

x

jade fox weekly improvisation

1stly...

JADE FOX...

oh how i love this band, saw them almost 3 months ago now, on a whim me & dinah went to see some myspacer that she'd befriended... this time it was the same venue, and very possibly the same bands playing, but in a different order...

so anyway, jade fox really rock my boat... beautiful sound, quality guitar/keyboard melodies, solid band... touching lyrics...

i went tonight with Wfloopy (shaman) to nambucca and i reckon dinah & him should play there next month when the same outfit are booking nambucca again...

and then in other news i video'd a piano improvisation today which i'm in the process of getting verifed on googlevideo... it'll be the 3rd video site i'm on, youtube being my number 1 and myspace video hosting connie as of only a few weeks ago...

i intend to put an improvisation up here and on my mypace every week, tempting to do it more often but i don't think people would bother watching it... i was hoping i could embed it into this post but googlevideo seems pretty slow... hmmm?

maybe i'll just show you a video of jade fox... hang on...


Jade Fox

there you go...

oh and i worked today, for 2 hours, my only work this week, it's been beautiful... i'm heading for a lean period...

and loooook my piano improvisation made it onto googlevideo:


piano improvisation

x

jinx ended?

2 years ago i watched only 1 match in euro2004 and it was the match that england lost to portugal, ending their hopes that year...

don't know how but i've managed to gather a superstitious feeling around me & england matches, hugely infrequent football watcher as i am... the jinx has had no chance to either be confirmed or denied as i simply don't watch football...

but it's the world cup... and more particularly spski has been following it so i joined him for tonight's match against sweden, felt the joy as joe cole scored in the first half, felt my spirits dampened as sweden played better than england throughout the second half, equalizing early, conceding another england goal only 5 minutes before the end, by now it seemed fairly likely that they would score again and lo & behold they did...

it must hurt to be an england supporter... they are so good at losing...

anyway, apparently it doesn't make any difference at this point in the tournament, a draw is as good as a win because we still finish top of our group... but it's disheartening...

in other news i've been playing through some old tunes, finding the way through to maybe playing them in a set... i got my keyboard back from the wedding yesterday, along with the rather nice journal that was a present from the happy couple to say thankyou for singing... odd to have a real life physical journal along with this one, i intend to use it to keep track of compositions... so many unfinished things floating about...

i'm about to go downstairs and plug my keyboard in, relish the grand piano sound that i was going on about the other day... see how certain tunes work/don't work with it... one tune i wrote years ago, preblogging days, for K who i partly wrote harbour walls for (one of the tracks on my mypace (slow) if you want to hear it), this one never saw the light of performance, i used to do it with my quartet that never gigged, i'm gradually reviving it, partly because when i finished rereading the emigrants the other day i found a long and involved piece of writing that i'd put in the last few blank pages, (similar in some ways to this) deep in the dream of this woman as i was... this song describes that dream and also predicts that i'll wake up from it... and it's odd, being in love as i am, i still somehow need K to hear this song that i wrote for her back then...

dinah has been out today in an amazing hat @ ascot, no doubt now she's at work performing her job meticulously through a haze of alcohol... her dad's birthday today - Wfloopy (shaman) who has the longest name of anyone in this blog...

it looks as though me & D are going to head down to blewbury just over a week late for our dad's birthday, to reenact a photograph that's over 30 years old now...

D who has been commenting a fair bit recently and who has finally joined the blogging community with a gardening & cycling blog...

me & felinity have been waiting for him to do that for years...

x

router foolishness

had a beautiful weekend, largely drunken...

F & R's wedding on saturday @ which i sang,

Wfloopy (shaman)'s birthday eats on sunday, dinah dressed to the nines looking super glamourous, me shambling along beside her just a shade less scruffy than normal...

the wedding made me think quite abit, emotional of course...

anyway, not so much time to relate it here...

i've managed to lock myself out of my router... clever... turned off the DNS server because i thought each computer had a static IP address anyway, wanted to keep our neighbours from using our bandwidth... Ken... don't know who that is... was leaching from us... he's not now... but then neither are we...

i don't want to reboot the router just yet, even though i know that would fix the problem, i want to see if there's another way, so i can preserve the settings i've put in place...

but look i'm sorry, unusually techy post, but it's what's bothering me...

going to ask brother D about it later tonight when i get in from the cinema extravaganza that i'm going to @ the curzon soho in an hour, a film maker called G who spanna's known all her life, funny guy, hmmm, should make a CD of my theatrical music to give him, could be a route into film music, or at least practise at film music... hmmmm....

