rock

had a rehearsal with T today, 1st one, enjoyed it... rocking out a little...

felt like shit carrying my keyboard down to kennington on the tube... not all better yet from this sickness, (may well go to bed pretty soon)... the venue for the rehearsal was the south london pacific bar which is amazing... really great, mad place...

the sign outside makes the name look more like the london south pacific bar... kookie vibe...

and i've just shaved off my beard, leaving a mexican bandit style moustache... scary...

my face looks too short... i remember when the drummer (G) in a band i was in @ university shaved his beard off, his face just looked really wrong... likewise mine now, dinah has never seen me without a beard...

so that's wierd, kind of cool..

it's more rock this way i think...

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pervy/creepy happy digits

ok so i have an avatar, most of us do these days, they are the little pictures that represent us online, particularly those of us who use myspace, they appear on other people's pages meaning us, when we comment on someone else's page our avatar is there being us...

but look, why am i bothering even mentioning myspace when blogger does the same... that little picture that sits beside your name... (i also have avatars on gameknot, flickr, youtube...)

anyway, a little while ago (just after midnight on the 8th/9th of july) i found out how to animate my avatar, for myspace, and i took a bit of video from one of my weekly improvisations and lo and behold, there it is, being me, in myspace... it catches people's eye i think... although it's a bit grainy...

i don't know how to show it to you in blogger, (having a slightly stupid evening) but you can see it if you go to mypace...

so, speaking with P - S&R reflect apprentice this year (& next) - about my weekly improvisations he used the expression happy digits...

speaking with nippy about my avatar she used the expression pervy/creepy...

?

hazy

in between my two lessons at hammersmith, the 1st of which has a few pain in the arse students, the 2nd of which is easier...

the class i just taught was made possible by the cooked breaked i made for myself this morning, made possible in turn by the bread that dinah went out to the shops to get before she went to college...

i've been slightly under the shadow of a cold/flu thing this week, tuesday was a bit rough, a sore throat coming on throughout the day and then feeling really weak in the evening, dinah came to jai krishna with me (no small thing for her, she claims to dislike indian food) and then in tesco afterwards i was struck by some kind of leg cramp that would have been pretty bleak had dinah not been there to make me smile...

but i'm warding it off though, but i'm a little hazy right now, with my second wave of students coming in...

..........

ok, 2nd class done and i'm feeling pretty done in... the cycle journey home should perk me up though...

glad to be going home...

it's such a different learning enviroment over here than @ londonbridgework, just the way the place is set up, having said that i have my first keyboard classes with londonbridgework tomorrow and no doubt they will be just as difficult just to prove me wrong...

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from saturday

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richie havens - ray cortens

spent a lovely night last night with Wfloopy (shaman) & T, dinah's parents, in celebration of dinah's entry into student life...

ate at a great restaurant called the triangle where the conversation was mainly about T's dad, (dinah's grandad) ray cortens...

a very interesting man, noncomformist, strange flow...

then we all went back to their's, listening to music - bob dylan's new album which was boring, an album of the influences on bob dylan which was great, reminded me of the existence of richie havens who i've been downloading today, wonderful stuff...

mondays... my day off these days... slow as you like...

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waterlow park

we were just finishing off breakfast, me & grace, when there was someone at the door...

& it was G from next door, G who both me & dinah had been to see recently where she'd been... she's out and she's happy and she invited me & grace to a puppet show @ lauderdale house in waterlow park...

we arrived there @ 11ish and left the park around 4... lovely day spent with G, her daughter L & L's grandfather M... grace cycling on L's bike... feeding bread to the ducks... listening to the free festival that amnesty international was putting on in the park... saw a band called eskiimo who i dug... (grace put her hands over her ears and told me it was too loud)...

all very nice,

josiah has just been, nippy driving them both back to hers for the night, i'm in that strange post godfather lull... grace wet herself in the journey back home and because she was sat on me she wet me too...

i'm short on sleep and my baby is working her last ever session @ the producers right now... maybe i should nap for a little while...

