Flickr dash

just spent a mad hour or so going through all the pictures i've taken since the last time i uploaded anything to my flickr... which was late april...

ganching has one now as well as trave and i just haven't been paying any attention to mine in ages, so i've just uploaded loads and loads, way too many as you can only see the last 6 or so that have been uploaded and i've just uploaded at least 3 times that...

went over to my landlords today to play his piano, going through the piece and i've found a way to play the bit that i couldn't play yesterday, my ability to play the whole thing comes and goes now, i'm in discussion with producerG about when we can record it...

then i went off to highgate mental health centre where a friend has voluntarily put herself, not someone i know very well but well enough to go see her being as she asked...

strange to be with someone so down and to be so cheerful afterwards...

waterlow park just beautiful..

x

piano bliss

i think i've finished the piano piece for the thames path film...

i think...

i still can't quite play it all the way through, still a few bits that challenge me, but i know what all the notes are going to be... except for the improvised bit at the end...

my fender rhodes remains broken, and being as i amplify everything in my room through the fender rhodes i've been playing piano through my headphones today... going next door to T's room and playing her real piano sometimes...

it's very beautiful in my opinion this piece of music...

i love playing it and it's very satifying playing something that you couldn't play yesterday, and tomorrow i'll be able to play even more of it...

going out with my dinah to see superman returns tonight..

x

longcat fender rhodes improvisation 27th july 2006

just the fender rhodes today (thursday actually), no voice, and a return to the short... less than 5 minutes this time... enjoy x being what i wrote when i uploaded it to googlevideo... but this... is being written on saturday around 4 in the afternoon, and i regret to inform you that this magnificent beast has faltered... yes, the fender rhodes that you see before you is not working today, it started yesterday with a stutter, coming on then dying straight away but then coming on properly the next time, it did the stuttering today a few times, but never came on properly... similar behaviour to my computer when it died... capacitors that was, and maybe this too... but taking this beast apart to fix it? phew... going to meet dinah in about an hour and then on to a BBQ @ bo's, long time no see for me & her... x

the african queen

i shed a tear near the end for Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn... filmfour being on freeview now is really rather nice, ghostworld the other night and today this one, except of course it's tempting to just stay in there watching films... the road to perdition is on now... tom hanks, i don't know... anyway i have my own film to make...

which reminds me i did my weekly inprovisation today, 5 minutes on the fender rhodes... deliberately short being as last weeks was so long... it's up on youtube but i'm going to wait until googlevideo has it, before i put it up here...

balthazara just came in, very affectionate, defleaing oh so imminent (wow, so many words i have trouble spelling all at once)...

the film is coming on apace, the music is at least beginning to look like a whole piece now, much work to be done polishing... very hard to play as well... and then i've got to write the vocal bit, i know roughly what i want to say but saying it... the piano piece is so hard i find it quite demoralising... (there's another one)...

didn't go to the circus tonight because of a misunderstanding between me & spski, kind of annoying but i'm complicit in it, he phoned about 50 minutes before the show to tell me he had got another ticket but i didn't get the message until too late, and anyway i'd settled on the african queen by then...

x

this city but not this time

this afternoon in the shower i found a way to structure my film and the vocal speech...

it's been twisting my head up thinking about it but basicly i make the cutup thames path film, perhaps with the cuts following the music... then record the vocal and put it to it, then cut the vocal at the same points and put the thames path stuff back in the order they started in and the voice is then cutup... then i've got 2 bits to cut between -

phew...

met a couple of really interesting charactors in manolis's today, great random conversation...

x

john twelve hawks lives off the grid

a small statement on the last page of the traveller which i finished last night after 3 - 4 days of intense reading... very good...

after the novel ends there is a small section called how we live now in which the writer talks about how the current state of the world inspired the traveller, in particular the use of CCTV and other forms of monitoring...

it effects my thinking a little in relation to the spoken words i'm currently wanting over the film i'm making, which will be a look at our world and our time, at the end of his book of fiction john twelve halks gives his own version of what i want...

i'm also thinking of doing a something slightly different for this weeks improvisation, i may well film a piano and a rhodes improvisation, layered one over the other and show both of them in the film...

thoughts..

x

splash

i'm loving the tune i made yesterday - do pop over to my mypace and hear it - i'd be interested whether it's just me, (quite possible)...