anyway, D if you're reading this on monday night could you ring me, (what are you doing saturday night?)

x

painted toenails & grand piano's

going out in a little while to see my girl perform with her band, but 1st i'm going to change out of these summer clothes, and wash the streets off my feet...

i took my keyboard over to nottinghill this afternoon, the wedding reception that i'm singing at tomorrow is over there, it was a beautiful afternoon - if a little too hot - and i decided to bring out the 3/4 length trousers and the flipflops... exposing the world to my painted toenails...

strange deal for me this has been, it's taken me ages to do it, being a man, knowing that you meet everyone and their dog out on the streets and worrying what people might make of it...

also forgot how much it hurts walking in flipflops... toughening my feet is one my summer tasks...

so two reactions from the world, both from random women...

firstly on the journey there, after the tube system had really messed with my journey and i was already annoyed, i got on the last of my many trains and a group of teenage women in burka's starting talking in their own language and openly laughing at my feet...

and then a few hours later, walking with spanna in soho, a woman was walking towards us on the pavement and i could see her swiftly taking in first my feet, then my face, then spanna's face...

funny how it is such a surprise to some people, seeing a man with painted toenails...

my other news today is that i've found a way to use the grand piano sound of my piano module... long story, but in brief the grand piano sound is very good but too harsh and i shy away from using it in gigs, preferring the fender rhodes sound or the mellower piano, but the mellow piano is way too mellow and with a little tinkering today i found way to use the grand, very exciting... possibly opening up a groovy space for my gigs, certainly it became a creative space playing it today, rather than a sound i retreat from...

ok...

laters

x

thoughts

as advertised...

playing chess with Wfloopy (shaman), listening (for the first 3-4 games) to my shuffle on shuffle...

random selection of quality tunes (in my opinion),

at one point W asked for something with pep (fuel)... when chet bakers album with P U came on, the one full of film tunes probably from the 80's but maybe the 70's, italian impersonation of a classic american bigband sound, we lost the random and let it play out...

it fueled his best game, a relentless pawn advance that almost had me...

it fueled a great conversation and also a fantasy of mine... coming into focus... in the tradition of gig fantasies which i've found can be a wonderful source - sometimes of music -

and the fantasy was 2 fold, 1stly that i had a drummer like that... which in fact i did have once... a gig @ the effra years & years ago, singing the thrill is gone (chet baker song - not the BB King song), and fairly randomly there was a drummer there - friend of S (who runs little bit of sunshine with M) name of B, (thrill B in my phone ever after, i so wanted him in my non-existent band) & he had a snare drum and some brushes and he breathed this kind of smoky jazz drum fuel into the rendition that night...

never played with him again...

and 2ndly that i could have a string section like that... and i already have half of what i'd need, assuming Hcello stays on board...

talking to her about this particular sound and what we'd need to do to use it in our context...

both do-able fantasies...

i just had to write it down while it's in my mind before i go to bed...

x

rain

i ordered some linen trowsers over the internet, i'm not a man who shops, most of my clothing would not be worn by someone else because it's too old...

so anyway, i ordered them and they arrived today and i love them, they are my summer apparel..

i go out in them, walk to manolis' listening to perfect tunes, (caetano veloso, gillian welch and others) and sit down, and it starts to really rain, much needed, momentary...

had a lovely chat with the man himself, read another short story from that book there, my 9th so far from that book, i love that both the book and the right environment for reading are in that cafe...

walked home again in the post rain coolness, dressed for hot weather... but the hot weather will return...?

won't it?

x

random moments

it's been an odd week for reporting events and therefore i'd like to give you 2 moments from my week that went unmentioned but are worth mentioning...

firstly the body... elle macpherson no less, no doubt she saw felinity, spski & me throwing stones into the thames and decided to follow us back to the union theatre, waiting a little while to make it less obvious, she arrived with a date after the play had started, in one of the longest scenes, and stood for awhile like lemons, waiting for the scene to end so they could sit down, eventually giving up and draping themselves elegantly into front row seats...

it was my 3rd time watching the play and felinity & spski were my 1st outsiders to see it, very glad of their presence, it was also the day that timeout published a very negative review of the play, and there was a noticeable edge to the production that worked really well... aside from being the only review out of 8 or so that was negative which is taste i guess, the review also spoiled some aspects of the plot and made up other aspects... pretty random but bad news for the production...

