where i'm at

dinah came down @ around 8:30am and me, C & J were still talking, she went off to her rehearsal and i stumbled into bed around 9:30...

she woke me with a tea and a smile around 3 and just prior to going out to the amazon cafe where we were expected i was putting in fresh contact lenses...

i put one in, then the other... and i couldn't see anything... either eye...

maybe the 1st one had fallen out(?) but the second one?

i kept blinking hoping they would sort themselves out...

anyway dinah came in and asked after me and i tried to explain it but i couldn't, except that i wasn't particularly capable today and then i had a notion that turned out to be correct...

i'd put both contact lenses onto the same eye...

this is me, today,

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water & improvisation uploaded

well as you can see, that improvisation finally came out... it actually took 12 hours and 14 minutes to render, but with the time cubase took to do it's rendering, converting to divx... i guess it's more like 13 & a half hours...

anyway, that is not why i'm here...

tonight is the night i unleash water & improvisation on the world, gordy has his film party tomorrow night so i've whipped it into a shape i'm happy with and i've uploaded it to both googlevideo and youtube...

it is the film i've been referring to as the thames path film that i did a version of for my december gig, it's been a long, long time getting here and it could still develope further but i'm signing off on it and letting the world see it...

both video hosting sites because i want to see how they compare and also to get the widest audience for it...

i'm not embedding either one here just yet because i only delivered this week's improvisation earlier today (yesterday) so i'll let that one sit there for the moment before showing this one...

but it's here or here if you want to go see it...

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longcat rhodes, voice & WEM copicat improvisation 22nd february 2007 week 36

2 cameras... huh?

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different sizes

i improvised this early evening with my camera and with Wfloopy(shaman)'s camera as well...

it's rendering now...

it was a long one 14 minutes or so...

the video file that my camera gave me was 56Mb...

the audio (stereo) for those 14 minutes was 225Mb...

the video file from Wfloopy(shaman)'s camera was 2.9Gb...

normally the video renders in 15 - 30 minutes, this one, if it's estimates are correct, will have taken 11 hours...

i know there are an awful lot of ...'s in this post but the difference is quite staggering, the quality is better of course, but...

anyway, i've got to teach in the morning, and when i get up to go to work this will still be rendering...

strange x

a fan

ok, so firstly, i've found a fan...

he put one of my weekly improvisations on his blog saying isn't he good?...

isn't that nice? (you know i just had a look at that improvisation - one of the few hosted on youtube - and it's been viewed 3306 times.......?)

and secondly i've been tinkering with the thames path film, the one i showed at my december gig... this week has seen me find a new way of doing something i've been wanting to do for ages and i've implemented an idea of spski's in relation to colour...

it's rendering now in it's most recent version and i can't wait to see it... gordy has a party on saturday night where we're showing films and it's a good kick up the arse to get this moved on...

i went over to felinity's new house last night where she's now living with her G, we ate fantastic vegi indian food and cooked, flipped & ate pancakes... lovely to see them both, strange to go visit her and for G to be there, not that it's strange seeing him, just that i'm so used to solo visits with felinity, this is it though, a new chapter in their life...

living together in a lovely, cute house..

makes me a little jealous...

it took me 2 hours to cycle home from there... although this was not a direct cycling experience... it was raining just slightly and i was a little camera mad... kept pulling it out of my pocket and snapping away...

well i had taken off my gloves by this point as it was not too cold and one time pulling out the camera i must have pulled out a glove at the same time...

i realised this on that road separating kensington gardens from hyde park and i spent a good twenty minutes looking for it, retracing my journey back to the royal albert hall but to no avail... i am now without my right glove which is a pain...

i cheered myself up with the thought of the miniroll that was waiting for me at home and i continued on, getting ever more into filming, until i was on the canal, the rain still there but only light... under a railway bridge, lights shining in wierd ways...

i don't know how long i spent videoing down there, and i haven't checked the footage yet, could well be all useless, too dark... but it was a lovely time spent all alone with the night and the water...

delusional

i can't help it... i'm almost all the way through the 1st wave of reading all the work, putting together my thoughts about marks...

and i come across this paragraph... i'm sure this is unethical but this student always makes me laugh in class and here they are making me laugh in amongst all this work..:

Piece: Trust Truth

This piece was very delusional, as we were constantly changing between an on & off beat. We were banging our feet against the floor while saying "Trust, Truth", eventually split into 3 groups, with each following group 1 beat behind as usually. It required a lot of concentration.