i had 3 hours work today, a moderation for the FUSE project that nippy ran... the moderator a nice man i've met several times already... might have got some work from meeting him today, for september...

cycled to the river for my now normal routine of thames path filming followed by 3 games of chess followed by more thames path filming...

i beat the puzzle factory 3-0 this time, satisfying...

but the splash was before that, as i was doing the 1st bit of thames path filming it was hightide & i saw that in a corner of the concrete edges surrounding the water the waves were sometimes making a large vertical splash...

so i made my way over to the splash and set up my camera to film it... stupidly...



x

wake me softly

i'm writing a piano piece of music to go with the thames path film and it's coming along nicely... this afternoon i turned a fragment of it into a tune called wake me softly which will shortly be playing over there on my mypace... it's a dreamy thing which i'm loving right now after i've just finished it... i hope i'll still like it tomorrow...

shortly going out to see Pirates of the... with Dinah & her folks...

x

longcat fender rhodes & voice improvisation 20th july 2006

5th of the series and for this one i used the fender rhodes... a truly sexy instrument... 20 minutes long... i stretched out... i hope you have the patience... x

"Royal Northern Gardens - an experiment" & other news

30 minute Royal Northern Gardens film finished in december - recently hosted on googlevideo

no post since monday... that's not like me...

dreamt that me & J (from hotel full of cops) were on different sides of a sectarian struggle and were meant to hate each other but ended up laughing at a cushion salesman practising falling into a carefully arranged placement of cushions... echoes of the wind that shakes the barley there that i saw this week at some point... using up the july free cinema tickets...

i don't know when i saw it though, can't have been tuesday because me & felinity were clambering around london rooftops to take this picture, wednesday i was rehearsing, last night i was cycling around half naked and saw... no but i'll tell that story in a moment... maybe it was monday night?

so it was very good (the wind that shakes the barley), if a little forced in it's storytelling right at the end, and this only noticeable because the story floats so naturally through most of the film, a fictional story set against 1920's ireland, the early days of the IRA, the brutality of the english soldiers... the lead actor from breakfast on pluto is excellent in it...

tuesday saw me & felinity climb to the high place above somerset house that i've been wanting to take her to, to take a picture of one of the stars of the star odyssey, she is only the second person to have possession of that particular star, testament to her networking, internet self... the indian restaurant that backs onto the spiral staircase had it's window open and i spoke to one of the waiters, telling him we'd be in there in about 5 minutes... unfortunately this drew a security guard's attention to our descent and we got told off on reaching the ground...

felinity took pictures of our journey up there and a few pictures of the star - although the picture that she posted to the community was one i took... (i so tried not to mention that fact... honestly i did...)

so anyway we went to said indian restuarant and ate, coming back to the fountains @ somerset house to wash our hands, then crossing the river again to where i'd taken some video for my thames path project when i met her, and where i wanted to take some more, a few hours had passed and a metre of so of tidal water level had shifted... we finished the night sipping G & T's in the national theatre bar... very nice... felinity great company as ever...

in fact i remember now, i went into town to take thames path video on monday night and went to see the wind that shakes the barley directly after, the same plan last night, i cycled in without a top on, first time for me in town on a bike semi naked but it was cool...

i arrived at my videoing point only to find a photoshoot going on exactly there, i had to wait around for half an hour, taking odd bits of video and pictures until they left, which meant that i missed fearless @ the pictures and ended up watching the lakehouse which was so, so, so stupid of me... it also meant that i didn't get back in time to meet spski and do the deflea i'd planned for balthazara last night... darned photoshoot...



the lakehouse was average to bad, keanu reeves is unbelievably bad and sandra bullock is so-so, the story has a few irritating holes, although the idea is a good one, added to this is that to my left on my row was a group of tourists who just wouldn't shut up... massively irritating, i spoke to them early on which shut them up for a time but after awhile they just carried on and i learned to live with it, being as it wasn't the greatest film... and i thought about this, why should it matter to me when it clearly is a rubbish film... but it DOES matter... it is sooooo rude...

the combined effect of the film and the tourists really wound me up and i cycled over to dinah's stage door for her soothing company as she left work which did me a power of good...

and look at that, no post all week and then you get this huge one...

which reminds me i did my weekly improvisation yesterday and it turned out to be 20 minutes long, googlevideo verifying it now, i don't mind that they've had it ages now being as they dealt with my 30 minute experimental film as well yesterday...