& then my other moment (yes, they are a little longer than moments, but indulge me), was yesterday, me & dinah went to the bull & gate in kentish town to drop off posters for her gig there next friday and we strolled up to hampstead heath for a little while to lay in the grass...

she went off to work and i returned on my bike to penetrate a little deeper into the heath, listening to my shuffle on random, gently cycling up hilly bits, through wooded areas... stopping at last at a bench in the shade somewhere deep in it, i read from the emigrants which i'm now almost all the way through for the 2nd - or is it 3rd time?

i've got 5 pages or so left now, i closed the book and found Yimkin's north indian field recordings podcast on my shuffle and listened to it in all it's 44 minutes, much more slowly cycling now within this one wooded area, strange to have north india in my ears and beautiful hampstead heath in my eyes and my nose and beneath my wheels, in particular the call to prayer whilst i was cycling through a clearing that had something magical about it... the sound and the place meeting...

found an unpsidedown tree, climbed it, that was pretty strange, actually climbing down it to get up, then climbing up it to get down again...

it had clearly been ripped off this one at some point in the past...

hampstead heath... one vast magical place... maybe i'll start swimming there again this year... (could happen)

x

all the 3's

pretty soon my counter will say 3333....

i love numbers

x

there's a lull in my life

lying in bed beside my beautiful girl, she sleeping soundly, me with a little grass in me & the slight paranoia that accompanies that, not even a bit sleepy...

that paranoia quietly shining a bright and focussed light on events of the last few days, seeing things in that different light,

makes me feel as though i've been sleepwalking for a few days and i've just woken up, i have the image of a teardrop, or just any drop of water for that matter covering the lens and distorting the view, then the image sliding into focus...

and chet baker singing there's a lull in my life comes into my head and i imagine myself singing it at a gig, maybe it changes somehow and becomes something i've written, but with that vocal line hanging over it still...

so i get out of bed and come here, find the tune and put it on... thinking also of wayne shorter and one of the tunes off schizophrenia, a beautiful major melody at the start of the tune that is shifted into a melancholic minor melody moments later, like my own tune this that is playing over on my myspace, when the rhodes melody comes in it's a major melody that gets shifted into a minor melody moments later...

and this brings to mind the melodic montage i made for J, my 1st girlfriend all those years ago, that i wish i still have, maybe do have somewhere on minidisk...

chet baker mixed with frank sinatra, maybe there was some miles davis in there...

i'll post it up if i can find it, it was beautiful...

x

laundry day moment

ok, so we ran out of laundry powder on sunday, it's my job in this huge house to get it in, don't normally let it run out... mad, mad, mad day yesterday so today i wake up knowing i have to do my laundry, but that i have to go out and get the laundry powder...

so as i have to go out in yesterday's ... anyway i say to myself that i'll have the shower when i get back from waitrose, as i leave the house, (sporting my new sunglasses ), i meet a plumber coming in to the house... i think nothing of it...

and when i get back in i'm very concious of the timetable of it by now.. in order to wash the clothes and dry them in time to get down to londonbridgework by 5ish i need to get it in right now...

then jump in the shower, hang out todays clothes in this lovely hot day once they're done...

but hang on...

didn't i see a plumber come in half an hour ago..?

so now i'm waiting, poised, for the water to be back on again...

x

the letter J on this 2nd birthday of my blog

ok, tagged by ganching, 10 J's about me:

July 12th is my birthday.

I don't like Jelly. It's a textural thing. Much of the foods that i don't like have Jellylike textures. I'm a fussy eater.

I'm fond of Jazz music and my piano playing style is very much informed by Jazz even though you wouldn't really call me a Jazz pianist.

I enjoy a good Joke. In fact i often enjoy bad Jokes. I was reminded recently about a long, long Joke about the Nobel Peace Prize that i must tell again sometime soon.

i live in london england and through most of the month of may i had to where a Jumper because it was unseasonably cold. it was as though we had our april in may... climate change...

i got hit by a car recently and this has led me to change my Journey to work to avoid the highbury roundabout. i love the Journey, and i love finding different routes to make my Journey better.