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13th weekly improvisation

grace asleep in my bed... dinah on her way home... a cup of tea in front of me...

i left the video uploading as i went down to brighton to get the girl... ah... there is the sound of my girlfriend getting in...

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Friday the 13th

actually friday the 22nd but i recorded my 13th weekly improvisation today...

exactly 3 months since the 1st weeks improvisation...

i'm about to go down to brighton and get grace... saw godma G yesterday...

slept deliciously late today... 3 days work killed me...

laters

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from the National Film Theatre Cafe

(this is the 2nd extract from my imaginery blogging journal that updates to the web as i put pen to paper)

sat in NFT cafe, having eaten a piece of toffee cake which i couldn't afford because i spent most of my money on cocktails with my boobelah a couple of hours ago... my tea awaits me...

the woman behind the counter gave me the cake even though i didn't have enough, a little present, & while i ate that cake i completed today's difficult sudoku - the 1st time i've done it...

i started it after i left work, grabbing ten minutes by the thames before going to meet dinah... sat beside an elderly couple - she wanting a drink - he wanting to walk - she wanting a drink - he wanting her to pack her bags for their holiday tomorrow - she wanting a drink - he folding his arms - she wanting a drink -

lovely to drink cocktails with my baby - her last double show wednesday - my last chance to bring a smile & some alcohol to her work before she becomes a student next week... such a delicious brief thing... much glee...

once she'd gone back to work i sat by the river again - the beautiful september sunlight fading as i worked on the sudoku - taking occassional pictures of waterloo bridge - when it got too dark to scribble numbers in boxes i locked up my bike & explored the lowtide, lower than i've ever seen it...


more pictures... my feet very slowly sinking into the damp sand of a peninsular reaching further into the river than i'd ventured before...

then this cafe - the cake - the alcohol wearing off - the sudoku triumphantly completed - the tea now drunk -

life is good

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gear change

after such a lazy day yesterday it was hard getting up this morning to go to work and all through the day i was swinging from focused to vague in a way that was obvious to my students... they didn't seem to object however and i gave a good lesson...

at one point i asked them to, at some point in the next hour, write down a sentence that i or someone else said... i got them to work in groups and make rhythms out of these sentences and one group in particular started with a sentence of mine that began:

ok... errr... right... now...

and turn it into a james brown style:

OK! ugh! Right Now!

i was pleased with the workshop, it's a funny one, it serves the function that another teacher takes out the students one by one to assess them, and i teach the same group two different modules throughout the year that pretty much encompases my known workshops, so not only does it kind of not matter, but i don't want to do anything i'm going to repeat later so i often come up with something just for this session... as i did today... successful, if vague...

and then afterwards i took a copy of the london paper and sat by the thames doing the sudoku, very similar to last tuesday, taking pictures of my bike at intervals to try and catch the changing light... the difficult sudoku is so hard in that paper, i don't think i've got one right yet...

popped over to the cafe near dinah's work to see her before she started her last ever tuesday working at that place...

then cycled home as the evening drew in, once more out without lights, must get used to having them with me...

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dreamy

dreamy & slow...

still yawning quite a bit... only been out of bed for an hour or so...

i'm working tuesday, wednesday, thursday & on friday i'll be going to get grace, bringing her back here for friday night hanging out with her on saturday, dinah's last day of work...

so today is kind of my one day off and i love it... i have a few tasks to accomplish for the outside world and a bit of planning for the week ahead but largely i'm going to be doing my own thing...

i sat down earlier at my keyboard and my fingers found a few cool shapes and it's really nice that i could just turn on cubase and record those shapes... sketches...

oh & i'm loving lady & bird...

my floor is covered in scattered minidisks but as the rest of the room is ordered it's not so bad... it pleases me for the moment...

oh & i finished journey by moonlight by antal szerb on the train last night coming back from brighton, actually on the rail-replacement bus journey from brighton to haywards heath, it's a great book... i'm so pleased to have found this writer, i don't know if there's anything else in english by him...

and now i've started your face tomorrow 1: fever and spear by javier marias, the 2nd of the three books i bought with my birthday book tokens, he has such long sentences, it'll take me awhile to recalibrate my reading to suit him... i do love his writing though, and that this is the first of three, the second out now in hardback, is great...

the third book i got with the book tokens was how to catch a star by oliver jeffers, which was grace's birthday present, hopefully not too old for her 3 years... it looks beautiful...