We were also fighting with longcat, because it didn't sound quite right, the rhythm was very misleading and it sounded like we weren't doing it right. Well at least to me. But he was probably right, he's the teacher after all.

improv blanket marking

got up this morning to watch kiki's delivery service, an early studio ghibli that was on channel 4 this morning... they're showing one every morning this week, tomorrow is the cat returns which me & felinity saw @ the pictures...

i have a mountain of marking and little time to do it in...

so naturally i've been looking at how my website looks...

but first, just a quick link to the new and improved clementine&trave wedding website...

ok, so here's the deal, i made this:



a week or so ago when i got the improvisation blanket going, and it's very pretty but has nothing to do with the improvisations... so i've now made this:



which is better, a little haphazard but i like it... it makes me want to do another one, or maybe a whole film with more deliberate patterns...

and finally W(floopy)shaman is going to redraw me a logo based on the natty logo on the copicat... my own shady version of it is currently the favicon for my random improvisation page... oh and favicons..?

how much fun is it just idly making 16x16 patterns..? the improvblanket's current favicon is another pattern i came up with...

la la la... without a care in the world... just patterns and websites and...

oh...

a big pile of marking and little time to do it in...

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random week 35

nearly at the end of the franco era coffee liquor... mix it with milk and you have almost a white russian, christened a litvinenko by gordy even though he won't try it...

there's probably one or two shots left in that bottle... it'll be missed...

gigged on tuesday night and i took the WEM copicat with me... cool to gig with, my 1st such gig but certainly not my last... the gig was pretty good, no monitors on my voice so that was shaky but great keyboard playing i think...

then on wednesday i had an interview for some more hours work - this time for haringey music service, piano teaching, it was a good interview but my lack of skill in sightreading may have meant i didn't get it... not that i know yet either way...

improvised tonight with my piano and the copicat, as you can see at the top of the post...

and my brother trave, whose impending wedding to M now has a website, has written me a bit of code to display randomly picked improvisation from my weekly series, so why not visit the random improvisation page on longcat.net... see what comes your way...

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a door was shut...

...which shouldn't have been shut,

so she shat in the sink.

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week 34 goodbye space echo

1stly, i just want to say i am not one of those bloggers who post single sentence - i'm just doing this now posts...

evidence to the contrary below i know and it does look kind of refreshing in amongst all the wordiness... it's just not going to be that way... go on go, walk out the door, turn around now, you're not welcome anymore... those of you drawn to single sentence posts...

we were just about to go and i thought i had 3 minutes instead of 30 seconds...

i have my own cat balthazara on my lap as i write this, which is pretty strange, she looks down at my fingers every now and then like she's reading the words i'm typing... maybe she is...?

are you?

if the answer is yes then lift your head up and nuzzle my nose...

no, either she didn't want her secret to be known or she wasn't reading, she's gone now...

as is the ROLAND space echo... E phoned earlier and asked if today would be convenient for picking up his technological boxes... being the projector and the space echo, both borrowed for the early december gig... very glad to have had that space echo in my possession for 3 months... a little sad that it's gone, but looking forwards and thinking of the WEM copicat that's still here, maybe finding a way to use it in the live band...

i did an improvisation with the space echo before it went, slihtly illegal being as i did an improvisation for this week on monday, but then i did miss that week in august... i think this is just me catching up...

i'll be doing week 35 next week and everything will work out nicely...

it was 20 minutes long and if i have my way it's sat up there at the top of this post as you read this...

ok i'm going to the shops...

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off out

about to go over to Wfloopy(shaman) & T's place, to feed their cat...