i'll be posting it when it becomes available

x

thames path

last workshop of the summer for the new students... left there and cycled to the place where i was filming from 6 months ago, a project i've been calling thames path just because that's roughly where it is...

took one piece of video a week ago and the contrast of the full leaved trees and the winter branches is very striking... so i want more of the summer trees...

i'll be checking out the tide levels to get some variation, i've been finding more or less exactly the right angles and X & Y values to line up the different days footages, hard and painstaking work but glad to be using video again...

so when i got to the place today they were painting it, which meant i couldn't get onto it, went and played 3 games of chess with the puzzle factory - bookseller under waterloo bridge, (won all 3) then went back to find the barrier still there but no people so i slipped under and took my footage for today... i'll be going back there a few times in the near future, getting more footage, may well play chess with puzzlefactory each time if he's up for it...

x

TV

last night, and two weeks ago last night, i had a great time in front of the telly...

you see i've got caught in this french TV thing on BBC4 called spiral... i saw the 1st 2, missed the 3rd, and have been catching up on friday nights with episodes 4 & 5 two weeks back & episodes 6 & 7 last night...

it's very good, it's only 8 episodes long and the last one is on tomorrow night...

but also on friday nights on BBC4 they have a little live thing from the 70's, 30 minutes, it was Bill Withers 2 weeks ago which was just fantastic and it was Carole King last night... heaven...

AND they have some kind of biographical musical thing too for an hour... Gil Scott Heron 2 weeks ago which was great... and John Martyn last night which was enormously inspirational...

john martyn who had his leg amputated 3 years ago and who is still out there, performing and writing...

i've had a vinyl copy of solid air for many years now which i love dearly, it was very interesting to see the other albums he made in the 70's and lust after them, i once heard bless the weather whilst on acid up north somewhere but have never possessed it...

also seeing shots if him perform with danny thompson, his echoplex tape delay on a chair in front of him, bantering with danny, who was on the program:

there'd be no point me saying to john... play me a Bb flattened 9th chord - i may as well say play me a dinner plate...

there's an album i'd love to get hold of called live in leeds from '76 or so that had john & danny (1st name terms now) & john stevens on drums... he who set up londonbridgework a couple of decades ago and who wrote the Search & Reflect workshops that i so love to teach...

anyway, i'm writing today from an interesting place within, as i finished the bulk of my admin/marking earlier in the week and then went on a debauched couple of days, it's taken me a bit of recovery time to remember that i was hoping to be creative once that work was out of the way...

my weekly improvisations are going on apace, and i realise that in some ways they are both too frequent and too infrequent... too frequent for the casual observer... too infrequent for me... i want to be improvising and recording the improvisation EVERY DAY... and of course i can do this...

so i feel as though i'm on the brink of some creative whirlwind... i'm preparing myself, thinking of the video projects i want to achieve, the playing/writing work, the singing/harmony work...

oh and one more unrelated thing - (or is it?) -

i woke up last night to dinah upset, couldn't work it out at first but it turns out i'd pulled her pink plastic venus de milo over, along with the mirror behind it and i was violently tugging on a fluffy thing that is pinned to her headboard...

not violent towards her but violent towards her belongings which does freak her out...

so i spent a good 10 minutes soothing her which is no bad thing, mulling over yet another violent sleep thing...

?

x

4th weekly improvisation

this being the improvisation i did last night directly after posting, googlevideo for once fairly nippy sorting it out...

a fair bit of singing in it this time...

x

33... yes i am...

and i have the most amazing hat...

so, starting from tuesday night when i'd been drinking all day... i'd fallen asleep in front of the TV (watching the 2nd of these very good BBC4 doc's about weather - the jet stream on monday night and then el nino tuesday)... dinah rang me - waking me from my nap... boobelah i need you to come down to the kitchen i've got a bit tangled...

i looked at the time and worked it out, midnight had passed, i sleepily went down to the basement where marilyn monroe was singing to the president and there was my beautiful girlfriend, wearing the dress that she'd made for new years eve, with my presents laid out on the table surrounded by night lights...

cufflinks... curb your enthusiasm DVD... the hat....

and that hat just made me smile for ages and ages, really woke me up... puss in boots as one party guest the next night had it...

so the next morning she woke up and cooked me breakfast before i went to work, meeting me by the river in my lunch hour... steaming my suit, shining my shoes...