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minidisks

grace's birthday tomorrow & i'm getting together recordings of the gigs i did @ my landlord's on CD to give to josiah, only there's only 2 out of the 3 gigs in my computer so i'm drifting through my vast collection of minidisks, hoping to find a recording of the 3rd...

and it's so strange listening to old pieces of my own music, tracks i was listening to, tracks i used to use in my teaching, spanning a time from 1996 to 2004...

strange and wonderful...

12th improvisation

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done

it took me 2 days to do it but i'm there...

my room is as i want it...

just recorded this week's improvisation and i've promised myself a jai krishna meal as reward...

my wall is particularly nice right now, a couple of posters from the bill viola exhibition that i saw on it's last day, a couple of beautiful pictures of my boobelah, a couple of tiny pictures that i bought when i moved in here one blue, one red, a painting by my mum, a photo of me, felinity & trave when she turned 21, a photo of me pushing grace on a swing, a picture by RC Gorman, a native american painter - the picture was here when i moved in... oh and a poster of the stained glass from the entryway to the trelic tower...

sounds alot i know but i like how i've done it... i'll take a picture tomorrow when it's dayliht again..

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the blues

i'm changing a few tings around in my room... the computer is on it's side on my bed while i find the right environment for it... a corner of the room that had previously been inaccessible is being opened up... it's a big job...

so i'm down here in the basement, listening to a CD i made for myself about 5 years ago when i had the blues...

if i tried hard i could work out which lover/girlfriend brought on this particular selection of sad... romantic... delicate songs... but i don't wish to go there...

i have a pizza in the oven and i'm loving the songs:

scott walker, sinead o'connor, roberta flack, david silvian, cassandra wilson, mark murphy, fiona apple, the beach boys, the cowboy junkies...

i had good taste back then...

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those same pictures

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sudoku & reflect

i taught my 1st session @ my work today... search & reflect... it went really well... i've got a great apprentice...

after work i was given the london paper in the street which i at first declined - but then accepted because they have 3 sudoku's in there...

last week at some point i was given the paper and i tried the difficult sudoku and it killed me... i was sat on a bench by the thames trying to work it out for hours it seems, a very nice woman from one of the stans sat next to me and gave me the odd biscuit while i furiously worked at it... in the end i thought i'd found a way in to the last stage but in my haste to complete it i got it wrong...

but by then i was so cold i gave up & headed home...

so today i started with the easy one... i did it while i was still at work...surprisingly hard actually... then i cycled down to the river and did the medium one... taking pictures of the lovely sky every few minutes... easier than the easy one as it turned out...

i began the difficult one but fairly quickly decided it was time to head home being as i didn't have my bike lights with me and the sun was setting...

when i got home i began the difficult one in ernest and it is damn hard... i'm banging my head against it and getting nowhere fast...

so here's a slideshow of the setting sun pictures i took... i'm getting back to the sudoku... take care...



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still vulnerable

having a bleak september sunday...

it's good for music if for nothing else...

i have a lovely melody/chords thing that's come out of today's funk... and i mean funk in the old fashioned james joyce way rather than the james brown way...

i put an old tune up on my mypace... you know you can have 4 tunes up there at any one time? the last week had you can't be mine an old ballad i cowrote with some tinpan alley character (in that i wrote the words to an old jazz standard) that i performed with Hcello back in 2003... and now i've taken a tune called sleep deprivation - all mine - from my album's worth of tunes i was toting about to my friends a few years ago...

i love it, it seems that one of my 4 tunes will be an oldy most of the time... that's the story now anyway...