I'm also fond of the beach of the thames that is created at lowtide and on which Jetsam can be found, washed up. Technically Jetsam is cargo that has been lost overboard and then found on the beach but i'm loosely including the mad variety of stuff that is thrown into the thames and then ends up on that tidal beach.

i like some Japanese writers, in particular the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami whose book of short stories after the quake i bought twice by accident and who wrote the story that the film tony takatani is based which i think i've missed now in london cinema's. i'm also reading a book by another Japanese writer called i am a cat (can't remember the writers name) and i've read at least one good book by kazuo ishiguro and two good books by banana yoshimoto (both Japanese)

I'm interested in Just intonation. It's one of the intonations that were used about 400 years ago before equal temperament came to dominate the way musical instruments are tuned. In brief, Just intonation is based on the harmonic series and gives a pure sound that resonates with the note that your instrument is tuned to, (Just C is the most common kind of Just intonation), and when you play in that key it all sounds great, but if you play in other keys it sounds wrong. with equal temperament many of the notes are shifted very slightly, away from the pure resonating notes so that they are in a regular system that allows you to play in whatever key you like. You never hear Just intonation these days. (i find this hard to teach, it's even harder to write in a blog, this is someone elses explanation)

i enjoy a good Jape, such as on saturday when me & spski were walking down axminster road and we saw these two garden chairs that someone was chucking out. we took them for our garden and had to roll them home which was great fun, it was also quite hard and it proved to be most sociable as almost everyone we passed was visibly amused and a few people remarked on it to us, their centre of gravity is not quite in the middle (like bowles) and it was quite challenging keeping them travelling in a straight line. they are now in our back garden but i'm keen one day to get find a space big enough to play bowles with them, you'd need a jack and you could only have 2 players but it would be funny.

that's all 10, and lastly, exactly a year ago this blog turned 1 year old with the interview game, the questions then were also supplied by ganching... my birthday meme tagger... thankyou x

almost 2

i have a small pile of marking to get through tonight and we are also scheduled to have a meeting with our landlord about his plans to make this house an art gallery...

i've started writing some music to the video i took leaving the islington vue cinema by the fire exit on friday, it's something i've been meaning to do for ages and was the reason i started the film project that became the royal northern gardens films but this is the first time i've had some video that has inspired me directly...

it'll take awhile but i'll show you it once it's done...

i cycled to hampstead heath yesterday, partly because it was an amazing day but also because i realised that my blog is very nearly 2 years old now and it started with a post about hampstead heath...

this time i visited the same copse of trees that i mention then but i went further, finding kenwood house that many people have told me about, sadly i couldn't find the hall with the amazing acoustic that that scottish woman told me about, she who wrote a wicked fist & who watched my blues workshop many years ago and told me i was an example to all young people...

the main building was shut but the gardens were open and full of londoners, beautiful lake and woods... must return soon...

so to mark the 2nd birthday of this here blog i will be giving you my response to this meme tomorrow...

(i love birthdays)

x

brick

the trailer had irritated me, right at the start the way that the lead character waits for a moment or two before answering a payphone irritated me...

it was the 1st of this summers free cinema experiences, courtesy of vue, D at hammersmith pulled me aside yesterday and showed me the envelope marked R, Hammersmith & West London College, which i then ripped open with glee... splitting the 20 tickets with him...

still no idea who the real R is @ hammersmith, and will probably never know... it's the same restriction as before, only films that have been out for two weeks already... which today meant brick, the da vinci code, mission impossible 3...

and brick it was, and brick itself proved to be pretty good... great language, very much inside the world of these teenagers in this american town, where've you been eating lunch? an important question... intelligence in evidence and some great images,

left via the fire escape and took some interesting (to me) video of that strange world, the first time for me with the fire escape @ islington vue, nice...

very nearly finished @ londonbridgework, just one more lesson on monday then teaching ceases, still work to be done but this academic year rolls to a close...

oh and i gigged last night @ the world's end in finsbury park, nippy's band, slightly shaky sound setup but a rocking gig, played after a heavy rock band which was curious programming but it kind of worked.. great to play...

balthazara

wouldn't go into the carrier...

it took me a little while to make it happen and then we had to walk up hornsey road which she didn't like at all...

on the way back we went a quieter route, via wray crescent, much calmer...

the vet's surname was another of the wise men as he told me, he was really nice, it turns out that balthazara's weight is exactly what it was 4 years ago when she was last there, there's been much speculation on how fat she is in this house and that fact will be much pondered...

i have to put a cream into her eye twice a day (for how long? - hmmm - that's a crucial piece of information), she got a boost to her immune system, she's somewhere between 6 & 8 years old...

she still loves me, although the vets the week after the deflea is pushing it...

x