she looked after me all day...

we went over to manolis's in the evening, meeting felinity there, setting up my old keyboard that i've had for 17 years now that much later J played a few tunes on, and then i sang 2 or 3 drunken songs...

by which time the night had been going on for 5 hours or so, swelling from me, dinah & felinity to somewhere between 15-20 people, josiah & grace, godma G, nippy & r9, producer G & his C (who got on really well with dinah - i knew they would), F & B (recently married), spanna, auntie opera, spski, k-wo, K, T & M from here...

one of those nights where i didn't really talk with anyone, flitting about from person to person, hanging out alot with grace, me & her went outside at one point and it was really nice looking back & seeing manolis's full of my friends...

and then today we woke up late, grace & josiah & me & dinah went over to the amazon for some very, very welcome food, and in the evening i met up with felinity and saw the circus space's 2nd year degree course show in shoreditch park... very good, some acts in particular shone through, i was going to come home and do my weekly improvisation but blogging took over and also J & K have been rocking out downstairs until just now so it wouldn't have been the silent canvas i'd want... something about the performance of the circus stuff though i found inspirational, the gestures, the extreme performance of it... maybe i'll do the improvisation now anyway... hmmm...

x

at last it's on google (drunk)

it became available late last night...



when i was really tired after quite a mad day... and now i've posted it after a pretty mad day today too...

and i know that now both the youtube version and this version are on this blog... hmmm...

so yesterday, after i posted that frustrated post i got down to it and finished my work, cycling over to covent garden to see my boobelah... lovely as ever...

earlier in the day i'd got a text from a singer who i'd known 3 years ago... in fact had been active in my mind in the writing of the song midnight... which i wrote after meeting this woman and trying to leave E... whose birthday it was yesterday... strange confluence...

so i left dinah to go to work and i stooged round a bit taking pictures by the river and by the gerkin... arriving at the vibe bar (the text had said that this woman was performing there that night)... eventually... (i'm quite pissed (drunk - english vernacular) so bear with me)...

i saw both L & S - both from kyo, both playing with a very nice fellow called S who engaged me in a very open conversation when i first arrived there...

lovely to see L & S, may play with L, someday soon, the singer who'd texted me was great... i felt inspired by the night and by the day in general...

kind of like a novel - loads of ideas i want to get into a song...

then today i went out for a glass of champagne on the london eye... because when i started @ hammersmith - that year - our department had been very successful and we were being rewarded with this day out... the eye - followed by lunch @ the oxo tower... drinks galore - hence my drunken state now...

waiting for J (staying with us this week) so i can share some food with him... drank really quite alot today... my birthday tomorrow... sorry to be a bit random & rambling...

x

aaaaargh

came in to work for a moderation and the moderator didn't turn up...

now i've been sat at this desk for hours finishing this work for londonbridge work - about 3/5ths through... i'm going a bit mad...

just got handed another essay from the batch i've just finished... this student had an extension... lordy...


can't wait to be done...

x

temporary solution

3rd weekly improvisation

i got fed up waiting for googlevideo, put it up on youtube, i guess i'll be deleting it once googlevideo have sorted it out... but then again maybe i won't?

x

guy fawkes

burn babylon burn

i've just put this up on youtube, mainly because i'm deeply frustrated that googlevideo have still not made my video LIVE...

so instead of my rambling piano playing and occassional singing you have this 3 minute affair, the night me & brinded went to victoria park and watched them burn down the houses of parliament...

x

improvisation

probably tomorrow morning (well... if i make it out of bed in the morning, maybe the afternoon) there'll be a post entitled piano & voice improvisation 07-07-2006...

it's uploading to google now and they'll take their sweet time sorting it out...

i don't know, i uploaded that little train/river video to youtube and it was ready instantly... why do i want googlevideo again?

i guess in my mind it's a little classier... something like that anyway, snob that i am...

so today has been of course the 1st anniversary of the london bombs, i was cycling through the barbican highwalks and there were a lot of police and plain clothed but obviously police or the like around... the museum of london was holding a service for the families of the victims, i was on my way into work to prepare for mondays moderation, the first of two this summer,

for the second day in a row i took all the marking i've got to do with me and completely failed to do any... tomorrow is my day for it now...