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exchange of printed word missed beauty

i didn't cycle to hammersmith today because it was snowing and my back brake makes my back wheel skid in the rain... haven't had my front brake connected back up yet...

but now i regret it... i was walking to the tube in the heyday of the snow a few hours ago, a heyday that is over now probably... snow doesn't last long in london...

just how beautiful would it have been to be one of the first to cycle by the canal... or through the park... with the fresh snow...

but we live with the decisions we make...

on tuesday i took the printed out cavafy poems in greek to manolis, he was pleased with them... as i was sitting eating my beakfast in his cafe that day one of the oddball regulars piped up that his book is now available on amazon... i've spoken to him before about his book, an expose of tabloid journalism apparently... anyway he went out to his car and brought me back a copy...

so giving the printed word to manolis brought back the printed word from the oddball regular...

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cloud organ improvisation - week 33

edited together a sound which i wanted to check out... so i did the improvisation on monday night, very much on the spur of the moment...

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last day off

listening to howe gelb's marvellous Sno Angel album, which is what i was listening to when i beat Wfloopy(shaman) for the 1st time online earlier on...

took a few printed out greek poems over to manolis's earlier only to find - and remember at the same time - that he doesn't open on mondays... so i ate a monday roast in the amazon instead... me & dinah having missed our amazon sunday roast yesterday because we were down south living it up with producerG... birthday boy...

we'd cycled off on our matching shopper bikes... cutting a dash as she told me... getting on the train @ kentish town down to tulse hill, cyling a little further when we got down there...

her bike is simply elegance itself and she only bought it on saturday so we're still in the honeymoon of it...

she returned on the train from somewhere past watford with it and we cycled up to the amazon, ate, then cycled over to regents park just because we could... beautiful day as it was... then yesterday the somewhat drunken and lovely time with producerG & his C, meeting a few lovely, lovely people as well...

then back here and a bottle of rose cava before the evening and a kind of house fun thing set up up by Gordy... darts, other daft games, dr K came, only spski was absent from the house and it was really nice, good to hang out with people we don't always get on with...

today i've been slowly thinking about music... sounds... i'm considering arranging a cover of guinevere by crosby, stills & nash... just me & my keys... a rhodes sound doing the chords which will be tricky, just my left hand... and my voice and a hammond organ doing the harmonies...

maybe it's too ambitious but i dig the notion...

also i need to sort out the sound setup of my keyboard before the rehearsal with T's band on wednesday...

also a tune that's brewing, started on sunday while i was waiting for dinah to be ready to leave the house... a touch of a bheki mseleku tune in there and it may morph into the half remembered faces tune i started the night me & filmo saw the dead C...

today has been my last day off for this week, the new semester is upon us and my wednesday's off are now a thing of the past... so i need to get used to doing everything i need to do today, like my laundry which i must get going real soon...

Howe Gelb now singing his Down Home 2000 album which is odder, not so nicely produced... but still great...

ok later x

searching

just been to manolis's and i want to find something that he will enjoy reading, he's in a little bit of a low patch, i offered to lend him my book of cavafy that i know he likes but he said if it was in greek... maybe... so now i'm about to search for cavafy poems in greek to print out and bring to manolis... he told me that i was very habitual, and that kant was also habitual... people used to be able to set their clocks by kant...?

also i've been on a strange and so far fruitless search since yesterday when i used some hakim bey spoken word stuff in my improvisation. it struck me that i should be able to identify where i got it from... and indeed what it is... when he was speaking and who he was speaking to...

and i have no idea... it seems to be on the winter solstice some year.. he's speaking as peter lambon wilson, i have no idea where it came from, maybe soulseek, or maybe through deoxy... or then perhaps it came from those grey lodge folk...

reminds me that when i met that iching guy who had had some contact with hakim bey he'd told me that hakim bey was really against the internet... favouring real breast to breast communication... or letters...

going over to W(floopy)shaman's tonight for chess and food... he who has only just gone over to internet chess... we're breast to breast chessing tonight as well as our internet game...

rehearsed with T's band minus the guitarist last night, we're gigging a week on tuesday if you fancy, we were fantastic @ the metro and we'll be a touch better @ leonards...

slow day i've had today, a kind of malaise i'm almost under, not as bad by any means as some days but, what with the next semester so close and the work still to be done for it... it can seem like a day like today is a waste, but i don't see it like that, if i need to spend a day like today - even as it's hard to see what it does for me... i celebrate the day i've had... i love the way i live my life...

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week 32

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