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week 11 (vulnerable)

dinah was kicked off her bike last night and is onviously shaken up by it...

this afternoon i realised that i too am a little shaken by it... & that affected the space i was in when i did this week's improvisation...

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princess mononoke

i'm not sure when but about a month ago i started watching princess mononoke on filmfour, but had to stop for some reason... i started watching it knowing that i could'nt watch the whole thing...

i remember being really struck by it... by how a complex story is built up slowly and meticulously... it's animated...

so it was on again tonight and i managed to get the remote to work for once and watched it...

less satisfying than the 1st hour had been - partly because it was broken up over about a month, but still very good... visually pleasing...

..

i'm in a strange place with the words... i've done a couple of experiments with how i wanted the words to fit with the film and it's proving harder than i thought... i'm almost at the point where i'm going to have much fewer words...

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full moon

dinah got accepted onto her course this morning... she's handing in her notice this evening @ the job she hates & in a couple of weeks she'll be resting briefly between leaving that job and beginning student life...

my oh my...

the moon is full and last night as i cycled back from the riverside cinema i was videoing bits of it for my film... although with my phone camera, not as good as my other one but probably good enough for what i want...

i'm really getting into this phone, you know that initial time of excitement with a new thing?

similarly new is beta.blogger which i've switched over to, blogging is changing a little and i was keen to be at the cutting edge... what with my 4000 visitors and all that (oh get off your horse about the visitors already)... but i'm almost regretting it now...

i went to comment on patroclus's blog yesterday (franticly looking for someone to share my 2for1 deal with - to no avail) and i couldn't... i can't comment on non-beta.blogs, which i have to tell you is a huge no-no...

there's no going back either, once you're in you're in... as that guy found out last week in the soprano's and ended up topping himself... oh... roll on 10 o'clock and give me that old time mafia feeling...

the film @ the riverside was renaissance - an animated french thing... very good in how it looked and actually pretty good all round... noirish...

the words are coming on for the film... getting close... which is just as well beacuse i'll be back @ work before you can wack that stooly...

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welcome

4000th browser (since july 23rd 2005)

i love numbers... & i love that counter over there on the right... i started it over a year after i started the blog, over a year ago now...

and in the last week it's given me pleasure watching it count from 3980 to where it's @ right now 3999....

so i have nothing else to say but welcome... oh 4000th browsing person...

welcome...

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and you were browsing from the city of Nagoya in Japan where it was 2.22 am 15 minutes ago (6.22 pm here) and it gave me the opportunity to check out what Nagoya looks like (bless google earth)

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Gillespie Road Local Nature Reserve

me & dinah were walking down holloway road this afternoon, we'd eaten well @ the amazon cafe & i was walking her to her audition for the performing arts degree that's she's doing right now...

a headline for a local paper was written on a board outside a newsagents and it said:

ARSENAL HOOLIGAN DOLLS OUTRAGE

at 1st this only made sense to me with the word DOLLS as a verb... an arsenal hooligan dolling an outrage... but doll is not a verb... even though it's possible to doll up...

anyway - i still don't know what it really means - i'm sticking with the arsenal hooligan dolling up this outrage - whatever that might be...

anyway i dropped her off and i walked down to highbury corner to pay a cheque in to the bank (my week's work's earnings) & then turned the corner to highbury fields and wandered awhile...

i found myself really needing the loo as i walked an area i don't know that well... found myself face to face with the new emirates arsenal stadium and pondered whether one could just walk in & use their facilities... but decided against trying...

a brand new block of flats is being built right there by the stadium... trapped by two railway lines, imagine living there and trying to get out on a match day...

affordable housing for keyworkers...

fantastically dumb location...

anyway i crossed another pedestrian bridge to get off the stadium site and i was close to arsenal station (previously gillespie road station before the team came up from southwest london) and i found gillespie road local nature reserve...

with a building and a loo...

and a good few acres of lovely parkland nature reserve..

amazing to be close to this and to not know it existed before...

so i wandered around in a bit of a daze... i fully intend to return there and soak in it's beauty...

i headed north after and walked through part of finsbury park station, bumping into a man i used to hang out with a fair bit in the mornings... now bearded... he runs a coffee counter in the station - but i can't remember his name... i used to buy a smoothie from him every morning before catching the train into work... (.. sam .. there it is)

finsbury park is dolling itself up a bit these days, i really like the colours in this roofy bit...