the improvisation was good i think, a little longer again than the second, which was longer than the first, i plugged my microphone in and recorded that as well, not that i used it a great deal, just sang a little in the middle then spoke about how it's the anniversary - and how isreal are invading gaza and how my boobelah just came into the room and that all these things have a bearing on my playing today...

cannot wait to be out from under this marking,

i'm off out in a few moments to see dinah and go to a comedy magic show that someone from her work is in... quite scary but i'm going anyway...

ok, tea to drink and video to deal with...

x

catchup week

@ hammersmith, a couple of students doing some final assessment for me, the last thing either of them have to do before they're free for the summer...

i'm hiding under a mountain of marking work for my other work...

offering words of encouragement while thinking about just how much marking i have to do in the next few days...

although i find the marking kind of validating as it's all about the teaching i did this last semester...

anyway, laters...

x

wending by the wandle

so, as an amateur, as in doing it for love, i got up this morning and traveled down to tooting to check out J's project... he's been my apprentice all year and it was effectively a way to feedback on his teaching and how it's developed...

got up with minutes before i had to leave so my plan of cycling down there... (a very long way) was scuppered, meaning that by the time i'd got there and finished my business with J (lovely guy, i will miss him in my lessons next year) i was on foot in the arse end of nowhere...

really close day, an abandoned looking path seemed inviting at 1st, being as i didn't know where i was going, it drew in hugely and was quite scary - the detritus of humans inamongst towering weeds, nettles, a common theme over the next hour or so...

the path eventually fed onto the back of an industrial estate so i back-tracked and phoned felinity for directions, having established that she'd had lunch already and we weren't all that close anyway she told me how to get to wimbleden park, which had seemed to me closest of the tube stations to this obscure place, i had no intention of walking back to tooting broadway station which seemed miles away... this morning i'd walked along garrett lane with a scalding hot cup of tea inadequately insulated in cardboard - munching on a toasted cheese sandwich with the sun roasting the back of my neck bemoaning the length of the walk...

so following her directions i set off down plough lane, a horrible road full of trading estates, before long i was drawn off the road by some kind of electricity sub-station that i had to get to the back of a ford dealership to take pictures of...

i rejoined the road but left it again almost immediately as there was a bike/pedestrian path that led alongside a small river & seemed infinitely better than the road,

so i walked along this path, passed the electricity sub-station from a different angle - all kinds of industry going on on the other side of the river - the wandle as it turned out to be...

no clear idea of direction, just a vague thought that i was heading (with the flowing water) to the thames.. at one point i heard thunder, probably a little before my own house was briefly wetted in a shower as i found out later...

after a little less than an hour the path stopped as the river widened, i did find another path by the river but it was another human detritus/weed zone, and it ended fairly quickly, i took a nice piece of video of the rail bridge ahead, just caught a southwest train crossing it... (can i be arsed to youtube it and post it here...?)



so i decided to leave the river and follow the trainline to the right, odd to be on streets again after that openended river... i met a couple of guys unloading something and asked to look at their A to Z and saw that earlfields station was very close, had i just walked as i'd intended i would have found it anyway...

for some strange reason i decided to get the train in a big W, one stop to clapham junction, then up to willesden junction, then from there to highbury, then finally the tube up to finsbury park... deliberately indirect... i had a fair amount to write in my journal (some of which appeared in this post) and the neil labute shortstories to keep me company, they really are good...

and then tonight, after a brief lovely kiss with my dinah just before she went off to work, producerG came round and we made beautiful music... very nice day...

very tired now,

x

a moment

getting to jai krishna's on friday night with no tables available i order a masala dosa (no peas) and am told to be back in 20 minutes...

so i cycle directly to the disused, a road goes straight from strowd green road and then a path between the terraced houses up to the railway, i cycle west until i get to crouch end, the railway is quite a lot lower than that big hill on the way in to crouch end (hornsey rise)...

by now 10 minutes have passed, i sit on my bike and read one of the short stories from seconds of pleasure by neil labute - a tiny story set onboard an aeroplane - then i cycle back the way i'd come,

when i get back to the restaurant there is a table for me & my food is almost ready...

heavenly

x

longcat piano improvisation (the 2nd)

2nd piano improvisation here it is... week 2 x (google takes ages doing their thing - i was waiting around yesterday for this to happen, expecting 30 mins... 2 hours at the most... i really have to recalibrate myself to just how long they take...)