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paying for a really funny night

Wfloopy(shaman) came round last night to play chess... bringing a number of marvellous longplaying records with him...

spski was around in the early part of the evening and he's always good fun... really lovely to spend time with him actually, don't seem to see him much these days even though we live together...

so me & W played chess... 3 games, 2-1 to me... dinah coming home midway through a particularly good abdullah ibrahim which she made very clear was not her thing...

anyway, the night ended with the 3 of us smoking & playing cards... our southern accents came out and we laughed & laughed...

W finally heading out to my record of peggy lee... clicking our fingers as we escorted him to the door... living out the ridiculous nonsense we'd brewed up by then...

by smoking in the evening always gets to my sleep... it's amazing... insomnia... guaranteed...

so today i've been a little shaky...

went to see the bill viola thing @ st olaves in london bridge... very good indeed... wonderful video artist...

just now i've been tinkering with my film... took a wrong turn and now i'm struggling to fix it... awkward space i've got myself into...

but i'm leaving that to go get my girl... have to find the energy somewhere... i'm sure once i'm on the bike it'll be fine...

laters

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vue facts

ok, so those free cinema tickets have now run out... i may yet get some more where they came from but i don't know...

just to recap, they only work with films that have been out for more than 2 weeks and that is why yesterday i used one to get a ticket for the break-up (over 2 weeks out already) but actually saw harsh times (newer than 2 weeks)...

but once i was passed the guy collecting tickets i realised that there was no indication anywhere saying which film was showing at which screen... my ticket told me the break-up was in screen one...

there are 8 screens at the westend vue...

so i started wandering around and opening doors surreptitiously... it wasn't on in screen's 1 - 4 on the ground floor...

it wasn't on in 5 or 6...

at this point an attendant saw me and asked if i was lost and i told him i was trying to find harsh times and he checked my ticket... whereupon i said oh - i mean the break-up and he sent me downstairs again eyeing me suspiciously...

so i waited for a few minutes before braving the upper floors and met someone heading all the way to the top... i asked her which film she was going to see and she said harsh times, telling me it was on @ screen 8... so i followed her into the screen and sat, a little nervous but happy to have fooled the system...

the pre-trailer adverts were on & a few minutes after i entered there was an alarm sounding, although they hadn't shut off the adverts so it was really hard to hear it... eventually it became clear that we had to leave the building and i had paranoid thoughts that it was a trap that the suspicious attendant had set for me...

we all filed outside and i got chatting with a couple of women who were halfway through monster house... some guy was wandering around with several glasses of both red & white wine on a tray and i half-persuaded myself that the cinema had laid on drinks for the inconvenience but stopped just short of reaching out for one...

in time it all settled down and i smuggled my way back to the top of the building again and watched the film... which was very good and truly harsh... christian bale visibly disintegrating into gulf-war syndrome...

once out of the film i didn't really have time to go home and come back out again to pick up dinah so i went and sat by the river, thinking about my vocal monologue for the film... a few good thoughts did pop into my head, even though i was still in a fairly dark post-harsh times space... ideas which have flowered today and i've found a way forward with the words now... very welcome...

i met dinah and we cycled back home, she cycling faster than usual so that i could get back in time for the soprano's which started last night, i missed the opening 5 minutes but caught the rest and it was great... shocking end...

so an end to the free cinema for now but the welcome return of the soprano's... a fair swap if you ask me...

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week 10

enjoy x